Rethinking Anger and Peacemaking

anger and peacemaking - Mormon Women for Ethical Government

When scrolling through social media or listening to the news, it seems lots of people are angry, for a lot of different reasons. It may be tempting to dismiss such anger as divisive. However, as a professor and student of rhetoric, I am troubled by this tendency to dismiss other people and their arguments simply because we believe those arguments are made in anger. If we are committed to peacemaking and eliminating injustice, we need to be open to discussions, even if the framing or content of those discussions makes us uncomfortable.

Not all anger is equal

I want to be clear: I’m not saying we should give a pass to everyone who is angry. Not all anger is equal; many forms of anger can be destructive and divisive. Long-held anger can harm relationships, rob us of our peace of mind, and physically impact our bodies.

But the fact that many kinds of anger are destructive does not mean all anger is. Anger is a secondary emotion — it’s almost always driven by something else. In an interview with Marjorie Rosen on “The Positive Power of Anger,” psychologist Harriet Lerner explains that “Anger is usually a signal that there’s an issue in a relationship that needs to be discussed and compromised on. Anger can be a vehicle for change. Sometimes it’s a message that we are being hurt or that our needs or wants are not being adequately met. Anger may also tell us that we are not addressing an important emotional issue in our lives, or that too much of our self — our beliefs, values, desires, or ambitions — is being compromised in a relationship.”

Anger may also be triggered by injustice. Many of the women who gathered at the 1848 Seneca Falls convention for women’s rights were frustrated and angry at women’s lack of fundamental rights. Many people of color today, particularly Black and indigenous people, are similarly frustrated by persisting racism and unequal treatment.

As we come in contact with speakers we perceive to be angry, it’s worth asking: What are they angry about? Why? What emotion might be driving this?

As individuals committed to peace, we should take ownership of our own anger, but we also need to be careful of extending justifiable concern about our own anger to others without considering the context. Where we might be able to judge our own motives and the effect of our own anger, we cannot always judge this fairly in others.

Our interpretation of anger is shaped by cultural and gendered contexts

Part of the reason we can’t always judge other people’s anger is that we read anger through cultural filters. Scholar Ellen van Wolde, in an article for Biblical Interpretations on anger in the Hebrew Bible, points out that anger is perceived differently in different cultures: in the Hebrew Bible, anger (defined as “uncontrollable fury in someone’s head leading prototypically to violence”) is always linked to masculine subjects and positions of power. God, kings, fathers, and older sons are angry; servants, children, younger sons, and women are not.

In American culture, we can’t separate questions of anger in discourse from the question: Who gets to be angry? Historically, men have been able to get angry in public with few social repercussions; women and people of color have not. In her book on feminism and affect, Barbara Tomlinson includes studies showing that both men and women tend to see male emotion as “rational” and “justified” but tend to see similar displays by women and other marginalized people as “emotional” and “angry.”

In other words, we may not always accurately read anger in others: We may misread passionate speech as anger, particularly in other women or speakers from different cultural backgrounds. Are we always certain that what we read and dismiss as anger is, in fact, anger? What we perceive as anger might be passion, it might be frankness, or it might simply be that our own discomfort with the topic makes us read a strong and direct tone as angry.

Anger has historically been used as a tool to dismiss social critique

Even if the speaker is clearly angry, we need to be careful about dismissing them. Historically, such dismissals have been used to delegitimize arguments by women and other marginalized people, raising serious concerns about injustice.

Such dismissals are dangerous for several reasons:

First, it puts the burden of the argument on the speaker. Requiring a speaker to be calm (according to the audience’s judgment) puts the focus of the argument on the audience’s comfort, rather than the speaker’s grievance. This will always disadvantage those with the most at stake in a conversation. But why should the burden of hard conversations always be on the speaker? Why don’t we require similar effort from the audience? If we are committed to peacemaking and eradicating injustice, we should be willing to put forth equal effort to listen in a generous and compassionate manner.

Second, the dismissal makes the argument about the perceived character of the speaker rather than the content of their speech. Dismissing someone because they are angry often implies they are also irrational. As Tomlinson argues, “To discount or bracket research and arguments because the author appears ‘angry’ assumes that they only make these arguments because they are angry, and when reason takes hold again, they will come to see otherwise.”

Third, these dismissals also make the argument about form rather than substance — instead of asking: Does this critique have merit? We focus on: Is this argument expressed in a pleasing fashion? But anyone who studies rhetoric knows the forms considered persuasive are constantly changing: Renaissance speakers favored a more flowery, emotional style than Enlightenment writers. We should be cautious about rejecting arguments just because of the tone the speaker uses — particularly when our perceptions of tone are often culturally contingent and rooted in gendered assumptions about who gets to be passionate when speaking, and who gets read as angry (this tactic is also known as “tone policing”).

Peacemaking demands great tolerance for people and none for injustice

As members of the LDS faith, we are often rightly wary of contention. As the Savior taught in 3 Nephi 11:29, “He that hath the spirit of contention is not of me, but is of the devil.” Although in contemporary usage, contention often gets conflated with heated argument, it is more than that. If we look at the term in the Book of Mormon, “contention” is often used in the context of war — not just disagreement, but violent disagreement. One of the synonyms listed in the Topical Guide is also “strife,” which Merriam Webster defines as a “bitter, sometimes violent conflict or discussion” and also an “exertion or contention for superiority.” Like the tango, contention requires at least two angry participants.

Understood as violent conflict or fight for supremacy, contention works against our goals of peacemaking. But we need to set our concern about contention against another scriptural injunction: In Alma 28:12, Mormon editorializes over the violent conflict between the Lamanites and Nephites and concludes, “and thus we see how great the inequality of man is because of sin and transgression, and the power of the devil” — in other words, the devil works toward human inequality. We should not let our concern about contention override our fundamental work toward human equality.

Can anger and contention be divisive? Absolutely. But I would argue that anger over injustice is not as divisive as the existence of that injustice. MWEG’s third principle of peacemaking says, “Peacemaking demands great tolerance for people and none for injustice.” If we reject arguments simply because they are made in anger, then we violate this principle: For the sake of a surface peace, we are tolerating injustice and being intolerant of others. This does not make conflict go away but creates an environment where it festers and grows.

Justice and social change rarely come without conflict and discomfort. Though Martin Luther King Jr. worked to eradicate racial injustice, in his lifetime he was called “the most dangerous man in America” by the FBI, and a majority of Americans disapproved of his work. Early women’s rights advocate Martha Coffin Wright was viewed by her neighbors as a “very dangerous woman.” Bryan Stevenson shared in a BYU Devotional that his work at the Equal Justice Initiative to end mass incarceration and unjust sentencing is often uncomfortable. Even our Savior, who shared principles of salvation, was hated and ultimately killed for what he taught.

As women committed to peacemaking and justice, we need to get comfortable with discomfort.

We need to listen with compassion and understanding to those who are angry about injustice. We need to be willing to call out injustice and discrimination where we see it. We need to petition for changes in unjust systems, even when doing so is unpopular. In doing so, we uphold our baptismal covenant to “mourn with those that mourn” — and transform our mourning into peaceful action.