Haiti & God

by Dennis Green

I’m sure you’ve seen and heard some of the careless, heartless commentary about the earthquake in Haiti, and the suffering of all those hundreds of thousands of fellow human beings. Pat Robertson — described by one observer as “that senile old man who shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near a microphone,” — declared that the Haitian people are being punished for “making a pact with the Devil” in order to throw off slavery and French domination in the late-18^th and early 19^th Centuries.

I was, like most people, at first horrified by those comments. Is this a thinly-veiled reference to the Voodoo practiced by some Haitians? (A combination of French Catholicism and West African beliefs…) Of course, Voodoo is also practiced in Louisiana and parts of New York City, so perhaps, in Robertson’s view, Katrina and 9/11 were also signs of God’s wrath.

And when I did the research, sure enough, there were comments by Pat Robertson and also Oral Roberts attributing both Hurricane Katrina and 9/11 to the sinfulness of modern, libertine America. And I wonder how common, how far-reaching such theology really is. Do most Evangelical Christians believe that such disasters are visited only upon the sinful?

Were there no believing Christians in the World Trade Centers that day? No believing Mormons? Just as there might be a few righteous, believing Christians under all that rubble in Port-au-Prince…

Just as Muslim extremists slaughter devout Muslims in the marketplace with their suicide bombs, so too does God appear to slaughter his own children in his zeal for cataclysmic retribution. And is that a God I care to believe in?

No, I’m afraid not. If the Very Right Reverend Roberts is simply a little more outspoken than most Christians, but his views are commonly-held, conventional, even orthodox among American Evangelicals, I’d sooner make a pact with the Devil than with them. When I see the suffering of those poor people in Haiti, and imagine an all-powerful God who either caused this suffering, or allowed it to happen, or simply set tectonic plates in motion and withdrew to watch us squirm…well, let’s just say I’m not moved to Glory, Glory, Hallelujahs.

Except when I see how people have responded to the disaster. Even George W. Bush, flying in the face of rightwing pundits, has said, “Just send money. We’ll make sure it’s spent responsibly.” And the rescuers, and the doctors and nurses, and the pilots and cargo handlers, the aids workers, the millions of donors all over the world, even Katie Courick holding the hand of a thirteen year old orphaned boy suffering terrible pain — witnessing all this outpouring of compassion warms my heart and lifts my spirits. It also gives me hope for mankind.

Moreover, I’m learning a lot about the history of Haiti. The breakaway Independence of Haiti, for example, led Napoleon III to offer the U.S. the Louisiana Purchase, doubling the size of America, and giving us our entire Midwest. Sounds like a good deed to me. And if there is such a thing as “national karma,” I am worried for my country, and not primarily for the fact that we have fornicators and queers among us, or because our President is a light-skinned Negro.

Try our two current wars, torture, Vietnam, Korea, our own history of slavery, our treatment of the aboriginal peoples living here long before white Europeans arrived, and the Salem Witch Trials. If anybody deserves the wrath of God…

But that’s the nice thing about having Free Will. I can choose to put my faith in such a wrathful deity, or in the compassion and kindness of my fellow man or even in a benevolent deity who doesn’t beat his own children senseless. I think when all is said and done, the Pat Robertsons are a rarity, and even if they’re not, they don’t count nearly as much as they would like to believe they do.

All those millions of human beings around the world feeling genuine compassion for the people of Haiti, and helping out in any way, they’re the ones who count in my book. And I hope they count in yours.

©2010 Dennis Green