My daughter attends Renovatus Church in Charlotte, North Carolina where the pastor is Jonathan Martin. Naturally I get some CDs of his sermons. I listened to one in which he mentioned how much he dislikes fear-mongering by politicians and I thought he was right on the money.
If I am not mistaken, the most common admonition in Scripture is, “Fear not.” John 4:18 says, “perfect love casts out fear.” If the Bible consistently tells us not to be fearful, perhaps we should even apply that to politics. The Bible would not go as far as FDR who said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” but the spirit is the same.
The blog Provocative Christian (http://provocativechristian.wordpress.com/category/god-is-sovereign/) gives two reasons why we should not be afraid. The first is that God is sovereign and the second is that Jesus is with us. That blog post is an excellent read.
But politicians want us to be fearful. Why? Because they think that certain fears will drive us to vote particular ways or provoke us to tolerate legislation they want to pass. This problem exists among conservatives as well as liberals.
Here are some examples from the left.
1. Concern about nuclear weapons has given rise to a Doomsday Clock in New York. It was recently reset to six minutes until midnight – doomsday. The odd thing is that the clock was started in 1947 when it was set to seven minutes to midnight. In the fifties it was reset as close as two minutes from Doomsday. One would think that after sixty years of sitting on the edge of our seats worried about nuclear devastation, those involved would get the clue that things are not as urgent as they had thought.
2. I used to get volumes of direct mail from the ACLU. They would sometimes strongly suggest that if Jerry Fallwell was not stopped, we would have an exclusively Christian government in no time and religious freedom would be a thing of the past.
3. Global warming has been a fruitful vineyard for fear. Remember the Time magazine cover that said, “Be afraid. Be very afraid?” Many of the prophecies concerning global warming have been without reason or restraint.
Fear-mongering from the right is just as bad.
1. A direct mail piece said, “In the next 120 days, they’re launching an all-out attack on your family.”
2. Another says, “Should Washington liberals force your child’s religious school to hire homosexual instructors?”
3. A talk show host said, “Liberals are trying to destroy our government from within.”
4. From a right-wing web site and speaking of a coming food shortage: “We may be facing the biggest disaster in our countries history.”
In Newsweek of Dec 24, 2007 Barack Obama rightly said, “We have been operating under a politics of fear: fear of terrorists, fear of immigrants, …” To be balanced he should have added fears of population disasters, environmental destruction, or right-wing takeovers.
So what should a Christian do if God calls him to work on an issue? He or she should work on it with passion and energy, but he or she should not be full of fear about that issue. When the day’s work is done and the Christian lays his head on his pillow, he or she should not lose one nanosecond of sleep due to anxiety, because God is in control and Jesus is with us.
The Church Is All Right
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