Tikkun Magazine, May/June 2005

Ministering to Anxiety

Take Abortion, for Example...

by Thandeka

After she heard the heartbeat, she couldn't do it. That's how Andrea Brown, an unmarried pregnant woman, explained her decision not to have an abortion. "When I had the sonogram and heard the heartbeat—and for me a heartbeat symbolizes life—after that there was no way I could do it." As for Andrea, so also for thousands of women like her, who are targets of the latest strategy by conservative church groups to stop abortions (New York Times, February 2, 2005). When these women hear the heart and see images of their fetus, they are often flooded with feelings of grief, guilt, and shame about what they were going to do. Deciding not to have an abortion is one way they can feel good about themselves again.

This anti-choice strategy works because it ratchets up anxiety to change beliefs and behavior. The key to this "anxiety-assurance" strategy, however, is not just the creation of anxiety, but the accompanying feeling of relief that washes over a person who has made the "right" choice. The loss of anxiety can seem salvific, a positive good in itself. Instead of being outraged that her choice has become a source of distress, the woman who chooses "life" is grateful for having been "saved."

The Conservative Formula

Thomas Frank gives us a vivid image of the anti-choice movement's use of this anxiety-assurance formula in his book What's the Matter with Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Hearts of America. The setting is a 1991 anti-abortion-rights rally in Wichita, Kansas. Speaking there, Pat Robertson exclaimed: "We will not rest until every baby ... is safe in his mother's womb." By the end of the rally, 25,000 people stood on their feet as a sign of moral resolve, spiritual fortitude and political resolution.

Pioneered by the anti-choice movement, the anxiety-assurance strategy has become the secret weapon of the religious Right. State-by-state, city-by-city, town-by-town, issue-by-issue, conservatives organized the moral fears of such voters into election day victories. Economic and racial integration, reproductive choice, equal protections for persons of all sexual orientations, environmental protections, even affordable housing and medical care, sustainable transportation measures, food security programs, and more may be rights issues for religious liberals, but they are (im)moral choices for religious conservatives.

The Right preyed on these voters' anxieties, focusing on their racial, sexual, and economic fears and vulnerabilities. Big-business politicians then stepped in and signed on to a winning conservative political agenda. The new science of political emotions that was born from this mix has been discussed by theorists like George E. Marcus, W. Russell Neuman, and Michael Mackuen, who conclude in their book Affective Intelligence and Political Judgment that voter anxiety actually has benefited politicians who know how to generate it and then use it to support their own political agendas.

Once we understand how the anxiety-assurance strategy works, we can see that middle-class and poorer Americans who voted a conservative ticket did not vote against their economic interests; they voted for the protection of the one thing they needed most: a feeling of security from their deepest anxieties.

Ministering Anxiety

When conservative politicians and strategists create anxious emotions to lock their vested interests in place, they don't feel hypocritical; they feel like religious and moral shepherds of broken human hearts. But the relief they give isn't salvific. It simply stops what those politicians have just created: pain. This is the key to the Right's anxiety-based ministry. The most effective politicians raise anxiety and then put themselves into a messianic or salvational role precisely in order to reassure their flock that making the "right" choice will end anxiety and bring real relief. Even if the "right-choice" policies fail, the voters' feeling of relief will remain in place.

President Bush has mastered this strategy. During his second Inaugural Address, Bush declared that the goal of his administration's policy would be to end tyranny everywhere and to bring human freedom to all, guided by God, the author of liberty. Claiming that social divisions do not define America, Bush reminded Americans of 9/11 and other national crises: "We felt the unity and fellowship of our nation when freedom came under attack, and our response came from a single hand over a single heart. And we can feel the same unity and pride whenever America acts for the good, and the victims of disaster are given hope, and the unjust encounter justice, and the captives are set free" [emphasis added].

