A few months ago, my elementary-age sons insisted Jesus had sinned: “He wasn’t perfect, Mom. Remember how he got angry in the temple?”
I was surprised they had come to this conclusion on their own. But when I reflect on most cultural expressions of anger, I understand why they would conflate anger with sin. In our increasingly polarized and digitized world, anger has not only gone unchecked—it has also become a profitable form of exploitation. Most of it is online, which makes it disembodied but not altogether disingenuous. People are angry, and they express it in increasingly unhealthy ways.
In 2025, Oxford University Press’s word of the year was rage bait. People often build platforms on anger (their own and others’) because in our attention economy, big emotions get clicks.
Christians tend to engage this dynamic in one of two ways. Either we embrace the vitriol of the public square, insulting and degrading our ideological enemies in the name of truth, or we suppress our anger about real problems in the name of charity. Some Christians define their public witness through displays of outrage, dunking on—or even trolling— those with whom they disagree. Others, seeking to avoid immature internet spats or exploitative rage bait, tend to disengage from conversations that do matter.
The result is that Christians are often seen as either too nasty or too nice.
As a woman raised in the South, I have tended toward suppression of anger. But in recent years, I’ve been convicted by Jesus’ careful, prayerful expression of this powerful emotion. When he cleansed the temple—the action my sons interpreted as sin—Jesus was not afraid to make a scene in response to wrongdoing. However, he did not act in a thoughtless rage. John’s Gospel says Jesus made a whip of cords after coming upon the money changers and sellers (2:14–15). This may not have taken him an entire afternoon, but it would have at least slowed him down enough to reflect and pray before using it. It’s the difference between sending an angry, unfiltered tweet or email and waiting to speak a difficult word after prayerful reflection.
Jesus had unique authority to overturn tables in the temple, for it was uniquely his Father’s house (v. 16). And our ability to experience completely righteous anger is severely tarnished by sin. But Jesus’ earthly life remains an example to follow.
As the true human, he shows us anger has a place when rightly submitted to God. Whether Jesus was responding to economic injustice, racial prejudice, or impoverished worship, Jesus’ concern was clearly born of love for God and his people. His example can inspire us to welcome the right kind of anger in the right way. Zeal for God energizes us to protect the purity of our worship and its accessibility to all people. It teaches us to fight corruption in our lives and in our world.
But we can’t do this fight merely for show or social recognition. When Jesus cleansed the temple, he wasn’t virtue signaling; he was initiating an action he was prepared to sustain at great cost to himself. When the disciples reflected on this moment later, they “remembered that it is written: ‘Zeal for your house will consume me’” (v. 17). Jesus’ cleansing of the temple ultimately took the shape of his own sacrificial death.
In my experience of righteous anger, I’ve noticed a willingness to stick my neck out up to a point. I might sign a petition or write a letter or have a hard conversation with someone, but ultimately I’m reluctant to ruffle too many feathers. I sometimes dress this up in the language of strategy: To retain a voice in a given situation, I opt to move slowly and press gently. Sometimes this is how God calls us to act. When Esther went before King Xerxes to advocate for her people, she did so slowly and strategically.
But in our discernment of God’s will, we must never confuse the way of Christ with “how to win friends and influence people.”The gospel is not strategic. It is upside-down to this world. It confounds and infuriates and disenfranchises and can lead to our destruction. Even Esther, in her carefully planned plea to the king, knew she was putting her life on the line to save her people. Righteous anger stands apart from the rage of the world because it is cruciform: Compelled to do more than point a finger at injustice, we learn to stand in the gap.
In his Letter from a Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. argued the costly, self-sacrificial actions of the civil rights activists were the result of their own prayerful discernment in response to the mistreatment of Black people:
We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community. Mindful of the difficulties involved, we decided to undertake a process of self purification. We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves: “Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?” “Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?”
The fact that King wrote this from a jail cell illustrates the cost—and at times, the seeming failure—of prayerful, sacrificial action. Rage-baiting is much easier and usually more lucrative.
Zealous obedience may lead to destruction in the short term. But there is resurrection. Those who have taken a fall for racial justice, the protection of children or the unborn, the plight of refugees, or abuse survivors in the church should know their labor is not in vain.
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Jesus demonstrates in his own person that godly zeal is not impotent or futile. It is a holy energy of self-giving love that goes to the grave and back again: “Destroy this temple, and I will raise it again in three days” (v. 17).
We can let God channel our anger toward costly action because he controls the outcomes—we don’t—and because he is the God of resurrection.
Righteous anger will look different for each person and community. We can’t sustain prayerful sacrifice in every situation that calls for it—another way internet rage exploits us is by implying we can and should own every cause—and we can’t discern our specific callings apart from the Holy Spirit. He has embedded each of us in a particular story and context, with particular limits.
A woman in my church has allowed God to animate her anger about the refugee crisis into a sustained local ministry on their behalf. She knows she can’t solve a global problem, but she faithfully labors to help refugees in our city. This year for Lent, my sons saved their money to donate to her program. I am thankful they have a real-time example of how anger can be channeled in submission to God for the sake of love. In an age of self-gratifying rage, we need that kind of witness.
Hannah Miller King is associate rector at The Vine Anglican Church in Clyde, North Carolina, and author of Feasting on Hope: How God Sets a Table in the Wilderness.
The post Why (and When) It’s Okay for Christians to Get Angry appeared first on Christianity Today.
