In an age of migration, anxiety, and political polarization, fear has become one of the primary forces shaping public life. How should Christians understand and respond to it?
One of the questions that led me to write Embracing Fear: Christian Reexistence in the Trump Era was deceptively simple: What happens when fear becomes more than a personal emotion and begins to function as a social force?
When Fear Organizes Public Imagination
For many people in metropolitan settings, fear feels intensely private. We fear losing a job, receiving a diagnosis, watching our children struggle, or facing an uncertain future. Yet as I reflected on the political and spiritual climate of our time, I became convinced that fear was doing more than shaping individual lives. Fear was becoming one of the primary ways societies organized belonging, identity, and public life.
Nowhere is that reality more visible than in contemporary conversations about migration.
Turn on the news, scroll through social media, or listen to political speeches, and you will quickly encounter a familiar vocabulary: invasion, crisis, threat, security, control. Immigration debates often appear to revolve around economics, law enforcement, or national sovereignty. Yet beneath these discussions lies something deeper. Migration has become one of the primary stages upon which societies dramatize their anxieties about change, identity, and the future.
This is why migration debates often exceed the facts. Fear is rarely satisfied by facts alone. Fear organizes imagination. Across authoritarian contexts, political leaders weaponize dread, promising salvation through the erasure of difference and demanding political conformity.
The question Christians must ask, therefore, is not simply whether migration is beneficial or harmful, legal or illegal, orderly or disorderly. The deeper question is this: What kind of fear is shaping us?
In Embracing Fear, I describe fear as one of the dominant spiritual realities of our age. While fear often appears as an individual experience, it increasingly functions as a collective force that shapes institutions, public discourse, and political imagination. Understanding fear in this broader sense helps us see why migration has become such a powerful site of cultural and theological conflict.
Babel’s Promise of Imperial Safety
Scripture offers a surprisingly relevant lens through which to understand this dynamic.
The story of Babel is often interpreted as a warning against pride. While pride is certainly present, another motivation drives the story. The migrants who became settlers declare: “Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower… lest we be scattered over the face of the whole earth” (Gen. 11:4).
At the heart of Babel is not merely arrogance. It is fear.
Migration becomes a memory to be repressed, and dispersion a future to be feared. Once the illusion of possessing a place is embraced, the fear of difference and displacement begins to build walls of exclusion. People fear the ambiguity of conviviality. They fear a shared future they cannot control.
In response, they attempt to create permanence through uniformity: one language, one project, one identity, one center of power.
Babel is humanity’s attempt to overcome fear through control.
Empire often works the same way. Indeed, Babel provides a scriptural lens through which to understand the logic of empire.
Empires promise security in exchange for conformity. They offer belonging in exchange for obedience. They reassure us that if we support the right leaders, identify the right enemies, build the right walls, and eliminate the right threats, then we can finally be safe.
The problem is that fear never stays satisfied. It always requires new boundaries and new outsiders.
The Mañana Fear cannot Control
Throughout history, migrants have frequently become the targets of fear-driven politics. This is not because migrants inherently threaten a society. Rather, migrants expose a society’s deepest questions: Who belongs? Who does not? Who gets to decide? What future are we trying to protect? For whom are designing worlds?
When societies become anxious, migrants often become symbols onto which those anxieties are projected. Sociopolitical phobias can function as anti-migrant vaccines, inoculating communities against encounters with difference. Aporophobia (the fear of the poor), xenophobia (the fear of foreigners), and rootlessness anxiety (the fear of losing belonging, identity, and place) become powerful forces shaping public imagination.
The migrant becomes the outsider.
The refugee becomes the threat.
The stranger becomes the explanation.
In reality, many migrants are fleeing the very forms of violence, instability, and fear that others imagine them to represent. Yet fear rarely operates through careful discernment. Fear simplifies. Fear categorizes. Fear divides.
And when fear becomes normalized, exclusion can begin to feel righteous!
The Christian tradition does not call believers to become fearless; it calls us to become resurrection (mañana) people. Scripture assumes that fear is part of the human condition. Again and again, God’s people encounter uncertainty, vulnerability, and displacement.
Abraham leaves home without knowing his destination (Gen. 12:1–4).
Israel wanders in the wilderness (Exod. 16–17; Num. 14).
The Holy Family becomes refugees in Egypt (Matt. 2:13–15).
The early church spreads across borders, cultures, and languages (Acts 2:1–12; 8:1–4; 11:19–26).
The biblical story is filled with movement because God’s future is rarely found in places of absolute security.
The question, then, is not whether we will fear.
The question is what we will do with fear.
Will fear become our teacher or our master?
Will fear lead us toward deeper dependence upon God, or greater dependence upon empire?
Will fear expand our compassion, or shrink our imagination?
These questions are especially urgent in our present moment. Families fear separation. Migrants fear deportation. Communities fear change. Nations fear decline. Churches fear irrelevance.
The Christian response is not to deny these fears or pretend they do not exist. Discipleship begins when we learn to name fear honestly and discern its power over our lives.
That question stands at the heart of Embracing Fear. It is also one of the defining questions facing the church in an age of migration.
Because fear is never merely about what we feel.
Fear shapes what we imagine, whom we trust, and what future we believe is possible.
The question is not whether we are afraid.
The question is whether fear will become our master.
But that is not an option for Christian disciples. We are called to become Mañana people—here and now, in the belly of empire.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Oscar García-Johnson is Professor of Theology and Decolonial Studies at Fuller Theological Seminary, an ordained minister in the American Baptist Churches USA, and an activist-scholar with La Fuente Ministries. He is the author of Decolonial Love in Times of Hatred, Embracing Fear: Christian Reexistence in the Trump Era, and Introducción a la Teología del Nuevo Mundo.About This Series
This article is the first installment in a four-part series based on themes explored in Embracing Fear: Christian Reexistence in the Trump Era. Throughout Hispanic Heritage Month, the series reflects on fear, migration, belonging, public witness, and Christian hope in anxious times.
Next: Authoritarian Belonging as Refuge: Why People Turn Toward Strongmen in Anxious Times.
The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the individual authors and do not necessarily reflect the official position of the Center for Public Theology & Migration. This platform exists to foster thoughtful theological reflection, dialogue, and public engagement on issues related to (im)migration.
