“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.”
1 John 4:18
We have just come through the season of the repeated refrain, “Do not be afraid.” It is curious that these are the words most common as those first spoken when God appears to humanity, in theophany, as an angel, or in some other form.
Perhaps the words, “Do not be afraid” are among the most countercultural words that can be spoken. Our world, both inside and outside of religious circles, more often declares, ”Be afraid.”
I came across a reflection on fear in Gabor Maté’s book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness and Healing in a Toxic Culture. Maté was addressing what fear does in terms of child development and trauma. He mentions that Polish Swiss psychotherapist, Alice Miller, identified that the harsh child-rearing practices in Germany before World War II “helped prepare the template for Nazi authoritarianism.” She also identified that fascist leaders, including Adolf Hitler and Hermann Göring, were shaped by such childhoods. Maté argues that “strict and rigid” could be substituted with the word “traumatizing.” He does not include in this description kind parents with firm curfews and boundaries. What he means by traumatizing are homes and environments which “imprint on a child a fear-tinged view of the world, and/or which require of the child to go numb in the face of suffering, starting with their own.”
“A fear-tinged view of the world”
After decades of work as a pastor in a church with an evangelical heritage, I can say that, perhaps, the biggest impediment to faith and growth for people in the church was fear. The problem was that fear was a tempting currency, and it was the motivation most trusted by even very loving people.
Fear is not only used by tyrants seeking to acquire and maintain power. It is also used by some of the most well-meaning people trying to care for others in the world. Without ascribing negative motivation to leaders, parents, and ministers, we could do a survey of the emotional and spiritual landscape of church.
Where in the following areas and principles was fear a primary motivating factor?
The concept of salvation (and damnation)
Considerations of other faiths and religions
Moral understandings
Ideas around blessing and provision
Practices of evangelism
Understandings of sexuality
Definitions of sin
Understandings of non-belief
A question comes up; if fear was a consistent aspect of what you learned about faith, is it possible to move to a more hopeful understanding of faith without walking away from church as you have known it? What happens when some of the most valued relationships in your life are fostered within a larger context where fear was a primary motivator? I am not suggesting an answer, merely asking the questions.
I often think of a woman who was in her later years by the time I became pastor at the church. We connected around concepts of faith. She told me she found the way I spoke about faith to be contrary to what she had heard in her upbringing, where faith messages had been dominated by fear. She said that she was grateful. She was thoughtful and insightful and engaged spiritually and intellectually. A few years after I started in the role as pastor, she moved to a care home as her medical needs increased. When I visited her, almost every time, the topic of fear came up. She would speak about how grateful she was to see a more positive, hopeful view of faith. She told me that something in her always knew that this is the way faith is meant to be understood.
Not long before she died she asked me to bring communion in for her. I had, in my mind, a kind of idyllic scene in which we would share communion and speak in gratitude about faith and life. This is not what happened. She had warned me that though she was compelled to the hopeful ways of seeing, the fear that was implanted in her in her younger years seemed to take over her mind at times. In the shadow of death this happened again. She was not afraid of death, as much as she was afraid of God and judgment. This was informed by her upbringing when she had been taught to understand God in the framework of fear. The terror re-asserted itself. This is how trauma can work. We did share communion and I prayed for her.
I find myself still praying for her, over her memory, for people like her. She was so lovely and yet she had been traumatized by a rigid understanding of faith. This terror is not of God.
We still seem, at times, so far from a hopeful understanding of faith, one that does not require terror and damnation and finger wagging and warning. When Jesus’ spoke words of warning, they always seemed to be directed towards those who used fear against others, yet presumed that they themselves were acceptable, saved, and right. It is as if he was saying, “If you insist on fear and hell and judgment, you are welcome to it.”
It is probably a good direction in life to determine that we will, to the best of our ability, not traumatize others. If our speaking of faith depends on ideas that produce trauma then, perhaps, we have some growing to do. I know that God is no fear monger. Many who have claimed to speak in God’s name have been fear mongers but, in hopeful faith, perfect love drives out fear; and God is perfect love.
A prayer of blessing;
I pray that if your understanding of faith has been dominated by fear you would feel freedom to walk away from that darkness. May you be blessed to know that the perfect love of God is not something achieved by our doing. This perfect love cannot be diminished or enhanced by our actions, good or bad. I pray a blessing that you would have the courage to love with a similar love. That you would be able to let go of fear as a motivation for those you love. It can be difficult to let go of fear. We too often think that fear is the only effective motivator. May we know that love is better.
Dear God, hear our prayer.
Amen.
Just started Mate's book, and I already have the sense that he has an incredibly important message for us, which I look forward to continuing to dive into. Think I agree with what he's saying about families that induce fear as a default, and what you're saying about how many churches did the same. But Bible verses aside, I don't really love "fear" as an opposite to love. Fear at its best is a physiological warning about threat. We *need* the emotion of fear; it's productive. It just shouldn't and can't be the driver of the ship, or very bad things happen. I will also say this, in the spirit of a wholistic conversation or critic: the "terror" that both you and Mate point to? It IS present both in the Bible itself and in history (as Mate certainly knows). In the Bible, sometimes it is the God character who's stirring it up! So it's certainly worthwhile, I think, to try to find our way to something else, but it's not like, well, all those families and churches out there just stirred up a bunch of fear. Existence is scary! And maybe that's your point, that faith is the anomaly, the counter-culture.