The Marketplace of Outrage: Duane W.H. Arnold, PhD
The Marketplace of Outrage
The keepers of social media learned long ago that anger sells. Their algorithms are designed to reward engagement, and nothing engages like outrage. If you provide content that provokes anger, you will have an audience. The currency is not truthfulness, but intensity. It no longer matters whether something is accurate—what matters is whether it can provoke.
Anger, however, is not a passive emotion. It seeks resolution. When outrage is cultivated, it becomes the gateway to something darker: sustained hatred and, eventually, violence. This progression is predictable. First, someone or some group is identified as the cause of our anger. Then they are labeled—stripped of nuance and humanity. Once labeled, they become targets.
This cycle has played out across our culture. We have watched as doctors and nurses have been harassed and threatened. Teachers and librarians—those once entrusted to nurture and educate—have found themselves vilified. Judges, election workers, law enforcement officials, and political opponents have all been swept into the same storm. Marginalized communities of color have endured this treatment for centuries. Now Jews, Muslims, members of the LGBTQ+ community, immigrants, and both the rural and urban poor are increasingly singled out as acceptable targets. In this atmosphere, it is no longer enough to simply disagree. Dissent now demands rage. Disagreement now seeks to be satisfied only through destruction.
What is perhaps most disheartening is how many churches have joined the chorus. Rather than standing apart as salt and light, many have chosen to mirror the world’s darkest instincts. They have adopted the tools of outrage and baptized them as zeal. They preach anger as though it were righteousness and division as though it were discernment. In doing so, they abandon the Gospel they claim to defend.
The result is catastrophic. The Church, meant to be the Body of Christ, has become just another faction in the culture wars. The damage to its witness is immense, and the harm inflicted on those caught in the crossfire is almost incalculable.
Of course, the bill for this compromise will come due. The older generation of evangelicals and fundamentalists who have championed this alignment will eventually pass from the scene. What remains will be a generation left disillusioned, skeptical of faith, and convinced that Christianity is simply another political brand.
There is another way, though it requires courage. It demands that we turn from anger as a strategy and return to the way of Christ. The Church is not called to stoke outrage but to bear witness—to speak the truth in love, to embody grace even in conflict, and to resist the easy temptation to dehumanize those with whom we disagree.
If we do not, we will lose not only our credibility but our very soul.
It has been said that the Church is never more herself than when she stands at the foot of the Cross. There, the angry crowds had already chosen their narrative and silenced their doubts with violence. Yet Jesus did not answer in kind. He bore their hatred and responded with mercy. That is our calling too.
If we would be faithful, we must refuse the trade of truth for outrage, or mercy for power. We must pray for those who hate us, serve those who revile us, and remember that every person we are tempted to label is one for whom Christ died. This will not win us the applause of the crowd, but it may yet help heal a fractured world—and save the Church from herself.
Duane W.H. Arnold, PhD
This is why I left anti-social media. Outrage is impossible to avoid. Jesus actually marshalled outrage a few times to intimidate his public opponents. [Matt. 21:26, 46; Mark 11:32; Luke 20:6, 19; 22:2] the apostles likewise advantaged such moments [Acts 4:21, 5:26}. With Jesus it seems strategic with the apostles more incidental. We can manage ourselves within our outrage. There is plenty of outrage manifested, even here at times, on all sides.
Anyway thank you again
Grace and Peace
However, the article is excellent and a good conversation starter. I noted the Van Jones article in CNN concerning his last exchange with Kirk. It was very much one that could have moved from outrage to dialogue, but outrage ended it the next day, before Van saw the message.
This was Stephen Miller at the Kirk memorial…
“The light will defeat the dark. We will prevail over the forces of wickedness and evil. They cannot imagine what they have awakened. They cannot conceive of the army that they have arisen in all of us. Because we stand for what is good, what is virtuous, what is noble.
And to those trying to incite violence against us, those trying to foment hatred against us, what do you have? You have nothing. You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred. You are nothing. You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing. We are the ones who build. We are the ones who create. We are the ones who lift up humanity.”
