<\/p>\n
Hey, Uncle Sam, put your name at the top of his list
\nAnd the Statue of Liberty started shakin\u2019 her fist
\nAnd the eagle will fly, man, it\u2019s gonna be hell
\nWhen you hear Mother Freedom start ringin\u2019 her bell
\nAnd it feels like the whole wide world is raining down on you
\nOh, brought to you courtesy of the Red, White and Blue.<\/p>\n
\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
I was embarrassed by how much I loved that song. After all, though I was as hawkish as one could get on an American response to al-Qaeda (and I haven\u2019t changed my mind on that at all), the song does not fit easily\u2014if at all\u2014with a Christian vision of reality.<\/p>\n
Even those of us who believe in the just-war circumstances under which war is permissible recognize that war is always awful. Even in circumstances in which one believes that a state is justified to take a human life, no one can or should rejoice in that.<\/p>\n
But I\u2019ll bet I played the song a thousand times, and I couldn\u2019t help but sing it out loud, at least when I was in the car by myself.<\/p>\n
I realized this when that song found itself once again on my personal playlist. I never stopped listening to Toby Keith, and his songs filled my playlist in the years following 9\/11: \u201cOld School,\u201d \u201cNew Orleans,\u201d \u201cMy List.\u201d Even though I was the chief policy lobbyist for the Southern Baptist Convention, I couldn\u2019t help but sing along with \u201cI Love This Bar\u201d (also alone in my car). When I left the SBC, I told friends, quoting Toby, \u201cI wish I didn\u2019t know now what I didn\u2019t know then.\u201d<\/p>\n
But \u201cThe Angry American\u201d didn\u2019t make my list. Even so, I heard myself humming it\u2014almost reflexively, and to the surprise of my conscious mind\u2014on January 6, 2021, watching the US Capitol being attacked by a lawless mob. I realized then that the song wasn\u2019t really about foreign policy or counterterrorism. It was about anger.<\/p>\n
By anger, I mean a specific kind\u2014the kind that is mixed with a sense of powerlessness but also with a confidence that this is still the country that gave us Washington and Lincoln and Eisenhower, the country that could give the world words from We hold these truths to be self-evident<\/em> to We have nothing to fear but fear itself<\/em> to Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall<\/em>. Uncle Sam\u2014black eye or not\u2014always gets up.<\/p>\nOne of the things a new Christian encounters in reading through the Bible for the first time is how comforting and reassuring the Psalms can be. There\u2019s a reason, the new Christian might think, that people want Psalm 23 recited to them on their deathbeds. There\u2019s a reason, she might realize, that so many of these words are sung in celebrative praise and worship songs. But then that new Christian might come upon other <\/em>Psalms that never show up in the songs, songs that seem disturbingly angry.<\/p>\nC. S. Lewis, I feel quite confident in saying, would have hated Toby Keith songs had he ever heard one. But he did know the Psalms, and in the middle of the last century he tried to explain those angry psalms of cursing enemies and calling down the judgment of God.<\/p>\n
I don\u2019t agree with all of Lewis\u2019s thoughts on the Psalms, but there\u2019s one thought in particular we need to consider right now.<\/p>\n
Lewis gave the example of some British soldiers he knew in World War II, all of whom had fallen for conspiracy theories that the government was making up the atrocities reported from Nazi Germany to \u201cpep up\u201d the troops. The conspiracy theories were bunk, of course, and the soldiers Lewis knew were dutifully serving their country\u2014fighting on the right side of morality or justice. But they thought <\/em>they were being lied to, and they felt not the slightest bit of anger.<\/p>\n\u201cIf they had perceived, and felt as a man should feel, the diabolical wickedness which they believed our rulers to be committing, and then forgiven them, they would have been saints,\u201d Lewis wrote<\/a>. \u201cBut not to perceive it at all\u2014not even to be tempted to resentment\u2014to accept it as the most ordinary thing in the world\u2014argues a terrifying insensibility.\u201d<\/p>\nSometimes, Lewis wrote, we think we are not tempted by something because we are above <\/em>the temptation when we are, in fact, below <\/em>it. We do not have to wrestle with our passions\u2014to channel them in the direction God intends\u2014because we have no passions at all. We don\u2019t feel the pull to wrath or lust or greed not for the reasons a wise old desert monk might no longer feel them, but for the reasons a refrigerated corpse in a hospital morgue would not feel them.<\/p>\nThe Psalms are not merely reassurance or celebration (though many Psalms are that). They also include the full range of human emotions\u2014not just displaying them and putting them in the context of redemptive history but also calling the expression of a right form of them from us<\/em>. \u201cDeep calls to deep,\u201d the Psalms say (42:7), and the depths of the Word of God do just that to us.<\/p>\nJesus commands us to love our enemies, to bless those who persecute us (Matt. 5:44). He does not do this the way a Zen Buddhist might\u2014with a word that our \u201cenemies\u201d are just an illusion or that our anger should be replaced with passionless tranquility. Instead, the Bible calls out the sense of injustice and wrongness that we perceive and feel, and directs us instead to the judgment of God as expressed at the Cross. \u201cIf possible, so far as it depends on you, live peaceably with all,\u201d the apostle Paul wrote. \u201cBeloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave it to the wrath of God, for it is written, \u2018Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord\u2019\u201d (Rom. 12:18\u201319).<\/p>\n
The way of Jesus does not dismiss anger but transfigures it by the way of the Cross. In conforming us to Christ, God is not making us less <\/em>human but more<\/em>. We are hidden in a Lord who is not un-angry or un-sad or un-happy but who is angry in the right way, sad in the right way, happy in the right way.<\/p>\nCould reading only the line My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?<\/em> (Ps. 22:1) without the rest of the psalm it starts, much less the rest of the canon, lead to an ungodly despair? Of course (the devil quotes Psalms, remember). But these are holy words, words of life, not just because the Spirit sang them through David but because Jesus repeated them as he went\u2014physically, spiritually, mentally, and emotionally\u2014through the valley of the shadow of death, for us.<\/p>\nSongs like \u201cCourtesy of the Red, White and Blue\u201d or Merle Haggard\u2019s \u201cThe Fightin\u2019 Side of Me\u201d can evoke some of the worst impulses. They can be jingoistic, vindictive, prideful\u2014all that\u2019s true. But the fact that we seem to need<\/em>, from time to time, songs like that might remind us of something.<\/p>\nWe have better songs\u2014psalms of anger and of awe, of lament and of elation, of disappointment and of gratitude. We shouldn\u2019t be embarrassed of them. We need them.<\/p>\n
Most of the rage we see all around us isn\u2019t really anger. It\u2019s not alive enough to be anger. The adrenaline jolt of hating somebody can give a little jolt to the limbic system, but it\u2019s as distant from genuine anger as pornography addiction is from intimacy. When you step into a different world\u2014the one you enter through the Psalms, all of them\u2014you might be surprised by anger. But it\u2019s real, and it\u2019s not the last word. That other kind of rage? That ain\u2019t worth missing.<\/p>\n
Russell Moore is the editor in chief at Christianity Today<\/span> and leads its Public Theology Project.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n