The Antidote to Fear (2024)

A little over a month ago, I wrote about casting out fear in the name of love. In the following weeks, I watched the country I live in give into fear and hatred. As I began to process my feelings, I turned to reading the words of Howard Thurman, a prolific preacher, writer, and advisor during the Civil Rights movement.

On my nightstand for the past year, I’ve kept a copy of Thurman’s Jesus and the Disinherited1, waiting for right moment to pick it up. In the midst of my anxieties and disappointments, his words brought me comfort and helped me cling to my faith in a moment when I felt like all was lost.

“It cannot be denied that too often the weight of the Christian movement has been on the side of the strong and the powerful and against the weak and oppressed – this, despite the gospel.” (Thurman, 20).

It is difficult to witness the weaponization of religion in the name of control and oppression. It is also not popular to own up to this weaponization in evangelical circles, but it is a necessary part of Western Christianity’s history that all are obligated to address. The ugliness of Christianity’s past cannot be overstated – in the first chapter of Jesus and the Disinherited, Thurman shares a conversation with his grandmother, whom he grew up reading scriptures to since she was denied an education, having spent the first part of her life as a slave. During this time, Thurman was never permitted to read to her from Paul’s letters in the New Testament. When he was older, Thurman asked why this was the case, and she responded:

“‘During the days of slavery,’ she said, ‘the master’s minister would occasionally hold services for the slaves… At least three or four times a year he used as a text: “Slaves, be obedient to them that are your masters…, as unto Christ.” Then he would go on to show how it was God’s will that we were slaves and how, if we were good and happy slaves, God would bless us. I promised my Maker that if I ever learned to read and if freedom ever came, I would not read that part of the Bible’” (Thurman, 20).

Before us, Thurman lays out a personal experience of how Christianity was used to oppress and dehumanize an entire group of people in the name of power, wealth, and control. If the rhetoric of our current political climate is anything to go by, perhaps history is repeating itself.

Over the last few days, one idea has stood out – many people are afraid. They are afraid of religious power in a government meant to be separate from the church, of oppression through religious ideals in a country that once promised the freedom to choose if and how to worship, and of the lasting effects of the incoming administration on future generations. Religious domination has never inspired conviction or admiration in the hearts of those who turn their faces from it. But for those who both hold the same faith and are a part of the oppressed, how can they navigate the use of the same God they pray to as a weapon against them? Or, as Howard Thurman posed the question, Is there any help to be found for the disinherited in the religion of Jesus?

To answer his question, Thurman turns to the scriptures, quoting the words of Jesus in Matthew chapter ten: “And fear not them which kill the body, but are not able to kill the soul: but rather fear him which is able to destroy both soul and body in hell.”

Jesus himself was a part of a persecuted minority group, and though he was expected by his people to overthrow earthly rulers and authorities, instead he brought hope able to withstand the greatest of adversaries. Without hope, the oppressed individual lives in fear of violence and persecution against which he cannot retaliate. Thurman’s antidote to fear is this simple assertion: Every individual is a child of God.

“The awareness that a man is a child of the God of religion, who is at one and the same time the God of life, creates a profound faith in life that nothing can destroy” (Thurman, 45).

Both good and evil acts have been committed in the name of religion. Faith in God has been professed as a way to withstand persecution and a way to administer it. To those disillusioned by the use of Christianity as a weapon against the disinherited, this is not the first time in history a religion has been divided, and it will not be the last. The same people that welcomed Jesus on a donkey demanded his death shortly after.

We have no way to predict the trials waiting ahead. All we can do is cling tightly to our faith, and to not let it be shaken by hatred. Several years ago, I was asked by a friend how I was able to maintain my faith despite a great deal of hurt I’d experienced in religious settings. I told her that if I walked away from my faith as a result of someone else acting on behalf of what they believed to be God’s will, it would be a resolution to their judgment. To hold onto my faith in God was the biggest act of resistance in the face of hatred.

My hope and my prayer is that for those of us that still believe, we will not lose our faith in the difficulties of the future. We cannot give into fear. Instead, we must be steadfast in our hope that Jesus sees the broken, the oppressed, the persecuted, and the disinherited, and cares for them as deeply as one who has held that same position can.