The most reasonable thing those of us who oppose this movement can do is keep our heads down and hope they don’t come after us anyway.
Any pretense of this being a discussion of of Christian ethics and values is over…this is about power, wealth, and vengeance…
I have come under some criticism from friends because outside of this site, I pretty much flood my social media with cat pictures and promoting animal rescues.
I think I’ve chosen the better thing…
Alan,
You’re right—Jesus did at times allow outrage to do its work in exposing hypocrisy, and the apostles certainly found themselves swept into moments where the crowd’s fear or anger worked to their advantage. Yet, as you note, there is a difference between the strategic use of such moments and cultivating outrage as a way of life.
That was part of my concern in the article. The algorithms of our “anti-social media” world monetize outrage, rewarding anger not for a moment, but as a permanent mode of discourse. What was incidental for the apostles and purposeful for Christ has become, in our time, a cultural engine that strips nuance, dehumanizes opponents, and often pushes people toward hatred and violence
So the challenge is not whether we will feel anger or outrage—we will. The question is whether we manage those impulses under the lordship of Christ, refusing to baptize them as zeal or confuse them with righteousness. In the end, the Cross calls us not to master outrage, but to let mercy master us…
Michael,
That quotation shows exactly the kind of rhetoric the article was warning about—outrage baptized as virtue, opponents stripped of humanity, and faith reduced to a weapon. When Christianity becomes a vehicle for power and vengeance rather than grace and mercy, it has already abandoned the Cross.
Duane,
Eminently well said…
Good words, Duane, much agreed.
I don’t believe in the Contemporary Christian Crusade. Instead of just signing up, I will be a conscientious objector so I can focus on the real spiritual warfare; prayer, Bible study and following the Holy Spirit’s wise leadership.
This means I might be avoiding Contemporary Christian Music, Mega Pastor messages, propaganda from news organizations, political parties and other media.
Pretty much already doing this anyway.
JD
That’s a wise stance. Refusing the noise of a manufactured “crusade” in order to give yourself to prayer, Scripture, and the Spirit’s guidance is exactly the kind of resistance the Church most needs. It keeps faith rooted in Christ rather than in cultural campaigns or media echo chambers.
Stephen Miller’s words sound like a confluence of Essene “Children of Light vs Children of Darkness ” apocalypticism and Ayn Rand-style social Darwinism. That mixture would, to paraphrase Bob Dylan, strangle-up your mind.
Robert F
…or The Underground Youth 😁
Yet Trump went even further than Miller. At Kirk’s memorial service, our illustrious president said that he disagreed with Kirk about this: Kirk didn’t hate his opponents, and wanted the best for them; but Trump said, “I hate my opponent, and don’t want the best for them.” It’s like the spirit of anger, hatred, and vitriol expressed and stoked in social media has been incarnated as the POTUS.
Yes, from what I’ve gathered second-hand, the contrast between the way of Christ (forgiveness expressed by Erika) and the way of Trump (hating enemies) was on display. Now, if only more Christians recognise the differences in other areas…
Eric,
The difference between the forgiveness mentioned by Erika vs. Trump’s takeover of Kirk’s memorial service as a MAGA campaign moment really bothered me. I didn’t agree with most of what Kirk stood for, but I also don’t believe in shooting anyone who expresses an opinion different than one’s own. Our anger fuels outrage at everything, except our inability to think clearly and biblically about the deterioration of decent public discourse in our society. I appreciated Duane’s article, especially “If we would be faithful, we must refuse the trade of truth for outrage, or mercy for power.”
The most informative part of the difference between Erikas statement and Trump’s is that both received huge ovations from the same people…
That, Michael, is very disturbing. Do they know there is a difference between the two things, between forgiveness and the hunger for vengeance? Or do the two seem contiguous to them?
Michael,
What are they gonna do? Boo the man? This had to be a place where it’s not either or.
We don’t have to retreat into conclaves of resistance. Last week is the outcome.
Alan,
Those are two positions that are utterly incompatible theologically…except in MAGA world where such is the norm.
It is a mockery of the Gospel…I would love to be able to hate my enemies instead of fighting my flesh like I’ve never had to fight it before.
