A Theory of Outrage
by Beth Ann Huber in The Zero Point
I was once a whole person…
I just heard a woman, now 80% of a whole person, say on my television that “Women across this nation are outraged.” OUTRAGED! I can see the images from the SCOTUS steps showing hundreds of 80% persons being outraged. OUTRAGED!
This outrage was first seen on May 3rd, when someone in the SCOTUS leaked that a gaggle of Christians, mostly male and mostly Catholic, were ready to strip women of our constitutional right to control our own bodies. We were outraged! OUTRAGED!
Then we got distracted by other worthy-enough outrages: 19 dead children that should have been protected by…someone? Democracy on the verge of crumbling into the autocratic sea that should be safeguarded by…someone?
Oh wait…they’re still coming after me.
Isn’t someone going to do something?
I was once a child…
I was eight-years old or so that night when my daddy and momma took me to the Pentecostal Church of God to witness the preaching of a family friend. It was a small church, I think, with individual wooden chairs set up behind a few rows of wooden benches. I remember it being dark and claustrophobic inside, but that could just be my brain’s way of coloring the scene.
The man speaking, our friend, started out his sermon very much like my daddy did, with hellos and announcements and goodwill for those who are joining in the worship. “Turn and welcome those around you” never fails to make a good first impression. Luckily, I was sitting between my parents, so nobody felt the need to bring me into the fold.
That was where the similarities to my father’s preaching ended.
My daddy frequently preached using popular culture references to root the experience of his parishioners. My favorite of his sermons asked the audience whether they, much like Glad Trash Bags, were “hefty, hefty, hefty” or “wimpy, wimpy, wimpy” in their Christian faith. Audiences loved daddy’s metaphors almost as much as they loved him.
And people did love my father, because he would never dream of telling anyone they didn’t deserve God’s love and protection. His was a gentle God who scooped up all who came into His house and all who didn’t. There was no judgment. There was no chastisement. There was only grace.
I admit that I don’t remember the specific topic of our friend’s sermon that night. There wasn’t either a hefty or a wimpy for me to root to. There was no God’s love to light the way. There was only Zuul.
Shameless Ghostbusters joke, but I’m not wrong.
“Are you safe from the fires of hell!?” Uh oh. What?
“Your skin will burn; your eyes will burn; your mouth will call out to be saved, but it will be too late. You will be doomed for all eternity.”
Eternity? I’m eight! Eternity is the amount of time between when I get home from school and the start of Scooby Doo on channel 4. Do I get some kind of handbook? This whole keeping your nose from burning off thing would seem an important piece of training, wouldn’t it?
Then, while the preacher was still sending us all to hell, several parishioners stood up and started moaning gibberish, waving their arms in the air, swaying side to side while looking at what I hoped was an imaginary ceiling spirit. I remember starting to tremble, then full-on shake. Not because I was filled with the holy spirit, but because I was fully and completely terrified.
My mother spent the whole car trip home assuring me that I wasn’t going to hell. This was really about their fear, she said. They were the ones afraid of the darkness — the unknown — what they called the sin.
I know now that their fear produced their outrage. And their outrage created my terror. And, to them, my terror was a sign of my sin and, therefore, a sign of my worthlessness.
Their fear has transformed me into less of a human.
I was once a Christian…
Yes, I know. “…not all Christians…” but please give me license to make this point:
“I listen to feminists and all these radical gals… These women just need a man in the house. That’s all they need. Most of the feminists need a man to tell them what time of day it is and to lead them home. And they blew it and they’re mad at all men. Feminists hate men. They’re sexist. They hate men; that’s their problem.” — Jerry Falwell Sr.; Founder of the Moral Majority, who played a pivotal role in the successful election of Ronald Reagan to the presidency.
I only ever saw my daddy inebriated once. He had gone to a massive dinner event for Christian ministers being held in a huge Kansas City hotel conference room set with multiple round tables and assigned seating announced by name tags on the plates. As he used to tell the story: He found his name, sat down, looked to his left and saw the name tag on his neighbor’s plate. Jerry Falwell. He ordered his first drink, thinking “Lord, help me keep my mouth shut…”
That was the late 1970s. We’ve come a long way since then, I’m sure.
September 13, 2001; Jerry Falwell on the 9/11 attacks:
“The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked. And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the Pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America, I point the finger in their face and say: you helped this happen.”
Allow me one more. September 24, 2006. The New York Times.
“The Rev. Jerry Falwell, founder of the Moral Majority, looked ahead to 2008 and the possibility that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton might be the Democratic presidential candidate. Ms. Clinton’s nomination, Mr. Falwell said to laughs, would arouse even more Evangelical opposition than Lucifer’s.”
The Christian far right — what has now become White Christian Nationalists — have always equated sin with the political left — abortionists, Pagans, feminists, gays, lesbians, the ACLU — all sinners. It follows then that their outrage is directed at the left, that they want the left to be terrified, that they see the left as worthless, as less than human.
This game was afoot long before most of us were born.
