The Spirit of Fear
And why is it so pervasive?
I keep thinking about fear – what it means, who benefits from it, etc. On the face of it, fear is a straightforward concept. I fear. You fear. We fear. Or so it seems.
Fearing an attack by a 10-ft tall grizzly bear, however, is not the same as fearing, say, the fall of democracy. One has a straightforward solution - don’t go hiking where grizzly bears live or bring bear spray. The other, not so straightforward. Depending on who you talk to or what side of the aisle you represent, the fall of democracy may not even be happening. Or maybe it’s falling two different ways (more left, more right) at the same time. It seems then that applying “fear” to these wildly different experiences falls shockingly short of conveying what the word actually means.
As a kid in Sunday school, I was taught to memorize 2 Timothy 1:7 (KJV): “but God hath not given us the spirit of fear but of power and of love and of a sound mind.” We had a song that went along with it, which means that song lives rent free in my brain for eternity. Anytime I was afraid of something, I was told to say 2 Timothy 1:7 or another verse (with an accompanying song) that said “when I am afraid I will trust in thee.” (Ps 56:3, KJV) These, they said, were the tools I needed to overcome my fear. Fear as a concept, therefore, shouldn’t even be a part of my repertoire.
And yet, the community that raised me is filled with the most fearful people I’ve ever met. They fear outsiders. They fear change. They fear new information. They fear the world, the flesh, and the devil. They fear anyone who is not like them. Anyone who doesn’t think or look like them.
These are not grizzly bear fears. These are merely holograms of other anxieties and therefore shift with the moral outrage flavor of the day. But go back and look at the sermons from Protestants in the sixteen, seventeen, and eighteenth centuries and you will find the same holograms have been around for a long time. The fear that “others” will take our churches, destroy our families, and generally keep us from living the Christian life is part of the DNA of modern Christianity.
Perhaps this is purely an American problem. I wouldn’t know. But I’ve come to believe that when you form a nation on stolen land and stolen labor, you can’t help but form a society that is afraid someone will come and take it from you. After all, that’s how you got what you have to begin with.
I encountered the hypocrisy of the way I was taught “fear” two years ago when I started a petition after my childhood pastor told a local news station he wanted to create a memorial garden for confederate statues that had been torn down across the country. (I wrote about that here.) Because of this petition, I heard from other church members (former and current) who told me stories of money laundering and intimidation techniques and pastoral abuse of power. I heard stories of death threats and received one myself. It was bad stuff. But I couldn’t get anyone to take their stories public.
I begged. I pleaded. I told them that if they wanted justice to be done that they should speak out. I told them that if they wanted to save the church by removing the pastor they should speak out. Every single one of them told me no. Despite the evidence and the recordings. All of these people with hard evidence were men. Men with name recognition and power in that community. People who if they said something, change would happen. They told me they didn’t want to get involved. They told me that this pastor was powerful and they didn’t want their families to be ruined. They told me that they didn’t want to lose their communities. In short, they told me they were afraid.
I’m sure that some freshman in a Bible College somewhere would love to tell me how I was taught the wrong meaning of these verses. How they’re not meant to say that we shouldn’t fear at all but that we shouldn’t have a worldly fear or something like that. I’m sure there’s some truth to that. Regardless of the exegesis, this is how these verses were lived out in my community.
There’s another verse in the Bible that says, “There is no room in love for fear. Well-formed love banishes fear. Since fear is crippling, a fearful life—fear of death, fear of judgment—is one not yet fully formed in love.” This, I think, is what was missing in my church - and in the community at large - love. As you choose to love people as they are, where they are, free of judgment, it makes it difficult to fear them.
I was told not to fear. I was told that faith could conquer fear, but what I learned from my experiences was that there was a lot to fear and that I had to be vigilant. I was told that faith overcomes fear. In reality, I was taught that faith is fear.
This week, I read a New Yorker review of the Showtime drama “Fellow Travelers.” It’s a show about the Lavender Scare – when Joseph McCarthy attempted to remove all LGBTQ people from government positions. It’s a magnificent review, but the last sentence stopped me in my tracks: “It’s in those fleeting moments of stolen pleasure that you can see what might have been, if these men had been motivated by anything other than fear.” What indeed would the world be if we were motivated by pleasure (happiness/love) instead of fear?
I used the example of the grizzly bear to show that we use words like “faith” and “fear”, assuming that we all agree on what the definitions are. That’s not how language works. We create our own meanings based on our circumstances and assumptions.
Faith as a concept has always been a little fuzzy to me. Love, however, hasn’t. You know love when you see it. It’s a lot easier for me to know how to love my neighbor than it is to have faith that God will keep me safe. I’d rather live in a world where everyone works to love their queer/hispanic/democrat neighbor than in a world where people “have faith” that God will “protect their values”. Because when I love my neighbor, it’s a heck of a lot harder to fear them.