An Age of Rage
“Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” Proverbs 4:23 (NIV)
We are living in an anxious moment. War has again flared in the Middle East, rumours and interpretations are spreading faster than facts, and many people are wondering what kind of world we are entering. In times like these, public life often fills with anger and certainty at exactly the moment when wisdom is most needed.
This is not the first time humanity has faced such a moment. But it raises a question Christians cannot avoid: what do we do with anger when the world itself seems to be sliding toward rage?
We are living in an age of rage.
You can feel it in politics, in church debates, in online discourse, even in the way ordinary conversations now seem to reach for an enemy much more quickly than they reach for understanding. You can hear it in the anguished protests of young climate activists who look at the future and fear that the world they must inherit is being irreparably damaged before their very eyes. The emotional temperature is high. The words are sharp. And once anger becomes the air we breathe, it quietly re-trains us: it tells us who is redeemable and who is not; what counts as truth and what counts as treachery; what must be protected and what may be sacrificed. Even appeals to reason now seem almost passé.
The Place of Lament
I am not writing this to minimise suffering. The Bible itself gives space for lament. Whole books of Scripture, like the Book of Lamentations, exist precisely to voice grief, outrage, and protest before God. Faith does not require us to pretend that injustice does not wound. In fact, the refusal to lament honestly can leave anger with nowhere to go except inward or outward as rage. Lament allows anger to speak without allowing rage to take the throne.
Sometimes religious language has been used to silence anger prematurely. People quote lines such as “Vengeance is mine, says the Lord; I will repay” (Romans 12:19) as if the faithful response to injustice were simply to suppress protest. Yet the biblical tradition makes room for grief and the cry for justice. What it refuses is the enthronement of vengeance in the human heart.
It is also worth saying something that the Christian story itself makes clear. The anger we experience as human beings is not a window into the emotional life of God. In Scripture, God’s “wrath” is not divine irritability or vindictive rage; it is the Bible’s way of describing God’s unrelenting opposition to everything that destroys life and love. The fullest revelation of God’s character is not found in the language of wrath but in the life of Jesus Christ, who confronts evil without becoming its mirror.
Beyond doubt, some anger is not only understandable—it is truthful. It is the soul’s protest when something sacred has been violated. Anger often arises because we have finally stopped colluding with harm.
Sometimes the anger we encounter is rooted in wounds that go very deep. I have seen people whose lives have been shaped by trauma, rejection, or long years of deprivation react with explosive force whenever that pain is touched. What we are witnessing in such moments should not be minimised—as though it were merely bad behaviour (typical of the cultural environment I was brought up in)—but recognised as the eruption of a wound that has never been allowed to heal.
It can be the first sign that we are waking up.
But this is the danger I keep seeing, both pastorally and culturally:
Anger is often the first stage of moral awakening. But it is a terrible architect for the Kingdom.
The deeper question here is not whether anger appears in us. The question is whether we allow it to rule over us.
Anger as Signal, Rage as Captivity
Anger, at its healthiest, is a signal of violated goodness. It tells the truth about violated boundaries, humiliation, coercion, cruelty, exclusion. In that sense it is morally meaningful energy—not something to be dismissed, shamed, or instantly “spiritualised away.”
One friend recently put it like this: “Suppressed anger tends to turn inward as shame or depression; processed anger becomes strength.”
That phrase processed anger can sound deceptively simple. In reality it is slow and demanding work. It means allowing anger to be named honestly rather than denied; listening to what the anger is trying to tell us about violated goodness; refusing both the temptation to implode into self-blame and the temptation to explode into vengeance. Often it requires conversation with others who can help us see clearly, and sometimes the painful task of grieving what has been lost or damaged. When anger passes through that kind of truth-telling and lament, it can become a source of clarity, courage, and moral energy rather than destruction.
That rings true to what I have witnessed over many years. When people are not allowed to be angry—especially when they are told their anger itself is sinful, rebellious, or proof of spiritual failure—the anger does not disappear. It implodes. It becomes self-violence: self-hatred, despair, compulsive behaviours, sometimes even the wish not to exist.
When Conscience Is Colonised
This is where some of the most painful pastoral territory lies. There are forms of religious formation that function less like discipleship and more like a colonising of the conscience—teaching people to distrust their own inner testimony, to treat their deepest longings as contamination, and to interpret protest as pride. At its worst, this resembles what survivors of political brainwashing describe: not simply an assault on the body, but an assault on meaning. It is not always loud. It can be gentle in tone and devastating in effect.
