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Is Our Faith Rooted in “Fear”?

Is Our Faith Rooted in “Fear”?

Last updated on: August 13, 2025 at 6:15 pm by Dan Peterson

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Is Our Faith Rooted in “Fear”? 2025-08-13T18:15:44-06:00 Dan Peterson

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“The First Vision” (Minerva Teichert, 1934; Brigham Young University Museum of Art)

I just came across the claim online, from an obviously very angry former Latter-day Saint, that people like me obey the leaders of the Church blindly, out of fear, and that we strive to obey God, likewise, out of fear.

Now, I know nothing about this guy’s psychology or his personal history. But I can speak with considerable authority about my own mental state and my own autobiography, and I can say quite confidently that I don’t follow my leaders “blindly.” I know what I’m doing. I’ve made conscious and deliberate choices. Nor do I “fear” the Brethren. I respect them. I honor them. Frankly, I hold them in great affection. (I know and have known several of them fairly well.) And I try to put their teachings into practice.

Nor do I “fear” God. Yes, yes, I know that the King James Bible and subsequent Christian writers use expressions such as “God-fearing” and “the fear of God.” And I have no problem with such expressions. I believe that they refer to holding God in awe, venerating God, worshiping God, feeling deep humility before God, submitting to God and to his will, loving him. I do not believe that such phrases indicate an obligation to quake in perpetual debilitating terror before the Lord. The God whom I worship is a loving Father. He is “God our Saviour, who will have all men to be saved, and to come unto the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:3-4). He is dramatically and wonderfully different from the God described in Jonathan Edwards’s famous 1741 sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”:

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times so abominable in his eyes as the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince: and yet ’tis nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment: ‘Tis to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you was suffer’d to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep: and there is no other reason to be given why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God’s hand has held you up: There is no other reason to be given why you han’t gone to hell since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship: Yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you don’t this very moment drop down into hell.

O sinner! Consider the fearful danger you are in: ‘Tis a great furnace of wrath, a wide and bottomless pit, full of the fire of wrath, that you are held over in the hand of that God, whose wrath is provoked and incensed as much against you as against many of the damned in hell: You hang by a slender thread, with the flames of divine wrath flashing about it, and ready every moment to singe it, and burn it asunder; and you have no interest in any mediator, and nothing to lay hold of to save yourself, nothing to keep off the flames of wrath, nothing of your own, nothing that you ever have done, nothing that you can do, to induce God to spare you one moment.

We aren’t “loathsome insects” in the sight of our Father. We aren’t mere “spiders.” All of us are his “offspring” (Acts 17:28) — or, as several translations render the relevant Greek word of Acts 17:28, γένος, we are his “children.” And “God so loved the world,” he wants so passionately for us to be saved, that “he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life” (John 3:16). He weeps when we fail. (See Moses 7.) He wants to give us everything he has, and to make us everything that he is.

I’m not terrified of the God disclosed to us in the teachings of the Restoration. Why on earth would I be?

Are we Latter-day Saints missing out? (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

This is interesting: “Alcohol consumption in U.S. hits new low amid health concerns: Old advice that alcohol might have some health benefits has been largely debunked.” In fact, it’s tempting to think of it as a discovery from the Christopher Hitchens Memorial “How Religion Poisons Everything” File™.

“At the Tomb of Omar Khayyám,” by Jay Hambridge, ca. 1911 (Wikimedia Commons public domain image). Khayyám had a great deal to say about wine, by the way. But should we take him literally on the subject?

Speaking of which: Finally, just so nobody out there gets to feeling too complacently comfortable, I offer a septet of chilling examples that I’ve actually drawn from the Hitchens File™:

Sadly, as distressing as such reports incontestably are, there’s really nothing that we can do about these horrors. As Edward FitzGerald memorably put it in his justly celebrated English re-creation of the early-twelfth-century Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám,

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.

And that inverted Bowl they call the Sky,
Whereunder crawling coop’d we live and die,
Lift not your hands to It for help–for It
As impotently moves as you or I.

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