The Religious Right, “God’s Wrath”, and the Disgracefulness of Tragedy-Based Proselytizing

As the sickening details continue to emerge surrounding Friday’s senseless massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, the inevitable national discussion about gun control and mental illness is already beginning to take place over the airwaves and at the dinner table. This discussion has to occur. For far too long, these two controversial problems have been ignored because people are afraid to disturb the fragile status quo of easy access to firearms and difficult access to tangible mental healthcare. Remembering and assisting the victims of this tragedy should, of course, be the nation’s immediate focus, but eventually we have to address these real issues that are negatively affecting our society.

However, there a small but obnoxiously boisterous segment of the population that wants to have a discussion that should be ignored and shut down whenever somebody tries to bring it up. That discussion relates to God’s supposed role in the killing of innocent women and children. Former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee said this about the Sandy Hook tragedy on Fox News, just hours after the killing had stopped:

"We ask why there is violence in our schools, but we have systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?”

This isn’t the first time that Huckabee has had such a vile reaction to a shooting spree. Back in July, he said that the Aurora, Colorado movie theater massacre occurred “[Not because we] have a crime problem, a gun problem or even a violence problem. What we have is a sin problem. And since we've ordered God out of our schools, and communities, the military and public conversations, you know we really shouldn't act so surprised ... when all hell breaks loose.”

So in other words, Huckabee believes that innocents are senselessly slaughtered because of a growingly liberal, secularist society that has ostracized God from everyday life. This is a truly sickening and self aggrandizing position to take. Regardless of the fact that the Sandy Hook shooter had little more than a secondary connection to the school, the notion that God would shrug at the safety and well-being of young kids because they weren’t saying an Our Father before beginning classes is Taliban-esque. Huckabee also seems to believe that if you don’t subscribe to his fundamental brand of Christianity, you are beyond saving, and that God’s supposedly all-encompassing love doesn’t apply to you.

How incredibly Christ-like of him. He’s truly loving his fellow man as God has loved him. Not.

This arrogant, doomy finger wagging isn’t limited to Huckabee either. Anytime a major man made or natural disaster occurs, the decrepit patriarchs of the political religious right always manage to set aside some time to spew verbal diarrhea over heartbroken countries and communities. In the days following 9/11, former “Moral Majority” leader Jerry Falwell said that the terrorist strikes on New York City and Washington D.C. occurred because of God’s hatred for America’s atheists, gays, feminists, and abortionists, and that the attacks that left 3,000 dead were “probably deserved”. After Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, Pat Robertson said that America’s abortion policies brought the storm to the nation’s shores. He also said that the earthquake that killed over 300,000 people in Haiti in 2010 was God’s punishment to a nation that made a “pact with the devil”. And in 2011, Fox News commentator and pseudo Christian revivalist Glenn Beck said that the Japanese megaquake and subsequent tsunami was a message from God.

These cretins need to shut up. Instead of showing compassion towards the victims of atrocities, they simply dismiss them as little more than the sacrificial lambs of a vengeful and spiteful God. And yet, these same zealots bemoan the abandonment of the organized religions that they claim to be the spokespeople for. Who in their right mind would willfully follow the version of God that Huckabee, Robertson, and Beck peddle? What type of Christian pictures Jesus turning his back on a school full of frightened children? With all of this newly invigorated talk about mental health awareness at schools and in the workplace, I think that it would be good for the producers of Fox News and The 700 Club to refer Huckabee and Robertson to a qualified psychiatrist. Only a sick and egotistical individual could truly believe the revolting rhetoric that these two men have been uttering on a tragedy to tragedy basis. At worst, Huckabee should be suspended from the airwaves until he delivers a meaningful apology for his comments about the Sandy Hook tragedy.

Of course, the words of these few men should not outweigh the actions of many Christians in the wake of the Sandy Hook tragedy and other catastrophes. Every teacher, police officer, and firefighter that played a role in saving children from the shooter’s rampage should be lauded as the heroes that they are. The thousands of people that packed Churches for prayer services in the communities surrounding the school should also be commended for their consideration and loving compassion. And the selfless heroes of past tragedies should also not be forgotten. The firefighters who saved workers from the burning Twin Towers, the Japanese citizens that managed to rebuild entire communities just a few short months after the ocean decimated them, and the Pennsylvania Amish that forgave a school shooter in 2006 all embodied Christ in ways that armchair demigods like Huckabee will never truly know.

Tragedy-based proselytizing is obscene and self centered. In the days ahead, messages of doom and divine retribution should be fully rejected. They have no place on cable news or in major publications, and they should be relegated to the grimy corners of society that they belong in.