Fear & Co.
What can a theology of hope do with a climate of fear?
‘Do you have what I need?’ I asked the shopkeeper as I walked past his plate glass window. He was outside smoking a cigarette.
‘What I have in here, these are the only things you need.’ Came the reply after a long draw.
And so I walked in, into a dimly lit, labyrinthine shop with peculiar wares, shelf upon shelf of them.
The shop was airless, tight. Though for the strangeness of the scene and dull, acrid glow of the light inside, the most unsettling part of it all was the sound. The shop was very still, yet every time I would pick something off of the shelf, I had the uncanny feeling that it was making a small noise, almost as though it was rustling.
It was only after turning over a few items in my hand that I finally brought one near to my ear. It was then that I fully realized the rustling was a whisper. In fact, as I held close this thing in my hand, I became aware of something, the whole shop was full of whispers.
I leaned in to listen, chilled, though intrigued by the small curiosity. And as I listened, I found I became more intrigued, and more comfortable, more at ease, indeed, with all of them—more interested in what they had to say, and before long I found I couldn’t do without the little whispers, I had to take this small thing at my ear home with me.
And so I walked to the counter with this, my new friend, paid the price, and walked to the door. I thanked the store clerk before I left, Dread I think his name was, and started home.
The unknown, it breaks the surface of our attention, raised by spare thoughts or large events that cause us to face it. It can be unpleasant, it can be more than that. I say this because I know that there is a statistical probability that there is a mixture of political views amongst you, my kind readers. Some of you feel reassured by recent election results, others don’t. With any luck, I want to stay away from the clichés Christian influencers are engaging in around politics, and so I am not primarily interested here in writing about the winning or the losing, but rather, the feelings concerned, the feelings we feel around these things.
We know it. We experience it. Fear is a powerful sales tactic. What was once phrased, even for those simple things, in a way appealing to a person’s judgement, are now phrased in order to sideline judgement and evoke reaction. A simple example may be noticed even in mundane commercials, phrases like, ‘it’s a good idea to have one of these,’ has bit by bit converted into, ‘you wouldn’t want to be caught without one of these.’ Did you notice that? A simple sales message has gone from the positive form to a negative just like that. It could have been said another way, but why take chances.
Fear is in vogue. I am not implying that bad things don’t happen, or that the world is comfortable, safe, or without mystery. Bad things happen, truly bad as to be called evil. But it seems as though we are being relentlessly bombarded with future omenations, continually we are told how fearful the future is, how good the past was, and, that it is finally all lost, the end has come. Eden and its angels, it appears, was just left and before us is Armageddon, and what we are to do now is wait. Though to my mind, for as many people as have forcast the imminent end of the world (religiously, politically), we would have needed 10,000 earths by now to accommodate all of the prophets. When all other discussion points fail, flood your hearers with adrenaline and cortisol. Rhetoric.
And it seems to me that there is some genuinely bad advice given to Christians when it comes to how to deal with fear. I’ll lay out two that I find particularly damaging. 1. Encouragement to ride the emotions. The Christian version goes like this. The living God dwells in us, and so to listen to our interiority is commensurate to listening to Him. This track seems to face the temptation, though, of our ascribing every feeling, no matter how aberrant, abhorrent, or self-designed, to the Holy Spirit—as though He was a kind of secondary accreditation to what we already made up our hearts on. Righteous-anger really just being anger, righteousness only just self-righteousness, and so on. But these lines of ‘being led,’ must be checked against who we know Jesus to be, this guiding us to the question: what spirit is doing the leading? I don’t mean to be funny, but it seems to me that we have lost an element of the obvious recently: if it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck it's probably a duck. Inversely, to confuse a sheep with a wolf is just bad judgement.1
The other option to riding emotions is that of denying them. The rise in neo-stoicism (and half-versions of it) has been rapid and popular. But we can see there is a temptation here also. What started with a gesture to Aurelius and a mastering of the inner response to the outer world, quickly slides into a sort of numbed avoidance if left unchecked. It marries too quickly with either skepticism or ambivalence. What began as a steeling of the heart against a world that can’t be controlled with its bubbling uncertainty, easily becomes aloofness.
