God’s Wrath and the Growth of Society: A Sociological Approach to Divine Anger
Introduction
In the final chapter of the Old Testament text 2 Chronicles, the Hebrew Chronicler highlights both the great power of the Hebrew God Yahweh and how it is spurred on by the deity’s wrath towards humankind. During the reign of Judea’s King Zedekiah, we are told, Yahweh’s anger rises against the nation, exacerbated by both the ruler’s wickedness and the people’s mistreatment of the god’s prophets and rulings. As a result, the Chronicler states that God “brought the Babylonian king against them” and “handed them over to him,” leading to a Babylonian Captivity that enslaved members of the Hebrew community for the greater half of a century.[1]
This is only one example of Yahweh’s seeming antipathy towards humans in the Old Testament. He also floods an Earth the deity deems “corrupt,” as seen in Genesis 7: 12-14,[2] and immolates Nadab and Abihu, the children of the high priest Aaron who led Hebrew slaves from Egypt, in Leviticus 10: 2 because they offered the god “unauthorized fire.”[3]
Nor is Yahweh the only depiction of a deity whose wrath causes them to harm humankind. Both the Greeks and Sumerians featured similar flood narratives where the gods Zeus and Enlil, respectively, flood the world to punish humankind’s disobedience.[4][5] The Egyptian Book of the Heavenly Cow, conversely, sends the ravenous lion goddess Sekhmet down to Earth to kill the disobedient, and only halts when she threatens to completely wipe out humanity.[6]
These tales certainly serve to inspire awe and fear towards specific deities. However, they also inspire a more cynical question: why would a deity so powerful that they could perform such magnificent tasks as controlling the elements or sending armies against others, would they care about human actions of any kind?
This essay seeks to answer this question, not by delving theologically into the nature of deities or other forms of the Divine, but through sociological means. It notes the close relationship between communities’ emotional, economic, and political needs and the conception of deities and religious practices. It states that portrayals of deities’ anger do not necessarily note the emotional state of the Divine, but rather highlight how threatening an action or belief is to the betterment of the community itself.
Religion, Rules, God, and Societal Construction
In his article “Origins of Religion,” Dr. Ara Norenzayan highlights the important role religious beliefs, particularly in deities, played in the development of human communities from small hunter-gatherer tribes to large-scale, complex societal systems. As humans began interacting regularly with “not-like” members of other human groups, they relied on tales of deities to determine how they should respond to foreigners, through violence but often also peaceful methods.[7]
As time went on, in a pseudo-Darwinistic “survival of the fittest,” deities that promoted community-building and the synthesis of multiple cultures, as well as those who were actively involved in individuals’ lives, became more prevalent than those who remained distant or indifferent. This occurred because the images of collectivist deities mirrored the desires of worshippers to develop larger communities that encouraged greater cooperation, both inspiring the worshippers and being inspired by them.[8]
Indeed, the relationship between religious beliefs about deities and the worshippers who follow them is deeply connected. Dr. Meredith B. McGuire, in her Religion: The Social Context, highlights how greatly religion supports the needs of a society. In particular, it provides a “social order” to society, both in a mundane form explaining how members of a human group should divide themselves politically and behave in certain ways, but also in a cosmological form where it explains why nature follows certain rules.[9]
These religious justifications, which usually surround a god or collection of deities interacting with the material world, prove invaluable for the emotional welfare of the humans within the faith community. Psychologist Dr. Giogio Shani emphasizes how salubrious these religious justifications can be on worshippers’ mental wellness, creating a sense of stability in a chaotic world and providing guidelines on how to behave in the most emotionally rewarding way within their society.[10] A perhaps somewhat glib example of this phenomenon can be found in the first verse of J.M.C. Crum’s hymn “To God Who Makes All Lovely Things,” from 1935’s The Hymnal for Boys and Girls:
To God who makes all lovely things
How happy must our praises be!
Each day, a new surprise he brings
To make us glad his world to see.[11]
The point here is that religion, here channeled through a song about the Christian God, provides emotional support for worshippers – “how happy” the singers must be, the song states, when they interact with a deity whom they know has created the Earth. When these singers encounter new phenomena in the world, they can see these as “new surprises” that make them “glad” to see the world.
This song also serves a social purpose. As a hymn, it is designed to be sung with a community, all of whom at least verbally espouse similar beliefs by reciting the song lyrics. Religion thus acts as a social identifier and unifier for human communities, aiding them in connecting with people who are “like” them.
