In the sixth chapter of Genesis, God informs Noah that,
with a few exceptions, all living things on earth are about to perish
because of their lawlessness and corruption. And although, once the
floodwaters have receded, God promises never to do it again, we heirs of the
biblical tradition have ever since been led to believe that natural
disasters are acts of God sent to punish wrongdoing.
As Patrick Greene of Bay St. Louis, Miss., put it to
NPR’s Melissa Block a few days after Hurricane Katrina blew through the Gulf
Coast, “The good Lord done put a whuppin’ on us.”
But why, exactly?
Since God’s punitive purposes are not as clear in our
world as they tend to be in the Bible, opinions on Katrina have varied.
Among the behaviors singled out for blame:
• New Orleans’ practice of “debauch[ing] the penitential
season of Lent” via an “orgy of drunkenness, drug abuse and sexual
promiscuity” (Rev. John Westcott of the Anglican Church of the Resurrection,
Ansonia, Connecticut);
• New Orleans and the Mississippi Gulf Coast’s habitual
indulgence of “gambling, sin and wickedness” (Alabama state senator Hank
Erwin);
• the California legislature’s approval of same-sex
marriage and a California federal court ruling against schoolchildren saying
the Pledge of Allegiance with the phrase “under God” in it (former Boston
Globe columnist and conservative blogger Don Feder);
• the U.S. role in Israel’s expulsion of Jewish settlers
from Gaza (the Christian web site Jerusalem Newswire);
• the U.S. invasion of Iraq (Nation of Islam minister
Louis Farrakhan).
The evangelical eminence Pat Robertson—perhaps recalling
the bad press he and the Rev. Jerry Falwell got for suggesting that God had
allowed the 9/11 attacks to happen because of pagans, feminists, gays, and
lesbians—only hinted on his television show that Katrina might have had
something to do with legalized abortion.
That the wicked merit divine punishment, in this world as
well as the next, has always seemed reasonable enough to religious folks.
But the idea that the innocent should suffer along with the guilty—including
the innumerable animals that didn’t make it into the ark—has long been, for
many, a tough pill to swallow. How to explain evil visited upon all flesh?
Classic Christian theology solved the problem, at least
for human beings, through the doctrine of original sin, which can be
understood as meaning that even those who have done no wrong merit
punishment because they are sinful by nature. Thus can the existence of a
good and all-powerful God be squared with the existence of terrible pain and
suffering.
At the beginning of the 18th century, the philosopher
Gottfried Leibniz gave the name “theodicy” to a different solution. It was
that natural disasters are actually part of a larger divine plan that we
cannot grasp, but which in fact maximizes the amount of good in creation. If
God is good and all-powerful, argued Leibniz, then we must
live in the best of all possible worlds.
Two hundred and fifty years ago, on November 1,1755, an
earthquake all but destroyed Lisbon, Portugal, leaving tens of thousands
dead and rendering as many as 17,000 of the city’s 20,000 dwellings
uninhabitable. The French philosopher Voltaire reacted by writing a poem
that portrayed the Lisbon disaster as a refutation of Leibniz:
“Come, ye philosophers, who cry, ‘All’s well,’ / And
contemplate this ruin of a world.” In Voltaire’s view, there was no way to
justify such visitations of “dumb nature,” and as for human beings, what was
required of them was simply to “suffer, submit in silence, worship, and
die.”
Something in human nature, however, resists the idea that
bad things happen to people for no reason at all, and among those who, early
on, resisted Voltaire’s interpretation of Lisbon was his younger
philosophical contemporary, Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In a letter to Voltaire,
Rousseau pointed out that nature had not built the 2,000 six- and
seven-storey houses in Lisbon that collapsed, and that many fewer would have
died had they not refused to leave the city after the first shock or
insisted on returning to their homes to retrieve belongings.
Some historians see in Rousseau’s remarks the beginning
of a new conception of the world’s moral economy—one that, on the occasion
of natural disasters, evades the impulse to justify God by making humanity
the agent of its own suffering. What is at issue, now, is not God’s goodness
and power but man’s technical and moral capacity to prevent suffering. Call
it anthropodicy.
Ironically, since he was a far greater friend of
religion, this makes Rousseau rather than Voltaire the father of the modern
secular understanding of evil that has dominated reactions to Katrina. The
stumbling efforts of federal and local officials and agencies, the
longstanding failure to build adequate levees and to protect wetlands, the
man-made phenomenon of global warming that may be bringing more intense
weather into being—again and again these have been cited in a “blame game”
whose ultimate purpose is to ensure, as God promised Noah, that it never
happens again.
By contrast, to the extent that the news media conveyed
religious interpretations of the hurricane, it was (like this column) via
the self-conscious mode of meta-explanation: not “what was responsible for
it?” but “how do we think about what was responsible?”
Bill Tammaeus of the Kansas City Star,
Jeffrey Weiss of the Dallas Morning News, and Charles Parker
of the Charleston Post and Courier, for example, rounded up
various religious ways of making sense of natural disasters in general and
Katrina in particular. Tom Schaeffer of the Wichita Eagle and Tom
D’Evelyne of the Christian Science Monitor applied the lessons of a
new book, David Bentley Hart’s The Doors of the Sea: Where Was God in the
Tsunami?
On the other hand, the Philadelphia Inquirer
editorially dismissed all efforts to see Katrina as divine retribution as
“blasphemy,” and Harvard history professor cum Los Angeles Times
columnist Niall Ferguson, embracing the Voltairean perspective that natural
disasters “have no moral significance,” adjured his readers, “Don’t call
them ‘acts of God.’”
Over at the New York Times, meanwhile, Edward
Rothstein traced the supplanting of religious by secular theodicies, while
Peter Steinfels lamented Americans’ proclivity for focusing on
problem-solving over “wrenching questions that natural and human evils raise
about God and the universe.”
Such journalism suggests that religious and secular
understandings of Katrina are mutually exclusive. But perhaps there is some
common ground.
The Bible teaches (in Deuteronomy 6:6 as well as Matthew
4:17) that we should not “tempt” God, by which it means that people are
forbidden to put themselves at risk in such a way that God has to perform a
miracle in order to save them. It could be argued that there were many sins
of omission and commission along the Gulf Coast that put people at risk in
just that way. Nature did not build mansions on the shore or housing
projects below sea level.
These days, as the icecaps melt and the tsunamis and
hurricanes roll in, it would seem to make sense for us to tempt God as
little as possible.