Hunter S. Thompson wrote a series of articles in 1971 in Rolling Stone that eventually were turned into the book Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream. One of the more memorable quotes, in my opinion, is as follows:

Hallucinations are bad enough. But after a while you learn to cope with things like seeing your dead grandmother crawling up your leg with a knife in her teeth. Most acid fanciers can handle this sort of thing. But nobody can handle that other trip—the possibility that any freak with $1.98 can walk into Circus-Circus and suddenly appear in the sky over downtown Las Vegas twelve times the size of God, howling anything that comes into his head. No, this is not a good town for psychedelic drugs. Reality itself is too twisted.

The last part is something I have come to embrace as a day to day truth. Often ‘reality itself’ is far more twisted than we’d like to admit. And it’s the pervasive reality of fear in our media, in our language, in our news, and yes, in our churches that becoming far, far too twisted. Now, don’t get me wrong, I fear things, so this is not one of those athletic commercials or t-shirts that brags about having ‘no fear.’ For example, I fear snakes, meatloaf, and stray dogs. So, the issue isn’t fear.  On the contrary, I think I am becoming increasingly afraid of all of the fear.

I just moved from Arizona back to the Midwest and I am amazed at how many people simply fear the immigration law around the country. Most people have never read the law; many more have no experience living in Arizona. We simply hear conversations that are grossly fear based. ‘Did you hear about the law in Arizona? They’re going to destroy the fabric of our society with that thing…what’s wrong with the people of Arizona?” Yes, I actually heard that—from church going folk!

What if the economy doesn’t recover this year? What happens if Barack Obama succeeds in having all of his policies pass into law? What happens if the Republicans win the mid-term elections? What happens if the religious right are proven to be totally wrong, will the evangelical church split? What happens if the Catholic church allows priests to marry? What happens if Protestants allow all gays, everywhere to marry?

Hunter Thompson writes in a different article, prior to his death: 

We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear—fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer.

"Extreme Behavior in Aspen," February 3, 2003

 In the church, I don’t hear a lack of fear either, although over a hundred times, God Himself tells us ‘do not fear’ in the Bible. We live in a culture of fear and loathing and it’s pervasive. People are exporting it to each other and other countries; church people are importing it to pulpits and Bible studies. So, when will it stop? I am not sure.  Steps, though, can be taken to reduce our succumbing to it. We can rehearse in our minds the promises of the gospel. We can celebrate the fact that we’re not in control. When ‘reality itself is too twisted,’ maybe we should realize that the non-twisted parts are often not reality. We can drink more, drink less, take road trips, acid trips, or mission trips. We can watch movies, read books, download an app., friend someone, or surf something. We can do a myriad of things to fight the fear and fight it we must. Because at this point, we may all have to answer the question--what are you more afraid of—the times we are living in or the people who are afraid of the times we are living in?

-bo