Fear

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Well of Loneliness (1928)

  Very pitiful Mary was in these days, torn between the two warring forces; haunted by a sense of disloyalty if she thought with unhappiness of losing Martin, hating herself for a treacherous coward if she sometimes longed for the life he could offer, above all intensely afraid of this man who was creeping in between her and Stephen. And the very fact of this fear made her yield to the woman with a new and more desperate ardour, so that the bond held as never before—the days might be Martin’s, but the nights were Stephen’s. And yet, lying awake far into the dawn, Stephen’s victory would take on the semblance of defeat, turned to ashes by the memory of Martin’s words: ‘Your triumph, if it comes, will come too late for Mary.’ In the morning she would go to her desk and write, working with something very like frenzy, as though it were now a neck-to-neck race between the world and her ultimate achievement. Never before had she worked like this; she would feel that her pen was dipped in blood, that with every word she wrote, she was bleeding! 2Christmas came and went, giving place to the New Year, and Martin fought on but he fought more grimly. He was haunted these days by the spectre of defeat, painfully conscious that do what he might, nearly every advantage lay with Stephen. All that he loved and admired most in Mary, her frankness, her tender and loyal spirit, her compassion towards suffering of any kind, these very attributes told against him, serving as they did to bind her more firmly to the creature to whom she had given devotion. One thing only sustained the man at this time, and that was his conviction that in spite of it all, Mary Llewellyn had grown to love him.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  A fleet of new purpose-built hospitals was set up, often dedicated to that boil-stricken Old Testament hero Job, now turned into an honorary Christian saint and patron of syphilis cures: with heartening inaccuracy, the hospitals were termed Incurabili. A treatment which was at least a palliative did emerge in the form of preparations from a wood known as guaiacum discovered in the Spanish colonies of America. Its origin and distribution through Catholic institutions made Protestants suspicious of guaiacum until experience did suggest its effectiveness. [93] Fear of syphilis was also a major motive behind one of the more remarkable ecumenical phenomena of the sixteenth century: the large-scale closure of the licensed brothels which were such a feature of medieval city life (above, Chapter 13). Luther had already called for this in his manifesto of 1520, Address to the German Nobility, and such closures became an invariable feature of urban Protestant Reformations. Nuremberg, usually more conservative than most Lutheran cities, was unusually late in waiting till 1562, while Henry VIII of England also belatedly imitated mainland European Protestants in 1546 by closing the ‘Stews’, the Bishop of Winchester’s licensed brothels in Southwark. Roman Catholics belatedly joined the stampede – the King of France in Paris in 1561, with successive Popes making two attempts in Rome, in 1555 and 1566, before getting their way, and Spain as late as 1623, following pressure on the monarchy from the Jesuits. [94] Few public statements about such closures admitted the connection with disease: Henry VIII for instance gave moral rather than medical reasons in his proclamation closing down the Southwark brothels. But at the same time public bathhouses also disappeared across Europe, outside Finland and the eastern areas dominated by the Ottoman Turks. Not all baths had the dubious sexual reputation that is their prevailing memory and there was no plausible religious justification for closures: general fear of close contact must have been paramount. [95] Ironically, their disappearance must have produced generally lower standards of personal hygiene. Anxieties about catching syphilis did affect people’s sexual behaviour, for instance keeping the future Jesuit missionary Francis Xavier a virgin at university. There is also evidence that personal codes of manners and gestures, encouraged by prescriptive literature on the subject, changed so as to avoid too much physical contact with other people. Given this justified worry about sex, it is unsurprising that Europe showed an equally ecumenical hatred of ‘sodomy’. Admittedly, Protestants allowed the medieval Catholic myth about a Christmas cull of the world’s sodomites to fall into oblivion, but that will have been the result of their general contempt for friars and pious legends. There were complications: even more than in the twelfth-century ‘Renaissance’, the intense Renaissance humanist admiration for Graeco-Roman literature could not ignore literary encounters with same-sex activity. Once more, the ramifications were cross-confessional.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  She said not. I went into my mother's room and remained talking for about an hour, but never mentioned the above subject for fear of exciting her, and finally forgot it altogether, returning to the dining-room, still in forgetfulness of what had occurred, but repeating, as above, the turning from sideboard to table in act of preparing more tea. I looked casually towards the fire, and there I saw the soldier again. This time I was entirely alarmed, and fled from the room in haste. I called to my father, but when he came he saw nothing." Sometimes more than one sense is affected. The following is a case: "In response to your request to write out my experience of Oct. 30, 1888, I will inflict on you a letter. "On the day above mentioned, Oct. 30, 1888, I was in———-, where I was teaching. I had performed my regular routine work for the day, and was sitting in my room working out trigonometrical formulæ. I was expecting every day to hear of the confinement of my wife, and naturally my thoughts for some time had been more or less with her. She was, by the way, in B——, some fifty miles from me. "At the time, however, neither she nor the expected event was in my mind; as I said, I was working out trigonometrical formulæ, and I had been working on trigonometry the entire evening. About eleven o'clock, as I sat there buried in sines, cosines, tangents, cotangents, secants, and cosecants, I felt very distinctly upon my left shoulder a touch, and a slight shake, as if somebody had tried to attract my attention by other means and had failed. Without rising I raised my head, and there between me and the door stood my wife, dressed exactly as I last saw her, some five weeks before. As I turned she said: 'It is a little Herman; he has come.' Something more was said, but this is the only sentence I can recall. To make sure that I was not asleep and dreaming, I rose from the chair, pinched myself and walked toward the figure, which disappeared immediately as I rose. I can give no information as to the length of time occupied by this episode, but I know I was awake, in my usual good health.

