Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear

by Scott Bader-Saye

Through politics, marketing, news programming, and popular culture we are taught to fear, often in ways that profit others. But what does all this fear do to our moral lives as it forms (or deforms) our character and our judgment? Drawing on Christian scripture and tradition, Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear articulates a response to fear that resists an ethic of security in favor of fostering an ethic of risk. The Christian virtues of hospitality, peacefulness, and generosity are presented as the way to defeat the countervirtues of suspicion, preemption, and control. Pastors, students, and lay people will find this unique book both accessible and intriguing. Excerpt Do not be afraid. We live in a time when this biblical refrain cannot be repeated too often. Both John Paul II in 1978 and his successor, Benedict XVI, in 2005 used these words to begin their papacies. Among all the things the church has to say to the world today, this may be the most important. No one has to be convinced that we live in fearful times, though we are not always sure what we should be afraid of and why. We suspect that our fears make us vulnerable to manipulation, but we find it hard to quell the fear long enough to analyze how it is being produced and directed for the benefit of others. One reason we are a more fearful culture today, despite the fact that the dangers are not objectively greater than in the past, is because some people have incentives and means to heighten, manipulate, and exploit our fears. Fear is a strong motivator, and so those who want and need to motivate otherspoliticians, advertisers, media executives, advocacy groups, even the churchturn to fear to bolster their message. I call this the "fear for profit" syndrome, and it is rampant. We have become preoccupied with unlikely dangers that take on the status of imminent threats, producing a culture where fear determines a disproportionate number of our p

Genres: Theology, Christianity, Religion, Nonfiction

172 pages, Paperback

First published June 1, 2007

About the author

Professor Bader-Saye joined the faculty of the Seminary of the Southwest in 2009. His teaching and research interests include economy, ecology, sex, politics, virtue ethics, and interfaith dialogue. His publications include "Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear" and "Church and Israel After Christendom." Dr. Bader-Saye also serves as Theologian in Residence at St. Julian of Norwich Episcopal Church, Austin, Texas.

Reviews

[Michael Miller · Rating 4 out of 5]

After the attacks in Paris, I decided to read this again. Now that I see so many friends posting (favorably) about the rush to block Syrian refugees, it seems even more timely. Rather that summarize, I quote from one part of the book: "The relentless pursuit of safety leads to uncharitable hearts, for we fear letting go of the goods that might protect us against an uncertain future. In the name of security we refuse to love our enemies, because we assume that if we do not answer violence with violence, we will be forever victimized. Because we wish to be careful, we do not open our lives to strangers, fearing they will take advantage of our hospitality. It is fear that constricts our hearts and thus fear that makes Jesus's ethic of risky discipleship look crazy, unrealistic, and irresponsible. Yet the virtues of the ethic of safety - suspicion, preemption, and accumulation - turn out to be but splendid vices."

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Be afraid, be very afraid."

Scott Bader-Saye would observe that this is perhaps a warning we may take too seriously, and this absorption with fear has profound consequences for the ways we live our lives, and for those who are Christ-followers, for how we pursue, or rather fail to pursue the life of the kingdom.

The book begins by looking at how fear sells, particularly in the media. Much of the draw that new media uses to attract continued viewership is to play on our fears--of getting cancer, of child abductions, of gun violence, of terrorism and more. He notes research that indicates that the more we absorb of this media, the more dangerous we perceive the world and the more anxious we are. The church plays on this as well--fear is good as a rallying place (and also to raise money!).

All this has a profound impact on our moral lives. Fear leads to insecurity and all the things we do when safety becomes our ultimate concern. We engage in unwarranted suspicion of others, we personally, and sometimes nationally act pre-emptively against perceived danger, and we accumulate everything from money to bottled water against perceived dangers.

The author is not urging "fearlessness" however. Appropriate fear is good, particularly an appropriate fear of God that recognizes the greatness of his holy love. The issue, rather, is one of putting fear in its place by maintaining a proper perspective on the imminence of the things we are encouraged to fear, as well as being grounded in the security of God's providence. While God doesn't protect against all evil, He is able to work through it in our lives and circumstances as we continue to trust in Him, as the example of the cross demonstrates.

