Embracing Fear
Christian Re-Existence in the Trump Era
- Ethics, Culture & Social Issues
- Publisher: Cascade Books (Wipf and Stock)
- Published: 2025
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Publisher's Description
Embracing Fear contends that fear--rather than something to medicate--can fertilize Spirit-powered imagination. Around the globe, authoritarian populists weaponize dread, promising safety through sameness and political conformity: one language, one wall, one flag. This "fortress mentality" echoes Babel's terror of scattering (Gen 11), now reinforced by algorithms, mass deportations and bombing, and competitive-authoritarian laws. Acts 2 offers a rival script: dispersion and migration become Pentecost. Refusing polite optimism that postpones liberation until Easter Sunday, the book invites readers to dwell in Holy Saturday, practicing "strategic hopelessness" in occupied democracies. Grace can flip fear into a discipline that shelters immigrants during ICE raids, hosts iftar in church basements, and translates worship into the many tongues silenced at Babel. Holy terror, not manufactured panic, sends Mary to sing of toppled thrones and Isaiah to proclaim good news to the poor. To embrace such fear is to choose reexistence: a Spirit-drenched life that scatters boldly and improvises Pentecost wherever Babel erects another wall.
Endorsements (4)
“García-Johnson is a master of the intersection of decolonial theory and theology. He helps us understand our current moment of ‘Babel rebooted’ in the authoritarian populist regime of Donald Trump and calls us forward to an exciting vision of ‘re-existencia’ in the Holy Spirit and a church without borders.”
“For those of us on the frontlines of immigrant justice, Embracing Fear is both mirror and map. García-Johnson speaks with the clarity of a prophet and the heart of a fellow traveler, showing how fear can become a holy fire that fuels resistance, dignity, and liberation. He dares us to see fear not as failure, but as the birthplace of resistance, justice, and radical hope. This is a guidebook for pastors, organizers, and spiritual seekers who long for a Spirit-led path toward justice, dignity, and communal liberation in the face of empire.”
“In a world increasingly shaped by the politics of fear, populism, necropolitical regimes, and global structures of apartheid, Embracing Fear presents a theologically grounded and methodologically provocative response. Drawing on critical theological traditions, Garcia reframes fear not as a condition to be avoided but as a theological locus of agency and moral discernment. Engaging contemporary political realities—from Gaza to immigration, from landlessness to the broader global apartheid order—Oscar García-Johnson challenges readers to resist the passive internalization of fear and instead approach it as a fertile site for pneumatological imagination and prophetic praxis. Urgent and intellectually rigorous, this book contributes meaningfully to current debates in political theology, decolonial theology, and public ethics.”
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