• From The Principles of Psychology (Volume 1 of 2) (1890)

  A sort of wave seemed to pass over me, and I became aware of the fact that my pulse was beating rapidly. I took out my watch, and by exercising considerable will-power managed to time the heart-beats, 135 to the minute. "I could feel each pulsation through my whole system, and a curious twitching commenced, which no effort of the mind could stop. "There were moments of apparent lucidity, when it seemed as if I could see within myself, and watch the pumping of my heart. A strange fear came over me, a certainty that I should never recover from the effects of the opiate, which was as quickly followed by a feeling of great interest in the experiment, a certainty that the experience was the most novel and exciting that I had ever been through. "My mind was in an exceedingly impressionable state. Any place thought of or suggested appeared with all the distinctness of the reality. I thought of the Giant's Causeway in Staffa, and instantly I stood within the portals of Fingal's Cave. Great basaltic columns rose on all aides, while huge wares rolled through the chasm and broke in silence upon the rocky shore. Suddenly there was a roar and blast of sound, and the word 'Ishmaral' was echoing up the cave. At the enunciation of this remarkable word the great columns of basalt changed into Whirling clothes pins and I laughed aloud at the absurdity. "(I may here state that the word 'Ishmaral' seemed to haunt my other hallucinations, for I remember that I heard it frequently there after.) I next enjoyed a sort of metempsychosis. Any animal or thing that I thought of could be made the being which held my mind. I thought of a fox, and instantly I was transformed into that animal. I could distinctly feel myself a fox, could see my long ears and bushy tail, and by a sort of introvision felt that my complete anatomy was that of a fox. Suddenly the point of vision changed. My eyes seemed to be located at the back of my mouth; I looked out between the parted lips, saw the two rows of pointed teeth, and, closing my mouth with a snap, saw—nothing. "I was next transformed into a bombshell, felt my size, weight, and thickness, and experienced the sensation of being shot up out of a giant mortar, looking down upon the earth, bursting and falling back in a shower of iron fragments. "Into countless other objects was I transformed, many of them so absurd that I am unable to conceive what suggested them. For example, I was a little china doll, deep down in a bottle of olive oil, next moment a stick of twisted candy, then a skeleton inclosed in a whirling coffin, and so on ad infinitum.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Sydney is central to a worldwide campaigning network throughout Anglicanism that has made no secret of its aim to supplant Lambeth Palace at the centre of the Anglican Communion, in order to promote a tailored version of ‘traditional values’. The campaign against homosexuality was galvanized by the choice of an openly partnered gay man as Bishop in the US Episcopal Church in 2003. Gene Robinson’s consecration for New Hampshire followed his open election by the diocese and took place in the largest venue available in the state, a university ice-hockey stadium (Plates 34 and 35). Following a slew of hate mail, both Robinson and his partner wore bullet- proof vests during the ceremony, as did Frank Griswold the Presiding Bishop of the Church: not a normal liturgical provision in the Anglican Communion. [31] In 2007, five provinces of the Communion took further joint action. They agreed to boycott the forthcoming Lambeth Conference and laid the foundations for an alternative, in an organization known as Global Anglican Future Conference (GAFCON). Four of the provinces were large Churches in central and east Africa, the other a small province in southern south America; others showed interest, including various conservative splinter groups formed in opposition to the progress of gay rights and women’s ministry in the US Episcopal and Canadian Anglican Churches. GAFCON has grown since, but it faces the recurrent difficulty of schisms based on principle; participants are liable to carry on splitting on principle. This is the value of homosexuality as an issue: women’s ordination divides GAFCON members, with some provinces ordaining women despite bitter criticism from others, but everyone can agree on condemning homosexuality, with the added advantage that it plays well on the frontiers of African Christianity and Islam. A favourite argument of African Anglicans denouncing Western attitudes to sexuality is that African Christians are ridiculed or worse by African Muslims because of their association with Churches that condone homosexuality. There is some truth in this; it has been one consideration in the Egyptian Coptic Church’s official reaffirmation of a firmly traditionalist line on same-sex relations. Despite gay people among the Coptic faithful urging change, the leadership is aware of the fragile position of Copts in a majority-Muslim Egyptian society. [32] Yet the competition between African Christians and African Muslims as to who can be most hostile to homosexuality irresistibly recalls competitive Protestant and Catholic punitive action against witchcraft in the European Reformation (above, Chapter 14).

