Think back to the images from last year in Murrieta, California, where buses of unaccompanied minors and women with children, all fleeing violence in Central America, were blocked by angry, screaming adults. In his column about this incident, the Christian evangelical, Jim Wallis, told of a talk he had recently given on immigration to his son’s fifth-grade class in Washington, DC–a class that was racially, ethnically, and religiously diverse. He talked about families separated or deported because they were undocumented, and the students wanted to know: Why doesn’t the government fix that? Wallis answered: “They say they’re afraid.”
“What are they afraid of?
“Then it hit me,” he said. “They are afraid of you…. They are afraid that you are the future of America.’”
Or think about the concern for national security that now pervades public policy–complete with massive surveillance and color-coded terror alerts that never get below “high.” The editor of the journal, Foreign Policy, David Rothkopf, suggests in a recent book that the U.S. has crossed the line from national security to national insecurity. There are real threats in this world, he writes, but, in our anxiety, we have redefined “disproportionate.”
There are so many stories that make my point, I hardly know what to include. How about U.S. military spending which, though decreasing, is still greater than the next eight highest-spending countries combined. Or reports that the U.S. has 743 prisoners for every 100,000 citizens, while the average worldwide is 148. A number of states now spend more on prisons than on universities, a striking indication that fear has triumphed over hope in political decision making. And at this time last year, we had the Ebola
crisis with numerous headlines to the effect that, in this country (not Liberia or Sierra Leone, but this country), fear spread far faster than any disease. A national survey conducted at this time last year found that 43% of Americans were afraid they or a member of their immediate family would contract Ebola!
We might also think of the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, with its images of police decked out as if for military invasion, or of Eric Garner in New York or Freddie Gray in Baltimore or Tamir Rice in Cleveland, but I am going to reinforce my point by mentioning the equally-tragic shooting of Trayvon Martin. “You could smell fear all over the story of Trayvon Martin,” writes columnist Alexandra Petri. “Fear of the nameless, faceless menace of You Shouldn’t Be Here. It’s the fear that makes someone appoint himself neighborhood watchman in the first place, to make sure nothing ‘Out of Place’ shows up….
Fortunately for the fearful,” adds Petri, “Florida’s ‘Stand Your Ground’ law has their interests at heart. To kill someone, you need not prove that he or she intended you harm. All you need to prove is a real and reasonable fear that your life is in danger.” Petri echoes numerous other commentators when she concludes, “We live in a terrified age.”
Fear is not, of course, a new theme in American history. There have been periods of obsessive anxiety from the Salem witch trials to the McCarthyism and bomb shelters of the 1950s. President Roosevelt tried to name and subvert the culture of fear that had seized the country as a result of the Great Depression. You probably recall his language: “…the only thing we have to fear is fear itself–nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Other leaders, however, have regarded fear as a useful political tactic–as we will experience all over again during the already-started presidential campaign.
What I am suggesting is that we are today in the midst of another period in which fear dominates our national psyche. This has been well documented in a number of studies showing, for example, that since the 1990s Americans express a growing fear of crime even as actual crime rates have steadily decreased. A columnist for the Seattle Times observed at the end of 2014 that unemployment is down, gas prices are down, military casualties are down, teen pregnancies are down, the number of uninsured is down, violent crime is down, the school dropout rate is down, but the percentage of Americans saying that they are afraid for the future of the country is way up. None of the scholars on this subject, by the way, believe that 9-11 created our national anxiety; but it did encapsulate it in a single event. As Cornel West once observed, 9-11 was “the first time that many Americans of various colors felt unsafe” (a feeling, he noted, that has been all-too-familiar for African Americans). But rather than simply target those who planned and executed the attack, our government universalized it into a fight against Terror–which is guaranteed to keep people afraid and to enlist their support for such things as torture.
As General Secretary of the National Council of Churches, I was in the room for the first round of Congressional hearings, chaired by Rep. Peter King, into the “radicalization” of American Muslims. King, you may recall, once declared that “80 to 85 percent of mosques in this country are controlled by Islamic fundamentalists”! After the hearing, I was one of several religious leaders to speak at a press conference, all of us pointing to the climate of fear that was driving this charade. Domestic terrorism may be a threat, I said at the press conference, but when fear dominates, it leads us to focus on easy, surrogate targets rather than on real, complex problems. We saw this as well in Switzerland and Italy, where a needed debate on immigration and national character got sidetracked by legislation banning the building of minarets and a boycott of shops selling kebobs.
I appreciate the summary offered by Fareed Zakaria, not only because he is an insightful analyst of U.S. social and political life, but because he sees this country through the eyes of one born elsewhere. “America,” he writes, “has become a nation consumed by anxiety, worried about terrorists and rogue nations, Muslims and Mexicans…immigrants and international organizations. The strongest nation in the history of the world now sees itself besieged by forces beyond its control.”
Fear, obviously, has a legitimate, even vital, role in human life. Indeed, without it, we would likely all be dead! Fear can move us to marshal our resources in the face of crisis–and there are real threats in this sinful world. There are certainly reasons why religious minorities in northern Iraq or school children in northern Nigeria would be afraid. But I hope you agree that excessive, obsessive fear is itself dangerous. It can lead us to misperceive the world around us and can undermine our capacity to interact constructively with others. To say it plainly, fear can turn us against the neighbor, corroding the trust and interdependence on which society depends. We discussed the issue of fear in a graduate seminar I taught last year at Seattle University. One of the students, a Roman Catholic nun from Uganda, told us that in her country “we say that fear is False Evidence Appearing Real”–and she added, it makes people dangerous.
