Why Indignation Is Always Wrong

Or, what I’ve been learning in my journey through feminism and Orthodoxy

One of the perks of first trimester is you have the excuse to rest, and therefore read, a lot more than usual. 

I can safely say I’m not the person now that I was twelve weeks ago, or even three weeks ago. For three weeks ago is when I cracked open my copy of Paradise and Utopia. Ask my husband, I barely put it down for several days. 

Fr.

John Strickland

(whom I had the pleasure to worship alongside one Sunday at Holy Virgin Mary in 2011, during my years studying Western Civilization at Pepperdine University) has successfully changed my mind and therefore my life with his recent book in four volumes, Paradise and Utopia. Let me explain. 

“Cradle Orthodox” such as myself are secretly fond of thinking of ourselves as “better than” “all those” converts. For we have a “genetic memory” of the faith, passed down over generations, and therefore we are automatically much wiser than those crazy neophytes. But in so doing, we simply shoot ourselves in the foot, or rather, the Achilles’ heel. One way this manifests in my country of America, which is not Orthodox like Russia or Greece, is by adopting/adapting oneself too much to a culture which is foreign, even antithetical, to the spirit of traditional Christianity. 

Here we go again, many of my readers are now thinking. Ye olde conservative hand-wringing . . . too bad she drank the kool-aid. But who has really drunk the kool-aid, if not the person who implicitly rejects the traditional Christian way of life, in favor of a new, updated, secular one, while retaining an “Orthodox” label? After all, is the person who is awake to the “brainworms” of our society so unlike Plato’s enlightened cave dweller, who found the way out, saw the sun and the way things really are, and returned to enlighten his companions in the shadows – but they simply think the escapee has gone both mad and blind, and so they ignore him? 

Thankfully for everyone, Father John’s writing is more down to earth, coolly logical, and skillful than mine embodied above. For once he shows you these things, you can’t un-see them. And what he has shown me, this life-changing insight, is that indignation, in ALL her forms whether ugly or seductive, is utterly foreign to the Orthodox spirit. 

Now, I’ve been told this a thousand times, but he showed me, and that makes all the difference. For a picture, even a textual one, is worth more than many words of moralizing. 

This textual picture that Father John paints is of a Christendom which, for various historical reasons, diverged in the West starting around the time of Charlemagne, solidifying in the Papal Reformation and Great Schism of 1054. These in turn planted the seeds for the Protestant Reformation and then the Enlightenment/benightenment (“benightenment” being the author’s delightful phraseology). All this ultimately led to the collapse of Western culture starting in the 1800s, culminating in the two World Wars, and manifesting today as a culture of death and nihilism. 

It all traces back to indignation. 

“Peter and the other apostles had preached repentance. The new clerical elite professed indignation. They were set not on personal but on institutional transformation.” (Strickland, Age of Division)

This is the key: we reject changing the one person whom we can change, ourselves, and we seek to improve others. This is not the way, and it never was. As Father John shows, the moment Western leaders began embodying indignation rather than repentance, they set off a whole chain effect. For indignation, expressed as such, cannot but lead to hypocrisy, which in turn breeds more indignation and more hypocrisy. If all this proceeds unchecked, ultimately violence will break out, leading to a massive loss of belief in God, and then – nothingness. 

“The polemical dehumanization of ‘enemies’ even within the revolutionary movement – something that would reach monstrous proportions under Lenin – can be traced to Marxism’s founding personality. This was unquestionably a function of the new Christendom’s virtue of indignation, which, released by the Papal Reformation and harnessed by the humanists, was becoming increasingly prone to violent destruction” (Strickland, Age of Utopia). 

How do I see the spirit of indignation playing out in real life today? I read just about any contemporary book, whether for children or adults. I turn on the TV or open any social media platform. I see endless self-righteous moralizing – not limited, mind you, to any religious affiliation or lack thereof. Not even those conservative Christian circles have escaped, quite the opposite – I distinctly remember being taught in my courses at Pepperdine to judge the masters. “Yes, I as an 18-year-old have something new and important to say about Homer.”¹ And in their/our defense – for we in the West are all now guilty of indignation, let’s not fool ourselves – it’s certainly not as if the world hasn’t given us something to judge it for. The last century gave us poison gas and the atomic bomb, and the question of theodicy seems ever more pressing in the wake of multiple ongoing religious wars. 

But all of this tendency toward indignation, now prized in the West as a virtue instead of a vice, is nothing but a siren song – and this is exactly what traditional Christianity (the Orthodox Church) has always taught and will always teach – this is what we cradle Orthodox, deep down in our bones, should already know, and what the converts should quickly learn. 