We live in relation to the external world and its events, indeed, we are always part of the world, inside it, as it were, and not separate to it. And in relation to this external world, we will always have emotional responses to those things that matter to us. And so it occurs to a person, if emotions are a basic part of what makes us human, part of our kit, yet, not quite always good, on the mark, nor consistent—truly something still needing correction because of our humanness—might we not inspect these emotional responses in a way that might be better than the two previous options of riding or aloofness? And, attempt that investigative move we try on the exterior world itself: try to understand and parse the design from the decay, the fruit from the briars?
What if we were able to inspect our feelings and use them as a kind of twofold test, it might look like this: 1. When something happens and I have an emotional response, is this response connected to something I find important, and if so, why? and, 2. What response do I currently own, and is it the one I want to own? If I react with anger, do I want forbearance, if I have worry, do I want peace, etc. Jesus asked a lot of questions He presumably already knew the answer to, but to the ones He was asking, the questions served as a catalyst if they were allowed that room. We may feel asking these questions are silly, redundant. But perhaps they aren’t, perhaps when we thought we were inspecting our feelings before, we were only feeling them, or acting in them. Now this isn’t the end of a transformative road, only the beginning, but everything must start with a beginning.
If we were to examine our emotions as we do other things, we might begin to unhitch them from some of the abstract fears of the future, fears played on by a world of words. We might be less open to manipulation by those who use fear as a way to control—as a bit effectively does in a horse’s mouth. We might stay to the sunlit road and away from those apothecary shops of bad medicine, those vendors of fear who kill in order to cure. I’ll make it explicit, I’m speaking of those who offer existential gossip and call it truth, the conspirators of conspiracy. Fear has to convert into something constructive or it will run wild. Abstract fear is the kind of fear that doesn’t take the exact shape of problems to be solved, but rather, is a sea that has problems in it, and to solve one particular issue may very well see the spawning of two new ones in the sea who’s depths were never plumbed to begin with.
Let consider another facet of the problem. Sometimes in our loneliest moments we wish the dark forest was a maze so that we would not feel as though we had lost our way, but that some counter-intention was keeping us from coming out upon golden fields. We secretly long for a conspiracy against us, so that we would have the salve of knowing that we did alright, and that given a fair chance, everything would have worked out for us. But if labyrinths do exist. It seems that we still need to confront the monster that haunts within. The Minotaur still needs found. And the only way to do it is with Ariadne's thread. The world is a complex place, sometimes things work out, sometimes they simply don’t, but what we fear most needs a reckoning if we are to ever be free.
Fear as our driver warps our other actions and secondary emotions. Fear poisons the well of our souls. It begins to twist around our curiosity, interests, responses, and operations. Fear satiates curiosity while starving it. It shuts down conversations or alternative viewpoints while offering secrets. It wholly externalizes evil. And so perhaps its antidote is the inspection of fear itself, as opposed to fear as the inspector. And in so doing, the inspection would cease to wholly externalize evil, and start to see evil as something we must all, every one of us, analyze and check. Fear would make us smaller people as we become tempted to discount out of hand more and more things, and consider less. And so when Christ asks us to ‘fear not,’ He is inviting us not to naïveté, but out of our constriction, He is inviting us to be a more flourishing people, to be more human, not less. Fear is our fruit dying on the vine. Hope, brought into the present as the marriage of goodness and activity, is fruit ripening.
To fear someone requires almost no investment in that person, to fear them you do not need to know them, hear them, understand them, or consider their needs or own experience-package. This was perhaps one of the reasons that the same figure who said ‘fear not’ was also the one to sit with sinners, to eat with them, even at the risk of offending those who ‘knew better.’
