Is it okay to be angry at God?

A lot of people ask this question quietly, because they have been told — or have absorbed somewhere — that faith and anger at God are opposites. They are not. Christianity has a name for the kind of prayer that is mostly anger: it is called lament, and it occupies a large amount of the Bible.

A short, honest answer

Yes. The Bible is full of it. Some of the people God commends most are the ones who refused to fake being okay with him.

The honest first thing

The Christian tradition has often been bad at this in practice — pastorally telling people to calm down, trust the plan, not say things like that out loud. The Bible does the opposite. It writes those things down and puts them in the prayer book.

• The Psalms — the church's official prayer collection for three thousand years — include lines like "How long, Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face from me?" (Psalm 13:1–2). Not "how long, Lord, give me peace about this." How long will you hide your face.
• Psalm 88 is the most famous example. It is the only Psalm that does not end on any kind of hopeful note. The last line is "darkness is my closest friend." It made the cut. It is in the Bible.
• Lamentations is an entire book of Hebrew poetry that exists for one purpose: to put unbearable grief and anger directly to God. There is no resolution in it. The author refuses to wrap it up.
• Job, who is described by God himself as blameless, says: "I will not keep silent; I will speak out in the anguish of my spirit, I will complain in the bitterness of my soul" (Job 7:11). He does not get rebuked for it. His friends — who keep defending God politely — do get rebuked: "I am angry with you and your two friends, because you have not spoken the truth about me as my servant Job has" (Job 42:7).
• Jesus, on the cross, quotes Psalm 22: "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?" (Mark 15:34). The God who is the answer to the question is the one praying it.

If you have been carrying the idea that anger at God is a betrayal of faith, you are carrying the wrong idea. In the actual Bible, the opposite is closer to the truth: anger at God is usually a marker that you still believe he is there and is responsible. People who do not believe he is real do not yell at him.

What Christianity actually claims

1. Anger is not the same as disbelief. You can only be angry with someone you believe exists. Half the time, anger at God is the form faith takes when it has nowhere else to go. The Bible writes that down, repeatedly, without panic.

2. God prefers complaints to performance. Job's friends try to defend God's reputation with answers Job will not accept. They sound pious; God calls them wrong. Job complains; God calls him right. The pattern in the Bible, again and again, is that God would rather hear what you actually think than a tidied-up version of what you should think.

3. Lament is its own kind of prayer. Christianity historically has a category for prayer-as-complaint. It is not "stage one before real prayer." It is itself prayer. The Bible models it, the Psalter teaches it, and the church has prayed it for thousands of years.

4. Anger does not get the last word — but it gets a real word. Christianity does not promise that anger at God resolves on demand, or that it should. It claims that God can take it, that he is not threatened by it, and that what comes out the other side of it is something more durable than the surface peace it replaces. But the way out is through, not around.

What about right now

If you are in a season where the most honest prayer you can pray is anger, the biblical word for what you are doing is prayer. You do not have to clean it up. If you want to talk it through with someone privately, you can.

Where this comes from in the Bible

A few passages worth sitting with:

• Psalm 13:1–2 — "How long will you hide your face from me?"
• Psalm 88 — the Psalm that does not resolve.
• Lamentations 3:1–20 — sustained, unblinking grief and accusation.
• Job 7:11 — Job announces that he will not keep silent.
• Job 42:7 — God prefers Job's complaints to his friends' defenses.
• Mark 15:34 — Jesus, on the cross, prays Psalm 22.