The Sin of Fear

For a two-week stretch last summer, Aubrey and our thirteen-year-old daughter were in Costa Rica on a trip with our daughter’s science teacher. This was a highly-anticipated journey, and they’d gamely taken along an AirTag so I could follow their adventures from afar and make sure that they stayed reasonably close to the predetermined path.

While the first stretch of their absence had passed swimmingly and I’d received an occasional “we have service!” text, or a picture, those little notes stopped suddenly a few days in. I checked in on the AirTag and got the response any Apple user with a bit of anxiety wants to avoid: “No Location Found.” I worried a little and tucked it away.

Those of us that remained at home spent that evening out and about together, having fun as we said goodbye to our eleven-year-old son for a few days; he was leaving the next morning on our ward’s summer Trek. The youth were heading to Martin’s Cove for a twenty-mile hike through the desert, with a near-record heat wave predicted in the area they’d be traveling. 

He was excited, but as Trek had gotten closer and I contemplated him actually going, he started to seem, suddenly, smaller and younger. At church, he looked a foot shorter than the other boys passing the sacrament. He was barely old enough to go and had never been away for an extended period on his own before.

After the kids went to bed the night before he was going to leave, I got stuck in my head. I ruminated on the potential disasters that might have happened in the jungles of Costa Rica or that could happen in the Wyoming desert, as half of my family slipped so many miles out of my grasp. My heart beat fast and my stomach clenched tight. I scribbled a semicoherent note in my journal:

My anxiety, as I write this, is sky high. Aubrey is in Costa Rica with [thirteen-year-old daughter]. I can't get a signal on her AirTag. [Eleven-year-old son] is leaving for Trek tomorrow. We just had a wonderful evening—we played football, he danced around with his sisters, doing his signature "airplane" move. More wonderful than we've had in a while. The joy was foreboding. Then, the sunset. A beautiful sunset. A peaceful sign, perhaps of the worst to come? A comfort in advance of a devastating tragedy?

I tried to reassure myself that everything would probably be just fine, but my worries felt like a full-body warning, like “the Spirit” was telling me to shut it all down, to pull back into our cocoon of safety. I seriously considered keeping my son home. What if I ignored this feeling, in the name of conquering my anxiety—and then something really did happen?

As irrational and off-base as my thoughts seem now when I simply read them off the page, it seems that I’m not alone in the occasional disproportionate worry—particularly among young people, anxiety is at or near all-time highs in the United States and elsewhere. And we Latter-day Saints often take it a step further, giving ourselves a theological justification for our distress: the questionable doctrine of the spiritual warning.

Though we’re very comfortable referring to the Holy Ghost as a comforter, it seems that in practical terms, we just as often describe the Spirit as a “warner.” Some of my most vivid memories of stories told over the pulpit are those in which the Holy Ghost told someone that something really bad was going to happen, usually followed by a miraculous escape.

I don’t want to cast doubt on the idea that the Spirit can warn. But I think I took the wrong message from these stories. What I took away was that the Spirit warns us through fear—in direct contrast to what we read in 2 Timothy 1:7:

For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.

We can acknowledge the reality of spiritual warnings—but from a Spirit that would do so through power, through love, through a sound mind—not through fear. Not through the stomach-churning, sweaty-palmed anxiety that keeps us awake at night. 

Looking back, of all of the pending disaster “warnings” I’ve thought I received, never—not once—has one come to pass. And I’ve received a lot. In the meantime, it’s caused a whole lot of unproductive anguish, a lot of missed sleep and even missed experiences. 

I think that’s a sin. Not in the sense that I’ve broken a particular law, or that I need to feel guilty, or beat myself up, or take a series of steps to regain God’s favor. But in the sense that, certainly, a loving God must mourn to see us deprive ourselves of experiences that would stretch us, or bring us joy, or move us to tears. After all, the Greek word most commonly translated as sin in the New Testament is hamartia (ἁμαρτία): literally, missing the mark. 

And so it seems to me that as easily as “sin” can be a trespass, it can be cosmic missing-out, a step in the wrong direction, away from our goal and our potential to live in eternal love and adventure. And by this metric, fear may become every bit as sinful as anything else in our usual list. Perhaps this is why Richard Rohr has advocated for fear to be added, along with deceit, to the list of the seven deadly sins.

But perhaps to an even greater extent than with other sins—fighting off the sin of fear is easier said than done. My body—my natural man—has gone through an evolutionary process that places a couple things as top priorities: procreation and the survival of my offspring. Accordingly, I have a hyperactive danger detector pumping me full of adrenaline and cortisol at the slightest hint of bodily harm to me or my loved ones. In small and moderated doses, or in the face of real, present danger, these can be good, of course! As a therapist friend told me, no emotions are bad in and of themselves—especially when they remain in their intended, helpful domains; our built-in danger detectors should probably keep us away from cliff sides on gusty days or from weaving through traffic on the freeway at high speeds.

