Listen To This Story

The first thing I noticed about the heart-wrenching stories of missing children along the flooded river in Texas was that they were at a Christian camp.  

I soon read in the The New York Times about another case of horrific deaths from flooding connected to another Christian camp. 

People living near the Guadalupe in Kerr County may have little time to seek higher ground, especially when flash floods come through late at night when people are asleep. In 1987, a rapidly rising Guadalupe River swept away a school bus carrying teens from a church camp, killing 10 of them.

Many adults were also swept away. Others were saved — and they were sure they knew why:

I just prayed, and I really believe that I was walking on water because I made it safely.

I don’t know how she survived. … If you are a believer, by the grace of God.

“That was a warning from God,” one survivor said, referring to a loud thunder clap that awoke him in time.

She knew to turn on her back … and she was singing “Rise and Shine Give God the Glory,” said the father of a teenage girl, describing what she did as she was swept away to her death.

We all need prayers. …  I know God is going to take care of us.

Kerr County, long known as “flash flood alley,” is also the home of a place called “Coming King Sculpture Prayer Gardens” — which contains a massive cross. Its designer said it is “on the same latitude as Israel.” Many other crosses, smaller, humbler wooden crosses honoring victims of the flood, line Guadalupe Park in Kerrville.

Thou Shalt Not Think

Hearing these quotes and witnessing these responses to disaster, I found echoing in my mind the slogans that seem to have greeted every such disaster in recent memory:

Thoughts and prayers.

It was God’s will.

Everything happens for a reason.

They’re in a better place.

The standard litany of “explanation,” the usual comforting exculpation for whatever human failings led to the latest catastrophe, applies equally to natural disasters like the cresting of the Guadalupe River and human abominations like the shooting up of a church or school by a social media-inspired “lone wolf.”

This reminded me of all the cases where students unleashed mass shootings at Christian schools. A large segment of those who support unfettered gun access self-identify as Christians. (Former Republican Rep. Louie Gohmert of Texas, a devout Baptist and gun absolutist, suggested that shootings could be avoided if the country placed a higher value on God.) 

Now, horrible things can happen anywhere to all kinds of people, but the very basis of Christianity — and religion in general — is the premise that an all-powerful deity controls our fate and that honoring this deity throughout our lives will make our lives better. And to be sure, to the extent that such honoring distills itself into ethical and moral precepts that guide behavior in the direction of kindness, acceptance, generosity, humility, and peace, there is obvious good in it.

But a great deal of professed religiosity is closely associated with bigotry and intolerance, and a self-congratulatory sense of being superior to others not similarly enlightened. The rigidities of fundamentalism lend themselves especially to such divisive and corrosive dynamics.

Another factor that often goes hand and hand with fundamentalist religious belief is a lack of trust in science.

In the US, many advocates for additional funding for religious — but not secular — schools also demand that the Ten Commandments, whose morally sound concepts need no religious imprimatur, be posted in public schools, presumably next to a poster displaying the periodic table of the elements.

Scientists (with some notable exceptions) tend not to believe in a deity — so religious fundamentalists do not believe in scientists, those godless people who say climate change causes extreme weather and that climate change is, in turn, caused by burning fossil fuels. 

Publicists for the fossil fuel industry nurture that distrust, and provide additional invalid reasons for it by supporting “think” tanks that promote utterly false information about the cause, the catastrophic effects, and even the very existence, of climate change. Among the worst: Heartland Institute, American Enterprise Institute, Heritage Foundation, Koch Foundation.  

And there are always scientists who will ingratiate themselves with that industry. For example, the men described in this news item from July 8 which  appeared while everyone was still reeling from the killer flooding:

The Trump administration has hired three prominent researchers who over the course of their careers have questioned and even rejected the scientific consensus on human-caused climate change. Each were [sic] given positions in the Energy Department, which is led by Secretary Chris Wright, a former oil and gas fracking executive.

Major climate-denying donors to the Republican Party are in the fossil fuel industry, such as those who run Energy Transfer, the company behind the Dakota Access pipeline.

Currently, 123 of the 535 members of the 118th Congress are climate deniers. 

Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-AL) summed up wider sentiment when he remarked, “The last time I checked, God was in charge of the weather.” 

This reflects the views of 23 percent of all Republicans who believe “climate change is not a serious problem because God is in control of the climate.” 

For deniers like Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX), the basic cause-and-effect scientific consensus on global warming goes against their true religion — their worship at the altar of the oil companies and their enormous profits. Just before going on vacation, Cruz made sure the Republican spending bill slashed funding for weather forecasting.  

In the meantime, it’s so much more convenient to hold “God” responsible for extreme-weather disasters. And it is “God” who, responding to fervent prayers, will save the situation.

