By now we have heard of Governor Sarah Palin’s invocation of God in order to obtain a natural gas pipeline in Alaska: “God’s will has to be done in getting a 30 billion dollar gas pipe line” for Alaska, “so pray for that.”
And her belief about God’s role in the war in Iraq:
“. . our national leaders are sending them [our soldiers] out on a task that is from God-pray for them-there is a plan and it is God’s plan.”
These comments from a potential Vice President of the United States are of concern from a number of different points of view:
1. The idea that whatever we, citizens and politicians alike, think is in our interest can or must also be in God’s best interest. This suggests that God’s interests are synonymous with ours and all we have to do is pray for this congruence to occur. What we want is what God wants for us-a pipeline and to invade Iraq as we did, or that new house on the block and rising stock prices.
2. There is a deep presumption of knowing the will of God. It seems to me to be the height of arrogance to lay our plans for any foreign or domestic policy initiative at the temple of God, because in some sense this may absolve us of responsibility. If things don’t work out as planned, then we can just say, “It wasn’t God’s will that we reach this particular objective.” If we reach our goals, then we can loudly trumpet, “See I told you so. It was God’s will that the Surge succeed, that violence was reduced, that the Iraqis came together to reach political amity.”
3. You must have a very personal concept of the Almighty to think that He concerns Himself so deeply in human affairs that we can invoke Him to ratify our own approaches to life’s problems. When I was a “born again Christian” my freshman year at Harvard I went to a number of fellowship meetings where some of my classmates would intone, “Well, God willing, I’m going down to the bookstore to get my economics text.” I was always slightly amazed at this-thinking that God cared whether or not you got your required reading done.
4. This, of course, leaves atheists, agnostics and some of the rest of us to rely on ourselves and our best thinking in order to solve problems. It may be that folks like Sarah Palin and President Bush also think we must try very hard to succeed even if we have invoked the blessings of the Almighty. When I was in high school I prayed everyday not for peace in the world, but for good grades. I believed what Norman Vincent Peale had taught in The Power of Positive Thinking-that prayer can move mountains. I invoked God for my own personal success. So I prayed nightly, right after spending four to six hours doing homework.
Thomas Merton, author of The Seven Storey Mountain and many other works of contemplation, noted that “Our discovery of God is, in a way, God’s discovery of us.” (New Seeds of Contemplation)
Prayer is one way of establishing a conversation with God through which He discovers us, not by which we gather all the material pleasures we want unto ourselves.
5. And, finally, the essence of Palin’s claim is that she can determine God’s will, God’s plan for Iraq and for natural gas in Alaska. I’m sure we’d all agree that Iraqis deserve to enjoy all the freedoms we do in this country. But was it God’s plan to invade Iraq with so few troops we couldn’t control the country, couldn’t prevent the insurgency that robbed over 4,000 of our fighting men and women of their precious lives? Robbed so many Iraqis of their lives and millions of Iraqis of their homes.
This is the height of arrogance to claim to divine the will of the Almighty.
But among the most troubling consequences of this marriage of God and foreign policy is where it might take us-to Iran, for example. What if McCain becomes President and thinks the only way to prevent Iran from getting nuclear weapons is to launch an air, missile and limited ground attack? What if, under the influence of his own religious views or those of his VP, he tells us this attack is much better thought out than the one launched against Iraq in 2003 AND, most importantly of all, it has God’s blessing, or it is part of God’s plan?
What this gives any administration is the audacity and arrogance to claim that whoever disagrees is putting interests other than country first. We’ve seen these assertions in McCain’s allegations against Obama. The Illinois Senator has stated his desire to end the war in Iraq and put forces where he, as well as others, believes, they can be more useful-in Afghanistan, in capturing bin Laden.
McCain charged that Obama was seeking votes rather than victory, that he put country second to, as Sarah Palin has phrased it, the desire for votes. This may be tantamount to being unpatriotic, unchristian and treasonous. How can you vote against God’s plan as you divine it?
Hence, the bumper sticker “Country first” as if some of us do not put our country first-always.
All of this emphasis on invoking God in politics is very troubling for someone who considers himself a religious person with a small “r.” I do not go to church regularly, but in my youth, as mentioned above, I had my days with the fundamentalist Christians at Harvard. But, eventually, the emotional zeal withered away as I was simultaneously learning how to fire weapons and command men at sea and perhaps in battle, as part of an NROTC educational program.
So, today my religious concerns focus upon the beautiful mystery of God and His Creation. Again as Thomas Merton noted, “Faith incorporates the unknown into our everyday life in a living, dynamic and actual manner.” How does this work, I wonder.
But I am also a healthy skeptic, wondering what kind of Deity I do believe in-whether the very personal one who cares about my every thought or, at the other extreme, one who set the Big Bang in motion and let all the physical laws of space, time, energy and matter develop as they have, creating stars that became galaxies that merged creating our own Milky Way and some galaxies with super massive black holes deep in the center millions of times as massive as our sun.
This, to me, is the magical mystery tour.
In the last analysis, I wish politicians would be more like Biden, McCain and Obama-keeping their religious beliefs more or less to themselves.
Palin scares me because I do not want another leader like George Bush in the White House who, according to Bob Woodward, failed to seek the advice of his earthly father prior to his pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. He supposedly told Woodward he appealed to a “higher” power or father. The Heavenly Father.
Maybe this invocation told him that whatever plans he made for this invasion, as short-sighted as they were in terms of troop levels would gain the “Mission Accomplished” banner. Perhaps this was why he ignored Secretary of State Colin Powell’s desire for overwhelming force and General Shinseki’s prediction that to control Iraq would require several hundred thousand troops, far more than Rumsfeld and General Franks were willing to commit. He might have thought God’s will was in the Bush, Rumsfeld, Franks plan.
Perhaps, because it was God’s will Bush failed for so long to recognize what Powell did early on-that our invasion had not only rid the world of a butcher, but had also unleashed the very forces of civil war that Brent Scowcroft and Dick Cheney (then Secretary of Defense) had warned against in 1991 as reasons for not going to Baghdad at the end of the First Gulf War.
Many of us believe in God. Many believe in widely different concepts of what the Deity is and can do in our universe and in our lives.
But beware those politicians who claim God is on the side of their own special policy in foreign and domestic affairs. Maybe all we have to do is pray hard-whether for good grades or federal largesse to reach our own private, sometimes very selfish objectives.
Or maybe faith, prayer and belief in God are gifts from the Almighty as ways of establishing a conversation we hope will lead to understanding Him and the mysteries of Creation.
I believe it was Abe Lincoln who cautioned us about God’s being on one side or the other: “Sir, my concern is not whether God is on our side; my greatest concern is to be on God’s side.”
John Barell
Author, Quest for Antarctica-A Journey of Wonder and Discovery (2007) and Why Are School Buses Always Yellow? (2007)
http://www.morecuriousminds.com
jbarell@nyc.rr.com
John Barell is a national consultant to schools desiring to foster inquiry, critical thinking and authentic assessment in classrooms for all students. He is author most recently of Why Are School Buses Always Yellow? (2008); Surviving Erebus–An Antarctic Adventure (2008); Quest for Antarctica–A Journey of Wonder and Discovery (2007) and “Inquisitive to a Fault”–Preserving American Democracy.
http://www.morecuriousminds.com