And at the same time, I have to face what’s true for me and was truer for me that evening before Trek than it ever had been: my body was urging me into the sin of fear—a reactionary state where I’d refuse to allow any of us to do anything that could possibly hurt us.

In this sense, my “natural man” truly can be an enemy to God: by living, all too often, in the sin of fear. But my body is also my vehicle to get to life’s richest experiences. Without my body, I could never have the relationality that leads to the fear of losing it; without my body, I can’t arrive at the adventures and misadventures that stretch and grow me. It’s clear that to repent from the sin of fear isn’t to retreat from the body. So what might it look like?

And here, ancient wisdom and modern science beautifully align. The corresponding virtue to fear, of course, is courage—what might be modestly defined as an intentional facing of that which we fear in spite of the fear it causes. Nelson Mandela said that he “learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it.” And this is exactly what modern therapeutic techniques call for in the face of anxiety.

In the 1950s, a new form of behavioral therapy called “systematic desensitization” was developed by psychiatrist Joseph Wolpe. In time, systematic desensitization evolved into what’s called exposure therapy, which is widely used today to treat clinical anxiety disorders. 

The idea behind exposure therapy is simple: when something triggers our anxiety, we often begin avoiding the thing that triggers it to avoid the anxiety itself (for example, keeping one’s son home from Trek). But this intuitive reaction gives more power to the thing we fear and can increase the anxiety the next time around. Exposure therapy very gradually exposes sufferers to their anxieties (a fear of spiders, for example, might call for a gradual increase in exposure to the idea of spiders—it could start with something as simple as a picture). As anxiety falls, the level of exposure increases, bringing anxiety up again while remaining manageable, until the person suffering the anxiety is able to fully face the thing they feared and successfully manage the corresponding anxiety.

While exposure therapy is used in clinical settings for debilitating anxiety and related disorders like OCD, its basic principles can also be used to great effect in our everyday lives. We don’t need to be in a therapist’s office to practice them: when our anxiety rises, when we’re afraid—what courage and proven therapeutic practice both call for is noticing our reactive retreat from fear, engaging it, gaining some “observational distance,” and maybe even moving further into it at a measured and even pace. 

As with everything, this idea can be taken too far—it’s possible to begin to fear our fear. What I’m hoping is that we can healthily engage and overcome the sin of fear: the kind of fear that stunts the spiritual growth we would gain through experience. The call to courage (root word cor, the Latin for heart) is not a call to charge into battle, replacing one amped-up emotion with another; it can be as simple as getting out of our amygdalas and into our hearts: vulnerably sharing our burden with a friend, sitting in the quietness of contemplation, or finding, as Peter Enns has said, a “deep trust” in God and moving forward in uncertainty. 

For me, last summer, that meant letting Aubrey and my daughter “be lost” in Costa Rica and sending my son to Trek. I took him to the departing vans early the next morning, and off he went. When my thoughts of Costa Rica turned anxious, I didn’t start calling backup numbers or trying to get in touch through other members of the group. I sat with that fear. And it turns out, that day was OK. And so was the next one. 

A week later—as I’m sure you guessed—everybody got back just fine, happy and healthy with lots of stories to tell. There were frog sightings and river splashings and jellyfish encounters and hot sauce discoveries. There were new experiences. There was learning and growth and joy.

I believe in spiritual promptings—even the kind that can prevent bad things from happening. But I no longer believe in the kind of prompting that makes us afraid. While I’d never attempt to proclaim what God can or can’t do, the scriptures suggest we can believe in a Spirit that moves us to act, that inspires us to greater compassion, that makes our thoughts clear and lucid and productive. For God hath not given us the spirit of fear; but of power, and of love, and of a sound mind.

Maybe the reason God doesn’t give us the spirit of fear is because God can’t encourage us to sin. It seems God moves only forward—urging us to stretch and expand and grow through experience. When we find ourselves fearful and responding to that fear by covering up, or missing out, or holding ourselves or others back from that experience—it might be nothing more than our “natural man.” Often, it’s our body doing its best to protect us—and we can be grateful for that. But we’re capable of much more; and when we repent from the sin of fear, we can move joyfully into the wild and wonderful adventures that God has in store for us.

Tim Chaves is a podcast host, a board member at Faith Matters, and a tech entrepreneur.

Art by Brian T. Kershisnik.