I read this book because I want to consult local church congregations on increasing their situational awareness and force protection. There are many congregations with growing children’s ministries that meet in public places such as movie theaters, storefront shop spaces, in nightclubs, and even on the beach. Churches have become targets of opportunities for violence and hate crimes. How will the church respond?
The Church’s Need for Force Protection
Perhaps reading a classic book on human violence and signs of predators will help congregations anticipate or spot pre-incident indicators and mitigate potential risks. I volunteer to be a “rover” at our former church that met in a movie theater. The building was obviously open to the public. A disheveled man with a beard and dirty clothes walked in with a guitar. My intuition had me follow him. He was headed to the children’s class. I asked him if he was looking for the main auditorium/sermon. He walked past me towards the children class and I raised my voice and got in front of him. My father instinct was kicking in as well as my wrestling background. I was ready to pounce anyone who was going to hurt our children and I would lay down my life for the women and children in that room. But I was also sure that wasn’t necessary. I was going to come out on top.
The church needs a force protection team that has situational awareness and informal/formal training with regards to security. The level of security should be adequate to the context; open/public spaces should have increased security whereas private buildings with one entrance may not need as much manpower/rovers.
Reading a book like The Gift of Fear may serve as a wake-up call to the reality of brokenness in mankind. This is not a nice world, per se. It is full of people who are in need of the Savior. In some cases, it may mean that we encounter hurt people who want to hurt people. And it is our job, as ambassadors for God and servants to protect those who cannot fend for themselves. We should always preach the message of defending the weak and opposing all that is evil and offensive in God’s sight.
Reflection
The book begins with a nail-biting story of a twenty-seven-year-old woman named Kelly who was minding her own business carrying her groceries home. A “friendly-looking young guy came bounding up the steps” and offered her a hand after one of her bags broke. There were a few awkward moments between her apprehension towards him and his persistence to help get food to her hungry cat. As they approached her apartment door, she said, “I’ll take it from here” and he responded with “I’ll just put this stuff down and go. I promise.” Those were his last words to Kelly before he raped her for the next three hours.
This kind of stuff stirs up the kind of anger that only a husband and a father of daughters can understand. The reality is Kelly is God’s daughter and my heart only breaks for what breaks his. God created us in his image and anything less than godliness is not what we were created for. As someone once told me, we live in a jacked up world with jacked up people and jacked up situations.
De Becker uses Kelly’s story to prove his point; namely, that “one small survival signal saved her life.”[2] That small survival skill was Kelly’s intuition to get up off the bed when her rapist told her to stay put, follow him down the hallway, and make a b-line for the door into a neighbors apartment when he went into the kitchen to “get a drink.” Later she learned that he had killed a previous victim by stabbing. The point in the story was her fear (i.e. acting on it in fight mode) saved her life.
The Gift of Fear was a perspective-shifter for me. De Becker cites the Oklahoma City bombing incident to point out that nineteen children died in that blast. That makes the incident even more horrific. But the gut-wrenching point was that “seventy children died that same week at the hands of a parent, just like every week - and most of them were under five years old.” [3] He then goes on to say that “four million luckier children were physically abused last year, and it was not an unusual year.”[4]
Critique
There is a saying that I have heard many times. It goes like this, “Don’t be so heavenly minded that you are of no earthly good.” That could not be further from the truth. Jesus and the Apostle Paul would tell us all to set our mind on things above, store up treasures above, keep our eyes fixed on a heavenly prize, and so on and so forth. This book would benefit to highlight the spiritual perspective.
My only critique of this wonderful classic is that I wish it would more candidly address the root causes of violence. Instead, it basically dissects the symptoms of it. It might teach us how to spot a serial killer. It might give us evidence-based research such as “100 percent [of serial killers] have been abused as children” (paraphrase mine) [5], but it never exposes the root causes that led them to a life of serial killing.
In any case, I would love to interview De Becker because I believe he would hear out my pleas. He even asks, “Why does America have thousands of suicide prevention centers and not one homicide prevention center?”[6] My answer is simple: because we are so caught up in treating symptoms and because we remain ignorant and fearful to be (completely) transparent and vulnerable with each other, we fail to attack our problems at the roots.
We are afraid to talk about beliefs and ideologies for fear of offending others. Some might argue, “separate church and state” even though root cause analysis has nothing to do with the church. But, I agree anyway. separate the church and the state. I’m about the Kingdom and you can’t stop that thing. It’s already here!
Oprah said it best in her 2011 reflection on the 1997 De Becker special. She encouraged women to ask themselves when they say, “No!” and the other person persists, they should “think immediately, why is this person trying to control me. Because ‘no’ is a complete sentence.”[7] And that is precisely my point.
