The Gift of Fear

Photo by Greg Rakozy on Unsplash

Once a year, Craig, the Regional President of the multi-national bank I worked for early in my career, would descend upon my regional market and accompany me on branch visits. Craig oversaw all banking operations in our two-state region, and the buck stopped with him. A serious person, his visits felt like audits, or worse, interrogations. He asked penetrating, high-impact questions—and effectively seared the mantra “know your numbers” into every mid-level manager in the region. Craig was corporate-first, and managerial ignorance was tantamount to corporate suicide.

On one such visit, as we were driving to our next banking location, I became the questioner. Switching our conversation to a more personal subject, I asked, “Given your position in the company, and given its demands—how do you balance your personal and professional life?” 

Craig paused and considered his words. I was not expecting what followed. “Let me tell you something,” he confessed, dropping his gaze, eyes straight ahead. “This job will demand everything of you until it sucks you dry. Then it will demand more. I have seen people lose their marriage, their health, and their career because they did not know how to establish barriers between the company and their private life.” 

This job will demand everything of you…Then it will demand more. 

The words hung in the air—raw, genuine. Further, the admission was shocking. Confessing our bank’s insatiable appetite for productivity felt heterodox in comparison to the typical “company line” uttered at meetings and parties. Later, when I told my boss, he was incredulous: “Craig said that?”

One of the things that struck me about my time in a secular corporate environment was, ironically, its religious undertones. Non-Christian? Yes. Non-religious? Hardly. To the contrary, our gatherings, language, and symbols bubbled with religious zeal. Though the company had a nationwide brick-and-mortar presence, its identity was something more—a transcendent entity quick to reward efficiency, productivity, and loyalty. The bank was not just a place. It was an idea, a god. More specifically, it was a god with demands. 

In his book The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, French Sociologist Emile Durkheim defines religion by what it does: it comprises a unified system of beliefs, rites, practices, and community. In this sense, our modern culture is inescapably religious, a point well-established by Tara Isabella Burton in her 2020 book Strange Rites. While our cultural landscape is characterized as religiosity “decoupled from institutions, from creeds, from metaphysical truth-claims about God,” she says, we still seek the pillars of religion and spirituality: “meaning, purpose, community, [and] ritual.”

For this reason, Charles Taylor defines our present secular moment, not as the absence of belief, but as an “age of believing otherwise.” Alternatives are myriad. Modern religiosity, says Kirsten Sanders, is a marketplace where we are given a menu of options that validate our preferences. 

Paul’s observation at the Areopagus in Acts 17 seems comfortably fitted to our modern moment: “I see you are a religious people.” Anthropologically, we are lined with religious sensibilities (see Christian Smith’s Moral, Believing Animals) in markedly religious conditions. And religious environments reinforce cultural liturgies that directionally habituate us into becoming certain kinds of people—what we think, believe, love, and pursue. In this sense, no space is value neutral. 

Who Is Influencing Whom?

Around the time I was entering the workforce as a young adult, Christians were encouraged to view the professional realm as a Trojan horse—a vessel to infiltrate and fruitfully impact non-Christian environments. The sentiment is noble. Debates over how Christians are to engage secular culture notwithstanding, the call to  bear faithful witness to “the hope that is within you” (I Peter: 3:15) is relevant in all dimensions of our life, including the professional realm. Moreover, people of faith have deliberately occupied various posts in public and private organizations, and it is undoubtedly a better place because of it. Scripture bears witness to faithful women and men seeking to bend the universe toward God, regardless of the time, place, or context they occupy. 

But if liturgy is, as Philosopher James K.A. Smith has suggested, a set of practices that shape and form us, we must consider the (highly!) liturgical nature of the various environments Christians seek to occupy and influence. The aspiration to  shape meaningfully today’s secular world seems missional and, therefore, commendable. But let us not overlook the reality that those who aim to shape culture are often unaware of how they are shaped by it. 

For example, how often do we assume that the professional work environment is evil, yet benign in effect? Or, similarly, that as Christians we are influential, yet immune to influence? Such assumptions can only be described as naiveté, or arrogance, or both. As James Davidson Hunter reminds us in his thought-provoking book To Change the World—“influence is never unidirectional in any relationship.” That is, we are not invulnerable to the forces we aim to shape or influence.

When we talk of culture, it is easy to assume it is “out there” somewhere. But this is incorrect. We exist in a stream of cross-pressured cultural currents. We are in culture. This was the point made by David Foster Wallace in his famous commencement address, “This is Water.” Like a fish unaware of the water that constitutes its existence and shapes its experience of the world, we are often unaware of how our own environment unwittingly frames and moderates our experience. 

I am thinking of Christian acquaintances desirous to be Christian actors or actresses in Hollywood, “influence the influencers” in Washington D.C., or amass commercial wealth to service a variety of Christian purposes. Let me be clear: my concern does not lie in the desire to “let our light so shine” in these spaces; my concern relates to the lack of awareness of what those spaces can, and often will, do to us.

