3 sources of anxiety .... part 2: be afraid! be very afraid!!

http://www.slate.com/id/2283221/pagenum/all/#p2

2) overdose of anxiety-inducing information

While many other theologians and biblical scholars have pointed this out already the most common injunction in scripture is "do not be afraid". The Lord tells saints to not be afraid. The psalmist tells us that because of the Lord's generosity we will not be afraid of the terror at night or the plague that strikes at day. Armies may fall but the Lord will preserve you. The one who dwells in the secret place of the Most High; who abides in the shadow of the Almighty; who says to the Lord "my refuge and strength" will be preserved.

We as Christians, however, rarely believe this for ourselves even as we admonish others to believe it. "You" should trust God and not be afraid while "I" will freak out that things are going to go badly soon. "Your" troubles and travails and worries are just proof that you need to trust God more while "my" troubles are huge issues. In other words, we're great at telling other people to not be afraid while being afraid ourselves. We will tell someone confidently that God is in control so long as things are going in a way that doesn't personally have us in a panic. Or we may really be confident that God is in control for us but not be so confident that God will be in control for someone we care about. Parents find it easier to trust God will work everything out for good for themselves than for their children, for instance. Well, at least that's the impression I have about my parents. Your mileage may vary.

Sometimes we have loopholes we create in our personal theology to come up with reasons for why we should be afraid. For instance, we may convince ourselves that while God is in control that God has, nevertheless, bound Himself to follow certain rules, rules that seem curiously absent in our theology when things are actually going our way. More pointedly, the rules we come up with tend to be the ones that allow us to have a retroactive theological rationalization for our fears.

For instance, I heard this one shortly after Obama got elected--that God has laws set up wherein if people do evil things (like voting for Democrats) that God makes evil things happen, such as leaders in government abusing authority. This is the kind of mentality through which one Christian could tell another Christian that the power supply on his computer burned out because someone else was looking up porn on the computer. Now I'm sure God disapproves of that second person doing that but it could be the first person foolishly bought a low-end Hewlitt Packard desktop computer from a place like Costco and that HP's business practices were less than sterling.

Here's another for instance, another person was afraid as the 2008 election loomed that George Bush II was going to declare a national emergency, halt the elections, declare martial law, suspend the Constitution, and set himself up as leader of a police state and then forthwith invade Iran. Didn't happen and by that time I had remembered (as does a good friend of mine) that Republicans were declaring comparable visions of doom for Clinton's pending end-of-second-term years before. They were positive that Clinton was plotting to declare a national emergency, halt the elections, declare martial law, suspend the Constitution, and set himself up as leader of a police state (but probably not invade Iran). Within weeks of Obama's election I got spams about how Obama was setting up secret internment camps to send Christians to. I've also heard people talking about how the Federal Reserve is behind 9/11/2001. The nature of the conspiracy is not so important and whether or not it is left or right is immaterial, the bottom line is that people use whatever they consider their personal spiritual gift of discernment is to justify being terrified.

We can be so eager to establish cause and effect as a way to avoid disaster we want to avoid the msot unsavory possibility of all, that no magic formula we embrace can change the fact that we live in a world full of death in which we ourselves will inevitably die. We also dread a loss of security.

I've been job hunting for sixteen months now and I have had family members tell me God is faithful to provide. He is and has been. That doesn't mean I haven't been steadily afraid every week that my best isn't good enough and that people look at my resume and find it impressive ... but ultimately not impressive enough to call me in for an actual interview or give me a job. I've had friends advise that my problem is, sort of, that I'm not willing to lie about my qualifications a tiny bit to get a job. They didn't put it that way, what they said is that in interviews I may be TOO honest to get hired.

I've been left wondering in one case whether a friend was telling me to lie in the job hunt just to get a job and then fake it until I make it. Now it may be true that I don't believe in faking it until I make it and that this is why people haven't hired me. I really do believe it is necessary to put all the cards on the table and admit what I do and don't know how to do. But I am not sure that faking it until I make it is a fair or ethical way to land a job with respect to an employer.

