United We Fear

There’s a bit in Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 in which psychiatrist and Washington Democratic Representative Jim McDermott says, “You can get people to do anything if they’re afraid.” This is a recurring theme in Moore’s work, cribbed to a large extent from Barry Glassner’s The Culture of Fear. A major thread of Bowling for Columbine, for example, as well as, I believe, Stupid White Men, is the way in which fear is used to manipulate. Moore notes, for example, how fear of the black man dominates the news. What’s interesting about this, for Moore, is how few times most people have actually been wronged by a black man (or by a person of another race at all, for that matter). Speaking from personal experience, that’s the case for me as well. About 99 percent of the bad things that have ever happened to me were caused by white people. Given, I grew up in East Tennessee, an area not particularly known for its racial diversity. Nonetheless, with the exception of a big kid who put a chain around my throat at the Boy's Club when I was about seven, I’ve mostly been screwed over by white people. White people were the ones who bullied me, made fun of me, treated me unfairly, lied to me, took advantage of me economically, and didn’t promote me vocationally when I deserved it. Maybe this is just me, but I don’t think so. Fear is very present in the brand of Christendom I’m familiar with, as well. In fact, fear seems to dominate this form of Christianity. It’s fear of children being corrupted that motivates James Dobson to “protect the family,” as if some wild band of homosexuals is going to sodomize his grandchildren and make him watch. It was a mixture of fear of Satanism, sexuality, teenage rebellion and even African Americans that was responsible for preachers in the 80s condemning rock and roll music (racist panic because, like the fear of aggressive Africanized honeybees, rock and roll is ultimately African, and you can’t be exposing your kids to those wild jungle rhythms). Fear is what motivates the more rural, working class members of my wife’s family, who are absolutely terrified of anyone not like them, be they rich, black, Latino, from the North, or on welfare. Fear is what motivates those who support George W. Bush’s war on terrorism, as if Bush could ever protect you from a determined suicide bomber. Fear, ironically, is also what brings many people to salvation. Christians often rely on two techniques for saving souls. One if the fear of hell and death. After all, you could die tonight in a car accident. And if you don’t know Jesus as your personal Lord and Savior, then you’ll spend all of eternity burning in torment, separated from God and all your friends. And eternity is forever. The second is the fear of being left behind. Despite the rapture being an idea roughly 150 years old, despite the reality that much of end times prophesy is strung together from out of context verses shoved wildly together into a perverse jigsaw puzzle that its advocates have already assembled in their minds, and despite the strong possibility that much of Revelation was a metaphor for Christian persecution under the Roman Empire (the values for Nero’s name add up to 666, for instance), apocalyptic fear is at an all time high. And there are many churches (and book publishers) willing to take advantage of that fear. Who wouldn’t want to not die? Who wouldn’t want to be whisked away from seven years of death and destruction? The question, then, is would many evangelical Christians even know how to evangelize if they weren’t allowed to scare people? Would evangelical Christians know how to, as St. Francis of Assisi said, preach the gospel at all times, and if necessary use words? Would they know how to persuade people, as Paul did, that Christianity is both reasonable and true? Would they, and do they, know how to love their neighbor as themselves? Or is it just so much easier to scare people shitless?