By Carl Hoover
Fear stalks my neighborhood each Halloween. And fear is stalking America this Election Day.
Fear stalked my house two days ago in the form of zombies, child vampires, bloody psychos and masked characters, knocking on front doors and demanding free gifts. I’m not scared, but I go along with the seasonal ritual — our daughters often have been among those costumed characters — and drop a handful of candy in the fears’ bags. Then I’ll close the door and grumble about it all.
Fear stalks again today, Election Day — not door-to-door, but at the ballot box, primed by months of fear pumped through television, the Internet, radio, print media and social media.
The bugaboos seeking to intimidate us aren’t masks of vampires, zombies, ghosts or cinematic killers. Instead, it’s Big Government. Islam. Taxes. Conservative Christians. Gay Marriage. Mexicans. Billionaires. Terrorists.
Pick any, pick all: Somehow they have the power to destroy a nation of 330 million people with a stable-if-sometimes-dysfunctional government, the world’s biggest economy and the world’s biggest military. Somehow they make us forget that God rules, that our trust should be in God, not man, and that as John writes, perfect love casts out fear. It all vanishes unless we throw candy in the right bags on Election Day. Boo! Vote!
And we do, year after year after year.
Fear drives our politics because it’s a great motivator, both cheap and simple. Comfort breeds complacency, but fear drives action — and history shows it works.
That’s always the response when Christians like me complain about the sorry state of political campaigning and discourse, but that response leaves out a crucial qualifier: Fear works because we give it power.
We choose not to take the masks off those who seek to scare us. We choose not to look beyond the fears to see fellow Americans — American Muslims, American gays, American Christians, Mexican-Americans, Americans both rich and poor — or that Christ calls us to love and serve our neighbor, even those we hate or fear.
We choose selfishness rather than sacrifice and reward those choices with more candy in others’ bags. Then we grumble that no leaders show up at our doors to call for sacrifice, consensus or consideration of our nation beyond the next election. We trust no one who doesn’t look or think like us, though God has created us all. We punish leaders for the offhand remark, the out-of-context statement, the slightest twitch of compromise. We speak and beg forgiveness and mercy in our steepled sanctuaries and our homes, but not in our politics.
The Halloween season, with all its spooks and goblins and creepiness, doesn’t scare my daughters. They know vampires, monsters and zombies aren’t real; bugs, the occasional mouse in the house and loose dogs in the neighborhood are. They recognize makeup and masks.
But who in our society and churches, outside of my wife and me, will hold my girls’ hands and show them that there are no monsters under the bed or in the closet — that God is greater than anything imagined? Who will challenge them as Christian adults to meet corrosive fear with healing love, to believe in a future under God’s care?
Or will their Election Days become little more than political Halloweens, a parade of fears engineered to keep candy in bags of earthly power?