Every now and then, I search the archives of Touchstone to see what they were writing and thinking ten, fifteen years ago.  I found this article, “Cultivating Christian Anger,” from a decade ago this month, where Theodore Pulcini, a religion professor, describes the problems of implied in the title.  He chides Christians for so much anger – this was in the zenith of the Religious Right, when we were mad and not going to take it anymore – and offers some solutions to it.  The problem is, Christians know about righteous indignation, and sometimes feel it’s more warranted than it really is.

Rarely a day goes by when I do not read, either on the Internet or in print, a piece aimed at combating a perceived error afoot in the world. The motives of the authors are usually quite lofty, but their purity of intention is often tainted by the unmistakable manifestations of anger, among which the following figure most prominently:

Simplism. In righteous zeal for establishing what ought to be, one finds it is so much easier to deprecate opponents by depicting them with as little nuance as possible [...]

Caricature. This is simplism taken a step further. Angry commentators usually understand their opponents much better than they let on [...]

“Nostalgism.” What better way to stoke the fires of anger than to depict one’s opponents as the saboteurs of a better time, when things were more like they ought to be. Anger not only clouds one’s perception of the present, it also tendentiously reshapes memory [...]

Arrogance. This is anger’s flip side. Anger constantly assures those within its grip that they have every right to scorn their opponents [...]

Granted, lots of Christians have relaxed a little in the decade since this was written.  We, as a giant and heterogenous group, have calmed down.  We know we are not in the New Israel.  We know we cannot make this place Heaven.  We have realized that our City on a Hill is really Rome, and that love and grace and diligence are just as important as anger and justice and passion.  But we still have a long way to go.