Paul Prather

4 min read ⭑

Way back in the caveman days, our ancestors lived precariously. Life-threatening dangers lurked behind every tree — from saber-toothed tigers to hostile enemies to hidden crevasses.

One current idea in the social sciences is that, as a mechanism for survival, our brains evolved to be hyper-aware of such dangers. We developed a fight or flight response that kicks in instantly when we perceive potential threats.

Some of the ancient dangers that wired our brains into super-sensitive alarm systems are gone now. But the wiring remains. A spiritual director I know calls it our “lizard brain.” We’ve all got one. It produces what mental health workers refer to as reactive thinking.

I’ve come to believe lizard brain/reactive thinking explains much about why religion and politics — not to mention, say, family quarrels — turn irrational and toxic.

Hear your house creak in the middle of the night and your first thought is, “Burglar!” Your adrenaline kicks in. Your heart races. Your breath goes shallow. You grab a baseball bat or pry open the bedroom window to jump out.

Then you realize, “Oh, wait, that was the HVAC unit kicking on.” False alarm.

But your first reaction is to assume the worst. We’re born ready-made with a predisposition toward the negative, which motivates us with an urgency the positive rarely equals.

I think this is why religious leaders and politicians place so much emphasis on the negative, on fury and fear-mongering. They know what moves us. If they can scare us or make us angry — fear and fury are twins — they can push us wherever they want us to go.

As a minister, I’ve puzzled over this for ages. I read the New Testament, Christianity’s guiding text, and find a message full of love, grace, mercy, hope and acceptance of outsiders, with a few admonitions toward clean living and a few warnings of eternal judgment. But mainly the message is, as the apostles insisted, good news. Very, very good news.

Often I listen to preachers and hear exactly the inverse. It’s all about damnation, threats and hellfire. You’re never good enough.

This negativity isn’t directed only toward non-Christians, although it’s directed there, too; it’s directed just as much toward fellow believers. There’s an old saying that Christianity is the only army in the world that shoots its wounded.

I think reactive thinking lies at the heart of this. Christian leaders are themselves human, and so, like everyone, they’re programmed to focus on whatever scares them and makes them mad, to the near-exclusion of the grace and comfort of Jesus’ teachings.

But they also know that the best way to control parishioners is to push scary news at them. Keep them thinking they’re persecuted, that anyone who’s not part of their sect is out to get them. Tell them God’s out to get them, too, and if they’re not pious enough God may cast them into the outer darkness with the demons and infidels.

You can’t motivate people nearly so well by telling them the Lord loves them just as they are and will happily forgive whatever wrongs they’ve done. That message takes the edge off.

You find the same approach in politics, with a slightly different vocabulary.

Each side tells you the other side is evil incarnate, an existential threat. If the other side wins, America is lost — we’ll be living in a right-wing dictatorship with Donald Trump as our new Hitler, or, as the other team has it, we’ll be living in a communist gulag run by a coven of pedophiles, with Kamala Harris as our female Stalin.

Run for your lives! Take up arms! Sprint to the barricades! The world’s going up in flames!

Well, yes, this could possibly be the end. But probably it’s not.

Why do politicians carry on so shamelessly? Partly because they sometimes believe their own propaganda, I guess. But largely it’s because the threat of annihilation keeps the donations flowing and the votes coming. Scare us, make us furious, give us an enemy to fear or fight, and we’ll vote for anything.

Fortunately, we have the capacity to overcome our lizard brain.

The first step is to recognize what’s happening.

When we find ourselves reacting to some event with what feels like an outsized, knee-jerk, murderous emotion, we can say to ourselves, “Oh, wait. I’ll bet this is my lizard brain at work. I’m being reactive.”

The second step is to take a step back and recalibrate.

“Start to breathe slowly and intentionally; take a walk; give yourself a time out,” advises mental health professional Ariadne Platero in Psychology Today. “This way, we give our system the opportunity to calm down, bringing down our stress hormone levels. When we calm down, we are able to access our brain manager and the more nuanced thoughtfulness that it is capable of.”

We can, through self-awareness and self-discipline, teach ourselves not to be the dupes of our prehistoric impulses or of the opportunists who would use those impulses to manipulate us.

Paul Prather has been a rural Pentecostal pastor in Kentucky for more than 40 years. Also a journalist, he was The Lexington Herald-Leader’s staff religion writer in the 1990s, before leaving to devote his full time to the ministry. He now writes a regular column about faith and religion for the Herald-Leader, where this column first appeared. Prather’s written four books. You can email him at pratpd@yahoo.com.

This article is republished from Religion Unplugged under a Creative Commons license.

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