One of his most beautiful chapters is the one on "Community and Courage" in which he chronicles the response of the Taize Community to the tragic murder of Brother Roger, one of the community's founders during a worship celebration. Their decision to continue to be a community of welcome meant no additional security measures, no metal detectors. This would mean to live in fear and suspicion rather than generous hospitality as a community.

The book concludes with three chapters that unpack what it means to live out of security in the providence of God rather than fear. This means hospitality that welcomes the stranger. It means peacemaking that risks misunderstanding and being caught in the midst of deadly conflict to bring reconciliation. It means generosity that trusts God's provision and gives rather than hoards.

There is also an appendix which has a profound exploration of the use of fear in the political arena, particularly because of the breakdown of any positive metanarrative to unite us. It helped me understand much of what drives the political narrative in my country and to see how contrary these appeals are to the narrative of Christian faith, no matter which party they come from. It suggests to me how vital the role of the Christian community is, not in adding political heft to the arguments on one side or another, but providing a "third way" that transcends the politics of fear that polarize us.

This is an older (2006) book that I hope enjoys continued circulation. Each chapter has searching questions that make it useful for church leadership boards and small groups. I'll leave you with one of these that challenged me:

Try this test. First think about how much you fear losing your house, your car, your savings account, or your job. Then, think about how much you fear being unloving, inhospitable, selfish, or impatient. Which do you fear more? Why?

[Lyndon · Rating 4 out of 5]

St. Thomas Aquinas thought that fear was a ‘passion of the soul.' What he meant was that, unlike a broken finger or a suntan, fear was an experience that referenced the whole activity of a person. A doctor could bandage your broken finger without regard to your emotions, and lotion could help the results of a suntan; but you cannot address fear without addressing the entire person. Aquinas taught that fear is a ‘bodily response of the soul'; it has a way of shaping how a person thinks, behaves, interacts, and prays. The question becomes: what hope do we have if fear has so much influence over us?

This question provides an implicit starting point for Scott Bader-Saye's, Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear. In short, Bader-Saye wants to put fear in its place. Following Aquinas, Bader-Saye reasons that responding to fear is a matter of learning how to fear and when to fear and what can truly be feared. In other words, fear, like anger or joy, is a ‘passion of the soul' that one learns to do well or to do poorly. How are we to learn to fear well? According to Bader-Saye, we are to live lives of trust in a God who offers provision and redemption as an alternative to a culture of fear.

The opening chapters of Following Jesus provides a deft appraisal of fear as experienced and created through politics, the media, the market, and even the church. “Just as “sex sells,” so does fear” (p. 16), Bader-Saye declares. Whether it is post-9/11 policies, parenting manuals, safety products or even the “repent or perish” sermon, the use of fear to motivate or make a profit has become a standard practice in the contemporary, North American culture. Bader-Saye obverses that, “We spend our money based on fear rather than stewardship. We make political decisions based on fear rather than the common good. We participate in religious life based on fear rather than love” (p. 21). Accordingly, our experience of fear has become disordered; however, Bader-Saye recognizes that we are not without an alternative. The church, Bader-Saye argues, has within its own theological resources, a faithful and hopeful response to disordered fear.

Central to the argument of Following Jesus is the conviction that fear is a moral issue, insofar as it shapes the kind of people we become. In other words, fear, like the other passions, shapes character. Bader-Saye names the prevailing character formation related to fear as the “new ethic of safety”: the post-9/11 suspicion of strangers, the desire to “do unto others before they do unto you”, and the fear of scarcity. These “shadow virtues”, according to Bader-Saye, promote excessive fear that, “threaten traditional Christian virtues such as hospitality, peacemaking, and generosity” (p. 29). Yet following Jesus, Bader-Saye notes, is about being a community that practices hospitality, peacemaking, and generosity. As such, these virtues are in need of recovery. They are, argues Bader-Saye, constituent practices of a church that is learning to tell the stories of God's provision as the governing story of our lives, our community and the world.