The solution to nihilism therefore becomes not mythological world building, but repentance. Under the influence of traditional Christianity, first-millennium Christendom had inspired the transformation of the world through a “change of heart” (a literal translation of metanoia, the Greek word for repentance). From the time of the Papal Reformation, the new Christendom of the West – while maintaining strong emphasis on the value of repentance – elevated indignation as another means of bringing about the transformation of the world . . . Indignation at an untransformed world only intensified when paradise was replaced by utopia in the wake of the Renaissance . . . Only repentance can save the world. This . . . was the insight of Dostoevsky. The tormented novelist was no church father, but he read church fathers and prophetically and insistently communicated their wisdom to the West in which he lived. Before the church fathers, of course, repentance was the teaching of Peter at Pentecost. And before that, Christ Himself declared: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven has drawn near” (Matthew 4:17). Repentance before the face of Christ opens man to the kingdom of heaven. This is the path to transcendence that ideology can never attain. It is the path of humility, not that of indignation. (Strickland, Age of Nihilism) 

For as Father John shows us above, the missing piece of the puzzle for us is that the indignation we espouse is simply unnecessary and even counterproductive. For what purpose does indignation serve, but “an instrument for the engineering of a new order, a kind of proto-utopia” (Strickland, Age of Division)? And WHO NEEDS UTOPIA WHEN UNION WITH GOD IS POSSIBLE, as traditional Christianity in the East, the Orthodox Church, has always taught and continues to teach now? When “it is here below that you must receive the Kingdom of Heaven fully, if you want to enter also after your death” (St. Symeon the New Theologian, quoted in Strickland, Age of Paradise)? The “genetic memory” (my phrase, not Father John’s) of this “transformational imperative” of Christianity (Father John’s phrase) remains with us, at the heart of every indignant cry of Christian or atheist, Catholic or Protestant, feminist or anti-feminist, LGBTQ+ ally or fundamentalist. But it is always doomed when it starts and ends with indignation. Repentance, the way back, is the only way forward. And this will bring about the transformation that we seek . . . first, of ourselves, then of our family, and ultimately of our entire society and culture. Christianity has brought this about in the past, and there is no reason why it cannot do so again.

And that’s where I am really taking this message to heart. I grew up Orthodox, yes, but I also grew up in feminism and secularism. Both of these latter movements are quite nuanced, and I am very grateful to be benefiting personally from their many advances.² But that doesn’t change the fact that at their heart, both movements are indignant. I sometimes feel a bit schizophrenic trying to be everything at once: an Orthodox Christian, a woman, an American, modern, wise, virtuous, independent . . . And that’s why I’m finding this message so freeing. Anything in me that rebels, that rejects what I’ve been given, that is dissatisfied with the status quo, all of this needs to lead me to repentance, not indignation, lest I deceive myself. For “…in truth we are each responsible to all for all, it’s only that men don’t know this. If they knew it, the world would be a paradise at once” (Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, as quoted in Strickland, Age of Nihilism).³

So let’s give up this exercise in futility, all of us, now! Cut off that indignant spirit! Forget your dreams of utopia – but also forget the nothingness around you, and go back, back, back to where “God dwells among men,” for “every man, after tasting something sweet, is afterward unwilling to accept that which is bitter, and therefore we cannot dwell longer here” (emissaries of St. Vladimir to Constantinople, as quoted in Strickland, Age of Paradise). Like the newly converted Russian nation of the early second millennium, let’s embrace humility and repentance, not pride and indignation. 

See you in church. 

Resources:

Paradise and Utopia, for a historical and cultural overview of Christendom over the past two thousand years. Run, don’t walk, to get your copy from the publisher, Ancient Faith, where it is half-off for a limited time.

Thinking Orthodox, to know more about the traditional Christian way of life and how it’s so different from our modern Western mindset.

Leadership and Self-Deception, for a common-sense yet secular resource against indignation.

The Brothers Karamazov and this delightful article by the Catholic Gentleman, for an Orthodox vision of life, and because everyone needs a good novel.

I can’t wait to read your comments! 

1. I will admit that at the time, I laid into Milton and Nietzsche rather fiercely. Still no regrets about that, indignant moralists that they both are.

2. So I ask, along with author Rebekah Merkle, if we can have our cake and eat it, too? To tweak her bicycle metaphor from Eve in Exile a bit, can we keep that front tire pumped up, representing the good parts from feminism and secularism (like increased opportunities for women, and scientific and technological advances), without neglecting the back tire, which is our salvation, repentance, and deification? What alternative do we have, really, if we are not to slide into either cultural oblivion and irrelevance on the one hand, or sin and dysfunction on the other? Could not these be precisely the parts of our culture that we “baptize,” as we once again make it Christian, starting with our own transformation?

3. Hopefully my tone in this article has made it clear by now, but lest I mislead anyone, let me clarify: I am not advocating for apathy as an alternative to indignation! Repeat, NO APATHY! For apathy is none other than the ugly twin sister of indignation. Both responses are ultimately prideful and death-bearing, whether metaphorical, spiritual, or physical. Rather, we should direct the energy that would otherwise be channeled into indignation, where it will actually be useful – to “the bottom line,” as they say in Leadership and Self-Deception (a supposedly secular, but quite Orthodox in spirit, self-help book) – by joyfully and faithfully repenting, not only of our own sins, but as Elder Zosima tells us in the Brothers Karamazov, on behalf of a sinful and suffering world as well.