What Americans Fear... and Are Religious People More Fearful?

The last graph is exactly what I would have expected. I have noticed a strong correlation between progressive political views and fear for many years. I wonder if this would also help explain some of the studies that show a correlation between political views and mental illness. There is political motivation to look at such studies-especially during an election year, but I think we could help people more if we focused on the fear connection to mental illness more. I would not be surprised to find that regardless of political views, fear tends to feed mental illness.

If people could replace fear with thanksgiving, as they realize godliness with contentment is great gain, then we would see much more love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self control.

Recent studies have also suggested that the same part of the brain that focuses on anxiety also focuses on thanksgiving. This is the perfect time of year to renew our minds and to focus on being thankful rather than fearful. Let thankfulness drive out fear as we think on new things as we renew our minds by putting off anxiety and putting on thanksgiving.

Plenty, plenty, plenty of religio-political Christians on the right are motivated by fear, too.

Plenty, plenty, plenty of religio-political Christians on the right are motivated by fear, too.

Exactly. Just because the stats show more of one political party than the other does not mean that both are not affected. Unless one sample has zero, then we have to recognize and be concerned that a certain percentage are affected and thus reflected in the stats. It is wise to remember that anytime we look at statistics.