The analysis of our ‘culture of fear' and the promise of Christian practices opens the way for Bader-Saye to recover a theology of God's providence. Notably, there is a fair amount of unlearning that Bader-Saye recommends as a result of a theological decline in the theology of providence indicative to the modern period. And the unlearning is worth it. Drawing from Aquinas, John Calvin and contemporary Anglican theologian, Sam Wells, Bader-Saye provides a renewed definition of providence that is narrative in nature, and hopeful in content. “Providence,” Bader-Saye maintains, “has to do with the conviction that our lives and our world constitute a coherent story, a drama, in which God and humankind, together, drive the story toward its proper conclusion” (p.79). This narrative rendering of providence focuses less on explaining how God is (or is not) active in the world, and more on the learning of skills to “read” history as a story which has its ultimate telos in God's provision and redemption. What this “reading” will teach us is that at the end of the day, “God's hopes for the human story cannot be thwarted” (p. 79).

Bayer-Saye's narrative theology of providence organizers the church's thinking on the agency of God around a pattern of learning and practices that receive coherence in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. “Providence,” notes Bader-Saye, “names the conditions in which we can, with courage and hope, follow Jesus in a dangerous world” (p. 100). Fear, suffering and difficulty do not evaporate in the practices of discipleship; rather, the stories of fear, suffering and difficulty are placed within the framework of the agency of God who enters human history and transforms it from within. Drawing from the witness of Israel, the incarnation of Jesus, and the lived confession of the church, Bader-Saye encourages Christians to view the pattern of God's self-involvement in the world as a sign of God's ultimate goal to secure all creation unto God's self. Fear, suffering and difficulty may arise in our experience; but the final word belongs to God alone.

To avoid creating an abstracted God who works in generic ways, Bader-Saye infuses the pages of Following Jesus with stories of friends and the departed faithful who have embodied the kind of courage and hope that highlight what it looks like when the pattern of God's provision and redemption governs the experiences of fear. “I am convinced,” Bader-Saye comments at the opening of his chapter on the risk of hospitality, “ that trust in God's providence makes possible the development of the virtues, such as courage, hope, and patience, that are necessary to negotiate a broken and sometimes dangerous world in ways that are expansive, life-giving, and even a bit risky” (p. 101). As is true throughout this work, Bader-Saye is careful to point to the lived, human expression of these virtues as a way to anchor them in the actual practices of the church.

The final chapters on the risks of hospitality, peacemaking and generosity, is where Bader-Saye develops the Christian alternative to the “shadow virtues” of suspicion, preemption and accumulation. These are rich chapters laden with careful critique and insight. Bader-Saye is concerned that Christians embody these virtues, not only because they provide faithful practices in a culture of fear, but because they are foundational to being the church. Bader-Saye has another name for these practices, namely: discipleship. As the title of this work indicates, following Jesus as disciples is the basis for any Christian response to living at a time of disordered fear.

Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear is a book written in and for the church. Bader-Saye, a lay Episcopalian and professor at the University of Scranton, strives to narrate the hope of God's provision and redemption as good news for people awash with fear. Equally comfortable in the arenas of popular music and film (his reading of the Star Wars saga is particularly helpful), pre-modern theology and postmodern analysis, Bader-Saye has written an accessible study appropriate for individual and group reflection. When I used this book as a Lenten study, the initial response was mixed. For instance, Bader-Saye's critique of the Bush Administration became a little tiring for some, while several group members struggled to follow his argument for a narrative theology of providence. By the end of the study, however, the response to this work was unanimous: this is a timely volume for the church. I concur. Taken as a whole, I am confident that this work will become an important resource for a church looking to follow Jesus when the prevailing alternative is fear itself.