Perhaps this also helps explain a troubling pattern that has surfaced repeatedly in recent years. When serious abuses have come to light within respected institutions—whether in churches, schools, care homes or charities—many people later ask how such things could have remained hidden for so long. Yet those who first encountered signs of wrongdoing often describe a strange kind of paralysis. The shock is so great, and the authority of the institution so deeply internalised, that people struggle to trust their own moral perception. Instead of immediate action there is hesitation, silence, or a stultifying inertia—with the vacuous hope that the problem will somehow resolve itself. In that sense the colonising of conscience not only damages individuals; it can also weaken a community’s ability to recognise and confront wrongdoing.
In recent years international human-rights bodies have sometimes described coercive “conversion” practices in terms that overlap with cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment—and in some cases conduct that may amount to torture. I understand why that language can sound exaggerated. Yet when you listen closely to those who have lived through coercive forms of “change” therapy, or spiritually enforced self-erasure, a pattern becomes clear: the aim is often not merely behaviour change, but identity invalidation. The pain is not only emotional; it can be existential.
I cannot offer a medical thesis, but I can offer a pastoral observation. When human beings are forced to fight themselves indefinitely—when the whole person becomes a battleground and the heart itself becomes divided—something eventually begins to break down. Human beings cannot live well without some measure of authenticity, the freedom to live honestly rather than permanently at war with their own existence. When that possibility is denied, the strain eventually shows itself somewhere. Sometimes it is the spirit; sometimes it is the mind; sometimes it is the body’s resilience. Either way, the cost is real.
At this point a deeper question emerges—one that is both psychological and spiritual:
Why does rage feel so morally convincing while quietly destroying the future it claims to defend?
Part of the answer lies in the way rage works within the human imagination.
The Contagion of Rage
If anger is a signal, rage is what happens when anger becomes a place we live rather than a truth we pass through.
Rage has its own emotional logic. It gives instant clarity: Here are the good people; here are the bad ones. It offers belonging: a community gathered around shared injury. It supplies adrenaline and moral certainty. It can even feel like love—because it bonds the wounded together.
But rage also narrows the imagination. It turns complex human beings into symbols. It makes reconciliation psychologically impossible, because reconciliation requires us to believe that the other is still human. Rage struggles with that. Rage prefers the defeated enemy.
And rage spreads. It is atmospheric. It is contagious.
A movement can begin in legitimate grief and moral courage—and then, slowly, without anyone noticing, anger becomes the organising principle. The identity hardens around opposition. The habit of outrage becomes the primary way people feel alive. Anyone who speaks of patience, gentleness, or costly love is suspected of betrayal.
Peacemakers, in an angry climate, are often treated as traitors.
There is a line attributed to Blaise Pascal that often returns to me in these moments:
“Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.”
Whether Pascal said it exactly in those words or not, the insight is sobering. Conviction is not the danger; conviction yoked to rage is. When rage is given a moral halo, it begins to justify what love would forbid. It can turn cruelty into righteousness and dehumanisation into “truth-telling.”
And once rage is enthroned, it becomes a rival lord. In biblical language this is precisely what idolatry looks like: something other than God taking the place where ultimate loyalty, moral authority, and emotional energy now reside. Rage begins as a response to injustice. But when it becomes our organising passion, it quietly takes the place where love was meant to rule.
That word enthroned matters, because it is worship language. When anger takes the throne it begins to define reality itself—who deserves compassion, who may be written off, what counts as courage, what counts as compromise. It reshapes not only our politics but our spirituality. It even re-interprets Jesus.
A Historical Mirror: When Rage Becomes Policy
History offers painful warnings here, not as ammunition for contemporary arguments, but as cautionary mirrors.
The French Revolution began with real grievance: crushing inequality, exclusion, hunger, the indifference of elites. The anger was understandable. Moral awakening was overdue.
But when rage becomes policy, restraint collapses. Suspicion becomes virtue. Fear becomes governance. The revolution devours its own children. The guillotine becomes a kind of sacrament of purification: a way of cleansing the world by removing the “unworthy.” And what was promised as liberation becomes another machinery of terror.
I am not drawing a crude comparison between today’s movements and eighteenth-century France. I am pointing to a recurring human pattern.
Anger can expose injustice. In that sense it can awaken a society that has grown comfortable with cruelty or indifference. But the deeper question is not whether we feel anger. The question is what happens when anger begins to govern. History has seen this pattern many times: anger may overthrow injustice, but when rage becomes the organising principle of a movement, it cannot build a humane society. Rage can dismantle a world; it does not know how to heal one.
