From Fear to Hope

Welcome to the Queer Theology podcast. I'm Brian G. Murphy and I'm Father Shannon T. Elkerns. We're the co-founders of QueerTheology.com and your hosts. From Genesis to Revelation, the Bible declares good news to LGBTQ plus people and we want to show you how. Tune in each week on Sunday for conversations about Christianity, queerness and transness and how they can enrich one another. We're glad you're here. Before we dive into this episode, we just wanted to remind you that our new book, Reading the Bible Through Queer Eyes, good news for LGBTQ plus people from Genesis to Revelation, is available for pre-order now. You can buy anywhere books are sold. We're super excited to share these quintessential stories from our decades of work, queering the Bible and making this work accessible to people. So the book is available for pre-order now. It comes out in December and we hope you'll grab a copy. Hey there. Welcome back to the Queer Theology podcast. I'm Heather Shannon here for another solo episode and I've been thinking a lot about fear lately, especially fear in religion, but also just fear in general. I feel like if you spend very much time on the internet or watching the news, there is just a lot of anxiety and fear that's happening. Fear about the state of the world. Fear about politics. Fear about the upcoming elections. Fear about climate change and climate crisis. All of these different things. I want to be very clear that it's not that there are not things to be concerned about or to be paying attention to. This isn't about putting your head in the sand and humming a ditty and going on about your day, but this is about how fear works in our lives and how it works in our bodies and how it works in our connections with one another. And so that kind of sense of looking around and seeing, oh man, there is a lot of anxiety in the air and a lot of people telling us that we should be very, very afraid all of the time. And I think some of that comes from very real feelings of people who are afraid. They're afraid for their safety. They're afraid for their well-being. They're afraid for their families and the future and all of those things. And again, I'm not saying that fear is bad, but I just want us to note that we're living in a time that seems to be amplifying messages of fear. And I think about the church that I grew up in, the religious community that I grew up in, which was also very rooted in the sense of fear. I remember really distinctly as a child being terrified that I was going to die and go to hell. Or that the rapture was going to happen and I was going to be left behind. And that kind of spun out into a communal sense of fear. Right? I remember my family really thinking that Y2K was going to be the beginning of the end. My grandparents who lived next door redid a room in their house to store canned goods and water. They bought battery-powered walkie-talkies for everyone in the family that had a large range so that when communications inevitably went down on January 1st of the year 2000, that we would still be able to communicate with each other. My own family stockpiled a ton of canned goods and bottled water and filled the bathtub that night. And I remember even at the time thinking, I think that this is a little silly. I don't think that Y2K is going to be this. But their anxiety wasn't a political anxiety. It was a theological anxiety, right? That they were reading the portents and saying, oh, this is how the end times begins. Like this could be a part of it. And so it was very easy for them because they were primed on this theology of destruction and desolation and Jesus coming back with a giant sword and causing rivers of blood to run. It was very easy for them to look at this political thing and feel that same fear and anxiety and say, oh, we should prepare. And looking back on that and even reflecting on the evangelicals that I know now and I'm spending time with, there seems to be a real contradiction between this belief that God is in control and that Jesus paid it all, whatever that means to them. And still living in this real sense of fear and anxiety, fear of difference, fear of not being number one, fear of their kids being quote unquote exposed to things that are going to lead them astray, right? There's this almost hand in hand conversation about God having all of the control and Jesus being all powerful with this real fear that the world is somehow out to get them. And I'm just struck by that. And I'm struck by how when you live in that sense of fear and anxiety, it's really hard to anticipate or picture or dream up any new way of being because your nervous system is just so incredibly fried all of the time. And I think that when, you know, I think back to when I was in high school and college and very much in this evangelical world and spending a lot of time feeling that fear and anxiety around my sexuality, around my gender identity, around my relationships with other people, around what was going to happen to me and did God love me and would there be a place for me in my family in the church, in the world, if I came out, right? All of these different anxieties. And it was really, really hard to have a relationship, have friendships, think about the future because I was so consumed all the time with this sense of fear. And it was just completely shutting down any sense I had of possibilities and hope. And I think that that is really intentional. And when I think about our current moment, our current political moment, our current social moment, our current environmental moment, this overwhelming fear, which again comes from a very real place and very real concerns and very real situations. But this overwhelming fear that shuts down and short circuits our nervous system and causes us to go into a freeze mode is very useful for people in power. It's very useful for people