There were a world of choices before them other than full throated approval.
Robert F,
In this form of Christianity it is allowable to hate your enemies, lie about them, and God only knows what’s next.
You can propagate the lies about the election, tell people migrants are eating their cats and whatever else you want to lie about as long as you lie about the enemy…cause God hates them too.
A journalist from News Nation reported that as Trump was making his comments, many (the journalist underscored the word “many”) people began leaving. His sense was that Trump’s message didn’t align well for a memorial service, and a portion of the crowd made their feelings known with their feet.
Ah
It’s all about the cats!! Of course, that makes sense.
Alf Dread
Michael,
Exactly—that is the tragedy unfolding before us. When hatred and lies are baptized as faith, the Gospel is hollowed out until nothing distinctively Christian remains. Once it becomes acceptable to dehumanize “the enemy,” to slander them with wild stories about stolen elections or migrants devouring pets, we are no longer in the realm of the Church—we are in the realm of idolatry.
This is not new. The prophets spoke against those who “call evil good and good evil”. Jesus himself told his disciples that their love for enemies would be the mark of true sonship ). To weaponize the name of God in service of vengeance and
deceit is to trade the Cross for a counterfeit kingdom.
The God revealed in Christ does not sanction our lies—He exposes them. He does not command us to curse our enemies—He calls us to pray for them. If we abandon those truths, we may gain political influence, but we will forfeit our very soul.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/23/opinion/erika-kirk-charlie-trump-miller.html
For those who couldn’t open the above link:
How Can You Cheer Love and Hate at the Same Time?
Sept. 23, 2025
By David French
Opinion Columnist
On Sunday afternoon, Erika Kirk, the widow of Charlie Kirk, who was assassinated on Sept. 10, stood in front of tens of thousands of mourners in the State Farm Stadium and millions of others on TV and online, and did something breathtaking: She forgave the man who murdered her husband.
“I forgive him because it was what Christ did and is what Charlie would do,” she said. “The answer to hate is not hate. The answer we know from the gospel is love and always love. Love for our enemies and love for those who persecute us.”
The crowd cheered. Watching at home, tears came to my eyes. Erika Kirk personified what it means for a Christian to imitate Christ, and she did so in a moment of maximum stress and pain. Much of the rest of the rally was a worship service — full of Christians expressing love for the Kirk family, grief at his death and hope for eternal life in the world to come.
But not all of the rally was the same. When President Trump and Stephen Miller, his deputy chief of staff, spoke, the message was different.
Speaking of Charlie Kirk, Trump said, “He did not hate his opponents. He wanted the best for them. That’s where I disagreed with Charlie. I hate my opponent and I don’t want the best for them. I’m sorry. I am sorry, Erika.”
Miller, for his part, had his own message for his enemies. Addressing those he said were trying to “foment hatred against us,” he said, “You are nothing. You are wickedness. You are jealousy. You are envy. You are hatred.”
“You are nothing,” he repeated, “You can build nothing. You can produce nothing. You can create nothing. We are the ones who build.”
It wasn’t as though the crowd cheered Erika Kirk and booed or sat silently when Trump and Miller uttered words of pure hatred. The crowd cheered their comments, too. Particularly disturbing was the rising crescendo as Miller repeatedly declared other people — human beings whose lives are every bit as precious as those of every person in that stadium — to be “nothing.”
Many people who saw or read about the rally were puzzled by what they perceived as a contradiction. How can you cheer love and hate at the same time? How can you worship Jesus and cheer such a base and gross description of other human beings, people who are created in the image of God?
My reaction was different. Finally, I thought, curious Americans who tuned in got to see MAGA theology more completely — and what they witnessed was the best and worst of MAGA Christianity.
The good is still very good. Erika Kirk’s act of forgiveness should be remembered for a very long time. But MAGA Christianity is also rooted in a dangerous distortion of Christian theology, one that motivates otherwise good people to walk a dark and dangerous path.
