What happens when we confuse a faith system with fear? The two are antithetical and mix like oil and water. The basic and naive assumption is that our faith will be greater than our fear, and that fear has absolutely no power over faith. But I am not talking about a fair competition on a level playing field. I am talking about thinking we are saying “faith” when in fact, we are saying “fear.” I am talking about an insidious changeling story where fear takes the place of faith, pretending all the time to BE faith. We need to grapple with this question for no other reason than it has already happened.

When faith is confused with fear you will note that Christians begin acting in strictly non-Christian ways. Instead of committing to an equitable sustainability for all people, we talk about who deserves what. Instead of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, and housing the homeless, we turn on people in need and vilify them, turning them into bums and leeches and blights on society. In extreme cases (such as we are seeing now) we make poverty a crime and can arrest someone for begging or sleeping on a public bench. Rather than welcoming and caring for the refugee and immigrant, we are told they are rapists and criminals, murderers and pedophiles. Rather than seeking to reform criminals, redeem those who stray, and rehabilitate those who violate our shared norms, we will imprison, punish, condemn, torture, and demonize those who most need restorative justice. We will elect politicians who lie to us, ramping up our fear and anxiety for no better purpose than their dysfunctional quest for power. We will take the tools of faithfulness such as scripture, preaching, and prayer and weaponize them, opting for an Old Testament proclamation of righteous condemnation and punishment instead of the gospel of Jesus Christ offering love, hope, and grace. Through fear, we will set up false binaries of good and evil – white good, black/brown evil, heterosexual good, polysexual bad, American good, non-American bad, ignorant and frightened good, intelligent and discerning bad.

When fear pretends to be faith we sacrifice solutions in order to wallow in our problems. With problems, we can manipulate and divide; solutions solve things and bring us together. Example: there are South and Central Americans and Mexicans entering our country from our southern border. The vast majority of these people come to this country as people have always come to this country – seeking a better life. A significant percentage are actually seeking asylum and are in fear of their lives and the lives of their loved ones. A few are criminals with evil intentions, but good research has shown that a smaller percentage of immigrants are violent criminals than in our general population. We are receiving less of the bad element than we already have. There are more than enough materials, resources, jobs, housing, food, land, and education for handle much more than we have already received. This is the reality. But look how easy it is to manipulate the information to create a fear/terror narrative. If good people from the south can enter our country, there must be evil global terrorists entering as well. People who are here “illegally” take our jobs, threaten our women and children, are psychopaths, don’t have good hygiene and therefore spread disease (even disease that fear mongers deny even exists), deplete our medical and emergency resources, and are voting in our elections to destroy our democracy. Any infinitesimal scrap of evidence in support of any of this misinformation is blown up all out of proportion to “prove” our dystopian fantasy.

What part of creation did God not create? What has God given to us to curse us instead of bless us? Is our God good or not? Is our God love or not? Faith says, “yes, good, yes love,” while fear says, “well, yes, but not for all, just for us.” I will always remember the response of a delegate to the 2012 General Conference who was angered by a blog I wrote about God’s unconditional love. When I asked him if he believed in God’s unconditional love, he responded, “Sure, but only for the people who deserve it.” Fear makes us worry about “enough” and our need to defend it. Fear fosters a scarcity mentality and the terror that someone might gain at our expense. This explains our love of guns. We actually don’t love guns, but we don’t want to admit we live in pants-wetting terror of “those” people. When faith rules, there are no “those” people – only “all of us together.” When faith rules, there is no need for guns, especially high-power weaponry suited for warfare rather than home protection. When fear prevails and you talk about guns, you hear all these idiotic defenses of hunting for food or for sport. Great, go ahead and use highly sophisticated equipment to hunt; no one is ever talking about this when we talk about gun violence. Fear causes the fearful to equate a six-point buck to a child on a school playground; faith says you do everything in your power to keep our children safe. Any weapon purchased with the thought that it might be “needed” to use on another human being is a tool of fear, not faith in Jesus Christ.

Faith will find a way. Faith will find a way to feed everyone. Faith will find a way to provide health care for everyone. Faith will find a way to house every person who wants shelter. Faith doesn’t confuse accountability with punishment but understands that a community and a society are only as strong as their weakest link. This means that faith watches out for each other instead of distrusting and despising one another. God has provided more than enough to care for every human being on this planet, and our country has the potential to provide an abundance to meet all human need. Fear will cause a ridiculous and indefensible conflict between faith and science. Faith is crystal clear – all of our advancements in human thinking, imagination, creativity, and invention come to us from God. Faith results in us maximizing the benefits of these advancements (think how quickly the world responded to COVID-19) while fear distrusts the advancements and denies the role God plays in our human development. Fear will make us reject the tools or turn the tools into weapons, often at the same contradictory time. Fear makes adults vaccinated as children against smallpox, measles, polio, and chicken pox loudly decry the safety of vaccinations. And fear makes even this dishonest. A large number of public figures promoting anti-vax conspiracy theories did so only after they had been vaccinated with absolutely no negative side-effects. Are these people evil? No, they are scared, and they live to make others as scared as they are.

We need to reclaim a faith-based Christianity, and soon. “Christian” nationalism is the poster child of fear. I can only put “Christian” in quotes with nationalists and evangelicals today because their visions have nothing to do with Jesus, with the gospels, with the core tenets of Christian theology, or the historical understanding of the will of God. An outgrowth of fear is rationalistic justification for all kinds of unchristian and hateful behavior. Mistreatment of women and minorities, name-calling, insults, denial of dignity, wild unsubstantiated accusations, disregard and disdain for good information, egotism and narcissism all emerge from the fear that pretends to be faith. Good Christians don’t rape women or grab them by their genitals. Good Christians don’t defend unborn life on one hand but call for death-penalty execution of other lives. Good Christians don’t deny the basic human rights of any of God’s children. Good Christians don’t take positions that support the war crimes of individuals, states, or nations. Fear does all these things; faith does not.

My deep and earnest prayer this year, an election year, is that we can clearly see the difference between fear and faith. Some might see this as a partisan request, but those of you who have read me before know that I am as harsh about politicians manipulating fear on both/all sides of the aisle. Our politics is every bit as much a politics of fear as our pseudo-Christian faith is fear disguised as faith. What we really need are faithful people to run for office instead of the bevy of fearmongers we often have to choose from. So, what do I suggest? Read the gospels. Get good commentaries and study the gospels. Don’t let celebrities, politicians, business moguls, sports stars or this week’s Taylor Swift tell you what you ought to believe. (When you are sick, you tend not to ask the butcher, the sanitation worker, the weather forecaster, or the Quik Trip attendant what you should do…). Don’t even listen to your pastor; too many of us have been poisoned by the bad news of bondage rather than the good news of salvation. Take responsibly and find out for yourself. There is nothing hidden or secret about it: true faith destroys fear and focuses our hearts and minds of the will of God. Take though authority and return to faith. Fear is a fast track to nowhere.