who don't want things to change. It's very useful for people who want a docile and subservient community because people whose nervous systems are fried, who are so afraid of stepping out of line and of all of the things that could happen to them, are not people that are dreaming. They are not people that are willing to experiment and risk. They are not people that are filled with joy and laughter and frivolity. And I think that it's important to pay attention to that. It's important to pay attention to the way that being ruled by fear shuts us down. It isolates us. It makes us pick at one another. I mean, if you just spend even five minutes on the interwebs these days, you can see queer folks tearing other queer folks down. You can see LGBT folks saying, we don't want trans people in our community. You can see one set of immigrants bashing on another set of immigrants. We are fighting each other. And again, that is also very, very useful to people in power because if we are fighting each other, we're not organizing. We're not communicating with each other. We're not forming coalitions and unions and other ways to fight back. And so I think back, again, theologically, that theology based in fear, based in anxiety, keeps us really bound. It keeps us in line. It keeps us looking to other people, pastors, preachers, bishops, the folks who gatekeep ordinations. It keeps us looking to them and saying, oh, do I have a place here? Will you accept me? Will you let me in? And making sure that we don't do anything that could possibly upset the powers that be because we really want to be a part of these communities. And so that fear, again, it isolates us. It shuts us down. It keeps us from doing the things that we need to do that might actually change the systems. So I offer all of this as a reflection to first simply start to notice when you are feeling fear and anxiety. When is it coming up for you? When is it coming up for you as you read the news, as you engage with other people? How does it show up in your body? What does it do in your brain? And just start to pay attention to that, to notice what things are triggering your fear and anxiety and how that's showing up for you. And then I would also invite you to pay attention to the moments when you feel hope and joy. Where are those moments coming from? How do they show up in your body? And how is that different than when the fear shows up? And then as you start to notice all of these ways that these emotions are showing up in your body, I would invite you to do less of the things that cause the fear and anxiety to come up. And again, this isn't about putting our heads in the sand and pretending that things aren't bad, but it is saying, we probably don't need to be spending 12 hours doom-scrolling. There might be other ways to get news and stay informed and then also have joy in our lives and being engaging in things that are bringing us hope. So can we do less of the things that are triggering fear and anxiety? Can we do more of the things that are bringing us feelings of hope and joy? And I think that if we start to do that, if we start to spend more time investing in the moments of hope and joy, as we start to calm down our nervous systems and our bodies, it will free up space for us to dream of different ways of being. We might start to see, like, yeah, man, there's some really scary things happening. And also, look at all of the cool ways that my neighbors are taking care of each other and organizing to make our community a better place. Yeah, there are all sorts of scary things happening, but look at the way my church is embracing queer and trans young people or people who are experiencing homelessness in my neighborhood or the elderly, right? Yeah, there are all sorts of scary things happening in the world, but look at these ways that people are creating ways to care for our environment and to push back against climate change. There are very scary things happening, and there is resistance happening every day, every minute of every day, all around the world from people who have decided to take back some of their power, have decided to link arms with their neighbors, have decided to say the people in charge don't get the final say, we can create the world that we want to create. And I think for me, again, theologically, a theology based on hope, on restoration, on the reconciliation of all things, on a God who has not come to inspire fear, but has instead, like they say in one of Paul's letters, that perfect love casts out fear, that our God is a God who cares about love and peace and wholeness and the abundant life, that if we can anchor into that theology, we can start to take apart the lies of the people who want us afraid and separated. We can start to fight back against the systems that are keeping us isolated and terrified, and we can start to create more moments of hope together. So that is my invitation for you today to start to move from a life of fear, a theology of fear, a posture of fear to one of hope, so that we can be the people that we need to create the communities that we want to create to build the world that is good for all of us. I'll see you next time. We hope you enjoyed this episode. If you would like to go deeper into the ways that queerness can enrich faith and faith can enrich queerness, then you have got to check out our new book, Reading the Bible Through Queer Eyes, which comes out December 1. It is available for pre-order now, everywhere books are sold. The Queer Theology podcast is just one of many things that we do at QueerTheology.com, which provides resources, community, and inspiration for LGBTQ Christians and straight cisgender supporters. To dive into more of the action, visit us at QueerTheology.com. You can also connect with us online on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, and Instagram. We'll see you next week.