To explain, let’s discuss two of the most famous passages in the Bible — Matthew 5 and Romans 13. Matthew 5 contains the beating heart of Christ’s Sermon on the Mount. This is where you find the Beatitudes, such as “blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted” and “blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.”
The Sermon on the Mount contains the command that Kirk repeated on Sunday, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.”
Romans 13 is quite different. In that passage, Paul describes the role of the ruling authorities, and his language is vivid. A ruler, Paul says, “is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain. For he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God’s wrath on the wrongdoer.”
As a result, when you watch MAGA Christians cheering Kirk and Trump, they’ll argue that there’s no contradiction at all. Kirk and Trump occupy different roles, and they’re each fulfilling the roles that God intends. Kirk — as an individual — is loving her enemies. Trump and Miller — as the president and one of his chief advisers — are playing their divinely appointed roles as “avengers.”
There is a kernel of truth here. Properly understood, the passages from Matthew and Romans work together to provide room for both grace and justice. The fact that Kirk forgave her husband’s killer doesn’t mean that the State of Utah should drop murder charges against him. The reality of personal grace does not relieve the state of the obligation to impose punishment and protect its citizens from a dangerous man.
Or, in the context of wartime, there is no inconsistency between a soldier, say, forgiving the Japanese officer who mistreated him when he was a prisoner and yet still believing that the United States of America had no choice but to confront and defeat Imperial Japan.
But to look at Romans 13 as excusing Trump is to make what amounts to an astonishing category error, in two ways. First, scripture could not be more clear that a ruler is obligated to do justice and that the sword (to the extent it should be wielded) exists to protect the innocent, not to punish your enemies.
Consider, for example, the prophet Jeremiah’s admonition to the King of Judah, his officials and even the people who pass through the palace gates, “Do what is just and right. Rescue from the hand of the oppressor the one who has been robbed. Do no wrong or violence to the foreigner, the fatherless or the widow, and do not shed innocent blood in this place.”
Those same themes are present in other verses. For example, in Deuteronomy, Moses describes a God “who is not partial and takes no bribe. He executes justice for the fatherless and the widow, and loves the sojourner, giving him food and clothing. Love the sojourner, therefore, for you were sojourners in the land of Egypt.”
The objection to Trump isn’t so much that he’s aggressive — Abraham Lincoln was aggressive against the Confederacy, just as Franklin D. Roosevelt was aggressive against the Axis powers — but that he’s malicious and unjust. And when Trump says that he hates his political enemies, it’s a confession that he’s governing through his basest desires.
There are endless examples of Trump’s malice, including a recent Truth Social post in which he declared Senator Adam Schiff, Attorney General Letitia James of New York and James Comey, the former director of the F.B.I., “guilty as hell.” He bragged about firing a U.S. attorney who didn’t do his bidding, calling him “A Woke RINO, who was never going to do his job.”
But God commands both individuals and nations to care for the poor and to treat foreigners with dignity. From start to finish the Bible condemns corruption and favoritism.
Think of these biblical commands in light of Trump’s actions. Politically biased prosecution decisions and pardons are anathema to any conception of biblical justice; so are brutal deportations without due process; so are violations of Constitutional rights; so is killing people without legal justification; so is the abuse of political power for financial gain.
Cheering Trump’s hatred is tantamount to cheering Trump’s corruption and abuse because hatred is at the root of his administration’s poisonous tree.
But that’s not the only theological mistake. You can’t apply Romans 13 to an American president because an American president is not a Roman emperor. He is not our “ruler.” Yes, he exercises authority, but the sovereign ruler of the American nation is the American people, and our rule is expressed through elections and — crucially — through constitutional law.
Our founders intentionally created a Republic that was as different from the Roman Empire as day is from night. When it comes to the obligation to act justly, the buck doesn’t stop with Trump — it stops in part with the crowd that cheered for his hate and roared its approval for Miller’s dehumanization project.
If MAGA evangelicals cheer Trump’s hate, if they welcome it, if they adopt it, and if they vote for it, then they are responsible for it. His malice becomes theirs.