Rep. Jared Patterson (R-TX) sponsored bills to force schools to post the Ten Commandments — and to prevent wind and solar companies from getting tax breaks. Reacting to the flooding, he said on CNN:

I want to say right off the bat, the No. 1 thing that folks can give is their prayers. 

The Third Rail

I’m just going to say it: Basic problems with religious belief systems and their consequences are an electrified third rail in US politics that almost no one seems willing to touch. But unless we do, we cannot begin to fix the mess this country has become. 

Even though a study found that 90 percent of American Christian leaders — from Catholics to evangelicals — now believe climate change is human-induced, many are reluctant to share that belief with their congregants. Yet when they do, they are convinced that “taking climate action is consistent with their church’s values while voting for politicians who will not take climate action is not.”

News coverage stresses the positive aspects of the Guadalupe River camps — which I get, because camp experiences can be wonderful. This, for example, from CNN’s Reliable Sources:

CNN anchor Pamela Brown was a camper at Camp Mystic thirty years ago, so she knows firsthand that it has been “a magical place” for generations of girls. Today she is back there, covering the aftermath of the flood tragedy, and how “so much innocence has now been lost.” She co-anchored several hours of coverage last night and is back on The Situation Room later this morning. 

Failing to address the role of religious beliefs is one thing. Being part of creating myths is another. As with Fox Corporation, which announced a donation to the Community Foundation of the Texas Hill Country’s Kerr County Flood Relief Fund.

That’s the Fox Corporation that thinks we don’t need a coordinated federal disaster management capability.

That’s the Fox that supports religious instruction over science-based instruction, that consistently minimizes or denies climate change. The same Fox that pushes the idea that government is too big and wasteful and that weather forecasting, disaster relief, and other public-interest activities can be cut. 

But even more honest news organizations won’t follow through on the deeper issues at hand. As Reliable Sources noted: 

Ever since the 4th of July, when news outlets scrambled to cover the middle-of-the-night catastrophe, journalists have been frustrated by unanswered questions at news conferences. Again [on July 6], at multiple pressers throughout the day, many officials “dodged when pressed about whether Texas was adequately funded and staffed ahead of time to prepare for the floods,” WaPo’s Anusha Mathur wrote.

Lack of preparation obviously needs to be probed, but so do weightier matters about how Americans think.  

Magical Thinking

Advocates of religion say that these tragedies have nothing to do with their faith. I agree. But allegiance to a fundamentalist religion that proudly proclaims there is not and cannot be a rational reason for religious belief — insisting that faith alone is the religious believer’s touchstone — condemns adherents to a deep aversion to evidence-based thinking. 

A central tenet of America’s dominant religion, Christianity, that a divine Jesus was resurrected from his tomb, should rank with the most bizarre of contemporary conspiracy theories. That it does not offers profound insight into why our times have proven so receptive to mis- and disinformation. Or, not to pick on Christianity, consider the six-day creation story itself — unscientific mythologizing that anchors Christianity, Judaism, and Islam alike. 

How is it possible that such hi-octane “miracles” happened only in the past but not now? That is precisely the kind of question a member of a fundamentalist sect would not ask. Welcome, then, to a nation in a state of denial — particularly if such denial jibes with one’s perceived self-interest or political agenda.

Increasingly, this kind of fundamentalist religion drives public affairs and thinking about education. And nobody seems willing to speak out against this primitive and widespread belief system. Indeed, some are threatened or attacked for doing so. 

Whatever benefits people imagine they derive from their immersion in this kind of religious experience must be balanced against the very real costs. These include avowing, and teaching their children, that truth is best apprehended through blind faith in millennia-old scripture as interpreted by charismatic leaders who typically demand, along with generous financial support, blind obedience — which can further dispose “the faithful” to embracing the evidence-free rants of political demagogues like Trump. 

And when reality collides with magical thinking, real suffering is the result.

Deadly Power of Denial

I saw this on social media this week: 

Yes, it’s hard to argue with belief, or shoot down the things some people tell themselves to help them feel better about life — and death. But that does not make illusion any less dangerous — especially when it affects the way we, as humans, govern ourselves and treat our planet. 

Being in denial about reality is a huge problem. It helps explain the growth of, for example, Holocaust denialism among a segment of the right. 

President Dwight Eisenhower understood how important it was to make sure people face facts. When Gen. Eisenhower and his men arrived at the Nazi concentration camps, Ike ordered that photographs be taken to document the crematoria, the barbed wire, the guard towers, the clothing left behind, the torture instruments, the mass graves, and skeletons piled high. 

He required that Germans living nearby be taken in to witness it for themselves, and proclaimed: 

Let us have as much documentation as possible — whether it be film recordings, photographs, testimonies — because there will come a day when someone will stand up and say that none of this ever happened.

We need to be bearing witness to what is actually going on, to the biblical-style scourges being visited upon humanity by humanity. We cannot begin to do that effectively if we shrink from dealing honestly with unscientific religious dogma and its impact.