My dear ones,
Can I ask you something? Have you noticed how tired you are?
I mean, more than the ordinary tiredness of work or family, something that lingers underneath all of that regular stuff. Soul-sucking tired. The kind that settles in your bones after you spend too long bracing for the next indignity that you’ll have to figure out how to absorb somehow.
Maybe you watched the president’s Thursday night speech. Or maybe you caught the Senate confirmation hearings for the Attorney General or the DNI. Maybe you just saw a clip while you were waiting in line at Kroger.
Whatever it was, and however it found you, you know the feeling I’m talking about, I suspect. That familiar tightening in the chest? The lump of rancid lard in your stomach? You witness some professional-grade corruption or senseless violence against an innocent person. You hear the people in charge tell you that up is down and down is up, that the land of the free and the home of the brave is dictator-curious. And you can feel your inner gears start to grind and seize up.
You’re afraid. I’m afraid. Anyone who’s not afraid is either clueless, lying, or shilling for authoritarianism because they’ve got an idea where they’ll land on the org chart.
Fear feels like the engine of our politics right now. So much of what our leaders rail against is either something they fear themselves or something they’re counting on to frighten us. That’s what left an ache in my soul this week.
Because fear does more than unsettle us for an evening. Give fear long enough, and it’ll start organizing a whole society.
And here’s the thing: Once people start thinking they’re under siege, they’re going to accept what they never would have considered accepting even a few years ago. People’s rights start to feel negotiable, and cruelty to people God loves starts to sound reasonable. The neighbor starts looking like a threat, which is precisely what the folks in power want. Because then power can step in to protect us from the very fears it gave us and trained us to keep stirred up—which is pretty damn convenient, when you stop to think about it.
Fear narrows the scope of our vision. It changes the question we’re asking, from “What kind of people are we becoming?” to “Who’s going to make me feel safe?” Those are really different questions. The first one puts a question to our imagination. But the second only asks for a promise of protection.
That’s what makes fear so useful as a form of political currency. A terrified public doesn’t take much persuading to hand over its freedom or look the other way when abuse starts popping up in the streets. People only have to believe the danger is, you know, extra dangerous... like just this once. Really, we promise; this time it’s different.
And so every crisis becomes a reason for another exception, another promise that normal life is just around the corner. Let’s be honest, though, if history’s any kind of guide, the promise rarely arrives.
And fear doesn’t stop at governments. It reaches down into our brain stem and starts monkeying around with our synapses, too. Fear teaches us to flinch before we think, to read a threat into every stranger and a catastrophe into every disagreement.
Give it long enough, and fear becomes the air we breathe. But it’s not much of a life when everybody’s holding their breath.
Fear makes a terrible life coach, always asking us to trade our humanity going forward for the immediate relief offered by the illusion of imminent safety in the present. We need to be honest that we’re not going to win any money on Kalshi betting that line. Fear circumscribes our freedom.
So if you’ve been afraid this week, don’t let anybody train your nervous system so that you jump when they say jump.
Don’t let them decide, on your behalf, who deserves your suspicion before you’ve had the chance to look your neighbor in the eye as a child of God and see in them what God sees.
Don’t be too quick to mistake the adrenaline evoked by fear for truth.
Don’t fall for the old canard that the loudest voice in the room is the wisest.
Our purpose as human beings was never to become experts in fear, in either its application or its prevention. We’re here to tell the truth regardless of who’s listening on Alexa. We’re the people who refuse to panic on command. And we’re the hopeless dopes who keep loving our neighbors even when somebody powerful insists that our neighbors are the problem.
Fear may spread faster than hope. But hope has one advantage over it: Hope can tell the truth without forfeiting its faith in a future where all of us live together in God’s reign of peace and justice.
Refusing the fear the powerful peddle, we can embrace the truth that each of us is accorded the dignity God granted everyone by implanting God’s image in all of us.
Benediction:
Go now, unafraid.
And when fear comes looking for you, as it will,
may you meet it with the truth
and with hope and a stubborn love for the neighbor God has set beside you.
May the God whose image you bear
keep you steady while others panic,
and hold the future open in front of you,
until the day we live together in the new world God desired for us from the beginning.
Amen.
Be gentle and brave,
Derek
Tony Dixon
The Rev. Derek Penwell
The Rev. Derek Penwell is Senior Minister at Douglass Blvd Christian Church in Louisville, Kentucky. This is a free post from his Substack blog, Heretic Adjacent.