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Bonnie J. Miller-McLemore is Professor
of Pastoral Theology and Counseling at
Vanderbilt University Divinity School
and the mother of three boys. Her
publications address major cultural
issues and include Death, Sin, and
the Moral Life: Contemporary Cultural
Interpretations of Death, Also a Mother:
Work and Family as Theological Dilemma, and,
most recently, a co-authored volume, From
Culture Wars to Common Ground: Religion
and the American Family Debate. She
is currently working on a book, Let
the Children Come: Care of Children as a
Religious Practice, funded by a
grant from The Henry Luce Foundation.
Where does human anger come from? Is it
avoidable, or is it something we should
try to avoid?
There has always been, as a part of
human nature, an angry element. That's
just how we are made. You could argue
that both theologically and biblically.
You could also argue it psychologically.
Freud, for example, said that there are
two basic instincts: sex and aggression.
The same thing is true when we get to
biblical tradition. In both the Hebrew
scriptures and the New Testament, you
can find images of acceptable, righteous
anger on the part of God, Jesus, and the
faithful. And in Ephesians there's that
interesting distinction made between
being angry but not sinning." In other
words, there's good anger and there's
sinful anger. There are some
theologians, like Paul Tillich, who
would say we are created with anger as a
good part of human nature, not as an
inherently sinful or bad part. Anger
only goes awry under the conditions of
sinful human existence.
Our culture seems very angry. We talk
about road rage, and now sports rage --
parents attacking officials at their
children's sporting events. What are we
so angry about?
I can name a few things that seem very
clear to me about anger. One is in the
last 50 years, for the good of society,
psychology has stressed that feelings
aren't bad. In fact you need to be in
touch with your feelings, and you need
to express your feelings. Up to a
certain extent that has been a very
helpful shift. Our parents and
grandparents kept a lot of things
hidden; a lot of things, and it didn't
solve problems. It led to abuse,
alcoholism, and other ways of acting out
anger. But there are, of course, limits
and problems when the free expression of
feelings, including anger, is taken too
far.
Also, some psychologists say that many
people today are more narcissistically
fragile. By that, they mean that many
people do not deal well with anything
that threatens their rather weak sense
of self. A narcissistic person is less
able to cope with setbacks and
disappointments, less secure and
confident, maybe even more grandiose,
and hence more easily set off. Rage then
is a natural result of even a tiny
injury to one's self-esteem.
Another thing that is clearly happening
is that we live in post-modern society,
a highly technological fast paced, high
stress, high stimuli. Living in that
kind of society, we are more volatile.
There are so many things going on in our
lives and our frenetic pace can spark
more anger.
How does this make our families
different from families 50 years ago,
where expressing anger was generally not
as acceptable?
I came from a family that had those
philosophies. Not only was conflict
suppressed, but there was also a sense
that the parents ought to present a
unified front. The unified front
sometimes came at the sacrifice of one
of the parents, often the woman who felt
she had to be the peacekeeper. This
model didn't demonstrate to children a
healthy way to process conflict, because
the conflict was hidden. My sense was
that my parents didn't have any
conflict, and I'm sure that they did.
There's a lot of interesting literature
on marriage education and communication.
That whole body of literature says that
the highest cause of divorce is avoidance of
conflict. That may or may not be proven,
but most people think that it is the
high conflict in a marriage that is a
problem. But avoidance of conflict
sometimes causes even greater problems.
Some of these studies show that happily
married couples will have as many as ten
areas of irreconcilable differences,
things that they can never wholly agree
upon.
How do we recognize healthy conflict?
There is destructive anger and there is
constructive conflict. Constructive
conflict involves being more open about
our frustrations and trying to work them
through, rather than removing ourselves
from the family. It means being willing
to be influenced, giving-in, and
compromising -- not easy things! The
bottom line has to be respect for the
other person in expressing anger so that
one tries hard not to degrade or demean
the other person -- something that is
hard to practice when you're really
angry but is absolutely essential. In
addition to this covenant of deep
respect, genuinely expressing anger
requires establishing trust in the
relationship -- that the relationship is
stronger and can outlast any extremely
heated conflict. Building this kind of
trust also takes patience, time, and
work and lots of memories of good times
together. With children too it's clear
that they need more than unconditional
positive regard. What is truly
empathetic for a child may sometimes be
a clear demonstration of anger.
You write about the effort to balance of
work and home and how imbalance can be
destructive.
One of the primary areas of anger in
marriage is the distribution of domestic
family labor particularly as women are
taking on more responsibilities in the
wider public arena. Women are more
likely to be angry about unfair
distribution of labor. Men are more
likely to be angry about being nagged.