Christians are not the only people of faith who know that obsessive, excessive anxiety can be hazardous to the health of humanity. Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, and Bahais would all agree with Gandhi when he says that “The enemy is fear. We think it is hate; but it is fear”–because fear keeps us from acting to effect the change we know is needed and because fear is the root of hatred. Christians, however, do have a powerful word to offer on this subject. Let me remind us of this by naming two themes from our Christian heritage. First, we hear over and over in scripture that the antidote to fear is, quite simply, trust in God. Because we fear God–that is, because we trust in God’s justice and mercy–we will not be ruled by fear in human society.
The part of my ordination service that I remember most vividly is a sung rendition of Psalm 27:
“The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom then shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life; of whom shall I be afraid?”
Let’s come at this from another direction. Christian faith teaches that anxiety, which is what humans feel when we are insecure, follows from trusting in the wrong things to protect us. If, for example, our sense of worth and personal security are tied to the size of our bank account, then we will likely never have “enough.” In Luke’s gospel, as we heard earlier, Jesus tells that wonderful parable about a rich man who builds bigger barns to protect his stuff–and you know what happens. People who try to guarantee their own security without thought of others often find that the more they accumulate the more fearful they become.
All of this, as you know, also applies to nations. The assumption undergirding much of our public discourse seems to be that it is appropriate, or at least okay, for “us” (however us is defined) to have a hugely disproportionate share of the world’s goods, and that using force to get or keep them is necessary and legitimate. But you know how Jesus put it: You can’t serve God and Mammon. If our choice is Mammon, then we will need all the military power we can amass, all of the walls we can build, to defend it. Indeed, security pursued through military force, as seen through the lens of religion, is the surest path to lasting insecurity–to perpetual fear. The second key teaching of our tradition, as I read it, is that fear is countered by recognizing our essential interrelatedness.
“People fail to get along,” Dr. King once said, “because they fear each other, [and] they fear each other because they don’t know each other”–don’t know that they belong to one another. Such interdependence, rooted in our conviction that life comes from a single Creator, means that true security is never achieved through unilateral defense, but through attentiveness to the injustice that afflicts other children of God. South Korea will be insecure so long as North Korea feels threatened. Israeli security depends on Palestinians having a stake in the development of the Middle East. U.S. security depends, among other things, on reducing the economic disparities that fuel global resentment.
I want to be clear. Most Christians acknowledge that there are real reasons to be anxious–finding or keeping a job, health care for our loved ones, safety for our children. But, along with followers of other major religions, Christians should surely refuse to define life as a zero-sum game in which our security is gained at the expense of others. Seen in religious perspective, life is not a fearful competition but a blessing to be shared by all. Fear is part of human life; but, at our best, Christians have said we will not be ruled by it or allow our view of the world to be defined by it. And because we know that life is interrelated, we will not allow fear to divide the human family.
The perspective I have just outlined is particularly needed in an age when fundamentalist religion captures the headlines. Fundamentalism is the religious form of the world’s anxiety. It draws lines to keep its identity secure by keeping others out. It responds to anxiety by demanding certainty, and, in this way, confuses religion with God. Fundamentalism adopts a mindset of scarcity and, thus, assumes that the goal is to defeat the competition. If we, in turn, set out “to defeat” fundamentalism, it will betray our message of interconnectedness! But surely we betray our God if we do not proclaim and demonstrate an alternative way of being faithful.
The problem, of course, is that we, our more liberal churches, also live fearfully. Our often-suspicious approach to other churches and religions, at least in the past, has been one indication of this, which is why our Disciples tradition has emphasized the importance of Christian unity and interfaith relations. Our world cries out for a witness to what the first letter of John calls a “love that casts out fear”; and the most profound testimony we can offer to such divine love is the way we live with people, especially strangers, around us.
You may remember the next verse in our reading from I John: “We love because God first loved us.” It is a powerful reminder that self-centeredness is the root of excessive fear. If our well-being is gained at the expense of others, then we will live anxiously. If our status depends on the depreciation of others, then we will live anxiously. If our lifestyle is built on a use of resources that threatens the planet, then we will live anxiously. If our security is based on treating others as enemies, then we will live anxiously. If our sense of community is dependent on exclusion of others, then we will live anxiously. And if our focus is on the preeminence of our church or our religion rather than the flourishing of this one divinely-given creation, then we will live anxiously. Let me put it another way: While divine love can cast out fear, human fear can also cast out love. Unlike grief or empathy, fear does not recognize the full reality of others. It is fundamentally narcissistic emotion and, thus, thwarts compassionate identification with those “outside.”
And so my plea for all of us, certainly myself included, is that we demonstrate, in our personal lives and in the life of the church, a way of living not dominated by fear. The opposite of fear is not invulnerability but hope in God’s future, both for ourselves and for life on this planet. In fearfulness, we live in anticipation of possible danger. In hope, we live in anticipation of promised fulfillment.
And that frees us to risk life in diverse community rather than in enclaves guarded by neighborhood watchmen.
Dr. Kinnamon, an internationally-recognized scholar and leader in the ecumenical movement, was our guest preacher at Saint Andrew this past Sunday. He is a past Secretary of the National Council of Churches, and has also served in leadership on the World Council of Churches. Dr. Kinnamon was a professor for more than 25 years, also serving as Dean of Lexington Theological Seminary. He has published several titles about ecumenism and the Disciples of Christ movement, and has a new book coming out next year about faith in a culture of fear (Westminster John-Knox). Stay tuned for review and discussion opportunities!