"The article is called 'God and the American People,' and it says 95 percent of us say that we believe in God. But our religion doesn't meet the writer's standards, not at all. To his mind, all those people in all those churches are the scribes and the Pharisees. He seems to me to be a bit of a scribe himself, scorning and rebuking the way he does. How do you tell a scribe from a prophet, which is what he clearly takes himself to be? The prophets love the people they chastise, a thing this writer does not appear to me to do." -Rev. Ames (Gilead, Marilynne Robinson)

I'm seeing an increase in self-consciously jeremiad attitudes, statements, and thinking among orthodox Christians--myself included, frankly. When we speak, is it out of God's anguished love for his straying people, as with the prophets, or is it out of scorn and fearful anger?