"Rage Bait" is the Liturgy of Hell
Oxford calls it the word of the year. The Desert Fathers called it the demon of wrath.
We near the end of 2025 and with it we get a new Oxford University Press (OUP) word of the year. This year’s word feels more like a diagnosis than just a word. The word of the year is “Rage Bait.”
It’s interesting to think about, though, considering that last year’s word was “brain rot.” If brain rot indicates passive decay through the overconsumption of the internet, then rage bait feels more like the weaponization of that overconsumption. We’ve gone from being zombies to being berserkers.
How Rage Bait Traps Us
As humans, when we see something morally outrageous, it is natural to want to respond. If we see a woman being abused or a child being mistreated, we feel a visceral sense of outrage that compels us to act. We naturally want to stand on the side of justice, truth-telling, and the defense of the weak.
The OUP defines “rage bait” as content designed to hijack this natural inclination. It manufactures feelings of self-righteousness, tricking us into believing that our engagement is a moral act. But sometimes, it is worse than this. It is not just that we are tricked. It’s that we want to be tricked.
Augustine warned of a specific temptation he called curiositas (the lust of the eyes). Unlike other vices that seek pleasure, curiositas seeks out experiences that are distressing or disgusting simply for the sake of the sensation. Augustine points to the spectators of gladiator games or tragedies who are drawn to feel sorrow or anger vicariously. He asks:
“Why is it that man desires to be made sad… by beholding doleful and tragic things, which yet himself would by no means suffer? …this very sorrow is his pleasure. What is this but a miserable madness?”
In the digital age, we are the spectators in the coliseum. We do not just click on rage bait to fix the world. We click because we desire the “miserable madness” of feeling intense emotion. We desire the outrageous and the unrighteous because it allows us to feel a dark pleasure through the suffering of another. We are not just victims of the algorithm; we are its willing accomplices.
Consuming Rage Bait Makes You Sick
In the Levitical worldview, “uncleanness” was not a moral judgment of intent, but a description of a condition. If you touched a corpse then you became unclean, regardless of whether you touched the body to honor it or dishonor it, or even if you touched it by accident.
Rage bait begs for you to touch it. It is a disease designed to spread. It has nothing to do with the well-being of a society or community or individual and everything to do with hijacking emotion, through manufactured means, so that it can steal your attention from what is actually happening in your world so that you can focus on the world it creates.
When we engage with rage bait, even to fight it, we fulfill its goals. The moment we click, comment, or share it we have touched the corpse. The content, which wants to infect rage throughout the world, has now found a new host to spread to, and every time someone is infected they are more likely to be infected tomorrow.
The Death of Nepsis
The Desert Fathers of the 4th century warned of the need for nepsis (watchfulness) or “guarding the heart”. They understood that a logismos (a provocative thought or image) was the first stage of spiritual captivity. The logismos acts as an assault, which provokes you to interact with it. In interacting with it you give yourself over to a lie and consent to act out in a certain manner. This acting out leads to a captivity, which flourishes into a proliferation of out of control passions.
Rage bait is the industrial-scale automation of these logismoi. The Desert Fathers described these thoughts as “fiery darts” or “intellectual missiles” shot from a deceitful bow. In the digital age, the scroll is not passive consumption. It is an active bombardment of these missiles. We invite the archer into our pockets.
More than this, when logismos bypasses our nepsis, it ruins the silence of the soul. Sertillanges writes that the silence of the soul requires the “exclusion of foolish thoughts which lead to a puerile and dissipating indulgence in distraction.” Rage bait is the enemy of this silence. It is the amplifier of the very “disordered passions” we are called to suppress, drowning out the quiet heart with the noise of the crowd.
The Demon of Wrath
If we shift our focus, it becomes a little more alarming. A liturgy is a repetitive practice that shapes what we love and how we act. And why shouldn’t this conditioning, this algorithmic distortion of our virtues, be viewed as anything less? The digital liturgy rewards the thin-skinned and those quick to judge. It says “be slow to listen, quick to speak, and quick to become angry” instead of “be quick to listen, slow to speak, and slow to become angry.”
Thomas Aquinas warns that while anger often masquerades as a “lust for revenge” or justice, “passion” deprives man of his reason. This is why rage bait is so dangerous, because the cause seems just, we feel justified in losing our reason.
We rage, but do we do anything? We scream, but do we pray? We share in outrage, but do we restore the victims? Love requires action, but wrath doesn’t require anything, except all of our energy. Rage bait is nothing but an invitation to enjoy the intoxicating reality of unrighteous, unearned, and unbridled wrath. Basil warns that this wrath changes a human being “as though changing a mask upon a stage,” making their eyes unrecognizable and their nature like “boars joining battle.” It is the possession of the demon of wrath.
The Ultimate Casualty
God is Good (the Good) and God is Truth. You cannot have the truth and be immoral, just like you cannot have morality and lack the truth. These two, in a way, all lead back to God, but you cannot have one without the other.
Rage bait is optimized for rage and not for the truth. It does not care about nuance, context, or humanity. It is an Architecture of Falsehood and a vast engine of desacralization. Mircea Eliade warned of a “profane” existence where acts lose their spiritual dimension. Rage bait does just this. It distorts the Imago Dei and reduces a human soul into a flat, hateful object for our consumption. We live in a world full of hallucinated monsters rather than a world full of fellow sinners.
When we live in these half-truths and act out based on them, we become the monsters we fear. We become wrathful agents for the High Priest of the Algorithm, who cares only for interaction and has no care for the eternal destinies of men.
We cannot drink from the cup of the demon of Wrath and the cup of the Lord (1 Corinthians 10:21). When we become overwhelmed by rage bait, we binge drink from the cup of Wrath while pretending to sip from the cup of the Lord.
As we move into 2026, we must refuse the cup of the profane and practice the nepsis of the quiet heart. Basil taught that we must “smooth the waxen tablet” of our hearts before we can attempt to write the truth upon them. We must disconnect from the machine that scribbles over our souls and return to sacred time. A time not ruled by the algorithm, but by the presence of God.