Have you heard the term “outrage porn”? I had never heard the term before last week, but it turns out … its a thing. Outrage porn was born in the coarsening of our culture, which is producing angry, offended, defensive people. It is the effect of the overload of bad news and then the offense to bad news that creates in us an almost craving for something to be angry about.
And people make money off of it. They capitalize on our pursuit of things to be angry about, writing and posting specifically to get us even more riled up. They want us to be outraged about everything because outrage gets clicks. Outrage sells.
This outrage culture is not a new thing and while a lot of it is manufactured for profit, the effect of it is real. Ryan Holliday says,
“What is real is the toll that fake outrage takes. Psychologists call it the ‘narcotizing dysfunction,’ essentially that thinking and chattering about something eventually gets confused and equated with doing something about it. Of course it doesn’t—but after enough blogs and posts we delude ourselves into believing we’ve made a difference.”
“Outrage Porn: How the Need For ‘Perpetual Indignation’ Manufactures Phony Offense,” The Observer.
Here’s the thing: When we get outraged about everything we end up losing our voice around the things that really matter, things we have been specifically called to.
Meanwhile, our ability to be offended, and to hold people we admire or people in leadership to impossible standards continues to grow. Tim Kreider, a political cartoonist, explained it a few years ago in an op-ed piece: “Outrage is like a lot of other things that feel good but over time devour us from the inside out. And it’s even more insidious than most vices because we don’t even consciously acknowledge that it’s a pleasure.”
Outrage sells, and it costs. Harvard Business Review curated a collection of articles on emotional intelligence. One of them is called, “The Cost of Incivility.” This is a business article, so the author is writing about how incivility — a culture of offense and outrage — can financially impact a business. Studies show that it creates decreased work effort, decreased time at work, decreased quality of work, decreased creativity, increased worry, even work time lost just trying to avoid the offender.
But here’s the real eye-opener: Simply witnessing incivility has negative consequences. Experiments have revealed that people who observed poor behavior performed 20% worse on word puzzles than other people did. People who observed incivility in other people were less likely to help others out … even when the person they’d be helping had no apparent connection to the uncivil person.
Think about the impact of outrage, and then think about the time we all spend online witnessing each other’s outrage and incivility. Now we’re talking about something that not only damages the culture but damages our witness and therefore the whole cause of Christ.
All because we keep on clicking and reading …
I found a treasure of a book earlier this year: The Patient Ferment of the Early Church: The Improbable Rise of Christianity in the Roman Empire, by Alan Kreider. The author tells about the spread of Christianity in the first four-hundred years through persecution, martyrdom, misunderstanding and cultural pressures. His point is that in those first four-hundred years the church grew mostly not by plan, but by slow-cooking. In other words, the Church grew mostly by discipleship — by the slow work of sanctification seasoned by the means of grace.
The author quotes from powerhouse early Christian thinkers like Justin, Cyprian, Tertullian, who all wrote defenses on the subject of patience. Justin talked about the “strange patience” of Christians. He said Christians behaved in ways that pagans found unsettling and attractive. Origen talked about “persistent patience.” Cyprian goes so far as to say that patience is what distinguishes the just from the unjust. Tertullian said that “patience brings possibilities,” meaning that when we get out in front of God — especially when we let our outrage or irritability or even just our hard-headed opinions get out in front of God — we cut off our options.
Amen all by myself.
Kreider’s conclusion is that the early Christian “learned to trust God and not be in a hurry.” And that, I believe, is where some of us need to be re-discipled. Friends, I believe we need to be re-discipled in this season in the virtue of patience.
In the last four months or so, we’ve been overwhelmed by a sense of urgency. Get a vaccine. Get our pantries stocked. Get educated. Get an opinion. Get re-opened. And then, with this current national unrest, we have absorbed a very justified sense of urgency. We need to address our brokenness. We need to get this right, both personally and nationally. Too many have suffered long enough.
All these things we’ve been dealing with are very real, but to express them with the toxic combination of outrage and urgency can actually cause us to overshoot our goal. What must change now is hearts, and discipling hearts to love as Jesus loves is the slow-cook of sanctification. There is no shortcut here. The next change must happen by discipleship, one life at a time, one conversation at a time, under the Lordship of Jesus and pace of the Holy Spirit.
To sustain change this time around, we need to be re-discipled in the ways of love, and love is patient. Pray for strange patience, persistent patience … patience that brings possibilities. Because we are in desperate need of an attitude adjustment that takes us closer to the spirit of Jesus and further from the brand of outrage that is tearing our culture apart.