[Jeff Garrison · Rating 4 out of 5]

We live in a fearful world. There is the treat of terrorism. On the medical front, we fear cancer, AIDS and other diseases. In our unstable economy, we fear unemployment and worry about losing our investments. There is always the fear of violent crime. All we have to do is to watch the evening news and we’re reminded of the danger lurking in the shadows. Will we or someone we love be the next victim? Although living fearlessly is foolishness and not a good option, Bader-Saye suggests there are theological problems created us being overly obsessed with fear. He doesn’t suggests that fear is a vice; instead, he explores how “excessive or disordered fear can tempt us to vices such as cowardice, sloth, rage and violence (26). For Christians, living too fearfully destroys our ability to trust in God and to love others and to practice basic Christian virtues: hospitality, peacemaking and generosity (29). In his closing appendix, Bader-Saye notes that we need a better theology, not a political theory, to overcome the fear what we do (154).

Bader-Saye begins his book with a chapter exploring “fear for profit.†Quoting Al Franklen (who’s possibility the new Senator from Minnesota), he builds upon his idea that instead of a liberal or conservative media bias, the one we should be most concerned with is the profit bias (16-17). Fear sells and the past few decades (especially since the FCC deregulation of broadcasting in the 1980s) the demand on news shows to create a profit and to boost ratings have lead to more sensational and shocking news coverage, which often unnecessarily increases our fear. Numerous examples are citing in support of his theory. We worry about toxic residue in food when far more people die from an inadequate diet. We fear little known illnesses or operating room accidents while ignoring other more tangible things we can do to protect our health. We believe we live in a more dangerous world than in the past, but those of us in the West actually live much longer than our grandparents and great-grandparents. In the 1990s, when violent crime rates were falling, most people felt crime was out of control. Our elected leaders run campaigns of fear: “if you can’t woo voters, scare them†(19). Even the church isn’t immune to this obsession. Without naming names, Bader-Saye reminds us of how “religious groups are particularly vulnerable to the kind of demagoguery that creates and capitalizes on fear†(20). Groups like Dobson’s “Focus on the Family,†Robertson’s “700 Club,†and Falwell’s “Moral Majority†all come to mind.

Although much of this book is devoted to fear in a macro-sense (especially in the political realm and in relationships between nation/states), Bader-Saye also notes the role fear plays in our personal lives. Perceived fear has even changed the way we parent as the emphasis shifts from “good parenting†to “safe parenting†(13). Fear also impacts our relationships. One who fears abandonment will have a hard time risking love, for if one does not love, one will never know abandonment. One who fears rejection may have a hard time trying something new. In an attempt to protect our hearts, we shield ourselves from that which we most desire (45).

This book has much to say about international politics. Out of fear, preemptive strikes against an opponent are often prescribed. However, what defines the threat and the politics of preemptive strikes leads us down a road to where the only way to be safe is to eliminate all who could potentially be an enemy. This philosophy obviously has problems. Bader-Saye suggests that one way to control fear is to have faith in God’s providence, but he also notes that too often a politician invokes providence “as a divine rubber stamp for human ideologies and interest†(120). In a study of George Bush’s State of the Union Addresses in 2003 and 2004, he notes how in the first speech, Bush claimed that God’s providence was hidden, but in 2004 was willing to link the Iraq war with providence. (122). Bader-Saye also explores pacifism and just war (126f), as well as economic philosophies. I felt he came down a little hard on Adam Smith, whom he described as having the “perfect economic philosophy for the modern age-all the calories, none of the guilt†(136). He links Adam’s “invisible hand†of the market place with providence, saying that Smith’s philosophy gave us a providential excuse not to be generous (137).

Reclaiming the original view of providence will help calm our fears as we trust in a good God. But providence is often misunderstood. Too many people see it “as a guaranteed protection plan [which] is to mistake both the real contingencies of life and the kind of power God chooses to use in guiding the creation to its goal†(89-90). We do a disservice to God and to others when we propagate the myth that our troubles are the result of our sinfulness and that following Jesus will take them all away. Such a belief isn’t even Biblical as both Job and Jesus point out.

