Having grown up in the American South — in Nashville to be precise, where it always seemed everyone was either trying to get a record deal or start a church (or both) — I have long found evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, with whom I’ve had more than a passing acquaintance, to be fascinating.
And when I speak here of such persons I refer specifically to the right-wing variant of the species. Although there are such Christians who would consider themselves politically progressive — people like Jim Wallis, for instance, for whom Jesus preached a gospel of social justice — let it suffice to say that at no point have such folks been the norm within the evangelical and fundamentalist community, and certainly not within its white cohort.
For the most part, Christian fundamentalism has cleaved to a reactionary worldview, and increasingly so, over the last half-century.
Among the most intriguing things about Christian fundamentalists, for me, has always been the way they envision God and then seek to sell that God to others.
On the one hand, they profess to love the Lord “with all their hearts,” and insist that this God so loved the world that he sent his only son to offer everlasting life (though some conditions apply). On the other hand, they’re quick to proclaim how the same God causes natural disasters, violent crime, and other tragedies as a way to punish the U.S. for allowing abortion, or “taking prayer out of schools,” or some other perceived moral slight.
After Hurricane Katrina, I received a chain e-mail quoting Billy Graham’s daughter to the effect that the inundation of New Orleans had happened because the nation had turned its back on God. Similarly, such missives made the rounds after 9/11, insisting that God was, in effect, taking his revenge on the people of America for having abandoned him.
Now, I’m guessing that if I were to send an e-mail around accusing you of causing such things, you would consider it libelous; certainly, you wouldn’t believe me if I said I was blaming you for mass murder because I loved you. But somehow, we’re supposed to take this blaming of God as a compliment, or at least, expect God to do so.
And we’re supposed to ignore, I gather, that loving such a maniacal entity as would do these things, is to be the worst form of enabler.
To believe that God can truly love the world while deliberately sending floods, earthquakes, and other forms of suffering to that world as punishment for supposed bad behavior, is tantamount to believing that the abusive husband loves his wife, even as he pushes her down the stairs for being “a little mouthy.” It would be akin to accepting that the parent who beats their child “for their own good,” and says it was because “the little shit was back-sassing me,” is something other than a sadistic monster deserving not of love but rather, contempt and confinement.
Of course, I can understand the impulse to blame disasters and other horrific events on a supernatural cause — in this case, God. It helps some people make sense of their world and provides an explanation for the chaos and seeming randomness that might otherwise overwhelm them. Seeking order is a very human thing (ironically, quite evolutionary), and so it’s not particularly shocking.
But still, we should reflect on how utterly irresponsible the claims are, not only for the slander they place upon a presumed deity but because of how they absolve us of responsibility for doing better by one another.
Because if natural disasters are just about God — as opposed to, say, the excess burning of fossil fuels, which alters climate and weather patterns enough to contribute to such events — then we never have to get our act together and work to protect the planet that these same folks insist God has bestowed upon us.
We don’t have to make sure we’re adequately funding levee protection in New Orleans, or ensuring good evacuation plans to help the poorest people there, because God will just keep flooding the city as a way to punish evil.
We don’t need to worry about encouraging safer sexual practices, because God will just unleash a new condom-proof disease if we don’t stop catering to “the gays” and their flamboyant parades.
We needn’t seek to create better opportunities for people in high-crime communities, since crime is just God’s way of reminding us how awful we are for presuming that perhaps women might exercise control over their own reproduction.
By blaming awfulness on God, we embrace a worldview that strips us of agency and renders us no more effectual (or relevant) than a single-celled organism. In that space, the only agency we might theoretically possess would be the kind that steers us to simply do what an ancient book tells us we must, but even then, only so we might keep this brutal, psychopathic creator at bay. And that is no agency at all. It is acting from a place of coercion.
It’s also notable which sins the Christian right assumes most anger God, and thus have invited his wrath upon America.
So they often reference 1962 as the starting point of the nation’s decline and the inception of God’s big payback, because that was the year mandatory prayer was taken out of schools. But why that year, and why that “sin?”
Why not quite a bit earlier? Why not during the period of slavery, or when lynching was a weekly occurrence, or when we were actively extirpating indigenous peoples? Why would God be more upset about the removal of official prayer in schools than those kinds of things? Is God more angered at the thought of people not being forced to praise him in homeroom, than he is about genocide and racism?
Similarly, consider right-wing hysteria over marriage equality. According to Texas Congressman Louis Gohmert, because of the Supreme Court ruling that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, “God’s hand of protection will be withdrawn” from America.
This too calls into question God’s priorities and suggests that he’s more concerned about men loving men, for instance, than he is about men oppressing and killing men.
After all, to claim that now God’s protection will be withdrawn is to suggest that before this time we were the active recipients of that protection. And yet, for that to be true, one would have to believe that God saw nothing wrong with the enslavement of African peoples, the slaughter of indigenous peoples, with lynching, or with segregation.
You would have to accept that God is more offended by marriage equality than any of those things, that God was essentially sanguine about formal white supremacy and willing to extend his protective blanket over us even in the face of that, but somehow “gay marriage” is a bridge too far.
Indeed, to believe that God protected America all through those periods of overt racial fascism is to presume God a racist, which not only disrespects people of color — who have been among the most faithful, even in the face of a church that has long normalized white supremacy — but would likely displease any Creator should one exist who actively intervenes in the affairs of man.
In which case, Louis Gohmert might want to chew his food exceptionally well from this point forward for having implied it.
So too, an awful lot of other white evangelicals.
And if these folks truly want anyone to believe God is real, or that God is love and deserving of ours, they’d do well to stop portraying him as a petty, jealous and insecure rage addict with too much time on his hands.
As James Baldwin, who was — let us not forget — ordained, put it in The Fire Next Time:
If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
Indeed, and either way, the sooner the better.
—
I’m an antiracism educator/author. I tweet and Facebook. My podcast, Speak Out With Tim Wise, is available on iTunes and Google Play, and I post bonus audio commentaries and content at my Patreon page. Speaking engagements are booked through Speak Out: the nation’s premier non-profit speaker’s bureau.
—
This post was previously published on Medium and is republished here with permission from the author.
—
◊ ◊
Have you read the original anthology that was the catalyst for The Good Men Project? Buy here: The Good Men Project: Real Stories from the Front Lines of Modern Manhood
◊ ◊
Talk to you soon.
If you believe in the work we are doing here at The Good Men Project and want to join our calls on a regular basis, please join us as a Premium Member, today.
All Premium Members get to view The Good Men Project with NO ADS.
Need more info? A complete list of benefits is here.
—
Photo credit: iStock
The post A God Unworthy of Praise or Worship appeared first on The Good Men Project.