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  It was up to fathers to help boys “find the correct path to masculinity,” and for this reason the father’s role was “more critical now than at any time in history.” In this respect, Farrar agreed with Dobson that “our very survival as a people will depend upon the presence or absence of masculine leadership in millions of homes,” but in the decade since Dobson had characterized the Western world as standing at a “great crossroads in its history,” things hadn’t improved. If anything, they’d gotten worse. As “point man,” the father needed to protect sons from feminization. Boys, he explained, were naturally aggressive due to their higher levels of testosterone; aggression was “part of being male.” Little boys were prone to doing reckless things like jumping off slides and swinging like Tarzan, splitting their heads open on occasion. But this was just part of being a boy. “They will survive the scars and broken bones of boyhood,” Farrar wrote, “but they cannot survive being feminized.” Boys who were overprotected, particularly by mothers, were in danger of having their masculinity “warped.” Homosexuals, Farrar believed, were made, not born. Satan’s strategy in the war against the family was to “neutralize the man,” but the solution was clear: “God made boys to be aggressive. We are to accept it and channel it.” Farrar’s Point Man was a training manual for culture warriors.26 Stu Weber, too, opened his Tender Warrior in the “heat and terror” of Vietnam, but he wrote from personal experience. A 1967 graduate of Wheaton College, Weber had strayed from his spiritual roots during “the social and intellectual turmoil of the sixties,” but as a Green Beret in Vietnam he had come face to face with death, drawing him back to his faith. His was a book about manliness, “real, God-made, down-in-the-bedrock masculinity,” something that men were “scrambling to understand.” The confusion was everywhere evident. Were men tender or tough? Strong or sensitive? All this confusion left men frustrated, but also determined: “Determined to discover our manhood and live it to the hilt.”27 Weber, too, believed that “a gender war” was being waged, and it was necessary to look culture’s confusion “straight in the eye.” Channeling Dobson and Elisabeth Elliot, Weber insisted that men and women were profoundly different.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  Goldwater wasn’t known for his religious beliefs, but that wasn’t really the point. He was bringing a message Sunbelt evangelicals wanted to hear.13 Four months later, the region’s evangelicals came together again, this time in Anaheim. The occasion was an event organized by the Southern California School of Anti-Communism, a “citizen’s training program” headed by Fred Schwarz. Schwarz, an Australian physician who founded the Christian Anti-Communism Crusade, had recently set up shop in southern California. At the close of the five-day event, sixteen thousand young people and their parents sang the “Star-Spangled Banner,” pledged their allegiance to the flag, and listened to celebrity speakers. First up was Marion Miller, a housewife who had gained fame crusading for anticommunist education in public schools, and for infiltrating the Los Angeles Left as an FBI informant. Next up was Ronald Reagan. Still a Democrat at the time, Reagan warned of communists’ devious plans to target teenagers’ “rebellious nature,” fooling them into thinking that their “patriotism is hollow.” Roy Rogers, Dale Evans, and John Wayne then followed suit. But it was pop star Pat Boone who stole the show that night, closing with an impromptu address that Reagan would recall years later: “I would rather see my four girls shot and die as little girls who have faith in God than leave them to die some years later as godless, faithless, soulless Communists,” Boone asserted. His audience was thrilled, even if his wife was not.14 [image "image" file=Image00005.jpg] Program cover for Barry Goldwater’s Pepperdine Freedom Forum luncheon, 1961. FROM THE PEPPERDINE COLLEGE FREEDOM FORUM COLLECTION , PEPPERDINE UNIVERSITY SPECIAL COLLECTIONS AND UNIVERSITY ARCHIVES . That same year, fundamentalist pastors were among those who rebuffed President Kennedy when he challenged the Soviet Union “not to an arms race, but to a peace race.” And they came to the defense of men like General Edwin Walker, who had been admonished by the Department of Defense for his attempts to indoctrinate troops with right-wing anticommunist materials supplied by fundamentalist evangelist Billy James Hargis. Walker resigned his post so that he would no longer be subject to “the power of little men,” as he put it, but Goldwater joined Senator Strom Thurmond and other Republicans to call for Senate hearings on the “muzzling” of the military. In the fallout of these events, Kennedy gave a speech at the Hollywood Palladium in November 1961, reproaching “those on the fringes of our society” who were easily wooed by “an appealing slogan or a convenient scapegoat” and warning against “the discordant voices of extremism”—against those who called “for a ‘man on horseback’ because they do not trust the people.” Thurmond responded by denouncing “pussyfooting diplomats.”15 General Walker may have resigned, but he did not go quietly. He was later arrested for “inciting rebellion” among segregationists as federal marshals attempted to desegregate Ole Miss, and in 1963 he took up with Hargis to lead anticommunist “crisis crusades,” persisting in his charge that the government was soft on communism and hamstringing the military.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  The moment of recognition comes when the stranger breaks bread at dinner, and they understand that all the time they have been in the presence of the Messiah, the christos, but that their “eyes had been held” from realizing it. It is only a fleeting illumination: almost immediately he vanishes from their sight. Henceforth, Luke suggests, Christians will glimpse the risen Christ only in the Eucharist, in the study of scripture—and when they reach out to the stranger. We may find that if instead of retreating from the stranger and rejecting his insights out of hand, we allow him to change our perceptions, our understanding of our own traditions may be enriched by the encounter and we too may have moments of numinous insight. Finally, consider the famous story of Yaakov (in English we call him Jacob) wrestling with a mysterious stranger on his return to Canaan. Twenty years earlier, after gravely wronging his twin brother, Esau, Yaakov had fled for his life to Mesopotamia. Now he is returning with his family to the Promised Land and is very apprehensive about seeing Esau again. When he hears that his brother is coming to meet him with a company of four hundred men, Yaakov is terrified. He sends his family across the Jordan River ahead of him and dispatches servants to Esau with a generous gift of livestock, saying to himself: “I will wipe [the anger from] his face with the gift that goes ahead of my face; afterward when I see his face, perhaps he will lift up my face!” 11 Then Yaakov is left alone. Now a man wrestled with him until the coming up at dawn. When he saw that he could not prevail against him, he touched the socket of his thigh; the socket of Yaakov’s thigh had been dislocated as he wrestled with him. Then he said: Let me go, for dawn has come up! But he said: I will not let you go unless you bless me. He said to him: What is your name? And he said: Yaakov. Then he said: Not as Yaakov shall your name be henceforth uttered, but rather as Yisrael [“God Fighter”], for you have fought with God and men and have prevailed. Then Yaakov asked and said: Pray tell me your name! But he said: Now why do you ask after my name? And he gave him farewell-blessing there. Yaakov called the name of the place: Peniel [“Face of God”], for I have seen God face to face, he said, and my life has been saved. The sun rose on him as he crossed by Peniel and he was limping on his thigh. 12 The story reads like a dream in which we confront issues that we suppress in our waking lives. The wrestling match recalls the struggle Yaakov and Esau had in their mother’s womb when they had “almost crushed one another inside her.”

