The Blame Game                    
September 15, 2001

by The Very Reverend Alan Jones

We have seen the violence and tragedy that follows when people confuse God with real estate or with their own peculiar take on life.

The reaction of some religious leaders to the national catastrophe has been sad but predictable. It's a natural human tendency to look for causes and assign blame when something awful happens. And when the event is of epic proportions God gets into the picture. Mind you, the God in question is very local and the deity of a particular tribe. Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell lose no opportunity to pedal their particular product. No matter what the issue is, there they are selling their wares. Their god has been keeping a special eye on America for years and we did well insofar as we followed the right of center path of righteousness. Every nation has a dangerous tendency to see itself as especially chosen and the United States is no exception. We have seen the violence and tragedy that follows when people confuse God with real estate or with their own peculiar take on life. So, we ask, "Why did such a terrible thing happen to us?" And the answers are pouring in. Feminists, homosexuals, the ACLU, and liberals of every stripe have been leading this country down the toilet. God uses even evil means to bring us to ourknees and to our senses.

The trouble is that the Falwells and the Robertsons of the theologically dumb party are partly right. There is a grain of truth in all their damaging nonsense. It is legitimate for us to ask hard questions about ourselves. What is it about us that attracts such rage and hatred? How have we contributed to the situation to make such an outrage possible? These are good questions for a thoughtful society to ask. And we can ask them without losing sight of the fact that what happened last Tuesday was unspeakable and--yes--evil. Such questions have been asked about the draconian burdens put on Germany after the First World War by the Allies. These burdens certainly prepared the way for Hitler but they do not excuse him. The spokesmen for the religious right are strangely partial in their list of causes and seem to exempt themselves and their followers who stand on the mountain top to watch the rest of us burn. There is no sense of their own penitence and there are remarkable absences on their list of causes: the way we treat the weakest and the poorest among us, our love of the death penalty, our commitment to a bloated defense budget, our divinization of the market place, our greed masquerading as the glories of freedom and democracy.

There are understandable reasons for large sections of the world to hate us but now is not the time for cheap theology. We should repudiate the god of the "righteous" cause. Think of the logic of terrorism. The terrorist says to himself, "Because my cause is just and because I have suffered, I am beyond criticism and accountability. I can do what I like." We should repudiate the god of the good life. Think of the logic of consumerism. We say to ourselves, "Our way of life is obviously superior to everyone else's in the world, and because I am free and have the money, I can do what I like without reference to the poor and the marginalized. I am entitled." We should repudiate the god of cowboys-and-indians politics. Think of the logic of God-is-on-our-sideism--the God of self-righteousness. The awful thing is that those who perpetrated this evil believe that they were doing the will of God. We were the evil that needed to be brought down. They were willing to give their lives. But the God of self-righteousness is worshipped by us too. The god of petty vengeance is alive and well among us. We should watch out as we seek justice that we don't thirst for vengeance, vengeance on each other as well as vengeance on those responsible. Certain religious leaders would have us turn on each other. It's been said that there's an easy solution to every complex problem and it's always wrong. Now is the time for us to come together with a new vision of who we are and what we are about as a human family. We owe at least that to those who died suddenly and unprepared.

Alan Jones, dean of Grace Cathedral.

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