The issue of rape is not about sex, per se, it is about the worship of control and power. Perhaps it is also about primary emotions of bitterness, jealousy, greed, anger, guilt, just to name a few. These are issues of the heart and soul, not of the chemicals in the brain. Scientists cant look at chemicals in the brain that produces sin. Beliefs always proceed behaviors and the heart of every issue is an issue of the heart. De Becker understands this. He alludes to what I criticize as symptom treating when talking about denial. “It’s like waking up in your house with a room full of smoke, opening the window to let the smoke out, and then going back to bed.”[8]
Innovation and Application
Symptom treating is a major problem in the workplace. We have seen many initiatives that do nothing more than let the smoke out of the room or dangle the career carrot by plastering the bathroom walls with “keep what you earned” or attempting to deter alcohol-related incidents with the #DONTBETHATGUY campaign. Those don’t “work” in the long run. It’s like chasing flies around the house but never taking out the week-old bucket of KFC that's producing maggots (true story).
My friend is a chaplain and asked me to speak to his unit in preparation for their deployment. I talked about spiritual readiness. I always talk about having a plan. I tell them “Fail to plan and plan to fail.” In saying that, I’m referring to priorities, goals, and activities. Priorities determine goals and goals drive activities. Or one can see it the other way. Take a look at your activities and see if they are conducive to reaching goals, and then see if those goals are in line with priorities.
Then I mention pornography and why they should not bring it on deployment. I almost always get half of the room to smirk and look at me like I’m some old-fashioned holy roller. But I keep pushing the issue. One guy shook his head and told me he disagreed with my presentation/point. I thanked him for his courage to express his opinion. I went on to prove my point that sexual assault begins way before alcohol is in the system. It begins with what De Becker alluded to in his illustration of a man overboard, “while the man overboard may enjoy the comfortable belief that he is still in his stateroom, there is soon a price to pay for his daydream.”[9]
The point is when these (mostly young) military members fill their “dead time” with movies, video games, pornography they are buying into something that comes at a high price. When they “hit port” and frantically search for Wifi due to FOMO (i.e. fear of missing out) on Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook [although this medium has been surrendered over to the “old folks”] there is a price to pay. All it takes is one small look and their world is rocked. One look at Johnnys six pack and now they’re dropping 120$ at GNC. They see Suzy's hors-d'oeuvres and blow their paycheck just to “keep up with the Jones.”
What’s the worst that could happen if we don’t target root causes? Well, Johnny spends all his time in virtual reality whether in video games, pornography or daydreaming while on watch and fantasizing about girls on the ship who are getting prettier and prettier each day underway. Two months underway and they are about to hit their first port visit. The birthing is dominated by young men who have been playing the same game. Making the same investments with their time. They hit up the bars, get some firewater in the system. The girls happen to be there from all over. Go figure. Girls who just happen to be there when a Navy ship pulls in ready to sell their bodies for money.
This is an ancient practice called prostitution. We can also call this human slavery and it is wrong, wrong, wrong. We can “fight the war on human trafficking” all we want, but if we’re not addressing the pornography issue in the birthing and the lifestyle the service members live while in the barracks in garrison, we will never see the kind of traction we want; that is, to eliminate prostitution.
The Heart of the Issue is an Issue of the Heart
The same goes for alcohol-related incidents, sexual assault, and domestic violence. The heart of the issue is an issue of the heart. We can analyze people and look for symptoms as de Becker suggests (and its all great suggestions!), but we must also discuss the heart issues of idolatry (i.e. the worship of control, comfort, approval, and power) or the primary emotions that control (i.e. greed, anger, guilt, and jealousy) if we are going to push back the evil and offensive criminal acts.
This is an all hands efforts. We need to collaborate a team cross-domain, multi-discipline in order to address the issue holistically; that is, biologically, psychologically, socially, and spiritually. Since people are made up of bio/psycho/socio/spiritual, it makes sense to bring teams together that can assess and consult cases of destructive behaviors from a total fitness perspective.
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End Notes
[1] Oprah Winfrey Network. Gavin de Becker Teaches Oprah About the Gift of Fear. Oprah's Life Class, YouTube, 31 Oct. 2011, www.youtube.com/watch?v=bBProrposzc.
[2] Gavin de Becker, The Gift of Fear. New York: Dell Publishing, 1997. 3.
[3] Ibid., 7-8.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Ibid, 48.
[6] Ibid, 32.
[7] Oprah Winfrey Network, 31 Oct. 2011, 4:10.
[8] De Becker, 41.
[9] Ibid.
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