Ultimately, Scripture does not confront fear with commands. It confronts fear with a promise.
My adult daughter called me recently. She was upset—not angry or fired up, just sad.
A close college friend had told her they could no longer be friends. Not because of anything my daughter had said or done, but because of what this friend assumed she believed about immigration and the recent events surrounding ICE. There was no conversation and no questions asked. A conclusion had been reached, a line drawn, and the relationship quietly ended.
That phone call has lingered with me. I didn’t shock me, but it did feel painfully familiar. I hear versions of this story everywhere. Families carefully avoiding certain topics. Friendships dissolving without a fight. Conversations ending before they begin. We have become remarkably efficient at labeling one another and remarkably poor at listening.
On this issue, especially, we seem unable to imagine complexity. Express concern about borders or law, and you are assumed to be cruel, fearful, or worse. Express concern for immigrants or refugees, and you are assumed to be naïve, reckless, or indifferent to order. Before a sentence can be finished, motives are assigned, accusations implied, and moral verdicts rendered. The question is no longer “What do you think?” but “Which side are you on?”
What troubles me most is not that Christians disagree about immigration. Reasonable people will disagree about policy, enforcement, and the best way forward in a broken world. What troubles me is how quickly disagreement turns into judgment—and how often fear is doing the driving.
The Results of Fear
Fear, once it takes hold, rarely produces wisdom. It produces suspicion. It narrows imagination. It makes conversation feel dangerous, and silence feel safe—until even silence is interpreted as guilt. In that climate, relationships fracture, and the possibility of charitable disagreement disappears.
This article is not an argument for a particular immigration policy, nor an attempt to untangle every question surrounding ICE, protests, or the suffering bound up in this moment. It is an attempt to step back and ask a more basic question: what is this issue doing to us, especially to Christians?
How has fear shaped the way we speak, listen, and judge one another? And what might a more faithful posture look like—one that allows for conviction and compassion without caricature or contempt?
Fear has become the emotional currency of our public life. It shows up across the spectrum: fear of disorder, fear of injustice, fear of loss, fear of being on the wrong side of history, fear of being unsafe, fear of being seen as heartless or foolish. Different fears all with the same effect.
Scripture takes fear seriously—not merely as an emotion, but as a spiritual force. God’s people are repeatedly warned not just about sinful actions, but about disordered loves. “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul,” Jesus says (Matt. 10:28). The issue is not whether fear exists, but whether it governs us.
The Idol of Fear and the Fear of the Lord
When fear takes on a governing role, it begins to function like an idol. It becomes something we look to for protection, meaning, and control. Once fear is enthroned, it does more than influence our decisions—it reshapes our identity. We begin to see the world primarily through threats rather than neighbors and dangers rather than responsibilities. Facts, Scripture, and even relationships are quietly rearranged around whatever we are most afraid of losing.
Fear-driven people tend to do a few predictable things. We simplify complex problems into moral binaries. We assign motives instead of asking questions. We assume the worst about those who disagree with us and the best about those who reinforce our anxieties. Over time, charity begins to feel reckless, and restraint starts to look like betrayal.
Scripture offers a different starting point. Before it ever addresses policy or power, it addresses posture. “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov. 9:10). Not fear of chaos. Not fear of being wrong. Not fear of losing status or safety. Fear of the Lord—a reverent trust that God is not panicked, not reactive, and not absent from history.
When fear of the Lord governs us, disagreement becomes something we can survive without dehumanizing one another. We can hold convictions without immediately reaching for accusations. We can acknowledge complexity without feeling unfaithful. We can admit uncertainty without surrendering moral seriousness.
This is where the church has a particular calling to model a different way of being human in disagreement. A way that resists fear’s demand for instant judgment. A way that refuses to collapse people into positions or friendships into talking points.
Fear always demands sacrifice. It asks us to surrender nuance and patience. Eventually, it asks us to lay relationships on the altar. My daughter’s lost friendship is not an isolated story; it is one small example of what fear is costing us.
Christians must ask not only, “What do I believe about this issue?” but also, “What is this issue doing to my heart?” Is it making me quicker to listen or quicker to label? More patient or more reactive? More anchored in trust—or more driven by dread?
The Wisdom of Slow Listening
If fear is one of the dominant forces shaping our public life, then one of the most countercultural things Christians can do right now is slow down.
