(RNS) — I had a recent conversation with Marshall Ganz, an old friend, veteran organizer and internationally renowned teacher of organizing at Harvard’s Kennedy School. He said something that struck me deeply in the midst of this stressful presidential campaign: “Fear shuts down part of your brain.”
After I repeated this at an event in Ohio days later, a doctor spoke to me and confirmed this from his own medical experience.
When people go into an MRI exam, he said, doctors monitor the brain patterns of the patients and they can actually see the brain pathways changing, likely not only to being in the MRI chamber but fearing the potential results. I asked him to send me more about how fear changes the ways our brains work, and he sent me this a day later.
Without getting overly nerdy and into medical details, the part of the brain most involved with the neural response to fear is the amygdala, and when activated our normal pathways of first processing through the cerebral cortex (the rational thinking parts of our brain) are bypassed. We think this developmentally allows us to react quickly to a fearful stimulus, rather than think through why we might be in danger (fight, freeze, flee). Interestingly, once activated, the amygdala also affects how our brain remembers the response this fear triggered in us.
Of course, the more we study this the more complicated it gets. There are biological, stress hormonal and other background factors in play. But bottom line, there is a neuroanatomical truth to what you said, and to what happens in our brain when we are scared.
Here is a reference to one of the earliest functional MRI studies that showed this, but there have been many replicated since that time.
As I travel around the country, I am seeing the very high stress about this election– especially in battleground states. I have siblings in western Michigan, who kindly came to hear me talk at Hope College, in Holland, Michigan. Over dinner beforehand, my sister Barb Tamialis, an expert in early childhood development, told me the same thing from her experience with both children and adults. The rational part of the brain shuts down when the fear factor comes into play. Fight, flight, freeze takes over.
The closing arguments of the Trump campaign and those of the Republican candidates who have sold out to him (because of their fear of the strongman who promises to keep them in or banish them from power) are all about fear. When I turn on the news in my hotel rooms, morning and night, I’ve been seeing their campaign ads. The Trump and Republican ads are either about the fear of outsiders, with constantly repeated lies about the nonwhite immigrant “invaders” who are “vermin” and “are poisoning our nation’s bloodstream” and are now taking over our country. The language is taken straight from Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”
Now Donald Trump is stoking more fear, talking about “enemies from within,” naming Democratic elected officials such as U.S. Rep. Adam Schiff, who oversaw Trump’s impeachment trial and is now running for the Senate, and former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Trump says he might have to use the military to deal with his political rivals. Fox News reporters have tried to give their preferred candidate a chance to back away from his extreme statements, but Trump has refused and just doubled down.
There are real reasons for fear. Gen. Mark A. Milley, Trump’s chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in an interview with Bob Woodward for Woodward’s recently released new book, “War,” called Trump “fascist to the core” and “the most dangerous person to this country.”
Many Republicans, including former Vice President Mike Pence and other former Trump officials, have called the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, an attempted coup that could happen again. Trump now refers to Jan. 6 as “a beautiful day of love” and has promised to pardon those arrested and imprisoned for their violent acts if he is elected president.
And as the election nears, Gen. John Kelly, Trump’s longest-serving White House chief of staff, the closest person to the former president as he governed, was so concerned when Trump said he would use the military against his domestic opponents that Kelly decided to come out publicly to say he also believes that Trump meets the definition of a fascist and would rule as a dictator.
With all this fear in the air, I turn back to the Scriptures, as we always should do but sometimes forget to do.
The Gospel of John says: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love. We love because he first loved us.” That God is love is fundamental to faith in all religions. And love is the great contrast to fear.
The Apostle Paul, in his Second Letter to Timothy, wrote: “For God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power, love, and self-control.” Psalm 34 reads, “I sought the Lord and he answered me and delivered me from all my fear,” while Psalm 27 lays out our political moment for us:
“The Lord is my light and my salvation, whom shall I fear? The Lord is the stronghold of my life, of whom shall I be afraid. When evildoers assail me to devour my flesh, my adversaries and foes, they shall stumble and fall. Though an army encamp against me, my heart shall not fear: though war rises up against me, I will be confident.”
After reading through the concordances about the subject of fear in the Scriptures, I turned to the Bible to read all the texts. I found that most had already been underlined in my personal Bible. I needed to read them again and ground myself in them, including the 23rd Psalm, which I repeat most every day: “Even though I walk through the darkest valley, I fear not evil for you are with me.”
The most ardent religious supporters of Trump, the Christian nationalists like the New Apostolic Reformation militants, have themselves become evangelists for the false religion of fear, hate and violence we see all around us. Some of Trump’s religious supporters are now actually saying that “love is too soft” for a time like this, that “loving your neighbor” cannot be applied in this election and we need a strongman to keep our power in this country as white Christians are losing “our country” and must become “God-appointed warriors” to take it back.
It is time in these few days before the election for all of us now to have those hard conversations with our friends and family who have been turned from the way of Jesus to the way of fear and will for political power to protect us. We need to listen to their fears and remind them that God is love.
Take time to explain how their distorted and deceiving false facts with those fear factors are wrong; but mostly to remind us all that only love can cast out our fears. That’s what we should be talking and praying most about.
(The Rev. Jim Wallis is director of Georgetown University’s Center on Faith and Justice and the author, most recently, of “The False White Gospel: Rejecting Christian Nationalism, Reclaiming True Faith, and Refounding Democracy.” The views expressed in this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)