Clem Britt
The earthquake in Haiti has brought forth a worldwide emotional response. We are stricken with grief at the loss of life and the persistence of suffering. We are frustrated that relief efforts are too slow and that we personally can do so little to relieve the torment of our fellow human beings.
These sentiments are not shared by U.S. televangelist Pat Robertson, who's convinced that the hand of God is evident in this human tragedy. In the Robertsonian view, the Haitians are being punished for a "pact with the devil" made by their ancestors two hundred years ago. How he knows this is unclear, but the implications are not. To help the victims of the Haitian disaster is to thwart the Almighty's handiwork.
It's too easy to dismiss these pernicious comments as the rants of some sort of lunatic. There's more to it than that, and we should make an effort to put the televangelist's reaction in context.
In October of 1623, some 300 persons attended a service in a makeshift Catholic chapel in London. The floor collapsed and more than 90 people were killed. Protestants were convinced that this disaster was the work of the deity displaying displeasure at the proceedings of "heretics." In pamphlet and print and from the pulpit, a torrent of abuse was heaped on the victims.
In the 14th century, more than a third of Western Europe's population died in the plague known as the Black Death. Surely, it was thought, God was very angry with a good part of the world. With the cause of the disease beyond the era's medical knowledge, "spiritual" solutions were tried. Some prayed, while others whipped themselves in an act of desperate atonement for their sins. Thus the so-called cult of flagellants arose. (Their misguided antics are dramatically portrayed in the 1957 Ingmar Bergman film The Seventh Seal .)
In an event much more comparable to the current disaster in Haiti, the Western world was shocked by the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Thousands died as buildings tumbled in a densely populated urban area. Was God punishing Catholics? If so, why was a mosque and some Protestant property destroyed along with the many Catholic churches? Moreover, why must innocent children die alongside presumably sinful adults?
Such unanswerable questions began the process by which our civilization decoupled natural disasters from direct divine intervention in human affairs. The French philosopher Voltaire led the campaign to discredit those who championed universal divine causation and their own ability to detect such a thing in tragedies large and small.
In the centuries that have passed since the Enlightenment of the 18th century, two processes have been at work in the Western world. First, we have become more secular in our thinking, and there are many who would jettison any attempts to explain human events and natural occurrences by divine intervention. Second, the mainline Christian churches have also largely dispensed with the notion that God directly causes every single event and is the author of natural disasters.
In about two centuries, most of the Western world has dropped off the old notion of divine intervention like so much unwanted baggage. It's been an interesting process, but not everyone's come along for the ride. That's where the likes of Pat Robertson are coming from. They're not crazy. They've been left behind with the old baggage car while the train carrying everyone else has long left the station. They simply give voice to an antediluvian view of causation in history that most of us have abandoned.
In his famous poem on the horrors of the Lisbon earthquake, Voltaire posed this question: "Will you, before this mass of victims, say, 'God is revenged, their death repays their crimes?'"
If Pat Robertson's answer to that question is a Yes, then the rest of us surely will respond with an emphatic No.
Fred Donnelly teaches history at the University of New Brunswick in Saint John.