Anger: A Secularized Theological Concept

Abstract

Media accounts often suggest that anger motivates the rise of populist political movements. Indeed, populism and anger are so closely associated in popular discourse as to become almost one: populism just is angry people doing politics. And today, many people are angry. I class accounts of anger into two groups. Some cultural critics and philosophers take anger as a fitting response to a wrong. Others take anger, or at least a certain type of anger, as opaque, directed at the injustices baked into a normative order. By turning to accounts of anger from the Hebrew Bible, where human and divine anger is closely tied with authority, I argue that the opaque concept of anger is often forgotten, or repressed. When it is recovered, we are attuned to questions of domination, and to possibilities for flourishing in a radically different world.