It’s a natural tendency to avoid anything uncomfortable. Many Christians tense up in situations where angry feelings arise. We’ve all probably witnessed the volcanic anger that erupts from a disgruntled customer in the grocery checkout lane. Everyone around gets singed by the heat of rage directed toward the offending cashier. They scramble to put distance between themselves and the angry eruption.
Avoiding all anger is like turning off the electricity in your house so as to avoid the potential of being electrocuted. While anger suppression works to keep you safe, it also means there is a diminished emotional capacity to deeply enjoy life or to reach out to help others.
While avoidance is a healthy response to destructive anger, Christians often try to steer clear of any expression of anger. The assumption is that if we avoid all anger, then we at least will not be guilty of sinful anger. That kind of “all or nothing” thinking, however, reflects a refusal to honestly struggle with the complex issues of life that are intended to direct our attention toward God, who is righteously angered by sin. God calls us to be like Him in this world (1 John 4:17). And that means we must learn to handle anger well, not avoid it.
There are at least four basic reasons why Christians avoid expressions of anger.
First, some avoid expressing anger because of the fear of repeating the abuses of the past. We’ve all witnessed destructive anger. Many are haunted by memories of anger that destroyed relationships, and wounded hearts. Many grew up in homes torn apart by parents who often resorted to angry outbursts or threats to squelch opposition to their plans or opinions. Anger has fueled all kinds of abuse. It has been a devastating component in the epidemic of broken homes that litter the landscape of modern society.
While past scars remind us of the wounds inflicted by someone’s anger against us, we also regret our own unholy use of anger. Because of those painful memories, many have vowed to steer clear of any expression of anger because of the fear of falling back into the same destructive patterns of the past.
However, being controlled by a fear of repeating the past tends to stifle our capacity to live boldly in the present. Courage is what empowers action in the midst of fear and uncertainty. A person who lacks courage is often defensive and more committed to self-protection than loving engagement. They reason: ?If I don’t get angry with you, you can’t get angry with me. We’ll let by-gones be by-gones and pretend that everything’s okay.?
Second, we may avoid anger because we fear powerful emotion — passion. The expression of anger is a passionate response. Because we are people who strive for control, we fear anything that is so passionate that it seems to defy control. We feel more safe and secure when everything is (or at least seems to be) under control. For many Christians, expressing anger represents a loss of control, and that’s why it must be avoided. The reasoning works like this: ?I’m afraid of my anger. I’ve hurt others in my anger. They’ve hurt me in their anger. Anger is too volatile. I can’t control it so I must avoid it. If I avoid all anger, I won’t make the mistake of misusing it.?
Avoiding anger because of the fear of losing control reveals a fundamental commitment to doing things right and not behaving in a manner that can be criticized. However, it is presumptuous to assume that anyone can always handle anger correctly. The deceitfulness of our hearts (Jeremiah 17:9) reminds us that we are hopelessly mired in our own selfish motives and cannot escape them any more than we can escape the earth’s gravitational pull.
Our fear of strong emotion catches us in a bind, for while we fear it, we also are drawn to it. We demand predictability but are quickly bored with it. We long for intensity in life, but in order to enjoy it, we must be willing to give up our control of relationships. Emotions like anger that can flare out of control are often too threatening for us to risk expressing so we tend to avoid them and settle for passionless predictability. In doing so, we seriously hamper our ability to respond in a healthy way with the full range of emotions that God has given to us.
Third, we sometimes avoid anger because we haven’t learned how to be angry about the things that God gets angry about. Many Christians grew up in homes where healthy anger was seldom observed. All anger was vilified and viewed as sin that needed to be confessed and avoided. We were taught that any display of anger was wrong — that we ?shouldn’t feel that way.? The message was clear whether it was verbalized or observed: Anger is unacceptable and intolerable. The threatened loss of relationships because of our anger served to ?keep us in line.?
By avoiding all anger, some Christians may feel they are honoring God, when in fact they are failing to obey His command to be angry but don’t sin (Ephesians 4:26). Anger and sin are not synonymous. While much of our anger is self-serving and sinful, the text makes a clear assumption that an expression of anger that serves God’s purposes is not sinful.
If we recognize a tendency in ourselves to refuse to get angry about anything, we must ask ourselves a painful question: Have we lost our sense of deep conviction about truth? God expresses tough words against those who claim to know Him and are committed to passionless mediocrity (Revelation 3:16).
Fourth, Christians avoid anger for fear of being characterized as angry people. Because Christians are often portrayed in the media as angry and narrow-minded, we tend to shy away from even healthy displays of anger. In an age where tolerance is heralded as the supreme standard of ?going along to get along,? standing against something or someone, even for good reasons, draws a crowd of critics. Even in the Christian community, anger is viewed more as a vice that must be avoided than a virtue to be cultivated. To boldly stand with conviction for God, means you must also be willing to stand against something (Romans 12:9) and expressing anger against something can be counter-cultural.
We must admit that Christians do mishandle anger. We’re often guilty of getting more angry about someone else’s sin than our own. However, the cure is not to ignore either. As Jesus taught us, we need to deal with the beam protruding from our own eye before we help (not condemn) our neighbor with the speck of sawdust clouding his or her vision (Matthew 7:3-5; Luke 6:41-42). Attempts at avoiding all anger simply push anger underground. While all seems pleasant on the surface, things underneath are constantly simmering and will eventually boil over into other areas of our lives. We may disguise it with words like ?frustration? or ?stress,? but the bottom line: Unacknowledged anger is making its presence felt.
