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- Subscribe - Contact Us - Rate Card - Place an Ad Archives Revels Classifieds Real Estate Menu Guide Wedding Weather Subscribe Contact Us September 29, 2005 Commentary For whom the wrath burns Rob Asghar Many morally and intellectually honest members of the American religious right must be squirming in the wake of recent catastrophes. I’ve ghostwritten a confession, “on spec,” in the hopes that some honest person will appropriate it as his or her own: “I am a member of the religious right, and I may be wrong. I will now confess this to you. “I have long sensed in my bones that the Lord uses disasters to awaken and discipline people. The destruction of Sodom was not to me an ancient legend: It was a model for how God works even today. “At backyard barbecues and on Internet message boards, I have rattled off a list of social groups for whom Heaven has been stockpiling its wrath. I was hardly the only person who nodded my head when conservative pundit Don Feder called Hurricane Katrina ‘the ultimate wake-up call for a morally somnolent nation.’ “But I cannot now reconcile my notion of divine judgment with recent events. “Do not dismiss my views on divine judgment as those of an atypical extremist. John Green of the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life estimated recently that half the nation shares my belief that supernatural judgment underlies natural disasters. “But I am not as unrelenting as many liberals would portray me. I have been aware that the devil’s master-planned community, New Orleans, was not the only locale to be judged so thoroughly recently. Also judged were a good many people in a Bible Belt region that works hard at being good. “Religious demographer George Barna has noted that the South remains the most Godly region of the nation, with its residents more committed to reading the Bible, attending Sunday school, praying and evangelizing. “Why would these people suffer such wind-propelled wrath? Such crushing wrath came, despite the fact that I and countless others prayed for their welfare. We prayed boldly and confidently, as we are instructed, and God’s hand did not move away from these people, who are far less deserving of such judgment than the average Bostonian. “All this I could rationalize, if not for the newest blow of Hurricane Rita and her aggravation of Texas and parts of Louisiana. I will not declare Rita’s less-than-cataclysmic impact to be a victory for people who prayed, as it still was damaging — damaging to parts of the nation that pray, while the prayerless have gone untouched. “Why did Providence not shower a spectacular judgment on San Francisco, whose most raucous earthquakes came before it became the poster child city for sexual permissiveness? Why not Las Vegas, a devil’s Mecca of unsurpassed arrogance? “All this suggests a few possibilities: Life is random, and events are meaningless. In the ‘us versus them’ culture wars, ‘us’ is being punished, not ‘them.’ “I reject the first possibility. I am not ready to discard my faith, my trust in Divine Providence, my confidence in the redeeming forces that are at work in even the most hopeless situation. “Yet I hear that some would cite recent events mockingly, implying that the ravaged states are marked by a jingoistic hubris that displeases a God of love. Some might suggest that God could be angered by the militarism that emanates from Texas and Louisiana, which yield a higher-than-average number of recruits for the American military. Such people seek to place the shoe of judgment on the other foot. “I reject that notion. I do not think the Lord would do such a thing to the sorts of women and men that I know and that I love. But I do consider that life is infused with a good deal more mystery than I’d been led to believe, and now I am not so convinced that God would punish my political and cultural opponents as readily as I once believed. “I will still disagree with others on matters of policy and ethics. But will I be as ready to smugly and publicly pronounce any event as a sign of divine wrath on those with whom I disagree? No longer.” To be sure, no self-respecting member of the religious right would publicly make such a confession. But I believe I have captured a number of private sentiments accurately. 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