One of my friends recently told me that he was told by an employer that he really undersold himself and all this time he felt what he was doing was just being honest about what he is and isn't good at. In his field of work he's seen so many people just flat out lie about what they can do they get hired. Or they have such winsome personalities they get hired and it's only months later after a trend of sub-par work gets produced or NOT produced that these winning personaliy people people get fired.

Now in the circles of Christians I've spent much of my life I've heard a lot, and I do mean a lot, about how the root of all sin is pride. Yeah, I've been told that a lot. Everything must boil down to pride. But in many ways pride can manifest itself in things that don't look much like pride and fear can be one of them. As I wrote long ago pride might as well be considered the stem cell of sins. It can turn into any other kind of sin and often does so that by the time the organ is fully formed you've long since stopped looking at a stem cell.

I've been going through the narrative books of the Bible for years now and the more I look at them and study them the more I realize how useless the stock meta-narrative is that says that people sin because of pride. Lots of Israelite kings sinned because of pride but even the godliest of them also sinned because of fear. Or, let's just say, "pride" often manifests itself in the form of fear or doubt. Will God REALLY carry me through this. Will God REALLY have my best interest in mind? To take up Jeremiah 29:11 and how brutally out of context it is often taken, does God REALLY mean the best for me to prosper me and not harm me by telling me that seventy years of exile in Babylon is better than being back in the Promised Land (actually, to the extent that the Jews in Babylon were assimilated into local business instead of being in a hotly contested land bridge linking three continents where wars were steadily fought, the answer to that was an emphatic "yes" but I'll have to put off my reflection on that and other aspects of military campaigns in ancient Israel for later).

For instance, I like reading Scotteriology but when I see links like this (to Rick Joyner, don't bother following it too closely), and particularly when I see comments about how terrifying the kings of things agathos posts are I wonder what there is to really be afraid of:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3ku9FK1Cx0&feature=player_embedded

Some Christians who are more liberal/left freak out that Joyner is part of a group of right wing Christians who are, as they see it, part of a terrible conspiracy to re-engineer America into a right-wing theocratic dictatorship. So what? It's not like the old Religious Left didn't take a crack at re-engineering America to be God's Country a century earlier. Why freak out that the Religious Right is just simple-mindedly making the same category mistake the Religious Left made? Because you're afraid there's some slight chance (like a snowball's in Hell) that they will actually get what they want? I've seen Christians and people in general on the left and right freaking out at the slightest provocation. Be afraid! Be very afraid! The right wing watch and the left wing watch both traffic in the business of paranoia. Doctrine hounds traffic in it (not that I'm saying we shouldn't care about doctrine, as I'm sure anyone whose read more than three blog entries here probably noticed).

Christians can revel in forwarding emails, writing blogs, sharing information (real or otherwise) that encourages us all to be afraid. Officially we may talk about the triumph of Jesus the King but we'll blog about the Obamanation of Desolation or the Antichrist (e.g. Bush II) or the evils of the Federal Reserve. We tell others not to be afraid only when we wear the mask of public piety and then privately freak out over things that reveal that we are hypocrites.

I don't wish to belabor details about how Christians find ways to circulate anxiety-inducing information because in many cases it need not be truly information. Consider the liberal terrified of the certainty (in his/her mind) that George Bush II was going to suspend elections and become dictator for life the same way the conservative was terrified that Bill Clinton would do the same thing a decade before?

It's not really "pride" that cause us to believe these things so much as fear. A lot of us, myself particularly, can find it easy to get scared and get discouraged and paradoxically many fellow Christians who would theoretically be the ones to encourage me by reminding me of God's faithfulness are often the ones who are imploring me to be terrified about things that I can't do anything about and to take actions that mean nothing (maybe forwarding this or signing that email spam that will get deleted by government employees even if a spam filter doesn't filter them out). Or they themselves are terrified about things.