Slow down our opinions.
Slow down our assumptions.
Slow down the urge to speak before we have listened, learned, or understood.
Scripture consistently commends this kind of slowness—not as passivity, but as wisdom. “Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger,” James writes, “for the anger of man does not produce the righteousness of God” (James 1:19–20).
Slowing down does not mean indifference. It does not mean silence in the face of genuine injustice. It means resisting the pressure to form an immediate opinion when the facts are incomplete and narratives are still forming. Not every problem that exists is ours to solve, and not every issue requires our instant response. Sometimes patience is not cowardice but faithfulness.
Listening, in the Biblical sense, is not waiting for our turn to talk. It is a posture of humility that assumes we may not see the whole picture. “The one who states his case first seems right,” Proverbs reminds us, “until the other comes and examines him” (Prov. 18:17).
Jesus refuses easy categories. He tells the truth without contempt and confronts sin without collapsing people into their worst moments.
This kind of listening is especially difficult when positions feel like confessions of character. Increasingly, people fear not simply being wrong, but being seen as immoral—on the wrong side of history or belonging to the wrong group. Often, this is less about faithfulness than it is about the need to be seen as faithful by the right people.
Here is where the temptation to contempt quietly enters. We stop seeing those who disagree with us as neighbors to be understood and begin treating them as problems to be dismissed. The real enemy of human relationships is not disagreement, or even hatred, but contempt. Contempt reduces people to caricatures and grants us a sense of moral superiority without requiring the harder work of love. Once it takes root, disagreement becomes something to eliminate rather than navigate. The irony is that contempt feels strong but actually reveals fragility: how little patience we have left for complexity and how dependent we have become on quick judgments to steady ourselves in an unstable world.
The gospel offers a different ground to stand on. Christians confess a Lord who does not rule by fear, who does not coerce allegiance through panic, and who is not threatened by disagreement. Jesus refuses easy categories. He tells the truth without contempt and confronts sin without collapsing people into their worst moments.
To fear the Lord is to trust that God is not overwhelmed by complexity or threatened by slow change. Faithfulness is measured not only by what we say, but by how we love, how we listen, and how we bear with one another in disagreement.
Paul’s exhortation to the church in Ephesus speaks directly to this moment: “Walk in a manner worthy of the calling to which you have been called, with all humility and gentleness, with patience, bearing with one another in love” (Eph. 4:1–2). Unity, in Paul’s vision, is not effortless. It requires virtues that fear quietly erodes.
Division, by contrast, comes easily. Scripture is clear that while truth matters, the enemy delights in fracture. He does not need uniformity; he only needs us to stop seeing one another as people made in the image of God.
That is why the stakes here are higher than immigration alone. What we practice on this issue, we rehearse for the next one. If fear teaches us to write people off quickly now, it will do so again.
My daughter’s lost friendship still grieves me—not because disagreement should never have consequences, but because it ended without curiosity, without conversation, and without love having time to work.
The invitation before us is not to decide faster or speak louder, but to become better listeners. To resist moral shortcuts. To remember that the person across from us is more than a position and more than our fears about the future.
When Promise Confronts Fear
At this point, it would be easy to turn all of this into a call to try harder—to speak better, listen longer, love more generously. But ultimately, Scripture does not confront fear with commands. It confronts fear with a promise.
“There is no fear in love,” John writes, “but perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). Not our love. Perfect love.
Fear is not defeated by willpower; it is displaced. In Christ, we are already perfectly loved—fully known, fully forgiven, fully accepted. That love does not fluctuate with headlines or political outcomes. It is settled.
When that promise is heard, and that love is trusted, fear loosens its grip. We no longer need to justify ourselves by being right or protect ourselves by condemning others. We are free to listen without panic, to disagree without contempt, and to remain in relationship without demanding resolution.
The deepest Christian response to this moment is not strategic but spiritual. “We do not wrestle against flesh and blood,” Paul reminds us, “but against the spiritual forces of evil” (Eph. 6:12).
The world will continue to reward outrage, speed, and certainty. But the church is called to a different way. Not uniformity, but unity. Not suspicion, but charity. Not fear, but love.
We will never agree on everything. That was never the goal. But we can refuse to let fear decide who we are to one another.
Not because we are especially wise or virtuous—but because in Christ we are perfectly loved, and that love vanquishes fear.
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