Ex-Mormon Anger, Part 2: LDS Teachings on Anger

In Part 1, we talked about what anger is and why it is important. In Part 2, we’re going to deconstruct some LDS teachings on anger. (We’ll deal with teachings on “contention” specifically in Part 3.)

Why are we doing this? Because you probably have false ideas in your head that are holding you back, whether or not you’re consciously aware of them.

For orthodox members, anger can be overwhelming, disturbing, incomprehensible, and possibly Satanic. So amid your faith transition, your anger may make you feel out of control.

I hope this will help. After you read this, you may want to go back to Part 1 and review what healthy anger is.

I’m also going to present some more nuanced interpretations I learned as a progmo (progressive Mormon) to help you out if your family is mixed-faith. In other words, you can use these progmo views to help them develop social-emotional skills without undermining the religious beliefs of the other parent or of the kids themselves.

Disclaimer: I am a person with a blog, not a medical professional. This information is for educational purposes and is not a replacement for professional counseling.

Demonizing Anger

As you might know, Mormonism is against anger in general. Exhibit A comes from the Book of Mormon.

As Lynn Robbins notes in the talk “Agency and Anger,” both the Joseph Smith Translation and the Book of Mormon change Matthew 5:22 from “whosoever is angry with his brother without a cause shall be in danger of the judgment” to just “whosoever is angry with his brother shall be in danger of the judgment” (emphasis added).

In the cited talk, Robbins preaches multiple times against “becoming angry” and advises listeners that, “Becoming angry is a conscious choice, a decision; therefore, we can make the choice not to become angry. We choose!” He encourages members to do away with anger and resolve right then to never become angry again.

LDS leaders have drawn a straight line between anger and the worst crimes. (I’ll talk about how right or wrong they are in a minute.) In “Agency and Anger,” Robbins calls anger a trigger for verbal and emotional abuse and says that physical abuse is “anger gone berserk.”

Likewise, Gordon Hinckley, in his talk “Slow to Anger,” says:

It is when we become angry that we get into trouble. The road rage that affects our highways is a hateful expression of anger. I dare say that most of the inmates of our prisons are there because they did something when they were angry. In their wrath they swore, they lost control of themselves, and terrible things followed, even murder. There were moments of offense followed by years of regret.

In that same talk, Hinckley also says that divorce is “in most cases the bitter fruit of anger.”

Now, that’s a lot to unpack. First, let’s just note that you might be afraid to feel anger because you’ve been taught that you could lose control and abuse or murder somebody.

So lots of fear getting you to suppress anger there. But before we dig in to the claims about social ills, we need to figure out what LDS leaders mean when they say “anger.”

Feeling Anger Versus Doing Violence

LDS leaders have gotten better at this over time, but until recently, they haven’t differentiated with feeling anger and being violent. For example, with both “Agency and Anger” and “Slow to Anger,” you can argue, based on the texts, that the speakers are talking about anger as a feeling or that they are referring to doing violence.

We’ll look at both interpretations here.

“Becoming Angry” As “Feeling Anger”

The more traditional, orthodox interpretation is to interpret “becoming angry” as a reference to feeling anger or acting out of anger. Both are included. And this seems to be what Lynn Robbins is saying in “Agency and Anger” when he says:

Anger is a yielding to Satan’s influence by surrendering our self-control. It is the thought-sin that leads to hostile feelings or behavior. It is the detonator of road rage on the freeway, flare-ups in the sports arena, and domestic violence in homes.

Referring to anger as a “thought-sin” makes it fairly clear that he is saying that feeling anger is a slippery slope to violence.

And I’ll refer you again to this Hinckley quote from “Slow to Anger,” which implies the same thing, that feeling anger leads to a loss of control and sometimes to crime:

It is when we become angry that we get into trouble. The road rage that affects our highways is a hateful expression of anger. I dare say that most of the inmates of our prisons are there because they did something when they were angry. In their wrath they swore, they lost control of themselves, and terrible things followed, even murder. There were moments of offense followed by years of regret.