That's perhaps the difference. In my own
experience, I find that there are times
when both persons get angry even if they
have tried to establish a just, fair
balance of what needs to be done in the
home. They both feel they are doing too
much, and they both are right. At that
point, instead of anger they just need
care and support! The wider support
structures for families trying to share
the domestic work unfortunately are just
not in place yet. I think we haven't
truly reached a sense of bold gender
equality when it comes to the household
and that it will continue to spark
anger. In my book, Also A Mother, I
argue that it is better for everyone
involved to share the household work.
That sharing is better for children in
terms of what they see and experience.
Sometimes working toward sharing
responsibilities is worth the necessary
conflict and anger that go with it,
except when it becomes destructive or
harmful.
It does seem another change from 50
years ago is how much more fathers are
involved, beginning with being present
at their children's birth. Is this
changing families?
I think so, although there are men at
both extremes -- fathers that are a
great deal more involved and more
"deadbeat" fathers that are not involved
at all. This gets to our core Christian
values and Christian ethics and how we
think about love and family. Since Also
A Mother was published, four other
authors and I worked on a book on family
debate called From Culture Wars to
Common Ground. One of the things we
observed by doing a Gallup Poll is that
most people today perceive their family
as being less self-sacrificial than
their parents thought necessary. Many
parents would affirm that even though
parenting calls for us to stretch
ourselves tremendously and asks very
hard things from us, being a parent also
gives to us very richly, and we become
ourselves more fully through this
exchange with our children. People today
would choose to emphasize an ethic of
what might be called mutuality or equal
regard or shared responsibility. Love is
a mutuality. Sometimes in Roman Catholic
circles it's discussed as caritas, which
is a more two-way love. Protestants have
traditionally conceptualized love as agape, unconditional
self-sacrifice. In an earlier time, the
highest ideal in a family was
sacrificial love, giving of yourself
unconditionally to your children. One of
our major agendas in our book is to make
a case that caritas or mutuality
is the Christian ideal. Even when Jesus
tried to create the household of God,
his sacrifice was a means to that end.
Not the end. Not the goal. Jesus'
self-sacrifice was the consequence of
his striving to create a genuine
community of caring, giving people.
Sacrifice can be an attempt to
reestablish a genuine mutuality. It's so
necessary and it becomes more acute the
younger and more dependent your children
are or the more dependent your aging
parents or your disabled sibling or
whomever you are caring for. The hope
remains that even in those situations,
there will be some way to balance that
will either be a different kind of
balance of return -- something is
received back for the caregiver. Or, if
not there are other people standing by
to support you and give to you in order
for you to keep going.
I can imagine some people hearing this
with some suspicion-mutuality sounds
great, but what about when the kids act
out, when they speak to you with
hostility. Most of us want to say, you
can't talk to me that way!
One thing that people struggle with is
what mutuality looks like when one of
the parties is not yet fully equal in
some respect, not in terms of human
worth and dignity, but in terms of moral
judgment or cognitive or physical
ability. If children are not "equal" in
certain respects, how do you have a
mutual relationship and let children
participate in a fuller way in family
process, while still protecting their
childhood? There is something healthy in
the wider range that we have given our
kids. Children deserve a greater voice
in decisions that affect their lives.
They need to participate as fully as
possible in family discussions and
planning. But there are boundaries and
limits to this. There needs to be. For
example, there is the question of when
to call a child on treating someone with
disrespect, whether another child or an
adult. The home is an essential place to
learn to show respect. There are times
when I will say exactly not only can you
not speak to me that way, but I will
tell you be careful when you cross this
threshold because you can't talk to a
coach that way either. You certainly
can't talk to a teacher that way or
others to whom you owe a certain amount
of respect.
How has your understanding of love and
anger affected your work as a
theologian?
One thing in terms of my thinking about
anger is a major reconceptualization of
what we think Christian love looks like.
I'm not sure these ideas are making it
to the pulpit. The theology of sacrifice
is still so much a part of our worship,
our hymns, the liturgy, how we
understand communion. So we're talking
core imagery here and that certainly has
implications for this whole topic of
anger. Things don't shift quickly in
terms of how we worship or how we think
about the cross and Jesus' death as
sacrifice. We really touch on so much
when we get into these questions --
funny how the issue of anger can get you
into almost anything. There is no
question that congregations cannot
ignore powerful human emotions like
anger, as much as they might want to!
And we cannot ignore the question of the
wider culture and its sometimes
distorted messages about violence and
anger. On these difficult issues
--anger, just distribution of household
labor, treating children with respect
but also with clear limits and
boundaries appropriate to their age
--congregations must speak up and help
people struggle along as we make up new
lives of faith together.
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