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  Let nobody lie to anybody or despise any single being anywhere. May nobody wish harm to any single creature out of anger or hatred! Let us cherish all creatures, as a mother her only child! May our loving thoughts fill the whole world, above, below, across—without limit; our love will know no obstacles—a boundless goodwill toward the whole world, unrestricted, free of hatred or enmity. Whether we are standing or walking, sitting or lying down, as long as we are awake we should cultivate this love in our heart. This is the noblest way of living. 1 THE ELEVENTH STEP Recognition At a very unhappy period of her life, Christina Noble had a powerful dream: “Naked children were running down a dirt road fleeing from a napalm bombing ... one of the girls had a look in her eyes that implored me to pick her up and protect her and take her to safety. Above the escaping children was a brilliant white light that contained the word ‘Vietnam.’ ” 1 From that moment, Christina was convinced, in a way she could not understand, that it was her destiny to go to Vietnam and that one day she would work with children there. It is not difficult to see why this dream made such an impression on her. Forty years later, the memory of her own childhood still makes her voice “high and tight, and there is a hint of fear.” 2 At the age of twelve, she had become a child of the streets in Dublin, sleeping in public toilets during the winter and under the bushes of Phoenix Park in the summer. She was perpetually hungry: a priest once discovered her eating wax drippings from the votive candles in front of a statue of Christ and threw her out of the church. One night she was raped by two men, and when they dropped her back on the streets, torn, bleeding, her face bruised and swollen, she was struck by “the horrible realization that there was nobody for me to go to. I needed just one person who would not see me as dust, or barely more than an animal.” 3 One of the men had made her pregnant: Christina was placed in a harsh institution, the child was taken from her, and she eventually stowed away on a boat that took her to England, where she married a Greek named Mario who abused her but who gave her three children. It was during this time that she had her dream.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  As a result, the intellectual atmosphere becomes even more polluted and people remain entrenched in angry negativity. As the Daoists pointed out, we often identify with our ideas so strongly that we feel personally assaulted if these are criticized or corrected. Perhaps it would be better to take a leaf out of the Buddha’s book and start from where people actually are rather than where we think they ought to be. In such public debates, instead of trying to bludgeon other people into accepting our own point of view, we may need to find a way of posing Socratic questions that lead to personal insight rather than simply repeating the facts as we see them yet again. We should make a point of asking ourselves whether we want to win the argument or seek the truth, whether we are ready to change our views if the evidence is sufficiently compelling, and whether we are making “place for the other” in our minds in the Socratic manner. Above all, we need to listen. All too often in an argument or debate, we simply listen to others in order to twist their words and use them as grist for our own mill. True listening means more than simply hearing the words that are spoken. We have to become alert to the underlying message too and hear what is not uttered aloud. Angry speech in particular requires careful decoding. We should make an effort to hear the pain or fear that surfaces in body language, tone of voice, and choice of imagery. To take just one example: every fundamentalist movement that I have studied in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is rooted in a profound fear of annihilation; and each one began with what was perceived to be an assault by the liberal or secular establishment. 9 History shows that to attack any fundamentalist movement, whether militarily, politically, or in the media, is counterproductive because the assault merely convinces its adherents that their enemies really are bent on their destruction. If we analyze fundamentalist discourse as carefully as we interpret a poem or an important political speech, ferreting out the underlying emotions and intentions of the poet or speaker, this fear and humiliation become immediately apparent. Instead of ridiculing fundamentalist mythology, we should reflect seriously on the fact that it often expresses anxieties that no society can safely ignore. It is difficult to achieve this kind of dispassion, because any fundamentalist position is a profound challenge to principles and ideals, such as free speech or the rights of women, that are sacred to their liberal opponents. But aggression, righteous condemnation, and insult only make matters worse. Somehow we have to break the escalating cycle of attack and counterattack. We have seen what happens when fundamentalist fear hardens into rage. Language is based on trust.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  The reassertion of white patriarchy was central to the new “family values” politics, and by the end of the 1970s, the defense of patriarchal power had emerged as an evangelical distinctive. The evangelical consumer marketplace was by then a force to be reckoned with, but this expansive media network functioned less as a traditional soul-saving enterprise and more as a means by which evangelicals created and maintained their own identity—an identity rooted in “family values” and infused with a sense of cultural embattlement. Christian publishing, radio, and television taught evangelicals how to raise children, how to have sex, and whom to fear. And Christian media promoted a distinctive vision of evangelical masculinity. Finding comfort and courage in symbols of a mythical past, evangelicals looked to a rugged, heroic masculinity embodied by cowboys, soldiers, and warriors to point the way forward. For decades to come, militant masculinity (and a sweet, submissive femininity) would remain entrenched in the evangelical imagination, shaping conceptions of what was good and true. By the 1980s, evangelicals were able to mobilize so effectively as a partisan political force because they already participated in a shared cultural identity.12 A militant evangelical masculinity went hand in hand with a culture of fear, but it wasn’t always apparent which came first. During the Cold War, the communist menace seemed to require a militant response. But when that threat had been vanquished, conservative evangelicals promptly declared a new war—a culture war—demanding a similar militancy. In 2001, when terrorists struck the United States, evangelicals again had an actual battle to fight. Yet even then, evangelical militancy was fueled by fraudulent tales of the Islamic threat, tales that were promoted by evangelicals themselves. Evangelical militancy cannot be seen simply as a response to fearful times; for conservative white evangelicals, a militant faith required an ever-present sense of threat. In 2008, the election of Barack Obama ratcheted up evangelical fears. Initially, the culture wars appeared to be lost and the power of the Christian Right seemed to have reached an ignoble end. But conservative evangelicals had always thrived on a sense of embattlement, real or imagined, and this time would be no different. Donald Trump appeared at a moment when evangelicals felt increasingly beleaguered, even persecuted. From the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive mandate to transgender bathroom laws and the cultural sea change on gay marriage, gender was at the heart of this perceived vulnerability. On the foreign policy front, the threat of terrorism loomed large, American power wasn’t what it used to be, and nearly two-thirds of white evangelicals harbored fears that a once-powerful nation had become “too soft and feminine.”13 Evangelical fears were real. Yet these fears were not simply a natural response to changing times. For decades, evangelical leaders had worked to stoke them. Their own power depended on it.

