Who can you trust? This year's Hollywood blockbusters reveal that the thing we fear most may be lurking right in our own backyards. (culture in context).

THRILLERS ARE ALWAYS A HOT SUMMER TICKET and this year Hollywood pumped out six of these paranoid roller coasters, having us run for cover with the likes of Al Pacino, Ben Affleck, Matt Damon, Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, and Mel Gibson. Given 9/11 and the war on terror, it's no shock we're seeing a bumper crop of flicks about bad guys (and aliens) threatening house and homeland. The attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center stripped us of the illusion of invulnerability from foreign assault, and filmmakers are exploring the terrain of this new nightmare.

Baltimore's apocalyptic destruction in Tom Clancy's The Sum of All Fears taps into our worst terrors about foreign zealots and bombs, and the global invasion in M. Night Shyamalan's Signs probes the horror of an alien attack. "Is it safe?" Laurence Olivier asked Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man. Apparently not. Close your borders and lock your doors; the enemy is at the gate.

And yet the majority of this six-pack of thrillers are not about foreign terrorists or invaders but about betrayal by those we depended upon, by those in our own family or inner circle of friends, those we thought we could trust. In Stephen King's Danse Macabre, the master of modern horror wrote that thrillers are divided into two types: those about "outside evil"--which present danger as an attack by aliens or monsters--and those about "inside evil," which offer up horror as something homegrown. In Insomnia, The Bourne Identity, Minority Report, and The Road to Perdition, Pacino, Damon, Cruise, and Hanks are not running from some alien or foreign invader but from a homegrown terror.

In Insomnia veteran detective Pacino has violated the trust placed in him by others, and local cop Hilary Swank must hunt down the man she most admires. In Robert Ludlum's The Bourne Identity and Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, Matt Damon and Tom Cruise have both been betrayed by the government agencies that employ them and are being hunted down as scapegoats by the men they most trusted. And in Sam Mendes' The Road to Perdition, the normally virtuous Tom Hanks plays a father who has betrayed his son's faith in him and is himself an adopted son abandoned and hunted by a man (Paul Newman) who makes Judas look good.

WHY ALL THESE FILMS ABOUT HOMEGROWN EVIL AND BEtrayal? Maybe because, in spite of9/11 and the war on terror, news stories over the past year have driven home the point that we have as many villains within our homes and homeland as without, and that all too often the real dangers banging away at our doors come from "inside traitors" we thought we could trust.

Since last fall the papers have been full of stories about the scandalous collapse of huge corporations like Enron and Worldcom. These meltdowns have left millions of jobless, devastated, and impoverished employees and investors in their wake. Folks whose life savings, pension plans, and investments have evaporated into thin air discovered that the chief executives and financial officers of these companies had betrayed their trust, lied about the fiscal health of the companies, sold off their own shares, and absconded with the profits. According to a piece in the Financial Times, top management in the 25 largest U.S. companies to go bankrupt over the past few years walked away with more than $3.3 billion.

These stories were soon followed by reports that highly esteemed accounting firms like Arthur Andersen had collaborated with the management in these companies, cooking their books and reporting inflated earnings to workers, stockholders, and customers, lining their own pockets with consulting fees even as the ship went down. And we soon found out that stockbrokers and researchers at brokerage firms like Merrill Lynch were giving biased and bad advice to their clients in order to improve their own financial situation, and that Merrill Lynch dismissed the researcher who was telling investors the truth about Enron.

Then in June we learned that the largest wildfires in Arizona and Colorado history were started this year by a part-time firefighter and a forest service employee. In a year when firefighters have been our greatest heroes and when millions upon millions of us have taken pride in the selfless courage New York firefighters showed on that morning last September, it was sickening that fires destroying more than 600,000 acres and nearly 560 homes were begun by the very people sworn to protect us from this danger.

Still, for Catholics at least, the worst betrayal came from our cardinals and bishops. To read in the Boston Globe this spring that the U.S. Catholic hierarchy was still failing to protect our children from sexual predators seemed like the worst breach of trust. As the stories broke we were told of bishops and priests who had sexually abused minors and of cardinals and bishops who, years after they should have known better, continued to overlook and cover up the sins of the fathers.

This year 250 bishops and priests were expelled from their positions because of their sexual misconduct, but not one bishop or cardinal in the U.S. lost his job for failing to take the steps to protect our children and us from these predators.

IN HEBREW AND CHRISTIAN SCRIPTURE we read that God is faithful, that our God does not break promises or betray trust but can be depended upon to honor covenants for a thousand generations. Deuteronomy 7:9 informs us "that the Lord your God ... is the faithful God, keeping his covenant of love to a thousand generations." Psalm 100:5 proclaims that "the Lord is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues through all generations."

And in Romans 8:39 Paul tells us "that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God." As it says on the dollar bill, "in God we (can) trust."

These same scriptures also call us to be faithful, to honor our promises. Indeed, faithfulness is at the very heart of the biblical notion of righteousness. Scripture scholar John Donahue reports that "the biblical idea of justice (sedaqah) can be described as fidelity to the demands of a relationship." Just or righteous people are those who honor the commitments and duties that tie them to their neighbors and the larger web of the human community. As Paul Newman's character notes somewhat ironically in The Road to Perdition, "A man of honor always keeps his word."

MORE THAN 30 YEARS AGO THE LATE Christian ethicist Paul Ramsey wrote that "We are born within covenants of life with life" and are bound to our fellow creatures by "canons of loyalty" that call us to practice faithfulness to God and our neighbors. Ramsey held that this biblical norm of covenant-fidelity was the "inner meaning and purpose of our creation as human beings."

For him, and for the authors of the Bible, our humanity and our righteousness is found in our faithfulness to God and our neighbor. To betray this trust is to destroy our very selves, for as Thomas More notes in A Man for All Seasons, "when a man takes an oath, he's holding his own self in his own hands. And if he opens his fingers then--he needn't hope to find himself again."

It is terrifying to consider the possibility that our nation could fall prey to foreign zealots armed with box-cutters or bombs, or that some maniac could pour anthrax spores into our drinking water. But it may be even more frightening to consider the threat posed by those who fail to keep the covenants of trust that hold together our communities and protect our children from harm. For terrorists can force us to put gates on our borders and locks on our doors, but those who betray our trust tempt us to shut ourselves up within closed and bitter hearts, to retreat from the very ties that make us human. And that is just too scary for words.

PATRICK McCORMICK, an associate professor of Christian ethics at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.