Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food
Angry Churches
On Easter Sunday, it seems appropriate to note Bill Stuntz‘s recent post on angry churches:
Judging by Jeremiah Wright’s sermons, Barack Obama’s church seems to be an angry place—angry at white America for the many ways it has held back and held down the black community represented in its congregation. I want to write about one source of that anger—crime and criminal punishment—in another post. For now, I’d just note that one can see something similar in a lot of mostly white evangelical churches. There, the target of white believers’ anger is the secular culture that tolerates and even promotes all manner of evil. ...
The rage that Falwell, Robertson, and Wright have peddled, by contrast, breeds nothing but more rage. Those propositions are ones that white and black Christians alike get wrong, and frequently.
Go read the whole thing.
Jonathan Edwards has a message for you:
The bow of God’s wrath is bent, and the arrow made ready on the string, and justice bends the arrow at your heart, and strains the bow, and it is nothing but the mere pleasure of God, and that of an angry God, without any promise or obligation at all, that keeps the arrow one moment from being made drunk with your blood.
I’m left entirely unconvinced.
As I’ve noted before: when a person is victimized, the first thing you do to help repair the victim is to _acknowledge_ what has happened to them. You authorize their hurt, and their anger. Why? Because it’s normal, and frankly acceptable. You don’t make them feel guilty for having it.
What’s wrong is if that’s where you leave things. If, as I think Wright does, you work then on methods of constructive community repairing, on working on ways for folks to get themselves out of the jam they are in my focusing on ways in which they can be more autonomous, then it’s healthy.
Which is exactly what you do with _any_ person who has been victimized.
Next entry: Waiting on the iKindle
Previous entry: Watching Papa Ratzi
Introduction
- UCLA law professor Stephen Bainbridge's personal journal. Mostly commentary on politics, religion, and culture.
- Part of the ProfessorBainbridge.com family of blogs.
Recent Punditry Entries
- Headline of the Day
- In Defense of Corporate Lawyering and Making a Lot of Money
- The Imperfectibility of Human Institutions - Even America
- Trojan Silliniess
- In the Event Hillary’s Really Finished
Hot Topics on Food & Wine
- Sanford Pinot Noir Sanford & Benedict Vineyard (Santa Rita Hills) 2001
- Spottswoode Family Estate Grown Cabernet Sauvignon (Napa Valley) 2004
- Who wears stiletto heeled peep toe pumps to a vineyard?
- Robert Mondavi Cabernet Sauvignon Reserve (Napa Valley) 1990
- Ridge Geyserville (Sonoma County) 2001
Hot Topics on Law & Business
Flickr
Archives
My Books
Blogroll
- Althouse
- Amy Ridenour
- AtlanticBlog
- Beldar Blog
- Conglomerate Blog
- Crooked Timber
- Daniel Drezner
- Ernie The Attorney
- Evangelical Outpost
- Fool in the Forest
- Hugh Hewitt
- Ideoblog
- InstaPundit
- Jules Crittenden
- LA Observed
- Leiter Reports
- Less than the Least
- Maggie's Farm
- Marginal Revolution
- Mark Kleiman
- Mark Shea
- Megan McArdle
- Mirror of Justice
- Outside the Beltway
- Pejman Yousefzadeh
- PoliBlog
- Political Animal
- PrestoPundit
- Roger L. Simon: Mystery Novelist and Screenwriter
- Scrivener's Error
- Stuart Buck
- The American Mind
- The Anchoress
- The Right Coast
- TigerHawk
- VodkaPundit
- Volokh Conspiracy
- Wizbang
- Yin Blog
Says alot, in a way, about “happy” churches like Schuller’s and Osteen’s. The Power of Postive Thinking and such.
Angry just doesn’t seem healthy or in the long run effecitve. Interesting that anywhere al Qaeda has managed to actually run things, it has generally failed miserably to win hearts and minds.