Title: Following Jesus in a Culture of Fear (Revised and Updated Edition).
Author: Scott Bader-Saye
Info: Copyright 2020: Brazos Press
Rating (on a scale of 1-4 stars): ✮✮
Category (ies) - Recommended reads(?):
This book was required reading for a book study at work.
Synopsis: Does American culture steep its citizens in fear? How do Christians respond to the temptation to walk in the suspicion, preemption, and accumulation that crippling anxiety produces? What does that response mean to how the marginalized are treated? Bader-Saye attempts to answer these questions.
Select Favorite Quotes:
While many have argued that the news media has either a liberal or a conservative bias, it may be that the bigger problem is the profit-making bias. A drive for profit affects both the selection of news stories and the angle of coverage. - p. 22.
Disordered fear has moral consequences. It fosters a set of shadow virtues, including suspicion preemption, and accumulation, which threatens traditional Christian virtues such as hospitality, peacemaking, and generosity. - p. 38.
Developing courage requires not only a community that embodies courage, but a community in which our fears can be given voice. Too often even church can be a place where we feel the need to hide our fears, to "dress up" so that we become presentable to God and others. This usually requires hiding the dark stuff underneath a smile and a handshake. Church can, unfortunately, be a place where vulnerability is met with either judgement or platitudes. Yet fear grows all the more powerful when we cannot speak it. To give words to our fear, to name our fear, is to begin to dispel its power. - p. 84.
Blessing includes not only material things that sustain well-being, but the rhythms of time that organize labor and leisure." - p. 93.
For academics, cynicism is an occupational hazard. We are rewarded for taking the high road, and by that I don't mean a moral high road. I mean a posture of detachment that gazes from an analytical perch down on the projects of others. While the analytical height can sometimes aid in research, it can be bad for the soul. It is easy to believe that we are wiser than the practitioners of the things we are studying. The religion professor who teaches and writes about religion all week does not easily set aside the evaluative posture in order to be an unselfconscious worshiper. - p. 96.
Jerome Binde makes the case that fearfulness tempts us to live perpetually in what he calls "Emergency Time." He describes it this way: "Our era is opening the way for the tyranny of emergency. Emergency is a direct means of response which leaves no time for either analysis, forecasting, or prevention. It is an immediate protective reflex rather than a sober quest for long-term solutions." Binde helps us see how living in a state of emergency produces impatience. When large-scale destruction occurs--a pandemic, a mass shooting, a terrorist attack--we are thrown into a state of panic. But long after the event is behind us, we don't always know how to shift out of emergency time. We can get stuck in the "immediate protective reflex" that keeps us in a defensive posture. We imagine that we don't have time for "analysis, forecasting, and prevention," so we double down on more guns, more soldiers, more police; we blame others and tighten our borders, not noticing the ways that this mode of prevention can set us up for the very thing we are trying to avoid." - p. 164.
The problem arises when our fear becomes excessive so that we can no longer make good judgements about what is enough, or when it causes us, in Aquinas's terms to "renounce that which is good." When we are so intent to avoid harm to ourselves that we neglect to do good to others, then we have lost the battle with fear. - p. 171.
Sabbath keeping is a way of practicing providence, of enacting the belief that God will provide. One day each week, we give up providing for ourselves. On this day, we practice the kind of reliance on God that can sustain our generosity throughout the rest of the week. At its best, a Sabbath day gestures beyond itself to other habits and practices that support God's economy of everyday living. - p. 183.
The Positive:
- The author's definition of God's providence as, "...a trust that God will provide what we need and redeem what is lost" (p. 154) is spot on, direct, and in keeping with the biblical doctrine.
- The book did challenge my thinking on some issues.
The Negative:
- Bader-Saye needed to define the specific types of fear to which he was referring. He seemed to be talking out of both sides of his mouth--taking one chapter to chastise the reader for fear while taking another to attempt to sell fear as a "friend." Some of what the author characterized as fear would fall under common sense, or for a more theological term, "walking circumspectly" (Ephesians 5:15, KJV). Obviously, this does not equate to anxiety and terror.
- There is not enough of the author here. What are some of his personal struggles with the fears he describes and how did he combat them? While the author laments the detachment academia can produce, he doesn't do a very good job of combating it in his own work.
- The author uses the term Latinex to refer to the Latino community. I have viewed many articles stating that the Latino community is not on board with this moniker. The majority find it highly offensive.
- As I've stated in previous reviews, I do not read these types of books to be inundated with politics--even politics to with which I subscribe. Rather than bringing useful information that informs and assists the audience, Bader-Saye uses his platform to make sure the reader knows which party he prefers and why--many of his defenses based on the very media outlets he accurately demonizes (see the quotes section).
- To me, the biggest negative is that the author doesn't adhere to his own premise. If one is to follow Jesus in relation to the fear that surrounds him or her, shouldn't Jesus' words about fear be presented...and in full? Overwhelming fear and anxiety cannot be conquered with half of a verse and a smattering of political hyperbole.
Conclusion/Takeaway:
While Bader-Saye's tome had some good points, the majority of the book was quite disagreeable. My other book reviews prove that I welcome reading works that challenge my thinking and present concepts with which I may not agree. In fact, I never totally agree with any author (even my favorites). However, for me to enjoy a work there must be enough common ground between me and the author. There was not enough here.
Part of the problem is that I am not the author's target audience. This work is directed to white middle-and upper-class "Christians" who are afraid of any face that doesn't look like theirs. He's speaking to those to whom the news and social media are their holy writ and instruction manual for life, and to whom the Bible is a mere afterthought.
That ain't me.
Quite honestly, all of the author's bravado and politically-correct chest thumping comes off as disingenuous. From his minuscule personal examples, one would conclude the Bader-Saye has not experienced much of what he describes. How ironic that his criticism of others should describe his book perfectly: "Those making these claims understood themselves to be Christians, but their claims often looked more like an appeal to a partisan cosmic fate than to Jesus" (pp. 157-158).
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