Behind Bush's words lay his primary text, Isaiah 61:1-3: "The spirit of the Lord God is upon me, because the Lord has anointed me; he has sent me to bring good news to the oppressed, to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and release to the prisoners; to proclaim the year of the Lord's favor, and the day of vengeance of our God; to comfort all who mourn in Zion...." Bush preached the Bible to stoke feelings of crisis and to relieve those feelings through reassurance. In so doing, he essentially represented himself as the Anointed One, the world's savior, the Son of Man backed by American firepower. It was a powerful message to his supporters on the religious right.

Four days later, Bush used this winning formula again when he spoke by phone to anti-abortion demonstrators at the thirty-second annual rally against Roe v. Wade organized by the March for Life Education and Defense Fund. More than laws are needed to stop abortions, Bush said. "We need, most of all, to change hearts" (New York Times, January 25, 2005).

Though it might sound innocuous to a secular liberal, every born-again Christian present knew exactly what Bush meant when he talked about the need to change hearts. He was calling on the evangelical interpretation of Jeremiah 31:33 in which Christ is seen as the fulfillment of the Lord's promise to write a new covenant of his laws on the human heart. Bush didn't have to tell his listeners how this change of heart would occur. All Bush had to do was preach this biblical text and they felt God's Word through Christ.

Political liberals keep missing this point. We know that conservative politicians rely on a common Christian salvational and moral language to win the evangelical vote. But what we don't understand is that the secret to the Right's success isn't that they thump the Bible—the secret is the way they summon biblical references to quell the anxiety they themselves have stoked.

The Liberal Problem

When we pay attention to political conservatives' anxiety-assurance formula, we learn two things. First, anxious hearts need an immediate emotional experience of peace. Second, the American heart is caught up in the throes of anxiety. So a liberal alternative also has to start with the anxiety level already present in the American heart.

Liberals often act as if reason is enough to change hearts as well as minds. We act as if our faith and values are born whole from reason instead of informed and shaped by our own experiences as communal, relational, physical, sentient beings. Yet liberal arguments made from reason have proven singularly ineffective over the past decade in moving the American heart.

For example, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton spoke about abortion issues on the same day as Bush, January 24, and also, like President Bush, called for "common ground." Clinton's elegantly argued speech included an extraordinary array of statistics, evidence, logic, references to co-sponsored legislative initiatives, and personal action. The Senator told her audience about women as a class. But she didn't tell individual women's stories of endangerment, grief, and loss. She may have reassured liberal political activists, but she didn't touch those Americans whose anxieties over this issue go much deeper.

Liberals and the so-called Left labor under a deep misunderstanding about our country, most recently expressed by Garry Wills in his post-election essay, "The Day the Enlightenment Went Out" (November 4, 2004, New York Times). Wills asks, "Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation?" and his answer, of course, is a resounding "No." He argues that "America, the first real democracy in history, was a product of Enlightenment values—critical intelligence, tolerance, respect for evidence, a regard for the secular sciences. Though the founders differed on many things, they shared these values of what was then modernity." But Wills's history is wrong. His list of Enlightenment values doesn't mention religion.

Daniel E. Ritchie, director of the humanities program at Bethel University, pointed out this oversight in his letter to the editor (New York Times, November 9, 2004). The actual American Enlightenment, Ritchie argues, "was neither antireligious nor anticlerical." For the founders, political liberty and religious practice were inseparable.

After correcting Wills's record, Ritchie offers liberals advice from the heart—"the heart of an evangelical university with a strongly pro-Bush student body." Liberals need to take religion to heart. In Ritchie's words: "America's elites must ... come to understand American religion, past and present, more deeply. Until they do, they will continue to create the polarization they lament."

Heart to Heart

To begin such work, we must reclaim our religious heritage. There is no reason for liberals to give up on the Bible and the heart-language it can speak. Biblical stories that inspire us are about God and people working together. We know God is always in our midst, in "the sphere of the between," as Martin Buber calls it, the space between I and Thou. This place is not a place of reason, it's a place of feeling. It's the place where heart-to-heart work begins as a spiritual practice.