Fortunately, history also offers another path.
When Nelson Mandela emerged from prison in 1990 after twenty-seven years of harsh confinement under apartheid, many expected South Africa to descend into bloodshed. Few would have blamed him for seeking revenge. The injustices were real, the humiliation profound, the suffering immense.
But Mandela had reached a different conclusion during those long years of imprisonment.
“Resentment,” he said later, “is like drinking poison and hoping it will kill your enemies.”
Instead of unleashing rage, he chose reconciliation. Instead of vengeance, he pursued a fragile and costly peace. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation process was far from perfect, but it prevented the catastrophic civil conflict that many had predicted.
What makes Mandela’s example so remarkable is not that he lacked anger. It is that he refused to enthrone it.
He discovered something that echoes deeply with the Christian story: suffering can either harden the heart or enlarge it. Anger can either consume a future or become the raw material for something wiser. Mandela understood something history repeatedly teaches: anger may awaken a people, but it cannot build the future they long for.
Human history shows both possibilities. The question is which imagination we choose to inhabit.
The Kingdom of God points us toward the second.
When rage is enthroned, it can overthrow—but it cannot imagine reconciliation. Rage is blinding. It can imagine victory, but not communion. It can picture a defeated enemy, but not a reconciled future. When rage rules the imagination, conquest becomes the only future it can recognise.
Rage may awaken a people.
But it cannot imagine the reconciled future they long for—whereas the Kingdom of God is precisely that reconciled future.
Jesus and the Courage of Peacemaking
This is where Jesus Christ confronts us—not as a polite moral teacher, but as the unveiling of a different way of being human in the world.
“Blessed are the peacemakers,” he says, “for they will be called children of God.”
Not peace-keepers. Peace-makers. Shalom-makers: people who actively work for restoration, right-relatedness, truth spoken in love, repair where harm has been done.
Jesus does not speak those words from a safe distance. His own life shows what that path costs. When rage gathered against him—political rage, religious rage, mob rage—he refused to mirror it. Even in the moment of betrayal, humiliation, and execution, he did not enthrone anger. Instead he exposed the deeper power of forgiveness: “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.” In that moment the logic of the Kingdom becomes visible. Violence may conquer bodies and traumatise hearts, but it cannot rule the future unless it captures the human spirit.
Peacemaking is not the absence of anger. It is anger transfigured.
Jesus is not a stranger to anger. He confronts hypocrisy. He names harm. He refuses gaslighting. He overturns tables in the Temple. He weeps over Jerusalem. His compassion is fierce.
But notice what he refuses to do.
He refuses to dehumanise.
He refuses to scapegoat.
He refuses to retaliate.
He refuses to let rage write the story.
The cross is not the triumph of vengeance. It is the refusal to let violence dictate the future.
This matters because in an angry age it is easy to re-imagine God as the guarantor of our rage—the divine endorsement of our need to get even. But Jesus reveals something altogether different: a God whose power is self-giving love, a God who does not secure his righteousness by crushing his enemies, a God who tells the truth without surrendering to hatred. In an angry climate, peacemakers are often treated as traitors. They refuse the simple moral map that rage demands.
That is why peacemaking is courageous. Rage is often easier. Rage gives immediate moral reward. Peacemaking costs. It requires restraint when revenge feels justified, patience when outrage is applauded, humility when certainty would be intoxicating, and moral imagination when the crowd demands a villain.
In this sense, peacemaking is not less strong than anger. Some will call it weakness—the coward’s way of avoiding conflict. But appeasement avoids conflict out of fear.
Peacemaking faces conflict and refuses hatred. It confronts injustice without surrendering to vengeance. That is not weakness. It is courage. At the deepest level this transformation is not simply a moral technique. It touches something deeper in the human spirit. The fourteenth-century mystic Meister Eckhart expressed it this way: “the ground of God and the ground of the soul are one and the same.” Whether or not one accepts that phrase exactly as he meant it, the insight points to something profound: the healing of anger ultimately comes from rediscovering the deeper centre of our being where God’s life and our own are not enemies. When we act from that ground, anger no longer needs to rule us.
Jesus does not avoid conflict. The Sermon on the Mount, the cleansing of the Temple, and his confrontations with religious power show the opposite. What he refuses is hatred.
