Beyond Control: Religion and the Search for Safety

Divine Reverberations in "The Heretic," James Baldwin, and Empathy

Mr. Reed: Religion is just a system of control.

The Heretic and the Narrative of Controlling Religion

Recently, my son and I watched the 2024 Hugh Grant thriller The Heretic. The film follows two young Mormon missionaries who, during their door-to-door canvassing, encounter a man named Mr. Reed (Grant), who appears eager to learn more about the so-called “one true religion.”

As the story unfolds—drifting steadily into slasher-horror territory—it becomes clear that Mr. Reed harbors deep suspicion, even disdain, for religion. His conclusion, revealed through escalating tension, cuts across traditions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and beyond. All religion, he suggests, emerges from humanity’s desire to control others. In his view, religious systems manipulate human choices and reinforce hierarchies that benefit the powerful. The “one, true religion,” to Mr. Reed, is control.

Mr. Reed: All ten thousand verifiable religions that exist in the world today are as artificial as the symbolic church you're currently standing in. It is farce. There is nothing holy here, your religious text is mere ornament, as hollow and as capitalistic as these ridiculous games.

This critique isn’t new. It echoes longstanding themes in both Enlightenment philosophy and contemporary pop culture. And to be fair, the argument carries weight. History bears witness to countless examples of religion weaponized to oppress, manipulate, and uphold unjust systems.

This remains undeniable.

Moving Beyond the Surface

But shouldn’t we go deeper? Can’t we ask more probing questions than whether religion functions as a tool for control? Given religion’s near-universal presence across human cultures, doesn’t it deserve our most nuanced, empathetic inquiry?

Importantly, asking these questions doesn’t require abandoning skepticism. James Baldwin, who grew up in a preacher’s household, embodied this dual stance—deeply skeptical of Christianity’s institutional abuses, yet empathetic toward its emotional and existential role in human life.

At age fourteen, Baldwin had a realization: “God and safety were synonymous.”

“God and safety were synonymous.”

-James Baldwin, The First Next Time

That insight reframes the conversation. It shifts the focus from religion as a mere tool of domination to something more psychologically urgent. Baldwin’s insight does not excuse religious control; it interprets it. We use religion to control because our lives are filled with anxiety.

Fear Beneath the Need for Control

Psychology teaches that control often masks anxiety. People reach for control when life feels uncertain, relationships shift, or social norms destabilize. Control becomes a coping mechanism—an attempt to secure stability when the world no longer makes sense.

On the surface, religious control appears as the central problem. And too often, we stop there. Labeling religious people as controlling or angry offers the illusion of understanding—and the comfort of moral distance. We categorize and dismiss them. We feel superior. We stop listening.

But Baldwin’s equation—God equals safety—invites us to look beneath the surface. Religious control often reflects deeper anxieties. It seeks safety in a world that feels unsafe.

This insight applies not only to religious leaders who manipulate with fire-and-brimstone rhetoric. It applies to everyday congregants, too. Many find comfort in surrendering agency to spiritual authorities. They feel secure in moral systems that offer certainty. They feel sane in theological frameworks that provide clean answers to morally complex questions. The world feels dangerous; control - especially religious control - gives them a sense of safety.

Complicity in Control

And this dynamic complicates traditional binaries. Even when religion becomes oppressive, the oppressed may participate—willingly or unconsciously—in their own oppression. The line between oppressor and oppressed blurs.

The congregation that cheers the rageful pulpit enables the manipulation it suffers. The disciple who seeks safety may reinforce the system that instills fear. Religious institutions, then, don’t simply impose control; they offer a tempting escape from responsibility. They promise a world where hard questions have easy answers and doubt finds refuge in dogma.

Yet this impulse isn’t unique to religion.

It’s a human reflex.

We all grasp for control when anxiety peaks. Baldwin’s interpretation - indeed, critique - of religion targets not just institutional power, but the seductive lie that safety can be guaranteed in an unsafe world. Religion, he suggests, often sells comfort dressed up as truth.

A Challenge to the Skeptical Left

Which brings me to a challenge for contemporary liberals: instead of defaulting to the view of religion as a mere “system of control,” consider it a deeply human attempt to manage fear.

At its best, religion channels that fear into rituals of hope, connection, resistance, and moral imagination.

At its worst, it calcifies into dogma and domination.

But always, it remains deeply human.

Recognizing this doesn’t mean absolving religion of its abuses. It means diagnosing those abuses more compassionately—and perhaps, more truthfully. The religious person who clings to doctrine may not crave power so much as peace. The community that enforces rigid norms may do so out of despair, not (merely) the desire for domination.

To dismiss all religion as control risks flattening this complexity. To understand religion, we must move beyond critique and ask: what fear does this belief address? What ache does this ritual soothe?

Those questions will not resolve all contradictions. But they might lead us closer to the heart of what makes religion persist—not merely as an institution of power, but as a mirror to the anxious, striving human soul. They might lead us to see that religious people, like all of us, are simply humans with anxiety in a constantly unstable world.