Fear and Love

Warning: Plot spoiler ahead, in paragraph 3.

The Village, a 2004 film by M. Night Shyamalan is one of my favorite films. A lot of people don’t like it because the twist was predictable, far-fetched, and perhaps a bit cheesy. But I loved that it made me think. (I tend to like movies like that, no matter how predictable the twists might be.)

For those of you who haven’t seen the film, but want to, you can skip the next paragraph. It will spoil the movie for you. Keep reading after the next paragraph. But for those who haven’t seen the film and probably won’t see it, here’s some background to the point of the film and why I like it so much.

<<<Plot Spoiler>>> Most of The Village follows the lives of a few young people who live in a quaint village set in nineteenth century America. The only trouble with this village is that it’s surrounded by woods, where mysterious, man-eating creatures live. As long as the inhabitants of the village throw sacrifices of animal meat into the woods on occasion, wear the color yellow as “the safe color” that the creatures don’t like, and hide all traces of red, the color the creatures are attracted to, the creatures stay in the woods and leave the village alone. Toward the end of the film, one of the young people becomes very ill. He will die if he doesn’t get proper medicine. The elders of the village tell his fiancée, a blind girl, that she must go into the woods to the nearby town and get the medicine for him. Before they send her into the woods, her father lets her in on a secret. There are no creatures in the woods. The elders have been lying to the rest of the village; they were pretending to be the creatures themselves. Every time a sacrifice was thrown into the woods, an elder was responsible for removing it later. When the village inhabitants needed a more vivid reminder of the dangerous creatures, an elder would dress up as a creature and come into the village to scare anyone who wasn’t quick enough to find shelter. The fiancée goes through the woods to the nearby “town,” where the audience discovers that the setting is actually contemporary 20th century America. Since the girl is blind, she never discovers the full truth, that not only were the elders of the village lying about the creatures, but they were also lying about the time they were living in. The movie then reveals that the elders decided to create a false world for the young people in their village because they had each experienced tragic losses through crime in the “outside” world. They wanted to create a utopia of the “good old days,” and the only way to maintain that utopia was to use fear and deception.

Now, we get to the part where I stop spoiling the plot and tell you what fascinates me about this movie. It’s the question of how we get people to be obedient. I’m not a parent yet, but I have had a lot of experiences with children (and most recently, with my dog) that make this question relevant. Is it ever justifiable to use fear to inspire obedience?

The Bible says that perfect love casts out fear (1 John 4:18). Jesus says that if we love Him, we’ll obey Him (John 14). It seems that obedience should be inspired by love, not by fear.

And yet, in our world, we so often act like the elders in The Village, assuming that our children (or pets) need a healthy dose of fear to ensure their obedience.

In an ideal world, children would listen. They would take us at our word.

In an ideal world, we would listen to our heavenly Father. We would take Him at His word.

But in our fallen world, sometimes fear seems to help inspire obedience even more than love. Some examples:

I love my country. I am grateful for the authority figures put in place to keep this country safe. But when I’m driving, it is not my love of country that causes me to drive the speed limit. It’s my fear of getting caught and having to pay a heavy fine.

The kids I baby-sit for love their parents. But when they decide to behave, it is usually not because they want to express that love; it’s because they’re afraid of being punished if they don’t listen. It’s because they’re afraid of not receiving a reward for good behavior if they decide to misbehave.

When my dog is getting ready to run into the street, she won’t turn around and come to me if I call her with a loving tone. But when my tone rises sharply, and she knows I’m displeased with her, she immediately stops what she’s doing and slinks to me apologetically.

When I first became a Christian, a few of my behavior changes were rooted in genuine transformation through the Holy Spirit, inspired simply by love for God. But I remember many times when I wanted to do something that I knew was wrong (for example, using bad language), and I would have done it, except that I was with other people who weren’t Christians. And I knew that if my words and actions weren’t reflecting Christ, my unsaved friends would notice. It was my fear for their souls, more so than my love for God or even fear for my own soul, that motivated me to be obedient.

So in our fallen world, do we accept fear as a tactic for inspiring obedience? Do you think God ever uses or allows fear to motivate us when our love for Him is immature?

What about your children or pets? Do you expect them to listen to you just because they love you? Or do you give them fearful consequences to motivate them to listen? In short, do you find that honey or vinegar works best to inspire obedience? Or are there different seasons when one works better than the other?

P.S. If you haven’t noticed, each week we’re adding music to our blog playlist (located on the right side of every page of our blog) that fits with the week’s theme. This week, I was even able to find an old Adventures in Odyssey episode on our theme of obedience. Hope you enjoy!