Bader-Saye draws heavily upon popular culture to illustrate his points. He quotes from all kinds of musicians, from Bono to Tim McGraw to Dashboard Confessionals (alternative rock). He draws upon many varieties of literature, from plays and movies. Theologically, he draws heavily from Thomas Aquinas, but also from John Calvin and Karl Barth and others. Although in discussion of the police of pre-emptive strikes necessitated much discussion of George Bush’s policies, when discussing the role fear plays within the political process, he didn’t limit himself to bashing just one political party, but made it clear that both political parties were guilty (19). He gives us a lot to think about in this short book. Each chapter concludes with a series of questions for the reader to ponder. For me, this has been an important book and has caused me to do a lot of thinking. I recommend it.

A few quotes:

On listening to the flight attendant’s instructions: “I’ve heard it many times before, but this time I could not help but hear ‘first secure your own mask’ as a kind of motto for the new ethic of safety.†(28)

“I used to think that the angels in the Bible began their message with ‘Do note be afraid’ because their appearance was so frightening. But I have come to think differently. I suspect that they begin this way because the quieting of fear is required in order to hear and do what God asks of us.†(59)

“Even the darkness cannot rob our lives of purpose, since ultimately our purpose is not constructed but received.†(86)


“The political search for security today relies on the conventional power that comes from strength and wealth. But if we believe the biblical witness, that kind of strength is no strength at all.†(92)

God draws history to its proper end not by conventional power (that is, control and domination), but by entering the fray of human history and transforming it from within. Jesus reveals to us a God who refuses to make the world out right by violently enforcing the good. To do so would be to betray the good by betraying peace. God’s ways are not the ways of the world. God is not a ‘superpower.’ God does not swoop in to rescue when things get really bad.†(93)

“This is part of the intention of terrorism, to create a climate of fear that poisons ordinary human relations with suspension.†(103)

“Believing that Christians are called to be peacemakers does not necessarily mean that one must be a pacifist, but it does mean that one always begins with a presumption for peace and a very limited set of circumstances in which that presumption can be overruled by tragic and just use of force.†(118)

[Bethany · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've owned this book for a long time and finally decided now (homebound by COVID-19) was the right time to finally read it.

It was the right book for the right time. And while I desperately wanted to give it five stars, the reason I didn't is because it's a bit heady, academic, and I save 5 stars for books I can recommend universally.

It gave great food for thought. It led the reader on a journey ruminating on what we fear and whether it's reasonable or realistic. It identifies some of the people and groups who remind us regularly of our fear because they stand to benefit from it. It discussed why fearlessness is not the goal, but ordered fear, and placed courage alongside this (courage is what we do in the presence of fear; it's not courage if you're fearless). And there was a great discussion about how our view (ordered or disordered) of Providence fits in. The end of the book dealt a great deal specifically with our fears about money and scarcity and abundance.

Great read. Though it's short, it was a slow read because my concentration is shot and the concepts are those I wanted to linger over.

[A.J. Jr. · Rating 5 out of 5]

An important book, especially during a time of endless media fearmongering. Don't allow the media to brainwash you. Start thinking for yourself and assessing risk properly and in a healthy manner. This book can help you do so.

[Kristi Lambert deter · Rating 3 out of 5]

Learned some really great things. Rated it a 3 only because it didn't speak directly into my heart emotionally.

[Rona Grace · Rating 3 out of 5]

Finally completed this book early this year. It's not a quick read but it's packed with thought provoking and compelling truth. If you're looking to unravel theories, concepts, and biblical truths regarding fear in our society and how it drives and fuels our culture (and has controlled society for hundreds of years) and how it's preventing people of God from living fully, then this is the book for you.

[Jennifer]

Mighty fine book that chronicles western Christianity and culture's responses of fear. Very readable and interesting.

[Josh Gering · Rating 4 out of 5]

fantastic ideas in this book. it had a significant impact on me. in re-reading portions I've realized that the writing itself isn't as great as the ideas communicated.

[Jennifer]

More relevant today than ever, but surprisingly un-preachy. I appreciated being able to put our current climate in the context of 9/11 (without having it done for me, since the book was written more than a decade ago).