The Fear-Mongering Dilemma

This morning, I read an article: "The Allure of the Far Right Demands Immediate Action." It was about the recent Values Voters summit, especially focusing on Steve Bannon's fiery address at that event. The author, Adele M. Stan, describes Bannon's speech as "a dark, apocalyptic address" featuring a "burn-it-all-down litany of grievances" that "set the house on fire." She went on to speak in frightening terms about the overall atmosphere of the summit:

A menacing undercurrent flowed throughout the Values Voter conference, not only in hyperbolic descriptions of the supposed threats to Western civilization posed by Islam and the American left, but in veiled threats, couched in the language of violence, directed at opponents of the Trump agenda.

What we are left with is a portrait of fear-mongers skillfully fueling the anxieties of a group of people, inspiring them to see themselves as under siege, as facing such dire threats to their existence or way of life that they need to take decisive action to defeat these threats.

The article left me feeling more frightened than I'd been before, less optimistic about the prospect of a peaceful future for this country and the world, and more worried about threats to civil discourse and civil society. The message of the article was that these fear-mongers and their followers pose a serious threat to our safety and way of life, and we need to take action.

Here is the dilemma. Fear-mongering is dangerous. It puts people in a defensive posture where they see others as a threat, a posture from which they are more likely to strike out violently. The more that fear is stoked, the more serious our conflicts become and the less likely we are to find peaceful, integrative solutions that meet everyone's needs.

And there are people today--and I an convinced that Steve Bannon is among them--who have elevated fear-mongering to an art form and are stoking the human capacity for fear by convincing those who listen that their lives or ways of life are in dire peril. They are fueling divisions and inspiring fear of those on the other side of the fabricated divides, and their rhetoric is laced with violent imagery and the notion that a violent confrontation is inevitable.

And then there are those who warn us about these masters of fear-mongering and the crowds sucked in by them. And their warnings put us in danger of a second-order fear-mongering, one that fuels fear of the fear-mongers and their followers.

And I can only imagine that this isn't the solution. Urging us to fear those who peddle fear, it seems to me, can only inspire feedback loops of escalating fear and defensiveness, bringing us closer to the brink.

In fact, I suspect that the fear-mongers are counting on this response. "If we sow seeds of suspicion and fear among those who are prone to follow us, there will be those who will become more afraid of us and our followers, afraid of the growing potential for violence that we represent, and will begin raising the alarms among those who weren't sucked in by our fear-mongering. This will start a cycle that will help our efforts to sow fear, as our followers feel the defensive anger of these others in a way that we can play on to magnify the defensive hostility of those we've seduced."

But what can we do? Fear mongering is dangerous. It is a threat to civil society. So how do we get people to take it seriously and stand against it without issuing warnings that become a kind of second-order fear-mongering that only fuels the fire of fear? How do we mobilize the forces required to de-fang the fear-mongers without stoking fear?

There is a difference, of course, between legitimate warnings and fear-mongering--but my worry is that once fear-mongers have gotten a sufficiently strong foothold in our polity, this line of distinction begins to matter less, and even carefully circumscribed warnings can become fuel for feedback loops of escalating fear. We can't avoid calling attention to dangers, so what do we do?

My answers--sowing seeds of hope, becoming love-mongers, building wherever we can bridges of understanding that ease fears--make sense in theory. But how do we implement them at the scale that is required?

Love and Fear: Lessons Learned from Cantors and Good Samaritans

Many people are afraid of the influx of refugees in Europe, and there are those who feed on and fuel that fear. Not long ago, Fox News showed a video--falsely said to be recent footage of refugees--that depicts Muslims on a train chanting "God is great." The caption reads, "Terrorists Inbound?"

The news network is not here inventing fear, but playing to it. Many people are afraid that the influx of Muslim refugees will also mean an influx of potential new terrorists on European soil. Many argue that the fear is warranted. But for me, the question of whether it is warranted is the wrong question to ask.

Fear is rooted in our instinct for self-protection (and also for protection of those we care about). It inspires action meant to reduce our vulnerability to harm. But in acting out of fear, we often make the world more dangerous.

