Happy Birthday, America: I'm Angry At You As Always
On The Foolishness of Anger and the Possibility of Hope
The world is politically upside down, and anger is the first response, but not the last.
Some True Things From A Rural District in Texas
For several weeks, I made it a habit of calling my Congressman, as useless an exercise as it was. My Congressman is the Chairman of the House Budget Committee, and as such was a key architect of the monstrosity which has passed through Congress, and will soon be the law of the land.
I cannot say I am surprised. But I can say, for the first time in a long time, that I am angry. To say that the poorest members of a society should be cared for is not some great moral act of courage. People can prudentially disagree on how this is to be done, but, in the interest of not pretending, it’s important to name what the bill on the table means for the area I live in.
Here are some true things:
Texas has presently the worst insured rate in America. Among the many provisions of the bill are 20% cuts to SNAP, which translates to nearly 2 million people losing benefits. The lowest 20% earners are looking at a 3% decline in income, creating a double bind for the very people that SNAP provides for. My district, containing 750k people, has nearly 150k on Medicaid.
Much of my district is rural, and not within driving distance of major medical interventions. Since 2005, 20 rural hospitals across the state have closed, with 25 at risk of closing in the next three years. Lack of Medicaid expansion in Texas has already strained this system; the reduction in Medicaid will undoubtedly continue this decline in services. Never fear: surely heart attacks can be resolved by TeleDoc.
In the effort to provide ICE with a budget three times that of the FBI1, literally millions of Americans were deprioritized, maligned, and put aside. But have no fear: I’m sure the waste is now taken care of and that my worries are unfounded. If history has told us anything, when law enforcement agencies and the military are given massive budgets, they find ways to use it in increasingly prudent and thrifty ways.
Here are some other true things:
I went to sleep angry, and woke up angry.
All of these outcomes were known by my Congressman, who has appeared on every major conservative outlet defending the bill with all the vigor his full head of hair can muster. And yet, he continued on, bravely meeting openly with business interests in the district, and conducting district town halls from the safety of a telephone line. Calling my Congressman is the moral equivalent now of “thoughts and prayers”.
He continues to trade on many tropes over government waste and welfare that just don’t exist anymore. Remaining on disability is difficult, requires multiple rounds of interviews, and pays so little that recipients disproportionately live below the poverty line already. The “welfare people need to work” line, frequently trotted out during Congressional discussions, assumes that the people with the least education and least work history are able to magically find jobs. That government programs have played a role in this situation? Absolutely. That this situation can remedy itself now by sheer government fiat, demanding the people go find a job? Impossible.
On Not Letting Anger Lead
There is a theological vein I’m friendly toward which emphasizes the need to disavow anger, that it is not a passion which is capable of being corralled or channeled. I know my own deep reservoir of anger, and the am keenly aware of the way in which it moves us not toward justice, but to unvarnished judgment. I am acquainted with the secret of the Hulk in maintaining a placid exterior.
Some of my draw to this derives from the Stoics, who saw the passions as those aspects of the human constitution which were more akin to raging floods than controlled streams. To be a moral being, for the Stoics, was to have self-discipline, restraint in one’s passions, to embrace the virtues of reason and reflection, and to channel these things for one’s nearby neighbors2.
Some of this finds its way into Christian theological treatments. John Cassian’s treatment of divine anger is, for my money, one of the most compelling—that our sense of God’s anger is actually our affective disposition, but not God’s reality. But in the end, it really is comforting to think that God will resolve these kinds of political insanities by blood or by fire. I confess to praying, more than a few times in the last months, for new worms to rise up from the earth, or for the impreccatory psalms to come to life.
Here is another true thing:
Anger is an index of love, the sign that something we have loved has been wronged.
But being angry is not the same as having justified anger: something we love can be bad for us, or can be the wrong thing to love entirely. When I am angry, I flip tables that are meant to be shared. While we should be skeptical of the notion that our emotions are knowledge, much less actionable knowledge, we can say that our anger is like a finger pointing at the stars: we just need to spend time reflecting on whether that star we are pointing at is in fact truly a star. Anger is a motivator, the spark which originates our action, but cannot be the engine which keeps us going.
To cultivate anger and expect it to be productive is like turning over an engine until it is flooded. Anger, in the end, cannot sustain us in the face of devastation. For the Spirit who gives and who grows fruit among us will give and change us in the process3.
And so, when I woke up angry this morning, it left me not fed, but hungry. It left me not wishing my Congressman well, but wishing him to spend a night in the Sudanese prisons he has helped enable, in the Everglade fever dream his work is helping to make a reality. My anger does not make any of this real, but deflates the only things I have possible: love, prayer, sacrifice.
Here is one last true thing:
The decisions of governance is the opportunity for Christians to recover a solidarity and charity that bleeds. Of the foolishness of legislators, there is no end. But of the love of God and the charity of the church, there is no end of a reason for hope.
Amidst this hope, I have many doubts. I have many doubts that churches will rise to the occasion, if only because the body of Christ in the world is frail, sinful, and broken, even if it is in its blood Christ’s own body. I have many doubts that churches will not militarize Paul’s words in Thessalonians against the millions who now stand closer and closer to destitution and despair.
I have many doubts that American churches are ready for such an opportunity, but it is my hope that the same Spirit who moved the early Christians to sell what they have that those among them might have what is needed might do the same again. There is no way to replace the SNAP money that paid for school lunches for children. There is no way to replace the Medicaid dollars that undergirded nursing homes, rural hospitals, emergency care centers.
And I do not think for a moment that churches need to evaporate or be sold in order for such things to exist: this would be a more grave confusion, assuming that all a church is is a social service provider. But now is a time for Christians, among all people, to get very comfortable with having less and with being more brave. Now is the time for Christians, of all people, to become friends with scarcity, and to lean into the hope that what is needed will be given, and given through the material hands of those moved by the Spirit, and not by anger.
ICE will have to wait for another day.
The Stoics indeed differed on precisely how this works. For a representative treatment, consider Seneca’s On Anger, mirrored in insightful ways by the treatments of John Cassian, and later, by Basil the Great.
Thank you for this brother. I needed this.
Oh my goodness, I needed this. Thank you for writing it.