Hillary Clinton was on par with, perhaps worse than, Satan himself. When she finally got the left’s nomination, the war had to begin. The war between good and evil; the war between outrage and terror. In their dichotomous worldview, then, Donald Trump had to be the anointed one, God’s chosen. Therefore, his overt actions designed to dehumanize and terrify portions of our population must be part of God’s plan.
No, not all Christians. But also not just a few.
I was once a Cold War scholar…
I’ve spilt much ink writing about how the United States tried to win the Cold War by rhetorically equating communism, The USSR, and the Russian people with Satan. Billy Graham, the much holier, less cringey, preaching predecessor to Jerry Falwell, wrote this in 1954 about Communism:
“It is here to stay. It is a battle to the death: either Communism must die, or Christianity must die…Has it ever occurred to you that the Devil is a religious leader and millions are worshipping at his shrine today? … The name of this present-day religion is Communism… The Devil is their god, Marx their prophet, Lenin their saint and Malenkov their high priest.”
The Soviet Union was a front for the Devil; Stalin was doing his bidding. The United States was on the right side of the good/evil battle. Until very recently, Americans stood together against the Russians. The Red Scare. The U.S. political system, nearly to a person, was outraged enough to detail Russian sin and bring terror to any potential sinners within our midst. I’ve written before about American rhetorical constructions of the Russians as diseased purveyors of depravity. Red deplorables.
A basket of deplorables, one might say.
But that was the late 1950s. We’ve come a long way since then, I’m sure.
At this year’s (2022) Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), attended by all prominent Republicans and wherein its delegates voted for Donald Trump as their preferred candidate for 2024, Lauren Witske, candidate for the senate from the state of Delaware, said the following:
“Here’s the deal. Russia is a Christian nationalist nation. They’re actually Russian Orthodox. … I identify more with Putin’s Christian values than I do with Joe Biden.”
In fact, under the leadership of the Russian Orthodox Vladimir Putin, Kremlin propaganda has reinforced “traditional family values” as their cornerstone and argued that the United States was trying to change the definition of “traditional family values” by extending rights to the LGBTQ+ community and allowing women reproductive freedom. Franklin Graham, son of ‘Russians are the devil’ Billy Graham, visited Putin in 2015 (now known to be during Russian election interference in the United States) and secured ties between the Kremlin and American Evangelicals.
Russian outrage and Evangelical outrage have coalesced into a spreading wave of terror for the American left.
I was once not outraged…
In The New Yorker interview about their new book The Flag and the Cross, Philip Gorski and Samuel Perry identify two forms of righteous indignation in American political discourse as currently constructed: Nostalgic and Aspirational.
White Christian Nationalists, which now largely dominate the post-Trump Republican party, are outraged at the destruction of “traditional family values” and are seeking a return to the way things were when white folk ruled the roost and were the “good” in good versus evil. Nostalgia. Make America Great Again. One nation under God.
An aside: you know, don’t you, that we added “under God” in 1954 to distinguish ourselves from the devil-loving Soviet Union?
The left, ever the ‘sinners’ they’ve envisioned us to be, are outraged that this America doesn’t live up to the aspirations we have for it. Equality. Diversity. Bodily autonomy. One nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. The perfect America.
But there’s two problems as I see it: First, the white right have distracted us with their outrage. They’ve piled on new outrage after new outrage after new outrage, and now we can’t hold onto any one outrage long enough to do anything but be generally outraged about [gestures wildly at everything]. Second, they’ve replaced debate with violence.
White Christian Nationalist outrage comes at the end of a flagpole fashioned into a halberd.
According to Philip Gorski, “That’s why gun rights are the most important: Because it secures every other right through access to violence.” Violence controls deviance and problem populations. Violence asserts white rights.
I was once a whole person…
The White Christian Nationalists are out-outraging us. We are terrified. To them, our terror looks like an admission of sin. Their fear of the America-that-could-be has transformed me into an 80% person.
And I am F&CKING OUTRAGED!
My daddy would never have sent me to this hell.
Worked Cited
Butler, Anthea. “Why White Evangelicals are Putin’s Biggest American Fan Base.” MSNBC Opinion. 1 March, 2022.
Casta, Nicole. “Falwell called NOW ‘the National Order of Witches’,” Media Matters for America, 23 November, 2004.
Graham, Billy. “Satan’s Religion.” The American Mercury. August, 1954.
Jenkins, Jack. “The Russian Connection: When Franklin Graham Met Putin.” The National Catholic Reporter. 8 August 2018.
Jones, Sarah. “White Christian Nationalism ‘is a Fundamental Threat to Democracy: Philip S. Gorski and Samuel L Perry discuss their new book, The Flag and the Cross.” The New York Intelligencer. 4 June, 2022.
Kirkpatrick, David. “Christian Conservatives Look to Re-energize Base,” New York Times. 25 Sept., 2006.
Maggio, Rosalie. Unspinning the Spin: The Women’s Media Center Guide to Fair and Accurate Language. Women’s Media Center. 2014.