I want to write about how this played out in the military and commercial alliances of ancient Israel but that is best saved for another time. As Koholeth put it in Ecclesiastes, that which has been will be again, there is nothing new under the sun. No matter how new we think we are we are all susceptible to fear and despite our pride in confidently saying that pride is what causes sin (for others) we have fears and those fears, when they get the better of us, are often what cause us to sin.

Musing on a Slate piece, 3 sources of anxiety today and how Christians can amplify them

http://www.slate.com/id/2283221/pagenum/all/#p2

Three proposed sources of anxiety get mentioned in this article in Slate as to why not only teens but Americans in general are more anxious now than fifty years ago. The recession and the bad job market or housing market are not considered the real sources of anxiety. The three proposed sources of anxiety interested me because in many respects these are sources of anxiety that we as Christians can accelerate in unexpected or unobserved ways.

1) loss of community

Ostensibly this is something all kinds of Christians in all kinds of churches say they WANT but what kind of community do we mean? In the last seventeen years I grew jaded by what is often meant by "community". The little school by the canal I attended had leaders whose idea of "community" was of a sort that looked pretty on student recruitment brochures and talked a lot about making a difference in the world and having global impact. All the while it remained the little school by the canal, big enough to get noticed by me in another state but not big enough to, so far as I see it, really change the world.

Ironically I was drawn to the church on the opposite side of the canal because it seemed to have what the little school opposite it didn't have. They also didn't talk about "community" quite the same way but they did talk about "intentional community". I was young enough and naive enough in my twenties to think that adding some kind of modifier in front of "community" meant that the overall concept had changed. Oh the folly of youth, eh? Not that I'm exactly old but I'm closer to forty than thirty.

At length I gained a certain jadedness to this "intentional community", too, because often "intentional community" meant an ambitious couple buying a house they couldn't really afford on their own during the `00s; renting out as many rooms as they wished to have to single tenants; and then hosting events at the house that were church related so that it could be a kind of de facto church building in lieu of being able to afford actually renting space. I'm not saying you can't or shouldn't do that but I am willing to say that in the long haul view of things that is a spectacularly careerist thing for someone with ambitions toward full-time professional ministry to do. It worked out very well for a few of the younger guys who did it, though! They have one of the fastest growing churches in the country on their hands. Very clever!

But the thing is that the more the church succeeded the less necessary it was to hold any connection to that "community". "Intentional community" in Reformed contemporary lingo now differs from "community" (as I've heard it described in secular and other Christian terms) only in terms of how much cherry-picking a person does to decide who his or her neighbor is or isn't. In other words "community" in many respects can isolate and constrain us. What we consider "community" can become more like an unrecognized social club in which, if you pay your dues and are productive as a member of the club you are considered valuable.

If you come upon hard times that last longer than a couple of months or, at most, a couple of years; if you reveal that you are a chronically needy person who constantly deals with failures; or if you are in all unvarnished terms a jerk who is actually a bona fide Christian then eventually the "intentional community" begins to feel you may not be pulling enough of your weight. You could ask them to help you bear a particular burden but they might decide that God will providentially let someone else help you bear that burden or suggest that how you seek help imposes a burden on them. After all God is faithful ... so I don't have to be.

As Tim Keller once put it, the reason so many of us do not help and say we cannot afford to help the person is not because we can't help but because we don't want that help given to the other person to cost us something we value for ourselves.

Dostoevsky wrote of the passion of young men that it is easy for them to be willing to die for a cause but to spend five years of one's burning youth in a boring life of study and research, well, then you'll find out what causes a young man is REALLY willing to make a sacrifice for. The pastor at my church once said that the measure of a pastor's work as a pastor is tested by how he treats the people he can't get anything out of. If he is only nice to the members of the congregation he can get something out of then he might as well be a hired hand and not a shepherd. A shepherd tends to the sheep who are infirm and even useless. In this sense a measure of a Christian's walk with the Lord is how willing he or she is to invest in the life of someone who lacks utility.

So that is a reflection on how Christian community can actually exacerbate both anxiety and loneliness. I suppose I should write about the other two points in separate posts.