The attitude that people often form based on these kinds of teachings is that feeling anger, while not always disastrous, is dangerous and should therefore be avoided, just to be safe.

Another point toward “feeling anger” being included as a sin is the fact that leaders don’t clearly explain what they mean, perhaps because they don’t understand the distinction themselves.

“Becoming Angry” As “Doing Violence”

You can also argue that when LDS leaders talk about “becoming angry,” they often are trying to say “don’t be violent.”

In “Agency and Anger,” Robbins quotes William Wilbank to illustrate that anger is a choice and can be controlled:

To those who say, “But I can’t help myself,” author William Wilbanks responds: “Nonsense.”

“Aggression, … suppressing the anger, talking about it, screaming and yelling,” are all learned strategies in dealing with anger. “We choose the one that has proved effective for us in the past. Ever notice how seldom we lose control when frustrated by our boss, but how often we do when annoyed by friends or family?” (“The New Obscenity,” Reader’s Digest, Dec. 1988, 24; emphasis added).

Wilbanks’s quote refers to actions and anger management strategies. Further, Robbins refers to the bits of the Family Proclamation that condemn abuse several times throughout the talk, including at the beginning and the end. So while I do think he’s clear on calling anger a “thought-sin,” it does seem like the “anger” he’s trying to address and prevent is ultimately “violence and abuse.”

Despite scary quotes like that “anger sometimes leads to murder” bit, Gordon Hinckley makes a bit more room for anger as a feeling, and sometimes even a motivator for action, being allowed. In “Slow to Anger” he cites Jesus’s cleansing the temple as an action manifesting controlled anger, and he quotes extensively from the hymn “School Thy Feelings,” which includes these lyrics:

School thy feelings, O my brother;

Train thy warm, impulsive soul.

Do not its emotions smother,

But let wisdom’s voice control.

I’m also amused to see that he contradicts Robbins. While Robbins says, “nor can becoming angry be justified” in “Agency and Anger,” Gordon Hinckley, in “Slow to Anger,” says, “anger may be justified in some circumstances.” What Hinckley condemns unequivocally is uncontrolled anger.

Unpacking the Causes of Social Ills

Now that we’ve addressed the lack of clarity around the meaning of the word “anger,” let’s return to the scary claims about anger leading to everything bad happening.

While crimes of passion exist, you’re unlikely to black out due to rage and wake up having committed unspeakable crimes. If you have problems controlling your anger, then by all means, work on your emotional regulation and anger management skills! But I don’t think that poor anger management is the cause of most crime.

Next, let’s address Hinckley’s claim that “most of the inmates of our prisons are there because they did something when they were angry.” The talk from which this quote comes was given in 2007 in the United States, where a massive amount of imprisonment has been of Black people who are imprisoned for non-violent drug offenses that white people also commit but aren’t punished for. Not sure what that has to do with uncontrolled anger.

More broadly, much of crime around the world is fueled by, in the words of John Green, systemic disenfranchisement, poverty, and lack of access to job opportunities and education (here’s the more-fun Songified version). Gangs, which commit a lot of serious crime, thrive in these conditions. And what about theft? Would it disappear entirely if there were no poverty? No. But a lot of it would be gone, and addressing poverty would do more than getting rid of anger.

Other important factors to consider include access to guns and power structures such as patriarchy.

Divorce can be caused by many things, but anger tends to be a side effect of the conflicts that lead to divorce, not the cause in and of itself. One partner never doing chores, having an affair, or abusing the other will definitely cause anger, but calling the cause of the divorce “anger” is incredibly invalidating to divorced people and their right to be respected and supported by their life partners.

And that brings us to abuse.

