Our personal history of experiences includes enough pain that when we experience fear for any reason, we draw on the power of all those prior experiences to dissuade us from engaging the current source of fear. Still, we are anxious and afraid. At the most visceral level, we are afraid of conflict. We know that we do not agree on several issues, yet we are ostensibly the Body of Christ. We are to be one in spirit together, but we are not.
Nobody wants to go into that dark alley.
We might lose something we value. But there is another, equal fear that is a shared or corporate anxiety, I believe. The issue of homosexuality serves as well as any other issue to illuminate this shared anxiety. Fear is a lot about pain, but it is also about loss. We fear the loss of health and well being, the loss of safety and security, or the loss of the known.