Christianity Today September 24, 2026 8 min signal 2026-09-24

Fear-driven churches create three kinds of Christians

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Christianity Today

September 23, 2026

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This piece was adapted from Russell Moore’s newsletter. Subscribe here.

Last week, I taught a university class on respect for the conscience. One smart young student talked to me afterward and said she sometimes had difficulty telling the difference between her conscience and the nagging voices in her head, which saw danger in almost everything, inherited from the kind of church she once attended. She put into words something I’ve seen repeatedly over the years.

Sometimes churches with identical doctrinal statements, leadership structures, and even worship styles give off very different—and hard-to-describe—vibes. And often that difference is based on the place of fear in that congregation. Fear-based systems tend to create at least three different kinds of Christians—and the future of the church depends on which you will be.

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By fear here, I don’t mean what the Scripture refers to as “the fear of the Lord,” which, of course, is the beginning of wisdom (Prov. 1:7). Our God is a consuming fire. I also don’t mean anxiety or insecurity, which can sometimes be passed down to the congregation by overly nervous leadership. I mean instead churches that actually want you to be afraid. After all, the Bible tells us fear is a very effective means of control: The Devil uses fear of death to subject people to “lifelong slavery” (Heb. 2:15, ESV throughout). The apostle Paul refers to fear alongside “the spirit of slavery,” from which the Spirit leads us away (Rom. 8:15). If a system can keep you afraid, it can keep you looking to it for safety.

But we know fear-driven systems never turn out well. The apostle John, who describes himself in his Gospel as “the disciple whom Jesus loved” (21:20), writes, “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). If what makes us holy is what Paul describes as “faith working through love” (Gal. 5:6), and if fear keeps us from love, then fear makes us less holy.

Sometimes people who grew up in the same unhealthy households respond in seemingly opposite ways, and we can find the same in people whose understanding of the gospel came through fear-based churches or systems. To look at how this can happen, think of the way Jesus speaks of the two greatest commandments: to love God and to love neighbor as self (Matt. 22:38–39). Obedience has both a vertical and a horizontal expression. Fear does too.

For some people, what’s cultivated is a kind of vertical fear. In these systems, what’s meant to scare you is a constant insecurity about whether you are really saved. The Bible, of course, warns about false, illusory faith, but these systems usually go well beyond that. In them, the default emphasis is on a Jesus who came to condemn the world rather than to save it. People sometimes start to think of God as a bloodthirsty warlord seeking appeasement rather than a Father seeking to conform them to the image of Christ.

The reason this is dangerous is that this kind of fear leads away from rather than toward the gospel. A person with vertical fear, after becoming aware of personal sin, tends to cower like Adam and Eve from the face of God. This person’s first thought, then, is not I have an advocate with the Father. Let me confess this and seek his help. Instead, it’s God must be angry at me; I should hide until I’ve made myself better.

And as we know, that kind of sanctification by willpower never works (Col. 2:21–23). In fact, it leads us into either delusion (“I have not really sinned”) or despair (“This is finally the time God gives up on me”), both of which take us away from the situation’s only resolution: “Let us then with confidence draw near to the throne of grace, that we may receive mercy and find grace to help in time of need” (Heb. 4:16).

Ultimately, that kind of fear leads people to give up. They think, But have I repented enough? or imagines there’s some number of times the Prodigal Son can stumble home before the father says, “Stay away. This time the fattened calf is for the good one.”

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For others, what’s cultivated is a kind of horizontal fear. There are a couple ways this can happen. In some places, fear’s primary focus is on the outside world. These places constantly present dark pictures of what one’s cultural or religious enemies are plotting, which can lead Christians to think that the faith itself is profoundly fragile. For some people, these pictures lead to a rejection of the faith altogether once they find that people who disagree are usually not plotting like supervillains in a lair and, in fact, rarely think of them at all.

Some scared people become really angry. Seeing what’s supposed to be our mission field through a lens of terror can cause such people to think that quarrelsomeness—the public denouncing or defeat of our “enemies”—is the measure of conviction. Of course, this kind of thinking twists the soul—but it’s really useful to leaders who can say, “If you just give me the attention or the money or the power I want, I will protect you from them.”

And some people do what seems to be the exact reverse. They try to minimize whatever aspects of the faith will alienate them from whatever group they want to appease, and they whittle those down to the nub. When either approach fails—and they always do, because there is no real utopia this side of heaven and no real dystopia this side of hell—such people become even more afraid and angry.

The gospel, then, is eclipsed. A church full of crucifiers can never demonstrate Christ and him crucified.

Maybe even more often, though, these systems cultivate fear of the inside world. We become afraid of one another. More specifically, a person is made to think that belonging in a community depends on staying in the good graces of the tribe. The fear, then, is of ostracism. That’s powerful because it gets at something primal—the kind of fear that shows up in stories such as “Hansel and Gretel,” of a child abandoned in the woods. In our day and place, fear often shows up in a requirement to repeat certain political-tribal shibboleths or else be cast out as a “not quite” Christian.

But fear of the inside world can sometimes show up in all kinds of small ways. When my children were very little, I worried about people finding out that I took them trick-or-treating in my community on Halloween. This is not because I have the slightest pang of conscience about doing so. I don’t. But I knew some people would say, “Can you believe this? The Devil’s night!”

At first, I told myself that my reluctance was about honoring the consciences of those in my tribe who objected to Halloween. After a bit of reflection, though, I realized I wasn’t honoring those who differed with me. I was afraid of them. We trick-or-treated.

In reality, both vertical and horizontal aspects of power by fear are idolatry. The prophet Jeremiah pointed to the idols of the nations that his people were tempted to adopt and said they’re “like scarecrows in a cucumber field, and they cannot speak; they have to be carried, for they cannot walk” (Jer. 10:5). His conclusion was “Do not be afraid of them, for they cannot do evil, neither is it in them to do good.”

Jeremiah knew idolatry can come through either adoration—an attempt to channel the power in these idols—or terror—allowing one’s life to be directed by the fear of what they can do.

Horizontal fear is idolatry too. John tells us many in the crowds were drawn to Jesus, “but for fear of the Pharisees they did not confess it, so that they would not be put out of the synagogue; for they loved the glory that comes from man more than the glory that comes from God” (John 12:42–43, emphasis added). A system that scares you can sometimes keep you compliant, but whatever can ultimately direct your life is your god.

But these three responses are not the only options. If they were, we would have no hope for those who have experienced fear-driven systems. Many find a different way—something like the sense of reality my student expressed. Just recognizing this kind of internalized fear-idolatry is what it takes to break it. It thrives in invisibility. When brought into the light, the darkness cannot overwhelm it. The person who says, “I’m scared and angry. Lord, deliver me,” has already turned around and is facing the way to freedom.

That doesn’t mean you’re not scared anymore. It doesn’t mean you don’t grapple with anger. But it means you hear a different voice over the voice of fear, and that voice is saying what he always does: “Be not afraid.”

Russell Moore is editor at large and columnist at Christianity Today as well as host of the weekly podcast The Russell Moore Show from CT Media.

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