Fear doesn't change the world for the better, and too often it triggers mutual fear responses in a feedback loop of escalating danger: You are afraid of me, and so you adopt a defensive posture, ready to fight or flee. I see your posture and find it threatening, so I become afraid and adopt a similar posture. Our fear of each other makes us ready to hurt each other, and the more ready we are the more scared we become until our fear has created the very situation it is meant to protect us from: We are an imminent danger to each other.

What is the pathway out of that cycle? The answer is simple but profound: love, love that hopes for the best and works the best even though it puts the agent of love at risk. When I am no threat to you and you reach out to me with vulnerable love, I remain no threat to you. When I am a threat to you and you reach out with vulnerable love, you make yourself vulnerable--but you also create opportunities for transformation. You act in a way that can change the world, or at least your own small corner of it.

In 1991, a Jewish Cantor named Michael Weisser moved to Lincoln, Nebraska with his family. He was soon targeted for harassment by the Grand Dragon of the Nebraska Ku Klux Klan, Larry Trapp. Instead of responding with fear, he responded with love.

So what did Weisser do? His Jewish faith taught him that the best way to overcome an enemy was to turn them into a friend. and so Weisser started calling Trapp and leaving messages on his answering machine. Not messages like "Stop harassing me!" or "I'm calling the police." Messages like this: "Larry, there’s a lot of love out there. You’re not getting any of it. Don’t you want some?"

Finally, Trapp answered the phone when Weisser called. Because Weisser knew that Trapp was disabled, he offered to help Trapp with his grocery shopping.

The whole story can be found in Kathryn Watterson's book, Not by the Sword, but here's the end of it: Trapp converted to Judaism. He apologized to those he'd hurt with his hate. When his health deteriorated, he moved into Weisser's home, where a room served as a kind of hospice. Weisser preached at Trapp's funeral.

Today, Weisser is a rabbi in Queens, where he continues to reach out in a spirit of love.

If unconditional love can turn a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan into a Jewish convert, what else can it do? Today I saw a video of a Christian group, Samaritan's Purse, helping with the refugee crisis in Europe. Samaritan's Purse is an international relief organization inspired by Jesus' story of the Good Samaritan to reach out and help people in need. I've pasted the video here. Please take a few minutes to watch it if you haven't already:



Now imagine this: Imagine that every refugee landing in Europe (or elsewhere) is greeted with the kind of compassion on display in this video. Every child, every elderly person, every man and woman who decided the risk of death was preferable to staying where they were. Compassion and care without agendas, without hidden strings. Just humans helping humans in need. Imagine that this compassion doesn't end on the shore, but continues as the refugees make their terrified way in a foreign land. Imagine that it becomes a daily feature of their experience in their place of refuge.

If that happens, how likely is it that they will become agents of terror in their new home? How likely would this be if, instead of a spirit of love, they were greeted in a spirit of suspicion, a spirit of hostility and fear?

As I said above, there are those who ask how justified is the fear that the refugee influx will open Europe's doors to a new generation of terrorists. But I think that is the wrong question--the wrong question for Christians like me, for Jews like Rabbi Weisser, and for all of us regardless of our faith.

The right question, I think, is this one: How can we resist the spirit of fear that perpetuates distrust and hostility and in its place cultivate the spirit of love, the spirit that makes friends out of strangers, even those who (as in the case of Weisser and Trapp) might start out as our enemies?

It is important to be realistic about something: the decision to act in a spirit of love does make us more vulnerable to those intent on harming us. Love means risk. It doesn't mean foolish risk, like hiring a person convicted of child abuse to babysit your child. But it does mean creative risk--the risk that comes with acting out of the hope of building community and connection in a world where people are afraid of one another.

If we live in a spirit of fear, we create and perpetuate and magnify the threats around us, even as we make ourselves less vulnerable to them in the short run. If we live in a spirit of love, we do the opposite. But whatever risks creative love brings, such love is the only path to a better world.

Apparently, Atheists Are Grumpy Goats

I found the following image posted at Sarah Brown's blog, and felt compelled to repost it here:



On the one hand, the image--not to mention the reference to "very advanced witnessing techniques"--makes me want to chuckle and roll my eyes. I know nothing about the flyer's origins, and a part of me wants to dismiss it as a bit of satire.