To meet, know, and understand is not to forsake the desire for truth or justice; empathetic analysis of different sides and perspectives is not the folding of conviction, if anything it is the stress test of it. It takes these perspectives out of the realm of the abstract, and, consequentially, also takes our inner world of the self-as-priority, and sets them all on the table, a table that is seated with the unlikeliest neighbors. Neighbors, Christ said, whom we were meant to love.
Fear and hope are opposites, but they are not present words, they are both set within the future, their equivalents in the present are reactivity and faith. If you have hope in the future, you will act out in faith that what you are doing will lead to, and take part in that future hope. Fear of the future leads not to greater faith, but greater bouts of reacting against that fear in the present, in expectation not of a positive act, but of negating a negative one. Again we see the positive has been replaced by the negative.
An abstract hope in the future is not enough though, nor a ‘hopeful feeling’ that is uninvestigated. Hope needs details, organs and bones, and so again it seems Jesus didn’t offer us a distant, ambiguous hope, but a tangible one, one instantiated with the sermon on the mount, and encapsulated on Easter morning. We need to have an image of the hope we have, otherwise a feeling of it will never get us as far as we need; and so with the hope Christ offered, He offered not ambiguity, but Himself.
It’s good for the Christian to be engaged in politics, in the workings of the society they are a part of. In fact, it is part of the Christian vocation. To care for people is central to the Christian framework and so the polis, the people they are part of, and that interest-in and care-of, outworked legislatively, judicially, and within program-innovation and installation, are vitally important. When we split politics and religion we effectively engage a split between heaven and earth, and engage a God who is missing from humanity’s cares. However, when the machinery of society take the position, or slot, of highest hope (or inversely, greatest fear) in a person’s hierarchical life (not only in theory but in practical operations), then they have effectively located politics in the place of God and God in the lower position, even if in theory they say He is first.
A Christian-political-imagination like this can start to work on fear in two ways. It encourages a disciple to take captive every word that is messaged to them politically, and especially those which evoke an emotional response within them. To analyze them and pick them apart to see what is being said, why, for what purpose and motive—parse out what parts are true, and what parts are propagandistic—and begin to think around the truth claims. And secondly, it provides a framework for response. This applies across lines of agreement and disagreement.
It mitigates several traps to which we are tempted. We are tempted to prioritize things that we are not meant to, essentialize things we are not meant to, and excuse things that we were not meant to. The Christian is to be clear-eyed when politics is weaving messages to evoke emotions that then drive engagement. We are meant to see, both truth and lie, even when we want the truth to be untrue, and a lie tastes sweet. We can’t in our hearts be like that old captain holding a spyglass up to an eyepatch saying, ‘I don’t see anything.’ We have to be sober about our catalyst questions. When does a message of prudent change for the future, and its corresponding actions for today, cease to be prudent, and begin to be manipulative? When does awareness turn into a ratings drive?
Fearful politics can metastasize into grievance politics, and grievance politics can metastasize into retributive politics. The phrase Christian-politics has taken on a dark and malformed tone in some areas and circles, and so to reclaim it, we need to reform it around the Christ who needs constantly rediscovered by us in Bible, history, and heart. We seek him first, not last. How do we engage in suffering-servant politics? If we are to be like Christ, how do we emulate those little Christian movements in our everyday politics? He is our pattern. We need to rediscover him always. If Jesus is the image of the invisible God, as John says, and God is one God, then we run the whole Bible through that image, we have no warrant to use disparate, cobbled together Old Testament verses to justify things that do not look like the eternal-God-made-incarnate.
If I have fear it will soak into my politics, if I have grievance it will soak into my politics, but if I have trusting faith that conforms me more to the image of Christ everyday as I sojourn, that will soak into my politics. Evil should not be externalized as an activity in self-righteousness. Evil exists, and it should be walked against, but it is Jesus who has the victory, and we who walk towards him, what we have for an evil world is only what He had for evil us. This manifesting in our calls for love, justice, and hope for a world in birth pangs, a world waiting.
Matthew 7.15-20