• From Twelve Steps to a Compassionate Life (2010)

  Over the millennia, however, human beings also evolved a “new brain,” the neocortex, home of the reasoning powers that enable us to reflect on the world and on ourselves, and to stand back from these instinctive, primitive passions. But the Four Fs continue to inform all our activities. We are still programmed to acquire more and more goods, to respond instantly to any threat, and to fight mercilessly for the survival of number one. These instincts are overwhelming and automatic; they are meant to override our more rational considerations. We are supposed to throw our book aside and flee if a tiger suddenly appears in the garden. But our two brains coexist uneasily: it has been fatal when humans have employed their new-brain capacities to enhance and promote old-brain motivation; when, for example, we have created technology able to destroy the enemies that threaten us on an unprecedented scale.9 So are the positivists correct in their claim that our compassion is skin-deep? Much of the twentieth century was certainly red in tooth and claw, and already the Four Fs have been much in evidence in the twenty-first. Compassion has dropped so far out of sight these days that many are confused about what is required. It even inspires overt hostility. The controversy surrounding Mother Teresa of Calcutta (1910–97) shows how difficult it could be for a relatively unsophisticated woman, who is making a heroic effort to address a crying need, to find her way through the labyrinthine and often corrupt world of twentieth-century politics. The vitriol of some of her critics reveals not only an uncompassionate tendency in modern discourse—are we not all flawed beings?—but also a visceral distaste for the compassionate ethos and a principled determination to expose any manifestation of it as “lying, pretense, and deceit.” Many people today, it seems, would rather be right than compassionate. And yet human beings continue to endorse ideologies that promote a principled, selfless empathy. Auguste Comte (1798–1857), the founder of positivism who also coined the term “altruism,” saw no incompatibility between compassion and the scientific era he hailed with such enthusiasm. Even though he had lived through a terrifying period of revolution in Europe, he looked forward confidently to the dawning of an enlightened social order in which cooperation between people would be based not on coercion but on their own inherent tendency to universal love. No calculations of self-interest can rival this social instinct, whether in promptitude of breadth of intuition, or in boldness and tenacity of purpose. True it is that the benevolent emotions have in most cases less intrinsic energy than the selfish. But they have this beautiful quality, that social life not only permits their growth, but stimulates it to an almost unlimited extent, while it holds their antagonists in constant check.10 Unlike E. O. Wilson, Comte did not regard compassionate behavior as hypocritical and calculated. Instead, he linked the “benevolent emotions” with the aesthetic, convinced that their “beautiful quality” had a power of its own.