Peacemaking is not the refusal to fight. It is the refusal to become what you are fighting, and the courage to remain truthful to the deepest ground of our humanity.
The New Testament’s final vision of Christ confirms this pattern in a striking way. Something remarkable appears in the Bible’s final book. In the Book of Revelation Jesus is announced once as “the Lion of the tribe of Judah.” It sounds like the language of triumph and conquest—the kind of power human history has always recognised. But when the seer turns to look, what he actually sees is “a Lamb standing as though slain.” And from that moment on the Lamb dominates the vision. The Lion is mentioned once; the Lamb appears again and again—nearly thirty times. The victory of God does not come through domination, but through self-giving love. Revelation quietly declares that the domination system which has shaped human history for millennia is not the future of the world. The Lamb is.
The courage of peacemaking is not the absence of anger.
It is the refusal to let anger take the throne.
The Kingdom has a different emotional climate
One of the most practical questions Christians can ask in an age of rage is simply this:
What spirit is forming us? What kind of people are we becoming?
Here, Paul’s list in Galatians 5 remains quietly revolutionary. The fruit of the Spirit is not a sentimental mood; it is the emotional climate of the Kingdom:
“Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.”
These are not soft virtues. They are the signs of a life governed by Christ rather than by reaction. They are what it looks like when the Kingdom is already taking root in a human being.
Rage, for all its intensity, is not fruit. It may be understandable. It may even be justified in origin. But if it becomes the organising principle, it does not produce shalom. It produces scorched earth—in the world, and in the soul.
I have sometimes watched people who have suffered greatly—especially those wounded by religious rejection or coercive “change” expectations—carry anger for years, even decades. Their reasons are often painfully understandable. But what grieves me is what prolonged rage does to the one who carries it. It is like living inside a volcano: a continual eruption that burns the body and narrows the spirit. In the end the poison does not destroy the enemy; it slowly consumes the one who drinks it.
It can also become counterproductive to their cause, because rage bullies; it does not persuade or reason. Instead, it mainly recruits fellow-angry people into a shared posture of opposition.
And sometimes Christian language about love is used in these contexts—“the love of Christ,” “justice,” “accountability.” Yet the actual shape of Christ’s love—its patience, its truthfulness without cruelty, its refusal to dehumanise—is absent. The result can be an unbalanced community: a circle of hurting souls who bond by outrage rather than being healed into freedom.
I don’t say that to condemn anyone. I say it because I long for something better—for all of us. Liberation that does not include inner freedom is incomplete.
The End of Rage Is Part of the Promise
This is where my mind sometimes returns to the strange and powerful imagery of Revelation. There, at the far end of the biblical story, death itself is destroyed:
“Death and Hades were thrown into the lake of fire… Death will be no more.”
Read in the light of Christ, that image is not sadistic. It is hopeful. It is the promise that cruelty does not get eternity. Rage does not get eternity. Accusation does not get eternity. The systems that feed on fear and hatred do not outlive God.
If rage and cruelty are ultimately not eternal—if they are destined to be burned away—then Nelson Mandela’s refusal of vengeance becomes a foretaste of that future. He lived, in a small but powerful way, as if hatred does not get the last word.
The Kingdom of God is so infinitely greater than the troubles of this life that it eclipses them—not by denying them, but by outlasting them. And if Christians do not dare to live in that hope, and embody its emotional climate, it will not come from anywhere else.
An Invitation
Anger can be holy in its first moment—the soul’s refusal to collude with harm.
But rage is a poor master.
The question is not whether we feel anger; the question is who sits on the throne.
In the Kingdom of God, anger may speak—but love must reign.
So if you are angry, do not be ashamed of that. Listen to it. Let your anger tell you what matters. Let it move you toward truth, toward boundaries, toward action. Process it until it becomes strength.
But do not enthrone it. Do not build your identity around it. Do not let it decide who is human. Do not let it become your gospel.
Because anger is often the first stage of moral awakening.
But it is a terrible architect for the Kingdom.
And Jesus Christ—astonishing, yet disarmingly practical—offers us a better way: not the false peace of avoidance, but the costly courage of peacemaking.
In the end, the Kingdom is not built by the energy of anger, but by the life of Christ taking root in human hearts.
May we become what we long to see.
May the best criticism of the bad be the practice of what is better.
And may the Spirit form in us not the contagion of rage, but the fruit of the Kingdom.
Jeremy Marks, 12th March 2026
Wow. Thank you.
Just what I needed to read today. Thank you, Jeremy. Best wishes. David L.