By David Gushee
Thousands of Haitians were dead, millions were displaced, and Pat Robertson responded last week by saying, “Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, ‘We will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French.’ True story. And so the devil said, ‘Okay, it’s a deal.’”
This is not the first time that Pat Robertson has offered such explanations for disaster. In 2005, Robertson attributed Hurricane Katrina to God’s wrath on America for legalized abortion. Also in 2005, he warned little Dover, Pennsylvania, that it faced God’s wrath because its citizens voted out school board members who wanted schools to teach intelligent-design principles that challenge evolution.
The late Jerry Falwell made news after 9/11 with a similar explanatory model for those terrible attacks. While visiting Pat Robertson on the latter’s “700 Club” broadcast, and with Robertson nodding his assent, Falwell said, “I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, ‘you helped this happen.’” Eventually Falwell apologized for these particular comments.
It is easy to poke fun, or express outrage, at comments such as these. Certainly for those who only (choose to) know Christianity by the statements of its most extreme “representatives,” the witness of Christ is desperately damaged.
But this pattern of thinking is well-established enough that it deserves more careful reflection. There is some instinct embedded here that needs to be identified so that it can be rejected, once and for all.
I would like to suggest that the pattern is a theocratic theology of the nation combined with a Deuteronomistic theology of history and linked to a reactionary social ethics.
Many conservative Christian leaders, especially of the last generation, preached and wrote about America as if we were the new Israel, the chosen people, in a special and unique relationship with God. They were reading the Old Testament so as to transfer (one version of) its theology of Israel to the United States.
When these Christian Right leaders were happy with America or its leaders for doing things they liked, they would say that God was blessing America. But, inevitably, when something happened to the United States that was painful, or when certain Americans did something that people like Falwell and Robertson did not like, the paradigm served just as well for an attribution of blame or judgment.
God has an elect nation. God will bless that nation as long as it does God’s will, but will curse that nation when it violates God’s will. This is the theology that courses through the book of Deuteronomy and much of the rest of the Old Testament, in relation to the chosen nation of Israel. This theology is also challenged elsewhere in the Old Testament, as in the book of Job. Preachers like Robertson and Falwell have simplistically applied the Deuteronomy paradigm to the United States while failing to wrestle with other dimensions of the biblical witness.
Robertson’s comments about Haiti show that he applies the same paradigm to other nations too. Robertson views God as pouring out divine wrath on Haiti just as on the United States or any other nation that violates God’s will.
The reactionary-social-ethics piece plugs in at this point. Robertson seemed to be implying in his comments last week that somehow Haiti only won its freedom from slavery 200 years ago through a pact with the devil — ergo, it earned God’s wrath. Falwell’s infamous comments in 2001 attributed blame to every social movement that he disliked at the time — all of them to his political left.
The problem of evil is the ultimate theological challenge. Many brilliant minds have wrestled to explain how so much disastrous evil, so much sorrow, so much suffering, can exist in a world created and sustained by a loving God.
It is not wrong to ask such questions. But most explanations create more theological problems than they solve, and involve making claims beyond the competence of the human mind, as the book of Job so clearly shows. The best response to evil seems to be to weep with those who weep, while working alongside them to repair broken lives, broken societies, and our broken world.