The bottom line is that American Christians inherit both scripture’s individual obligation to love their enemies and the national obligation to do justice. That is a high moral calling. Hatred and dehumanization are not viable moral options for us. There is no scenario in which we can cheer for or empower either one.
The opposite is the case. As coequal rulers of this Republic — along with people of other faiths or no faith at all — we are not to sit idly by when a president abuses his power. The citizens, including Evangelical citizens, have the responsibility to hold Trump accountable for his many grave wrongs. And the singular failure of MAGA Christianity to uphold this biblical obligation has helped unleash Trump’s hatred on our nation.
I hope the lasting legacy of Charlie Kirk’s memorial service is found not in Donald Trump’s hate, but in Erika Kirk’s grace. But when grace is relegated to the individual sphere while hate is an element of the political project itself, the results will always be dire.
And so it is today. Countless Americans are enduring Trump’s vengeance. Far too few experience Christian kindness. It is a great tragedy of our time that so many Christians see Trump’s malice as an instrument of God’s divine plan.
Unfortunately French’s words will fall (and have already done so in other cases) on deaf dears. The “Christianity” of the American Church is the one espoused by Trump. MAGA “Christianity” has won and the thundering to the remarks to their True Lord and Savior Trump and his apostle Miller only proves it. No different than when the Judaism of “Give us Barabbas” won out in 1st Century Israel. And unfortunately, like in the 1st Century, then only way to fix it is to burn everything to the ground. And like the Jews (and their political saviors) 40 years after “Give us Barabbas”, a similar fate needs to befall American Christianity and all these MAGA adherents in order for the faithful remnant to bloom and grow.
Kevin H
The contradiction isn’t just puzzling—it’s devastating. To cheer love one moment and hatred the next is not a paradox to be explained away but a symptom of a deeper sickness: the Gospel confused with tribal identity and political theater. Once faith is reduced to a rallying cry for “our side,” the image of God in the other can be denied with applause.
Jesus left no room for this kind of duplicity. He told us plainly that love of enemy, not their erasure, would mark us as children of the Father (Matt. 5:44–45). The early Church lived this out at great cost, refusing to curse even their persecutors. The Church today cannot bless both the Sermon on the Mount and the dehumanizing shout of “nothing” without forfeiting her integrity.
When worship and hatred are fused in the same breath, it ceases to be worship of Christ at all. It becomes idolatry—faith bent to serve the ends of power, vengeance, and fear. And idolatry, however loudly it cheers, cannot save.
We have seen this before. In 1930s Germany, crowds filled stadiums to hear Adolf Hitler and the National Socialist leadership speak. We forget that hymns were sung, prayers were offered, and Christian symbols were displayed alongside swastikas. The very same people who celebrated the language of faith also applauded when Jews, political opponents, and other marginalized groups were dehumanized—declared “vermin” or “subhuman.”
The danger was not only in the leaders’ rhetoric, but in the people’s willingness to cheer both “love of God” and hatred of neighbor without seeing the contradiction. Most of the established churches either accommodated or actively supported this distortion. Only a minority—the Confessing Church with voices like Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Karl Barth—refused to fuse worship of Christ with worship of nation and race.
The parallel to today should sober us. When Christians applaud language that calls others “nothing,” while singing songs of love in the same breath, they are walking a road with a terrible precedent. History teaches us that once dehumanization is normalized in the name of faith, the consequences can be catastrophic.
Duane,
Earlier this morning I sent Michael an article I wrote expanding on some of these thoughts. I actually saw the David French article, which hit on some similar themes right after I sent mine to Michael. If Michael’s good with it, I imagine he’ll likely post it later today or tomorrow.
All that said, I agree there is all kinds of contradiction and duplicity going on in these things which is no good at all. Idolatry is winning.
Duane in reply to your comment @ 8:33 am,
That memorial service for Kirk was nothing more than a Nuremberg Rally for MAGA Christian Nationalists, their true Lord, Savior, and Furhrer Donald Trump, his Acolyte and Goebbels Miller, and the all their Bund member followers. Instead of a burning government building, these authoritarians are using the corpse of a dead man to further their agenda.
As they say, history doesn’t repeat itself but it rhymes…