What happens when we live in a state of fear? How do the media and political leaders exploit our reactions to fear to manipulate us, influence our decisions, and affect the way we act towards others?
According to research out of UCLA, fear and anxiety quickly alter our bodies, stirring up a host of reactions, including jittery and shaking feelings. Fear floods the body with adrenaline and sugar for energy, speeding the heart and narrowing the mind.
The fearful person plunges into the emergency state of fight, flight, or freeze. This animal instinct gives us the burst of energy we need. In that state, we can’t think clearly—just react to protect ourselves and our loved ones. That same chemistry plays out in our politics today.
I live in the USA, a land where fear dominates our lives. I hear both my conservative and liberal friends speaking the language of fear with all the suspicious, dehumanizing power fear brings with it. I listen to friends talk of their terror of ICE agents, immigrants, trans people, socialists, and Trump supporters. Fear fills my friends' minds and bodies, and that fear floods every conversation, and soon enemies abound.
I was 17 years old when my pastor assigned 1 John 4:18 to study and memorize. “There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear, because fear involves punishment, and the one who fears is not perfected in love.”
Up until then, I assumed the opposite of love was hate. In this verse, I encountered an unexpected counterbalance to love — fear. Love has the power to displace fear, and when love is absent, fear dominates, holding love at bay. When fear takes hold and grows, love diminishes. Where love abounds, fear loses its grip.
As a believer, I marvel at how some people claim the USA is a “Christian Nation.” Millions of American citizens practice faiths other than Christianity or do not have religious beliefs at all. More strikingly, the USA does not feel and act like a nation of love. Fear, distrust, and disgust dominate the political discourse, filtering down to our daily encounters with the neighbors we are taught to treat as the enemy.
bell hooks, in her book All About Love, wrote,
“Fear is the primary force upholding structures of domination. It promotes the desire for separation, the desire not to be known. When we are taught that safety lies always with sameness, then difference, of any kind, will appear as a threat.”
Fear divides us, dehumanizes us, and misshapes our understanding of others and ourselves, but “when we choose to love,” hooks continues, we choose to move against fear--against alienation and separation. The choice to love is a choice to connect — to find ourselves in the Other.
First John chapter 4 is all about love. Verses 7 and 8 say, “Beloved, let us love one another, for love is from God; and everyone who loves is born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love.”
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