Imagine that you believe in ghosts.

By 'believe' I don't mean that you're simply open to the possibility, or that you once saw something that you aren't fully able to explain, or that you're vaguely agnostic on the topic in a "more things in heaven and earth, Horatio" kind of way. I mean that you believe in ghosts and that this belief is a central organizing principle of your life. You believe the world is crowded with spirits and that you are surrounded by the ever-present vengeful dead.

How could you function, believing that? How could you get through the day without being paralyzed by fear? And—assuming that being crazy wasn't already some kind of precondition for believing this in the first place—how could you live with that constant fear without it driving you mad?

This is what I don't understand about the true believers on the fringes of the loony religious right. Here, for example, is the most recent eMail I received from the Christian Worldview Network touting the new installment of Brannon Howse's radio program:

Topic One: Is the world on the verge of being divided into 10 regions? Rev 17:12 says that 10 world leaders will give their power and authority to the anti-christ. Iraq has unveiled plans for the creation of a regional economic and security union for the Middle East explicitly modeled on the European Union. Have you heard about the African Union, The Union of South American [Nations], The North American Union and Asia and Pacific Union? Has President Bush turned our U.S. Economy over to the European Union? Financial Times writers admit that a world government is "now plausible".

Topic Two: How many of the 10 planks of the Communist Manifesto has America fulfilled thus far on our road toward socialism?

These people must be terrified. And they seem to spend all their time urging one another to be even more terrified.

How do they manage to get up in the morning, make the coffee and drive to work in a world so full of terror and menace? How do they summon up the courage to walk out their front door when the "Union of South American" is lurking outside in the hedges?

How do they sleep in a room filled with ghosts?

Howse speaks of the "anti-christ"—a term he uses to name the central figure in the frightening campfire story that constitutes his 'Christian Worldview'. The word antichrist(s) comes from the book of 1 John. It's part of that book's single, unified argument that "God is love" and that life presents an unending series of choices in which we must either side with love or with its opposites—with God or with anti-God, Christ or antichrist, love or hate, love or falsehood, love or fear.

"There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear," the author of 1 John writes. "The one who fears is not made perfect in love."

Somehow, Brannon Howse and his terrified followers do seem able to sleep at night and to get up in the morning and go to work. The fear that defines and organizes them doesn't seem to prevent them from doing any of those things.

But it has rendered them incapable of loving others.