Maybe the Stock Exchange needs a chaplain

Heather MacDonald, at the Secular Right, has doubts about some of the political uses of faith:

Unfortunately, Beck didn’t spell out how a greater engagement with faith would save the country from wrack and ruin under Obama.  I can’t identify many devout countries that are in any better shape than the U.S.  The populace of Mexico undoubtedly enjoys a much more vigorous relation to saints than the U.S. population, its faith in many cases unmarred by the slightest stain of Enlightenment skepticism.   Ditto every other country in Central America and the Caribbean.  As Sarah Palin would say, ‘How’s that workin’ out for ya?’  The prayer habits and attendance at houses of worship  of the Egyptians, Indonesians, or the Afghanis would put America’s Sabbath mall-shoppers to shame.  None seem like models to emulate.  But Muslim nations may not count for Beck, since a Christian God might not acknowledge the prayers of the infidel.  So what about Spain: its absolute fealty to the Catholic Church did not arrest its decline into a geopolitical non-entity following the Reformation. 

Perhaps a lack of prayerfulness and faith led to the election of Obama, in Beck’s view.  By implication, then, a greater prayerfulness may have given the country George W. Bush.  That religious devotion didn’t prevent 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, or the financial meltdown.   But of course, the list of catastrophes that faith has not prevented is endless.   To arbitrarily pluck just some recent misfires that neither preemptive nor post hoc religiosity could cure: the flash flood that killed at least 20 campers at an Arkansas campsite on June 11, the barge crash that killed two young Hungarians on a Philadelphia tour boat on July 7, or the April 20 explosion on the Deepwater Horizon oil that killed 11 workers.   At present, putting one’s faith in Paul the octopus seems to be the wiser course.

Is it presumptuous to expect God to have prevented these catastrophes or to have intervened once he caught wind of what was happening?   A believer might so reprimand us.  Then why does Beck think that God will respond to anything Beck or his listeners may pray for now?  Yet the governors of Alabama, Texas, Florida, and Mississippi declared a coordinated day of prayer in June to ask God for help with the oil spill.  Wouldn’t God already have noticed that something was awry without the day of prayer?  Or does he require a threshold number of bended knees before he rouses himself?  Of course, at some point the oil spill will be contained, so if we just wait long enough, we will have clear evidence of God’s responsiveness to prayer.  The many intervening human agents will be merely agents of his will.  So did the neighbors of Abby Sunderland, the publicity-seeking, would-be world circumnavigator, see God’s hand at work in her rescue from the Indian Ocean this June, even though the crew and captain of the French ship Île de la Réunion might seem to be more proximate causes of her salvation than the Almighty.  Let the 16-year-old forswear all human assistance the next time she capsizes, and we might have a better demonstration of God’s power. 

If science and technology followed the logic of religious thought, we would be lucky to be living in mud huts.  I posit that wearing fluffy sweaters prevents cancer.  Here, in confirmation, are dozens of sweater-wearing people who didn’t get cancer.   Oops!  Just found some other warmly-clad sweater-wearers who succumbed to the disease.  Never mind!  Their fate is beyond human comprehension, but what I do know is that these other more relevant people were saved by their sweaters.