• From Lower than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity (2024)

  Yet while I write on the assumption that this is likely to be true, in the last half-century sex and gender have rapidly become more instrumental in internal Church conflict than at virtually any time over the last two millennia of Christian life. [5] Some institutional Churches have recently split apart as a result; everywhere there is hurt and contention. Once upon a time, ecclesiastical explosions were fuelled by such matters as the nature of the Trinity or the Eucharist, the means of salvation or patterns of Church authority; now human genitalia overshadow most other organs of ill- will. That sudden convulsion in religious thought reflects the extraordinary speed of societal changes centring on sex and gender over a period of, so far, little more than half a century. This transformation has been experienced right across the world, not just in societies with a Christian complexion. More than half a century ago as a young graduate student, I was exhilarated at my radicalism in being open about homosexuality, and in subsequent years I felt rather pleased with myself in being at the forefront of sexual liberation. Then I found that my assumptions had been completely outflanked by proclamation of trans identities hardly ever discussed in my youth, and equally by vituperative criticism of trans identities on feminist grounds; those opposing but passionately held convictions both shared roots in the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s. These confusing experiences have taught me a lesson about being more observant or empathetic about the differences of others. In such circumstances, we should not be surprised that those slow-moving conglomerations of myriad opinions known as Churches have found it agonizingly hard to react coherently to questions they had not previously asked, let alone answered. Church leaders feel obliged to bring some clarity or comfort to those whom they seek to guide, and they are right to be wary of embracing the latest primrose path to novelty. The story of eugenics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which we shall visit in this book, is a salutary warning about that (below, Chapter 17). Yet everyone confronting the unfamiliar, inside or outside a religious system, has a duty of enquiry and exploration, as a means of combating fear. Fear is generally fear of the unknown. Knowledge is like a medicine to soothe a fever; in particular, proper knowledge of the past is a medicine for intellectual fevers contracted from prejudiced views of history. Prejudice, like fear, generally bases itself on ignorance, and such ignorance breeds distorted perspectives that poison present-day lives. My aim for this book is to deal with some of that fear by chronicling and even celebrating the sheer complexity and creativity of past generations grappling with their most profound emotions and consequent deeds. Looking at past attitudes to sexuality, we will find that over centuries they have been startlingly varied.

• From Jesus and John Wayne: How White Evangelicals Corrupted a Faith and Fractured a Nation (2020)

  , a primer on the politics of the Religious Right. His audience was the sixty million people Gallup had recently identified as “born-again Christians,” in addition to another sixty million “religious promoralists”—all told, his “Moral Majority.” With numbers on their side, the time had come to reclaim the country from “a vocal minority of ungodly men and women” who had brought America to “the brink of death.” However, the first pages of Listen, America! aren’t about America at all. Instead, Falwell opened with graphic details of atrocities committed by the Russia-backed “Vietnamese Communists” and the “Red China”–backed Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Such slaughter would soon be upon America, he warned, if they didn’t hold communism at bay and fight the “moral decay” destroying American freedoms. Signs of this decay abounded: “welfarism,” “income-transfer programs,” divorce, abortion, homosexuality, “secular humanism” in public schools, federally funded day care, and the Domestic Violence Prevention and Treatment Act. The Domestic Violence Act was especially insidious, for it would do away with “physical punishment as a mode of child-rearing” and “eliminate the husband as ‘head of the family.’” Another bill pending in the Senate (S. 1722) at that time would enable women to sue husbands for rape, he claimed. The Department of Health, Education, and Welfare was a particular target of conservative ire. Created in 1953, the department oversaw school integration, public-school curriculum revision, and welfare expenditures, money that conservatives felt could better be spent on national defense.16 Falwell offered solutions to the grim situation the country found itself in: free enterprise (as “clearly outlined in the Book of Proverbs”), patriotism, turning to God instead of government, and taking a firm stand against the ERA, feminism, and “the homosexual revolution.” Defending the family was the linchpin of Falwell’s ideology. God had created families for a purpose: families were central to procreation, and, properly structured around patriarchal authority, families were also God’s mechanism for controlling and “containing” the earth. But the family was in peril. Protecting the family required moral revival, but even more importantly, a revitalized military. As Falwell explained, “the most notable example of government malfeasance in its family obligations is in the area of defense.” Due to the government’s “unilateral disarmament, mutually assured destruction, and the acceptance of Soviet military superiority,” America was failing to protect its families.17 Christian citizens must rectify this situation. Lest Americans be misled by traditions of Christian pacifism, Falwell insisted that Christianity sanctioned military aggression.