Instead of using the salvific model of the Christian evangelical Right to address the anxiety simmering in America, liberals can instead draw upon the "sphere of the between" by creating beloved communities. These communities are formed by small groups of people who always begin their spiritual work together with talk from the heart, sharing their personal stories, discussing mutually chosen texts and topics. By so doing, these groups generate communal feelings that are linked to spiritual practices and sacred texts that inspire them and sustain them as they work together on community projects as a spiritual practice.

Two stories show us why this kind of heart-work in a beloved community is where human salvation begins.

A New York Times article on January 15, 2004, described a group therapy program for HIV-positive people and AIDS victims in a remote area of Uganda. In these groups, the depression, sadness, and despair of these persons began to recede. Why? As one member put it: "This group didn't take the virus out of my body ... I still fall sick. I am still weak. But at least now I'm living." Or as another group member put it, "The group told me my life was worth something." She no longer tosses and turns at night, but sleeps peacefully.

The reporter gives us the key concept: the creation of a beloved community. "The therapy sessions drew participants together so effectively that many have continued meeting [after the outsiders left]. Some have also used their counseling groups to start business ventures together." These groups were no longer "therapy groups"—they were spiritual renewal groups. They renewed the hearts and thus the lives of the participants and their communities.

The second story. I often talk to congregations and other organizations about starting small groups in which members share personal stories. I have particularly fond memories of one such event. After talking with one New England congregation, I asked those present if they might be willing to meet together in small groups over a meal and talk about their emotional needs.

One of the most respected elders of the congregation stood up and slowly walked to the front of the assembly. He had wanted something like this for years, he told his fellow congregants, because he was lonely. "I do not have any friends," he finally confessed. Waves of shock rolled through the gathering. How could he be lonely? He was a revered and beloved member of the church.

When the group quieted down, the man spoke again, saying, "Every man in this room who is my age knows what I am talking about. Our social upbringing has taught us not to talk about our feelings. We are not supposed to be emotionally vulnerable or close to anyone except our wives."

People rose to their feet and lined up to form these new groups. Why? Heart-to-heart talk and work lowers anxiety without first raising it. Instead, the gathered community's awareness of its own collective concerns expanded and this new space gave anxious hearts the breath of life they needed for rest, repose, and renewal through shared feelings and collective action.

Evangelical Christians organize small groups and create mega-churches consisting of hundreds and hundreds of these small communities. Liberals, moderates, and the so-called Left must do the same. Our communities, however, will be religiously diverse. They will not be based on doctrinal unanimity. They will affirm persons rather than ideas. They will be a place for talking heart to heart.

We cannot ignore the anxiety-assurance strategy of the Right. While we must continue to probe and uncover the rhetoric the Right uses to raise anxiety, we cannot dismiss such anxiety with rational explanations. We, too, must speak to it. We, too, must use sacred texts. But with one difference: we won't raise anxiety to lower it. We will lower the anxiety already present in the American heart through heart-to-heart work that links immediate personal feelings of emotional and spiritual relief to public policies that actually provide Americans with structural support for a better life on earth through decent schools, jobs, and medical and other social benefits. Whether we're secular or religious, we will only speak effectively to America again when we speak from the heart.

This summer, the Tikkun community is sponsoring a conference for Spiritual Activists. One goal of this conference is to launch a national campaign to create thousands of beloved communities within synagogues, churches, temples, community centers, businesses, and among friends as well as strangers looking for a place to create the experience of ongoing, self-sustaining, beloved community for spiritual renewal. Join us!

For more information, visit www.tikkun.org or call 510-528-6250.

Thandeka is a Unitarian Universalist minister, a professor at Meadville Lombard Theological School, the president of the Center for Community Values (www.the-ccv.org), and the author of Learning to Be White: Race, Money and God in America.

Source Citation

Thandeka. 2005. Ministering to Anxiety: Take Abortion, for Example... Tikkun 20(3):19.