February 5, 2010
By Ray Waddle

If it's not the fragile economy, it's the crime news on TV. If it's not the war or terrorism or climate change, it's E. coli, or cell phone cancer.

If all that's not enough to keep you frayed and afraid, ancient Mayans and recent movies are stoking the collective fear with speculations about future ruin.

A modern menu of daily dread, real or exaggerated, assaults nerves – and tests faith in divine purposes. But thinking about what scares us, and why, also invites us to reassess personal values and demystify needless fears that rob life of joy and common sense.

"There are not more things to fear than before," says Scott Bader-Saye, a theologian and the author of Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear.

"But we project a ‘narrative of decline' on the world and say it's getting worse and worse. But is that true?"

The film "2012" uses computer graphics and distortions of ancient Mayan ideas to wallow in a relentless spectacle of future global disasters. The movie "The Road" follows a father and his boy along the dangerous byways of an empty, post-apocalypse America. End-of-the-world alerts on the Internet keep readers twitchy with pessimism.

Intensely visual films serve as projections of collective dreads that confirm fearful fantasies. They are also profitable.

Life safer, threats fewer

A puzzling paradox lies at the heart of this "culture of fear." Anxieties drive our politics and pastimes, yet life is less threatening and no more dangerous than it was a century ago or 1,000 years ago, Bader-Saye argues.

"We've made life less threatening–we don't notice it," says Bader-Saye, who suggests getting information instead from newspapers and radio, rather than TV news.

Life expectancy is dramatically higher today. Polio and smallpox no longer threaten. Antibiotics and a thousand other medical breakthroughs are now taken for granted. As the saying goes: "Life is good."

Yet that's not the impression. In the 1990s, crime rates fell remarkably, yet most Americans assumed they were rising. Why? Sociologist Barry Glassner also points to TV news distortion.

Viggo Mortensen and Kodi Smit-McPhee are a father and son who make their way through post-apocalyptic America in "The Road." Copyright © 2009 Sony Pictures. "Television news programs survive on scares," he writes in The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things.

"Between 1990 and 1998, when the nation's murder rate declined by 20 percent, the number of murder stories on network newscasts increased 600 percent."

In a climate of jumpy nerves, poignant anecdote replaces scientific evidence, he says. Isolated incidents are hailed as trends, obscure scholars are dubbed as experts, and cable news allows us to follow far more murders and child-snatchings than before 24/7 media existed. A long roll call of threats gets its retail moment to shine and frighten: carjackings, killer bees, killer asteroids, road rage, Y2K, West Nile disease, home invasions, SARS virus and end-time predictions.

Faith as a firewall against fear

Religion gets enlisted in the panic. The Book of Revelation has been exploited for centuries as a gloomy excuse for the idea that God is eager to destroy creation. Yet biblical faith ought to provide a firewall against such spiritual defeatism.

Christian teaching–the news of Jesus' Resurrection, trust in God's purposes and courage in the face of death–offers a sturdy antidote to a greedy world of scare tactics and 24/7 worry:

• Behind the Genesis story of creation is the doctrine that God has a purpose for the world that is shored up by grace and moves toward a divine goal. A biblical message of hope, says the Rev. Craig Hill, professor of New Testament at Wesley Theological Seminary in Washington, D.C., is that God's purposes will ultimately succeed: "God wins." It is misguided to predict specific end-time timetables and immoral to lose heart in the fight against injustices.

• Jesus' Resurrection embodies that hope. It is the supreme act of God's care. "We have this hope, a sure and steadfast anchor of the soul," says Hebrews 6:19. Abandoning hope yields to the notion that God's power is not total after all, and God failed against the forces of chaos and fear on Earth.

• Hope in the risen Christ gave early believers a fearless ethic of sacrifice and neighborliness, and the faith blossomed. Modern Christians could stand to recall that example, says scholar Kristin Kobes Du Mez of Calvin College. "Looking back over recent American history, it is discouraging to note how fear, rather than selfless sacrifice, often seems to have motivated Christians to act," she writes at http://www.gospelandculture.org/.

Legitimate fears and dangers, some new, some perennial, certainly endure. But many are merely exploitive. It takes some clear-thinking divine trust to get clarity. When the end of 2012 comes around, you can bet Sony Pictures, which produced the profitable "2012" disaster movie, will not shut down, expecting the end of the world.

So take a deep breath, turn off the TV news and remember Who's in charge.

United Methodist News Service
Ray Waddle is the editor of Reflections, the theological journal of Yale Divinity School, and a columnist for Interpreter Magazine. This article originally appeared in the January-February issue of Interpreter.