In his book, Age of Anger: A History of the Present, Pankaj Mishra recounts the meeting between Timothy McVeigh, who in 1995 ignited a bomb outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people, and Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 attack of the World Trade Center. These two men, raised in different countries, in different religions, and with different political ideologies motivating their terrorist acts, found themselves in adjacent cells at the Supermax prison near Florence, Colorado. In the time that they were neighbors, the two formed an unlikely relationship, and found that, in spite of their enormously different life experiences, they had a deep connection. In fact, after McVeigh was put to death, Yousef commented, “I never have [known] anyone in my life who has so similar a personality to my own as his.”[1]
Mishra calls their meeting “the most illuminating coincidence of our time.”[2] But what is it that their relationship illuminates? According to Mishra, this story sheds light on the defining feature of the early 21st century: We are living in the age of anger, a time of rage that is not isolated to one segment of society or to one region of the world, but has spread throughout the world and infected every level of society. What connects McVeigh and Yousef, in spite of all of their differences, is a deep anger at the state of the world, an anger that creates a desire to strike out against the people and structures that are the object of their ire and are, in their mind, the cause of their alienation.
As pastors, we are called to lead our flocks through the age of anger, to lead them to resist conformity to the forces at work in our world that are creating this age. To do so, it is critical that we understand the dynamics that are creating the age of anger, and to counter these dynamics with faithful preaching and discipleship, being used by the Lord to form communities of peace in a time of rage. It will come as no surprise to pastors that the anger of our era has infiltrated the church. We have witnessed this anger as members of our church battle it out on social media. In order to shepherd well during this time, it is important for pastors to understand the dynamics that are at work globally, and to see how these dynamics are playing out in our local fellowship. As pastors, we must ask: How do we shepherd our flock in this volatile time? How can we counter the anger of our age that is flooding the church?
Why So Angry? Understanding the Age of Anger
In order to pastor in the age of anger, we must first understand the dynamics at work. According to Mishra, the widespread anger that has come to mark our age is rooted in the complex story of the rise and spread of modern liberalism, a vision of being human that makes comprehensive promises about how to improve the human condition and achieve flourishing. Modern liberalism makes promises of equality, economic well-being, and autonomy over our lives. However, it turns out that these promises are not easily deliverable to the vast majority of humanity.
Mishra argues that the success of modern liberalism is that it has captured the imagination of billions of people, becoming the dominant ideology of the late modern world. Throughout the 20th century, as the post-war world was established and global communication grew, billions of people heard the promises of modern liberalism and its vision of human thriving through autonomy and self-determination. As this vision spread across the earth, more and more people seized on the possibilities, but this has led to a rising anger: As more people adopted the possibilities of modern liberal ideology, so more people could be disenchanted with the failure of bringing those possibilities into reality. Therefore, Mishra asserts that the age of anger is rooted in the gap between the promise of what the universal society of self-interested individuals would accomplish and what, in fact, it has delivered.
In this gap ressentiment grows. Ressentiment is a concept explored by Nietzsche in The Genealogy of Morality. Nietzsche’s discussion of ressentiment is found in his analysis of the victory of the slave morality. For Nietzsche, the victory of the slave morality dampens the human spirit and human development, destroying the natural passions of the soul and leaving it filled with a deep-seeded sense of weakness and a longing for power. The call to surrender, which was initiated by the Jews and taught by Jesus, has been embodied in Christianity and is, according to Nietzsche, a destructive force within history. For Nietzsche, the tragedy of the slave morality is that it creates a sense of indignity and disgrace in humanity.
Mishra, taking up this theme of ressentiment, utilizes it to describe the forces working on our world today. For him, ressentiment forms in the gap between promise and reality because the gap creates the conditions in which the sense of dislocation and alienation, the sense of indignity, do their formative work on humanity, and creating deep anger. As history has progressed through the end of the 20th century and into the 21st, the spread of western ideology via the growth of multinational corporations and entertainment, the sense of ressentiment has spread.