• From Why We Believe: Finding Meaning in Uncertain Times

  Another option is to block out the memory of troubling events or episodes that subvert the plausibility of individual beliefs or ensembles of beliefs – such as the goodness of humanity. The ‘art of forgetting’ plays a significant role in Renaissance literature, allowing ‘those moments that threaten to destabilise – or even to shatter – identity’ to be erased from an individual’s memory, and thus cease to be a threat to a worldview that underlies existential wellbeing.20 Lewis himself bears witness to this construction of mental frontiers and imaginative barriers, as he sought to keep his traumatic memories of combat in the First World War at a safe distance. Some might see this as a ‘flight from reality’. Lewis, however, chose to see this as ‘a treaty with reality, the fixing of a frontier.’21 Lewis realised that there were limits to the ‘reality’ that he could cope with, and had to draw a dividing line between what he wanted to remember and what he needed to forget. A third option is to affirm individual human goodness, while suggesting that social forces give rise to pressures and stimuli that lead good people to do bad things. One of the most influential and thoughtful presentations of this approach is found in Reinhold Niebuhr’s classic work of moral theology Moral Man and Immoral Society (1932). Niebuhr’s prophetic essay recognises the ‘constant and seemingly irreconcilable conflict between the needs of society and the imperatives of a sensitive conscience.’22 The pure morality of the individual conscience is simply not transferable to the messy realities of collective human activity. It’s a fair point. Yet others would object that ‘society’ is an aggregate of human beings, so that the problem of human goodness has simply been displaced, not resolved. Held Captive by a Big Picture: Wittgenstein the TherapistIn famously declaring that ‘a picture held us captive’,23 making it difficult for us to liberate ourselves from its imaginative thrall, Ludwig Wittgenstein was pointing out how easily our understanding of our world can be controlled by an ‘organizing myth’24 – a worldview or metanarrative that has, whether we realise it or not, come to dominate our perception of our world, in effect predisposing us to interpret experience in certain manners as natural or self-evidentially correct, while blinding us to alternative ways of understanding it. When you are trapped in a worldview, you need a philosophical therapist who can diagnose the problem and propose a solution. And that’s why Wittgenstein is so important to our reflections. One way of making progress in philosophy, according to Wittgenstein, is to loosen and finally escape from ‘the grip of simplifying “pictures” or conceptual templates that attempt to generalise beyond their contextually specific sphere of applicability.’25

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  Hence the frequent postponement of the sacrament,441 which Tertullian very earnestly recommends, though he censures it when accompanied with moral levity and presumption.442 Many, like Constantine the Great, put it off to the bed of sickness and of death. They preferred the risk of dying unbaptized to that of forfeiting forever the baptismal grace. Death-bed baptisms were then what death-bed repentances are now. But then the question arose, how the forgiveness of sins committed after baptism could be obtained? This is the starting point of the Roman doctrine of the sacrament of penance. Tertullian443 and Cyprian444 were the first to suggest that satisfaction must be made for such sins by self-imposed penitential exercises and good works) such as prayers and almsgiving. Tertullian held seven gross sins, which he denoted mortal sins, to be unpardonable after baptism, and to be left to the uncovenanted mercies of God; but the Catholic church took a milder view, and even received back the adulterers and apostates on their public repentance. Notes In reviewing the patristic doctrine of baptism which was sanctioned by the Greek and Roman, and, with some important modifications, also by the Lutheran and Anglican churches, we should remember that during the first three centuries, and even in the age of Constantine, adult baptism was the rule, and that the actual conversion of the candidate was required as a condition before administering the sacrament (as is still the case on missionary ground). Hence in preceding catechetical instruction, the renunciation of the devil, and the profession of faith. But when the same high view is applied without qualification to infant baptism, we are confronted at once with the difficulty that infants cannot comply with this condition. They may be regenerated (this being an act of God), but they cannot be converted, i.e. they cannot repent and believe, nor do they need repentance, having not yet committed any actual transgression. Infant baptism is an act of consecration, and looks to subsequent instruction and personal conversion, as a condition to full membership of the church. Hence confirmation came in as a supplement to infant baptism. The strict Roman Catholic dogma, first clearly enunciated by St. Augustin though with reluctant heart and in the mildest form, assigns all unbaptized infants to hell on the round of Adam’s sin and the absolute necessity of baptism for salvation. A dogma horribile, but falsum. Christ, who is the truth, blessed unbaptized infants, and declared: "To such belongs again kingdom of heaven. The Augsburg Confession (Art. IX.) still teaches against the Anabaptists: quod baptismus sit necessarius ad salutem," but the leading Lutheran divines reduce the absolute necessity of baptism to a relative or ordinary necessity; and the Reformed churches, under the influence of Calvin’s teaching went further by making salvation depend upon divine election, not upon the sacrament, and now generally hold to the salvation of all infants dying in infancy. The Second Scotch Confession (A.D. 1580) was the first to declare its

• From History of the Christian Church: The Complete Set of Eight Volumes (1858)

  the disguise of a groom, wrapped in a gray cloak, wearing a gray cap, and having a crossbow tied to his saddle.305 The flight was made while the gay festivities of a tournament, instituted by Frederick, duke of Austria, were going on, and with two attendants. The pope continued his course without rest till he reached Schaffhausen. This place belonged to the duke, who was in the secret, and on whom John had conferred the office of commander of the papal troops, with a yearly grant of 6000 gulden. John’s act was an act of desperation. He wrote back to the council, giving as the reason of his flight that he had been in fear of Sigismund, and that his freedom of action had been restricted by the king.306 So great was the panic produced by the pope’s flight that the council would probably have been brought to a sudden close by a general scattering of its members, had it not been for Sigismund’s prompt action. Cardinals and envoys despatched by the king and council made haste to stop the fleeing pope, who continued on to Laufenburg, Freiburg, and Breisach. John wrote to Sigismund, expressing his regard for him, but with the same pen he was addressing communications to the University of Paris and the duke of Orleans, seeking to awaken sympathy for his cause by playing upon the national feelings of the French. He attempted to make it appear that the French delegation had been disparaged when the council proceeded to business before the arrival of the twenty-two deputies of the University. France and Italy, with two hundred prelates, had each only a single vote, while England, with only three prelates, had a vote. God, he affirmed, dealt with individuals and not with nations. He also raised the objection that married laymen had votes at the side of prelates, and John Huss had not been put on trial, though he had been condemned by the University of Paris. To the envoys who found John at Breisach, April 23, he gave his promise to return with them to Constance the next morning; but with his usual duplicity, he attempted to escape during the night, and was let down from the castle by a ladder, disguised as a peasant. He was soon seized, and ultimately handed over by Sigismund to Louis III., of the Palatinate, for safe-keeping. In the meantime the council forbade any of the delegates to leave Constance before the end of the proceedings, on pain of excommunication and the loss of dignities. Its fourth and fifth sessions, beginning April 6, 1415, mark an epoch in the history of ecclesiastical statement. The council declared that, being assembled legitimately in the Holy Spirit, it was an oecumenical council and representing the whole Church, had its authority immediately from Christ, and that to it the pope and persons of every grade owed obedience in things pertaining to the faith and to the reformation of the Church in head and members.

