Fear & Courage in a Cold Climate
Right now fear grips the UK. Indeed, as the financial crunch has deepened into something more akin to a financial pulverisation, fears have sprouted like brambles in Spring.
There is the fear of losing a job, the fear of not finding a job, fear for others, fear that our country will never be quite as prosperous again. There is the fear that our hasty homage to the finance sector, the decades when far too many of the brightest graduates were lured away from manufacturing and entrepreneurship, away from making things and creating products to making money from money, will leave us with nothing of economic value to offer the rest of the world.
Furthermore, there is the fear that our nation which has the unhappiest children in the developed world (cf Unicef), and the unhappiest adults in Europe (cf WHO), will not have the social capital, the community spirit or the familial strength to weather the storm with anything like the dignity and cohesive determination of the war and post-war generations.
By coincidence, a number of recent films have explored the question of fear and our responses to it. Faced by a terrible tyranny would we bow to it or seek to oppose it? It's a question examined in Valkyrie's dramatisation of the plot to assassinate Hitler led by von Stauffenberg. The answer for von Stauffenberg, as indeed for Bonhoeffer, was to fight. Similarly, Defiance, the story of WW2 Jewish guerrilla warfare in the forests of Poland, breaks the stereotype of Jewish passivity, to depict their determined and effective resistance and survival in the face of terrible odds.
The much lauded The Reader also has its roots in the Nazi era but offers a different and perhaps more telling challenge to contemporary audiences. Hanna, played to heart-aching effect by Kate Winslet, takes a job as an SS guard, not because of ideological intimidation but because of the more common fear of social shame. She cannot read and her employer's decision to promote her to an office job would have immediately exposed her inability. Her life becomes an elaborate charade designed to conceal this one reality. The question The Reader asks is not so much whether we will oppose tyranny but how far will we go to avoid social shame. The fear is of others, of being found wanting, of being shown to be incompetent, of being mocked, of losing face.
In reality, it is this fear of social shame, of being out of the in-crowd, of not being thought to be a 'real' man or a woman, that is the driver of so much of our consumerist behaviour. It's a conclusion implicit in Lily Allen's recent satire of the culture of consumption in her No 1 song - 'The Fear'. She understands the source of our material whirl:
'Don't know what's right and what's real anymore
I don't know how I'm meant to feel anymore
When we think it will all become clear
'Cuz I'm being taken over by The Fear.'
Of course, Lily Allen isn't the first pop singer to critique consumerism but she may be the first popular artist to name it as 'fear.'
In fact, fear has long been the enemy - sin's agent provocateur. Pride may have led to Adam and Eve's fall but it is fear of punishment that leads Adam to blame Eve and God for his own rebellion. None of us wants to be found out - whether what we conceal is a crime, an ugly character trait or flabby thighs.
In sum, though many commentators, have suggested that Western culture has see-sawed from a Culture of Greed to the very different Culture of Fear, this fails to recognise that fear remains the primary propellant. In the Culture of Greed we were driven by the fear of social shame, by the anxiety of not belonging or not being 'worth it' or worth anything. In the current Culture of Fear, the fear is fuelled both by the spectre that bills may not be paid and by the dread of the social shame that is often the mournful companion of depleted financial circumstances.
Fear, however, poses a real threat to our society. Fear, after all, may be a cold companion but is rarely a passive or silent one. Fear changes things. Fear makes the open hand clench and the confident look over their shoulder. Fear tightens the heart strings as well as the purse strings. Fear furrows the brow and scowls at play and playfulness. Importantly, fear stifles the creativity and the appropriate taking of risk that are so vital to all forms of the truly good life. After all, all expressions of the good life, economic and otherwise, involve risk. Seed sown can be pecked up by birds, a job application rejected, a kind word twisted, an invitation to a date spurned, an offer of prayer rejected in anger. Nevertheless, if no seed is sown, no talent invested, no love offered... there can be no harvest.
How then are we to live in this culture of fear?
If fear is a virus - easy to catch, hard to eliminate - biblically, its antidote is love. The Apostle John expresses it concisely: 'Perfect love drives out fear' (1 John 4:18). We don't need to let fear rule our hearts if we allow the depth and breadth and height and width of His love for us to line our hearts. We are, as Paul puts it in Romans 8, 'more than conquerors' precisely because nothing can 'separate us from the love of God that is in Christ Jesus'. Furthermore, this love does not only protect us it provides us with the resource to fight against the prevailing culture. It gives us the capacity to love. 'We love because he (God) first loved us' (1 John 4:19).
Bruce Springsteen, on his new album Working on a Dream, sings it this way:
'There's a soul sitting sad and blue
Now the remedies you've taken are all in vain
Let me show you what love can do
Let me show you what love can do.'
Our calling, however, is not only pastoral but also prophetic. We are not limited to ministering to pain but duty-bound to address its causes. Indeed, as many people question the values that have led to the crisis, it opens up the opportunity for Christians to contribute to building new foundations for our national life by voicing an alternative set of values. This after all is the great project God has chosen to involve us in: to work with him to see his will done on earth as it is in heaven, not just when he returns, but now - in the UK, in our homes and schools and churches and workplaces.
Our witness to a fearful culture, therefore, is one that will show that we are living - even if much, much less affluently - with the deep assurance of being loved by the King of kings. We are his sons and daughters. It will be a testimony marked by a contentment in abundance or even in want, and yet by generosity. It will model an economic practice marked by prudence, as well as by the capacity to take the kind of risks that create common wealth, a wealth deployed to create a society whose aim is shalom, human flourishing for all - a dream that is surely worth working on.
Mark Greene
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