Religion also aids in preserving a society’s physical needs. Drs. Theiss Bendixen and Benjamin Grant Purzycki note how the desires of supernatural forces like gods often seek to enforce norms that will protect the health of a human community. They use the example of southern Siberia spirits known as cher eezi, who condemn those who over-forest or over-hunt, and how belief in these beings prevents behavior that could lead to starvation of other members of the community.[12]
Muslim and Jewish kosher laws prohibiting the eating of pork have likely served a similar purpose in promoting societal wellness. Pork, in the ancient world, included parasites like Trichinella spiralis that could prove harmful to humans.[13] A 2012 article in which self-identifying Muslim scientists from Pakistan defend Quran rules prohibiting pork usage by arguing for the medical complications the meat can cause illustrates how religious beliefs are often utilized to protect societal wellness. In its six pages, published in “Scientific papers, series D, Animal Science,” Drs. Muhammad Fiaz Qamar and Ifrah Raza assert that pork spreads diseases like salmonella and attempt to connect it to diseases like cholera, foot rot, and dysentery.[14]
And, of course, religious rules promote societal order. By prohibiting sex outside of marriage, these rules helped stabilize methods of inheritance and protect patrilineal lineages, as well as standardizing a specific type of group – families bound by marriage – as the smallest inner-societal group.[15]. Religious sentiments are also used to legitimize political power structures. It’s meaningful that one of the most popular myths in ancient Egypt – the story of how, even though the god-king Osiris was killed and his throne usurped by his brother Set, his son Horus eventually became the rightful king of the nation – legitimized dynastic monarchy as the “correct” way of governance.[16]
Religion, therefore, ought not be seen as an isolated aspect of the human experience crafted by a supernatural entity, but rather a human structure that serves to support a society’s emotional, social, physical, and political needs. Any idea of “God,” therefore, and their emotions are mediated through a human-constructed structure that seeks to guide the human experience.
Three Reasons for “Divine” Anger
So what, then, does it mean when a deity becomes angry?
The Christian theologian Richard Swinburne provides an intriguing explanation for this query. He states that, at moments when God appears to be angry, God instead seeks to convince individuals to behave in certain moral ways rather than expressing human anger.[17] This belief pairs well with the sociological point espoused by Dr. Bertram H. Raven, who sees deities as forms of social control that encourage self-regulatory behavior. Raven explains how the belief that the Divine’s omnipresent nature causes individuals to morally evaluate their deeds, and that the fear of an angry deity deters them from performing behaviors considered socially and/or personally destructive, whether that means committing murder or eating certain diets.
However, Raven continues, the belief that a deity must remain content provides justification to allow social or political leaders, such as chieftains or kings, to perform certain actions to prevent or appease anger.[18] In this sense, a deity does not become angry because they are angry, but because the human leader wants them to be angry.
The examples of this in the modern day are endless; Claire Smith et al, for instance, in their review of the tools the groups Da’esh and Hizb ut-Tahrir, often labeled as terrorist groups, utilize to recruit and indoctrinate followers, provides one such example. They illustrate how, within these groups, leaders repeat narratives that highlight the intensity of Allah’s anger, reinterpreting passages of the Quran about the deity’s anger and how they apply to misdeeds from “outgroups” including Jews, Christians, and even other Islamic communities. Group leaders portray then portray themselves as arbiters of justice, punishing in the deity’s name to reduce Allah’s anger, and thus obtain the obedience and, often, awe of these recruits.[19] In this case, Divine anger is utilized as a tool for leaders to legitimize their belief systems and goals and to obtain resources, physical and otherwise, from those following them.
A third reason humans might point to a deity’s anger comes from a desire for social consensus and discomfort from those who step outside community conventions. James Aho, in describing the process by which religious discrimination and othering occur, highlights how, at their core, humans have a tendency to engage in tribalistic behaviors. What this means is that, in their desire to create coherent social identities, humans also create identities for what they are not, imposing them on others as negative stereotypes. When applied to religious spaces, this othering often becomes symptomatic of the Divine rather than humans themselves.[20] Therefore, when the community finds itself uncomfortable with an “other,” it is not only their discomfort, but the deity’s as well. And when the community becomes angry, so too does God.
Conclusion
Human conceptions of God – their physiological or metaphysical makeup as an entity, the rules they mandate, and their emotional state – are just that: human. It is necessary to view deities as part of an elaborate set of intellectual, emotional, political, and social frameworks that labor together to help in the shaping and support of society. Rules attributed to deities are designed, at their core, to establish and protect a cultural community and the people therein and to aid in the continuation of that community. Because humans can only see the Divine through these structures, any anger from a god must come through these structures. God is angry when humankind believes it should be angry, either when they morally evaluate themselves or wish to legitimize personal or collective needs.
This is not to say we should necessarily view a god as a pastiche or mere symbol used to “manipulate the masses.” Rather, it suggests that any deific influence must come through human sources, and according to the mindsets and experiences of those who worship them. An effective metaphor for this god-human interaction would be the case of gods’ appearances in ancient Egypt. Within temples like that of Horus at Edfu, gods were supposed to exist within mundane structures, including statues and animals trained by human hands, like the Horus temple’s falcons.[21] The physical nature of the statue or the behavior of the falcon did not necessarily change, whether or not a deity was within it, but worshippers still derived meaningful experiences within these divine spaces anyway.
Religion and society, humanity and the Divine, cannot be separated. Rather, they are all part of the human experience and thus reflect the thoughts and desires of humankind. Why does a god become angry if we disobey certain rules? Because we believe the god gets angry because we believe, either personally or collectively, that those rules are important, and we make space for the Divine to influence humanity through these human systems, regardless.