Fear can have a range of effects on faith, and it’s my belief that a truly robust faith has room for this feeling. For an earlier post about fear, click here. To look at the intersection of fear and faith, read on…

“When a system is subjected to chronic anxiety, people begin to lose contact with their principles, self-determined goals, and intellectual capacities…. When society is subjected to chronic, ongoing anxiety, it may lose the capacity to think imaginatively and resort to more and more emotionally determined behaviors.” —Peter Steinke, Uproar

“The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge; fools despise wisdom and instruction.” —Proverbs 1:7

I realize I’m starting to sound like a broken record, but I grew up white American Evangelical. I talked a few weeks ago about the inherent anger of this tradition, but this week, I want to address the anxiety.

Though I didn’t pick up on it until around 8th grade, one feature of my tradition was frequent tests of orthodoxy— of course, we never would have called it that! There was a Protestant Reformation or something, and we didn’t trouble ourselves with such terminology. “Orthodoxy”? No way, we were just “following the Bible.” Of course, “following the Bible” meant something very specific which actually had very little to do with how the Bible has been read and interpreted for centuries. In our case, “following the Bible” meant believing in a literal six-day creation, defining marriage as between one man and one woman, condemning abortion, viewing the Bible as perfect and without error, having sex only within a heterosexual marriage, and a bunch of other stuff that hadn’t been worth Jesus’s time to address. To step out of line on any of these issues was to risk shunning, and thus, the system was incredibly anxious. Such systems can’t really nurture robust faith; they can only offer checklists. As theologian Catherine Keller writes, “An accusation of heresy is a quick way to shut down thought— and therefore honesty— and therefore faith.”

Anxious systems lose their creativity and intimacy, and everything becomes about fitting the patterns and beliefs we think will reduce the anxiety. “If we all just agree on everything, then the anxiety will go away.” The irony here is that such a thought process in fact creates more anxiety, not less. And thus, the system’s anxiety becomes self-perpetuating.

Also, this should go without saying, but the entirety of Purity Culture is fear-based:
God won’t love you if you masturbate too much.
Your future spouse won’t love you if you’ve looked at porn.
You’ll never be good enough if you have sex before marriage.
Everyone will judge you if you wear that dress.
You’ll be cast out if you’re anything other than cisgender and heterosexual.
And so on.
The whole system runs on anxiety, and when you introduce thoughtfulness, trust, and the rest of the peaceful wedge of the feeling wheel, Purity Culture crumbles.

While fear is a natural human response to threats, this kind of systemic anxiety really isn’t. It’s been cultivated by institutions to exploit the faithful, and it should be approached with caution (or, if you’re like me, anger). So what does healthy fear in faith look like?

The Bible frequently uses the phrase “the fear of the Lord.” This kind of fear isn’t so much the clutching-the-armrests-during-a-scary-movie kind of fear or the an-immortal-deity-will-spank-me-if-I-do-wrong kind of fear. It’s more about reverence for something deeply holy. Theologian Rudolf Otto coined the term mysterium tremendum et fascinans  (Latin meaning approximately “mystery which leads us to trembling and fascination”) to describe humanity’s complete awe of God because we are just so different. Biblical fear is about respect for God and awareness of our comparative weakness. “Fearing God” is not “being afraid of God.” It’s a term which invites wonder and mystery, even if we realize our smallness in the process. The beautiful twist, of course, is that God sees us as anything but insignificant even with the extreme differences between Creator and Creation. We are fearfully and wonderfully made, and we respond with holy fear, not the anxiety our institutions cultivate for their self-preservation.

Leave room for fear in your faith.
(Just be careful about how others may try to use that fear.)