Everyone Is Losing
As we have seen, Mishra has argued that ressentiment has become endemic across the globe, as a palpable sense of loss has taken hold across wide segments of the population, fueling anger, violence, and social media rants, as “they” win but “we” lose. This notion of others winning while we are losing brings us to Mishra’s conclusion about the driving dynamic of our age: In the early 21st century, in a way that has never been the case in human history, everyone feels like they are losing. Ressentiment isn’t located in isolated pockets of revolutionaries or disaffected communities that feel grieved; it has become the overarching formative power of our time.
The formation of ressentiment creates a society in which we must find those who are responsible for our losing. “They” are the winners who are causing our losing, who are standing between us and the promises of self-determination and success that we have been given, and so “they” are threatening us. This creates a societal blame game, in which everyone blames others for their loss. We see this dynamic at work in American society today, as white mid-western working-class people, who have lost the security that came with steady employment, pensions, and unions, blame the liberal elites, who, in their minds, are the “winners” who are stealing the promises of prosperity. At the same time, liberal elites feel that they are losing the promise of democracy to Red State Republicans, who, they believe, insist on denying the freedoms of others by imposing their dated morality on society. African-Americans, who have had the experience of being losers in the promise of liberal democracy for centuries, blame the structures of America that favor historically privileged whites, a stance that causes a reaction from working class whites who don’t in any way feel privileged exactly because they themselves feel like losers. Ressentiment creates a vicious cycle of blame, fueling passions around a political culture that feels like a zero-sum game in which the future of “our” society is at stake. Everyone is angry.
Here, Mishra makes an important observation: Many believe that the anger animating our world is driven by human difference, by group values coming into conflict with one another. Hence, the solution is in diversity training, by which people are trained to understand their biases and the viewpoints of others, in order that differences might be bridged. But Mishra rejects this interpretation. For him, ressentiment arises, not from difference, but from similarity. The spread of modern liberalism has formed humanity to desire the same things, to have a basic shared vision of “the good life.” It is because of this shared vision that ressentiment festers so broadly. Mishra writes, “We come closer to understanding ressentiment today when we recognize that it arises out of an intensely competitive human desire for convergence and resemblance rather than religious, cultural, theological and ideological difference.”[3] As such, Mishra connects ressentiment with mimetic desire, the way that our hearts are shaped by the longing to have what others have. Mimetic desire is the dominant mode of formation in the modern world, as the few who have received the promises of modern liberalism shape the tastes of people who have not. Ressentiment and mimetic desire have spread across the globe in ways never previously possible, creating dynamics that have seeded our age with anger.
Common Objects of Love
As noted in my introduction, the age of anger has not stopped at the church door. Social media has become the site of battles between Christian soldiers, marching as to war, against each other. As pastors who are called to shepherd our flocks in these difficult days, we must understand how our congregations have been shaped by the forces that have created the age of anger, and to be intentional in our pastoral work to preach and disciple so that our churches might be freed from the dynamics of the age of anger. The anger among Christians is a sign that the church has subscribed to the promises of the modern world, promises that we must question and hold up to the scrutiny of the gospel.
In his book Common Objects of Love[4], Oliver O’Donovan engages with the question of how commitments of love form a community. O’Donovan borrowed this notion from Augustine[5], who defined a people as “a gathered multitude of rational beings united by agreeing to share the things they love.”[6] As such, a people becomes a “we,” a community of shared purpose, by agreeing to love certain objects that shape the way this community understands the world and their place in the world.
In O’Donovan’s description of common objects of love, we find a connection between a community’s tradition and its identity. No community can long endure without tradition, as tradition is what provides continuity with the commitments of a society and is the process through which the common objects are passed on through time, forming the necessary foundation for the continuance of a society. Without a recognized and agreed upon tradition, it is impossible for a community to have shape, to have a sense of what makes us “us.” From this, it is clear to see that the common objects of love also form the shared identity of a community. Who are “we”? What unites us as a social community? The common objects of love perform this function, and it is the common objects that set social groupings apart from one another.
