In “Are We Still Buying a New World with Old Confederate Bills,” Lillian Smith writes, “The Devil knows that if you want to destroy a man, all you need do is fill him with false hopes and false fears. These will blind him to his new direction and he will inevitably turn away from the future and destroy himself and those close to him.” Smith understood that fear is a powerful weapon because it causes people to have a visceral reaction in order to “protect” themselves from whatever “false fears” politicians and those in power proclaim as a threat.

The fears cause the populace to lash out, to become offensive instead of defensive, looking for threats where none exist. Imbibing these fears will lead to destruction, bringing individuals and nations to their knees. Smith continues by stating, “It is as true of a nation: fill its people with false hopes and false fears, and they will do the rest; they will go straight to their appointment with Death; and they will drag all nations friendly to them down into the maelstrom of their moral and mental confusion.” Politicians use fear to acquire political office and power, and those who seek power cozy up to these politicians, participating in a grift to stoke fears among the populace.

Politicians have known, for. along time, that fear drives votes. We can look at countless examples from fears of slave insurrections to fears over crime during Richard Nixon’s 1968 campaign. This fear gets used in various ways, and one of the most potent, as I’ve written about before, appears in the evangelical church, specifically through the language of persecution and the idea that Christians are losing their position in society. As I read Tim Alberta’s The Kingdom, The Power, and The Glory: American Evangelicals in and Age of Extremism, this fear comes up again and again with the individuals that Alberta interviews.

At a Road to Majority event in Nashville, Tennessee, Alberta notes that the multi-day conference featured countless speakers who took to the stage “warning that it was open season on Christians in America, urging attendees . . . to vote Republican in 2022 to end the secular occupation.” The fear of secularism, of Christian persecution, of declining incluence has been the playbook since Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority arose in the late 1970s during Jimmy Carter’s presidency, and it has played on loop since then, taking on new pieces here and there while casting off others, and it remains potent, stoking fears and riling up individuals for a war to “protect” themselves and their interests.

Ralph Reed, a political consultant and lobbyist, hosts Road to Majority, an at the event in Nashville, Reed told Alberta that the people in the audience listening to speeches are “genuinely scared about the future of the country” and that their fear is “a big, big motivator when it comes to [voter] turnout.” That fear, though, arose from individuals such as Reed and pastors such as First Baptist Dallas Robert Jeffress telling people they are under attack and that political opponents will take away their rights and values, trampling them underfoot. Alberta notes this writing that while individuals have legitimate fears about things such as the economy they are “mostly scared because people like Reed were trying to scare them: people like Reed needed to scare them.”

The menace of victimhood arises out of fear, and the belief of victimhood is one of the key components of fascism. When individuals such as Reed use fear as a tactic, they know what they are they doing. Alberta continues, “Reed unleashed a pack of starved partisan animals to feast on the fright of Christians” because Reed put forth and played into the rhetoric of children being groomed, of community invasion, of confiscated guns, of disinformation, and on and on and on. Toni Morrison, in “Racism and Fascism” (1995), notes that the first step of fascism is to “[c]onstruct an internal enemy, as both focus and diversion.” The myriad list of fears that Reed and other propagate does just this, providing ample avenues for individuals to have their “false fears” lead them to violence because that is what ultimately happens.

Like Morrison, Umberto Eco, in “Ur-Fascism” (1995), points out the ways that the stoking of fear leads to fascism because fascism “grows up and seeks for consensus by exploiting and exacerbating the natural fear of difference. The first appeal of a fascist or prematurely fascist movement is an appeal against the intruders. Thus Ur-Fascism is racist by definition.” Both Morrison and Eco point out the ways that the use of fear, the creation of internal enemies and divides works to spur on fascism and violence, pitting individuals against one another for political gain.

As Alberta points out, while some of the audience members’ fears at the Road to Majority conference were not without basis, they served as kindling for Reed and the gasoline he threw on the fire to make it burn out of control. Reed, like Jeffress, Falwell, and others, tapped into evangelical Christians fears of persecution and use those fears to achieve political power and to grift their supporters. John Dickson, an Australian Anglican minister, told Alberta and a group at Wheaton College that America would soon be like Australia, a “post-Christian nation,” and that “[w]ithin ten years, Christians will be a minority in America.” Data supports this, and this fear exists among individuals, but what one does with that fear is where the issue arises because instead of learning how to, as Dickson puts it, “lose well,” individuals go on the offensive, attacking others. Summarizing Dickson, Alberta writes, “Too many Christians are swaggering around and picking on marginalized people and generally acting like jerks because they’re angry and apprehensive.”

Instead of adhering to Jesus’ command to “love one another as I have loved you” (John 15:12), the fueling of fear leads to Christians bullying others instead of doing what they are called to do. It leads to violence and hate, not love and compassion. When spies asked Jesus if it was right for them to pay taxes to Caesar, he told then, “give back to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s” (Luke 20: 25). Christian fascism demands blood and violence, it demands allegiance not to God but to a worldly political mechanism. As Brain Zahnd told Alberta, “You can take up the sword of Caesar or you can take up the cross of Jesus. You have to choose.”

Benjamin Boswell says something similar in For the Facing of This Hour: Preaching that Resists White Christian Nationalism when he writes, “We have assimilated into an empire that maintains its power through consumer capitalism, corporate domination, structural racism, White supremacy, environmental destruction, colonialism, and global war. And we have the hardest time acknowledging that we are living in that empire or any empire at all when the political party we belong to is the one in power. Our eyes are blinded by partisanship.” Boswell, Zahnd, Russell Moore, and countless others counter Reed, Jeffress, and their ilk by pointing out that politics and the church shouldn’t mix because politics corrupts because it seeks power not submission, because it seeks control not servanthood. Instead of caring for the migrant, it seeks to destroy the migrant. Instead of providing healthcare for all, it seeks profit for a few. Instead of nurturing the populace, it seeks to cripple it.

Fear is potent; it is powerful. We must recognize when individuals deploy it and we must counteract it with hope because, as Dickson points out, early Christians, in the face of attacks, were “confident and cheerful.” Speaking to American evangelicals, Dickson says, “We should think of ourselves as eager dinner guests at someone else’s banquet. We are happy to be there, happy to share our perspective. But we are always respectful, always humble, because this isn’t our home.”

What are your thoughts? As usual, let me know in the comments below, and make sure to follow me on Twitter at @silaslapham.