Identifying Causes of Abuse

Abuse is perpetuated by people at all socioeconomic levels and can be exacerbated by poverty but is not caused by it. Specifically, we’re going to talk about domestic violence and gender-based violence, since that is a major target of Hinckley’s and Robbins’s preaching.

To be clear, I’m glad they’re preaching against abuse! Abuse is bad, and people should not abuse other people! The problem is that the preaching isn’t accurate enough to be very helpful. See, abuse is generally not caused by people failing to control their anger.

Abusers often cite anger or someone “making them angry” as their excuse. And Robbins notes that point and comes very close to understanding it in “Agency and Anger” when he quotes William Wilbank to illustrate that anger is a choice and can be controlled (see the quote above).

Robbins rightfully identifies that since these men are not losing control with people like their bosses (people with power over them) they are clearly making a choice to express themselves in an abusive way with their family members.

His problem is that he doesn’t interrogate why these men are willfully abusing women and children. He seems to think that their problem is giving place to anger in the first place and then losing control, as though anger can only be controlled in the early stages.

And this is just wrong. We have tried to reform abusers who have been convicted of battering their wives through teaching anger management and assertiveness. And it hasn’t worked, because that is not the problem. Anger and violence are tools abusers use to serve a specific purpose: controlling women and children.

Why do they do that? Because they feel entitled to control women and children. Why do they feel entitled? Lots of reasons, but when it comes to Mormon men who abuse their families, the explicit patriarchal structure of families and the Church definitely fuels entitled attitudes in many men.

For example, canonized modern scripture describes women and children as the property of men. Thankfully, some patriarchal wording has been removed, but temple covenants used to require women to obey their husbands and give themselves to them, while men made no equivalent promises.

And still, there’s been no clarity around whether those covenants are still in force for people who made them. Are women who had to give themselves to their husbands their own people again, since that part is no longer in the wording of the covenant, or does the switch not apply to people who already made the covenants? Or do all wives still belong to their husbands, as indicated in all of scripture and Church history, only we don’t say that part out loud anymore?

If LDS leaders are serious about wanting to stop violence against women and children, they need to do more than listen to men who say “she made me so angry that I abused her” and then preach a sermon on how that’s not a good excuse. Abusers are aware of what they’re doing. LDS leaders are letting them get away with it.

I’ll get off my soapbox now, but the point is, sure, anger can be involved in abuse, but you can manage and express anger in healthy ways without committing crimes. Hinckley and Robbins have no idea what they’re talking about.

Managing Anger and Teaching Kids About It

On a brighter note, teaching strategies for anger management and emotional regulation is a great thing to do with kids.

If you are in a mixed-faith marriage and need to find a way to teach about anger that works with Mormonism, then connecting Church teachings on anger to bad things done with unrestrained anger is how I’d go about that.

And probably I’d avoid using either of the talks I’ve cited in this post to teach your kids. So much terrible information in there.

So what can you teach them? Anger is useful when it’s helping you identify when you need to set boundaries. Channel this kind of anger into assertive action.

How do you explain the differences between passivity, assertiveness, and aggression or violence?

As I was told in therapy, imagine that someone steps on your foot.

It is not bad for you to say, “Hey, get off my foot.” If the person will not get off your foot, you would not be out of line to push them off your foot. Those are both examples of being appropriately assertive.

If you just let the person keep standing on your foot and don’t say anything, then you’re being too passive. They’re hurting you, and you matter too.

If you scream at the person and beat them with a baseball bat for standing on your foot, then you’re being too violent or aggressive.

The semantic distinction many people draw with anger is to tell people to be assertive, not passive or aggressive.

Note, however, that if you use the word “aggressive” in explaining anger management to a child, then you need to explain that “aggressive” often means something different in sports scenarios. Otherwise, you might casually shout “be aggressive” and then have a child who is very confused about why you’re upset that they slide-tackled another kid.

For more ideas for teachings kids about anger, see Part 1.

Tune in next time, when we’ll talk about LDS teachings on contention.