Fear and Analysis

The most common, the most popular framework for analyzing religion in America appears to be fear. 

Religion is complicated. It always amazes me when people think they can read a couple of books, check out a website or two, and then begin making strong assertions about this or that religion. Would they do that with quantum mechanics? Or genetic biology? 

Because religion is complicated, the hardest thing about teaching religion is working out how to approach that complexity so that students can gain at least some insight into what religion is and how it functions in human lives and societies. 

Do we approach religion through important texts? The Bible, the Qur’an, the Rig Veda, the Pali sutras? Certainly these are formative. Or do we look at prophets, priests, and preachers and their role founding and shaping religion? Do we look at religious movement and sectarian divisions? Do we look at how power (political, economic, and physical) is created, distributed, and contested by and within religions? Do we ask about the psychological underpinnings of religious belief and practice? Or its roles in human social structures? Or how it shapes human understandings of personhood and self? Or whether and how it tells us something about God? 

Each of these frameworks for analyzing and understanding religion is useful. Each allows us to identify what would constitute data and then relates these datum in useful ways. Taken together these analytical frameworks actually yield considerable understanding.

Yet neither individually nor taken together are they the most common framework for understanding religion in America. The most common, the most popular framework for analyzing religion in America appears to be fear. Fear becomes the filter through which we select our data for analysis. And fear becomes the framework by which we gather that data into larger structures of meaning. 

In my experience this use of fear as an analytical framework is most often applied to Islam, and it arises among people of many different religions. Christians, Jews, Atheists, Hindus, Buddhists. All are quite capable of letting fear be their guide into understanding Muslims. 

And each other. 

Part of the problem with fear is that fear is irrational, and thus analyzing through fear doesn’t yield consistent results. Half a dozen fearful people, looking at the same data, will get half a dozen different explanations. 

But there is something even worse. Fear begins to push out all more rational analytical frameworks. Fear makes us stupid. 

And right now, with religion playing a powerful role in shaping human societies and personal interactions across the world we cannot afford to be stupid. We cannot afford to be afraid. 

Unfortunately because fear acts as a filter and framework for analyzing the facts it cannot be cured with facts. That is the lesson I’ve personally learned in teaching about religion for nearly 40 years. Facts are no cure for fear, although the most rational among us might wish it were so. 

The only cure for fear is relationship. The cure for fear is engaging the thing you fear, or the one you fear. And this is hard because fear is a force that is self-sustaining, almost diabolical. It drives us from the thing we fear, and thus insures that we cannot overcome our fear. 

As a Christian I would point out that there is one thing that exorcises the demon of fear. And that is love. But whatever you believe might work to rid yourself of fear and allow you to engage with the people you fear, do it. Don’t be stupid.