The Gift of Fear

If today’s marketplace is liturgical in its makeup, constituted by practices and rituals that unwittingly shape and form us in idolatrous ways, what is the solution? Much ink has been spilled on the various fight or flight responses Christians should assume in response to a culture drained of Christian assumptions and practices.

These responses aside, we ask: What disposition is necessary to fortify us in a world governed by non-Christian values? What virtues are necessary to navigate a post-Christian—though not necessarily post-religious—environment? 

Ancient wisdom provides us with at least one answer: fear. 

Often touted is an unhelpful and inaccurate view of fear claiming the life of a Christ-follower is constituted by fear-lessness; quite literally, the absence of fear. Alternatively, in Scripture we see two notions of fear. One is antithetical to faith. It stunts our spiritual growth, weakens our resolve, and alienates us from our Creator. This brand of fear deceives us into thinking we are in control, not God. “There is no fear in love” we are told in 1 John 4, as the two cannot occupy the same space. We might call this toxic fear. 

The second notion of fear is entirely different. It recognizes limitation, percolates reverence, and begets wisdom. This fear establishes a proper sense of self—our inadequacy, susceptibility to danger, and need for a Savior. It steers us toward God, not from him. “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul,” says Jesus in Matthew. “Rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” In other words, forces that deform our souls and separate us from God rightly deserve our fright. We might call this healthy fear.

Toxic fear drives us inward. Healthy fear draws us outward. Toxic fear, and the forbidden fruit it drives us toward, is a curse. Healthy fear, says Aquinas, is donum timoris—a gift. The former could kill us. The latter may save our lives. 

As Aristotle helpfully noted, the virtue of courage sits between the vice of excess (recklessness) and the vice of deficiency (cowardice). That is, courage is not fearlessness. It is resolve in the presence of fear. The Christian, says philosopher Josef Pieper, seeks the ordo timoris, the “order of fear.” More specifically, he writes, “Fortitude presumes to a certain extent that a man is afraid of evil.” 

In J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous Lord of the Rings trilogy, we are provided a fruitful metaphor for thinking about rightly ordered fear. The protagonists in Tolkien’s series are not immune to the ring’s lure and power; they are skeptical of it. More accurately, they are skeptical of themselves. We praise Aragorn, Gandalf, Galadriel, Faramir, and Samwise not simply because they reject the ring, but because they recognize their own susceptibility to its destructive capacity. In contrast, Tolkien gives us pictures of Boromir, Saruman, and Denethor who not only succumb to the ring, but justify their pursuit of its possession with seemingly altruistic rationale (defending Gondor against evil, overthrowing Sauron, etc.). Any good intention to wield the power of the ring was overshadowed by the ring’s power to wield them. They were, in the words of Aragorn, “not nearly frightened enough.” 

The Christian’s concern, writes Pieper, is “that he not fear things that are not at all truly and definitely fearsome, and likewise that he not regard as harmless something ultimately fearsome.”

Ordered Fear is Wisdom

I work at a Christian university preparing students to foray into the professional world and a variety of non-Christian spaces. I want them in those spaces. I want them to be a God-honoring, neighbor-serving presence and a fruitful “salt and light” witness to those around them. Indeed, and perhaps naively, I am of the conviction that the future continuity and flourishing of Christian institutions will be somewhat proportionate to the perceived social value we offer. That is, our long-term existence in a pluralistic society will not be secured, alone, by legally adjudicating our rights. Christians need to make an argument, yes. But it is not an argument we express or propose so much as it is an argument we perform: a light unto the world, working for the good of our neighbor, exhibiting the Fruit of the Spirit (Galatians 5:22-23), and seeking the peace and prosperity of the city (Jeremiah 29:7).

I am, then, a strong advocate for people of faith occupying public and professional spaces. But I want them to do this with a healthy skepticism of themselves and an ordered fear that rightly recognizes that while they seek to influence, they are also influence-able. 

This will not happen by accident. And, I would add, awareness alone is likely not enough. Healthy fear—faithful action while recognizing the deformational capacity of the spaces we occupy—is something we practice. The faith tradition is constituted by traditions, rituals, and actions that inculcate piety or express mercy—narratives that burrow their way into our imaginative landscape, shape our conception of the world, and motivate our words and actions. Part of being a Christian is practicing—liturgizing—ourselves into ways of being, knowing, speaking, thinking, and desiring. 

The character of a person, writes Phil Kenneson, is doxological. We are lovers. We desire. We worship. We are pulled toward objects we deem ultimate. But what do we worship? Who are we becoming? This is why Augustine described virtue as “ordered love” in The City of God.

If “ordered love” is virtue, we might say “ordered fear” is wisdom. And wisdom begins, Proverbs tells us, with reverence for God. Moreover, part of reverence is a healthy respect for the forces that may draw our affections away from God.  In this sense, fear is not a threat or impediment to our flourishing. It is a gift. 

Kevin Brown is the 18th President of Asbury University.