I propose that O’Donovan’s vision of the common objects of love give us insight into the task of pastoring in the age of anger. As we have seen, Mishra has argued that the age of anger has arisen as a result of the promises that modern liberalism has made, growing in the gap between promises and reality. As pastors, shepherding our people in the age of anger, this places us in a critical interpretive position. As church congregations are divided by anger and political affiliation becomes a way of deciphering another person’s salvation (“you can’t be a follower of Christ and vote for ___”), we must do the pastoral work of engaging with this anger, explicating for our congregations where it comes from and what we must do to be freed from it and so be formed as communities of love rather than anger.
As pastors, it is vital that we make clear to our congregation the common objects of love that we share as followers of Christ, and to make clear that the promises we have received are not the same promises that the world around us has received. The ideals that Mishra highlights as the prominent ideals of modern liberalism, such as autonomy and self-determination, are not coequal with the common objects of love of the church, and are, are often contradictory to the call to follow Christ. As such, the common objects of modern liberalism have created a vision of life that bring promises of what to expect that are at odds with the vision contained in the common objects of Christianity, and that form the church into a society called to live among, but not be conformed to, the broader society.
As we call our congregations to follow Jesus, we must make clear that He doesn’t promise us a greater degree of control over their lives, but instead promises us the loss of control over our lives as we lay down our lives for Him. While modern liberalism tells us that we will flourish as self-interested, autonomous individuals who have entered into a social contract in order to protect our self-interest and exercise our independent rule over our lives, and declares that human freedom lies in pursuing our own self-determined ends, the gospel declares that we are created to be a self-surrendered, dependent community who live under the rule of YHWH, who has made covenant with us to guide, protect, and provide for us. It declares that freedom lies in being dependent on YHWH as He reigns as Lord of our lives. As the church, the common objects of love that shape our identity puts us at odds with the affections, desires, and strivings of modern liberalism.
When the church is freed from the common objects of love that are desired by the world around us, we are also freed from the ressentiment that has arisen throughout our world and is rooted in a sense of alienation from the world’s common objects. Called to be strangers and aliens, the church will be estranged from the world’s common objects of love. But, contrary to the alienation that fuels the age of anger, our alienation does not to create anger in us, but rather forms us in the joy of being free from the desires of the world that we might truly love the world. It is only as those who don’t share the common objects of love of the world that we can truly be formed as those who love the world. For Mishra, the mimetic desire created by modern liberalism creates the ressentiment that powers the age of anger; as followers of Jesus, it is our difference that makes us able to love the world, and so frees us from the passions of the age of anger. The church’s dislocation operates in the opposite direction of the world’s dislocation: The world, shaped by her common objects of love, engages in a competition for those objects, and so is formed by a deep anger at the inability to attain them. The church, formed by our common objects of love, is alienated from the mimetic desire of the age, and so free to pursue reconciliation with and for the world out of a genuine love for the world.
As pastors, it is our calling to shepherd our congregations through the age of anger. To do so, we must courageously expound for our people the forces that are shaping them, the passions of our age that demand their heart, and that have the potential for sowing greater anger and discord in our congregations. We must disciple our people to direct their hearts toward our Common Object of Love, toward Christ Jesus, who forms us as a community and gives us our true identity. And we must call our people to embrace the promises that He has given them. These promises are not those of autonomy, or self-determination, or prosperity, but rather are promises of true life that come through surrender. As we do this, may ours be communities that are freed from the passions of the age of anger and filled with the Spirit of love, through Whom we can bear witness to the peace of Christ that rules in our hearts.
Notes:
[1] Pankaj Mishra, Age of Anger: A History of the Present, London: Penguin Books, 2017, 285.
[2] Mishra, Age of Anger, 284.
[3] Mishra, Age of Anger, 50.
[4] Oliver O’Donovan, Common Objects of Love, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans Press, 2001.
[5] Who adapted it from Cicero.
[6] O’Donovan, Common Objects of Love, 25.
This resource is part of the series Kingdom Politics. Click Here to explore more resources from this series.
Joel Lawrence is the Executive Director of the Center for Pastor Theologians. He previously served as the Senior Pastor of Central Baptist Church in St. Paul, MN and as a Professor of Theology at Bethel Seminary. He holds a PhD in Systematic Theology from the University of Cambridge. He is a member of the St. Anselm Fellowship of the Center for Pastor Theologians.
