The fear of the faceless can be cast out by the start of a relationship

“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” If this is indeed true, it suggests that perfect love is in short supply, for fear abounds.

Fear abounds even in - perhaps especially in - the places in the world where people enjoy the greatest prosperity. The ones who apparently have the most to lose fear the most. And often our fears arise out of quite legitimate concerns. The things we value - our culture, our security, our very lives - can be lost.

Even compassionate people throughout Europe might fear the influx of refugees, fearful of how it affects - and disaffects - their communities, fearful of the potential for yet more terror. Clearly there is risk involved, but it us unclear to many if it’s a risk worth taking.

In my own country, the USA, much of the population has spent the past eight years fearing our outgoing President, and now an even greater number of people fear our incoming President. It is our habit for one segment of the population to always fear and loathe the President - and the people who put him in office. We fear our society drifting away from some ideal past or, alternatively, abandoning the course for some ideal future.

Fear is a visceral, unreflective - and therefore - powerful emotion ; it can easily subsume all other considerations. Fear is always an ultimately destructive, divisive force. Nothing worth accomplishing will ever be achieved by giving reign to fear.

So we need perfect to love to drive out fear - a statement might sounds naive, if not foolish. This kind of hopeless idealism has been discredited, replaced by sober pragmatism, even atavism. But I want to insist that the quaint notion of love has a practical, essential place in our politics, love in the sense of “love your neighbor as yourself”. This is not love in the abstract, love at a distance, but a love that implies a relationship, a common life, a shared flourishing. It commands us to love the one we know. In fact, it may be that we can only love the ones we know.

And this points us toward a way forward and away from despair : we need to actually get to know people. It is much easier to fear an abstraction, much easier to love the concrete. We live in a globalized world in which it is nevertheless increasingly easy to self-segregate ourselves. We tend to only have neighbors of our own choosing and so we need only love the ones like us.

In the USA it is remarkable the extent to which people who identify with one political party do not - and indeed do not want to - have any interaction with people of the other party. A simple conversation between two people would be helpful.

If we get to know actual refugees, in most cases we will discover our shared humanity. The fear of the faceless can be cast out by the start of a relationship, by regarding another person first as a person, not as a threat.

Getting to know the ones we fear does not, of course, magically make conflict disappear, and some relationship will only confirm our fears. Real problems persist, for - hopefully - our neighbors will always be different than us. But it remains true that one conversation can lead to a relationship that changes our perspective, changes our hearts and minds, and even produces a love which can cast out fear. And the world could use more of that.

Logan Dunn is Pastor associate, All Nations Church