• From The Decameron (1353)

  Now I firmly believe this favour to have been obtained for me from God by Saint Julian, in whose honour I recite my prayer; and if on any morning I neglected to say it, I would feel I could do nothing right the whole day, and would come to some harm before the evening.’ ‘Did you say it this morning?’ said the man who had asked him the question. ‘I did indeed,’ replied Rinaldo. The man, who by this time knew what was going to happen, said to himself: ‘A fat lot of good it will do you, for I reckon you are going to have a poor night’s lodging if all goes according to plan.’ Then he turned to Rinaldo and said: ‘I too have travelled a great deal, and although I have heard many people speak highly of this Saint, I have never prayed to him myself. Nevertheless, I have always managed to find good quarters. Perhaps we shall see this evening which of us is the better lodged: you, who have said the prayer, or I, who have not said it. Mind you, I do use another one instead, either the Dirupisti or the Intemerata or the De Profundis, all of which are extremely effective, or so my old grandmother used to tell me.’ And so they went along, talking of this and that, with the three men biding their time and waiting for a suitable place to carry their villainous plan into effect. The day was drawing to a close when, at a concealed and deserted river-crossing on the far side of the fortress-town called Castel Guiglielmo, the three bandits took advantage of the lateness of the hour to launch their attack and rob him of everything he possessed, including his horse. Before leaving, they turned to him as he stood there in nothing but his shirt, and called out: ‘Now see whether the prayer you said to Saint Julian will give you as good a night’s lodging as our own saint will provide for us.’ They then crossed the river, and rode off. Rinaldo’s wretch of a servant did nothing to assist his master on seeing him attacked, but turned his horse round and galloped all the way to Castel Guiglielmo without stopping. It was already dark by the time he entered the town, so he conveniently forgot the whole business, and put up for the night at an inn. Rinaldo, bare-footed and wearing only a shirt, was at his wits’ end, for the weather was very cold, it was snowing hard the whole time, and it was getting darker every minute. Shivering all over, his teeth chattering, he began to look round for a sheltered spot where he could spend the night without freezing to death.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  The first time the poet hit me was on a Saturday night. We hadn’t been together long. We were partying at Okie Joe’s up the street. … I tried to ignore them and kept shooting the solid balls into the pockets of the pool table, just as I had ignored my father when he and his friends partied, argued, and played. I knew the routine. There was a high, and then there was a low. … He aimed a pitcher of beer at the bartender; it missed and smashed into the bar mirror with a terrible crash.

• From Crazy Brave (2012)

  It skipped us and tore up trees and cars on the next block, tossed them into the sky as if they were toys. We were uncertain what this hurricane would do. It had lost force as it traveled north. We listened to reports on the radio as to the storm’s progress and sang along with the radio to songs we knew. Suddenly a ball of fire sizzled and crackled as it flew from the roof of the kitchen through the house. It disappeared down the hall, and then it was gone. I felt a panicked doom. The sign was ominous. Then my stepfather drove up, and my mother didn’t have to remind me to hurry to my room. We would both have been in trouble if I had been up past bedtime. And he did not like us spending time together. I escaped to my room just as the front door opened. The water monster lived at the bottom of the lake. He didn’t disappear in the age of reason. He remained a mystery that never happened. In the muggy lake was the girl I was at sixteen. The story at the surface said she got there by car accident, or by drowning while drinking. Whatever it was, they’d say, it was an accident. The story was not an accident, nor was the existence of the water monster. It lived in the memory of the people as they carried the burden of the myth from Alabama to Oklahoma. Each reluctant step on the trail impressed memory into the broken heart, and no one ever forgot it. When I walked the stairway of water into the abyss, I returned as the wife of the water monster, wearing a blanket of time decorated with swatches of cloth and feathers from our favorite birds. The stories of the battle of the water monster were forever ongoing. Those stories seeped into my blood since infancy like deer gravy, so when the water monster appeared as the most handsome man in the tribe, or of any band whose visits I’d been witness to since childhood, how could I resist? The first time he appeared I carried my baby sister on my back as I went to get water. She laughed at a woodpecker flitting like a small red sun above us, and before I could deter the symbol we were in it. My body was already on fire with the explosion of womanhood as if I were flint, hot stone, and when he stepped out of the water he was the first myth I had ever seen uncovered. I surprised him in a human moment. My baby sister’s cry pinched reality. The red bird was a warning of disjuncture in the brimming sky. What I had seen there in the body beyond the water needed the words of holy recounting. I ran back to the village drenched in salt and sky.