At the time of this writing, Hurricane Irma is venting its fury on Florida. The hurricane pummeled Key West, then swung up, smashing into Florida's Gulf coast. With Hurricane Harvey hardly in the rear view mirror, and Hurricane Jose on the way, it's pretty clear that there's some catastrophic weather happening at the time.
Florida--southeast Florida, to be exact--has a special place in my heart: I served my two-year long mission in Miami-Dade and Broward counties. While I never personally went farther south than the Kendall/Hammocks area, my mission boundaries included everyone in Key West up to West Palm Beach, with the Everglades on the east and the Bahamas out in the west. So though the hurricane is currently pummeling the western part of the peninsula, the areas where I served thirteen to fifteen years ago are in rough shape.
So, even though Hurricane Harvey's deluge of Houston was in my country, and my heart, thoughts, and prayers went out to them, seeing my other 'home' of southern Florida beneath such furious winds and water is a more personal tragedy. Since it's Sunday, I find myself wondering if some of the people I knew back in the early aughts are still attending, still active, still working. Did they cancel church meetings? Are they helping with the relief efforts? I'm hopeful they've moved apartments since I was there--some were pretty horrible--but are the sisters and elders safe? Are the people there going to be okay? Are all my Cubanos safe on Calle Ocho and in Hialeah? Is the beautiful chapel on Miami Beach a place of safety, or has it evacuated? Images of the hurricane blot out the entirety of my mission (save the islands), an eclipse of water and wind.
These types of events--the fires in L.A. and, closer to home, throughout the state of Utah--can take on an apocalyptic feel, which can lead people to read into it a divine wrath or retribution. In other words, this type of destruction is considered a "sign of the times", an indication of the end of the world.
I'm not going to jump into that reading of scripture. Instead, I want to look at the idea that what we're seeing is a punishment for the sins of America. I don't mean to caricaturize conservativism, but I often hear two themes from the political Right: One, God hates and punishes sinners, especially those who commit the "sin" of homosexuality; and two, climate change is a hoax that isn't corroborated by hard data.
These two assumptions conflate when you look at this tweet by Ann Coulter, a conservative mouthpiece. (While it should go without saying, it's obvious that Coulter's conservative point of view doesn't reflect everyone who espouses conservativism, but, based upon whom conservatives elect, it seems clear to me that most of the Right agree with Coulter's stance.)
There's plenty to tease out, especially the rhetorical approach that she's going for, but, again, the point of this isn't how she said it, it's the sentiment that's behind it. To put it baldly, climate change isn't real, but God punishing the wicked with severe weather is.
So let's take that at face value. While I disagree that climate change isn't credible (it's now reached an overwhelming consensus), let's go with the idea that God punishes people for the sins they've committed through sending hurricanes, fires, floods, and other natural disasters.
This leads to a question of the gravity of particular sins. Let's say that there are some people in southern Florida who are good people, undeserving of catastrophe--they don't "elect a lesbian mayor" or some other sin of...uh, toleration, I guess? They aren't beating their kids, smoking, drinking, or doing anything lascivious. They get the punishment anyway, right? Bad things happen to good people, that's established, no big deal (except it's a huge deal, but we're not getting distracted today). So we have our hypothetical people inside a country that's doing "bad things" and that's why the hurricane comes.
Okay, but what if we're misunderstanding what the "bad things" are. What sin could all of America be condemned of? It certainly isn't being gay--the latest thought is that 4% of the population is gay, which is about double the amount of people who claim to be LDS--because being heterosexual (and heteronormativity) is the vast majority of our preferences here in the U.S. The idea, then, that God is punishing America for the gays' sake is, statistically, at least, a distortion.
As a Mormon, I think drinking is a sin, and Americans love to drink, right? That has a broader impact: it's estimated that 84.6% of Americans drink. That's a bigger number than homosexuality, that's for certain. Maybe it's smoking that brings such tempests upon us? Well, that's below 20%, so that doesn't fit. Sports on Sunday? This last Superbowl pulled in about one out of three Americans, with over 111 million people watching. Are these enough of a sin that God is smiting us?
We're still sitting on our primary supposition that God punishes the wicked, after all. But that question of what sin we're all committing could, perhaps, be one relating to the very Earth we all inhabit. One way of reading Genesis 2:15 is that the requirement for tending and "keeping" the Garden is expanded outwards to all of Creation. If taking care of the creations of God is one of the things on which we're judged, then America, as a whole is flat out violating God's commandment. We make up only 5% of the world's population, yet our impact vastly outnumbers our demographics. Due to the cult of capitalism, we've pillaged the planet for profit, the result of which has now made it a political statement to say that human behaviors are affecting the climate.*
If God punishes the wicked for their sins, and polluting, deforesting, exploiting, and spoiling the Earth is a sin, then we are not being punished by God so much as by ourselves. We live in the natural consequence of denying our stewardship in the face of profits, and that consequence is everything that climate scientists have been saying for years. Increased global temperatures will melt ice caps, which adds water to the overall climate systems. Overheated oceans now pour their hot water into hurricanes that ravage our coastal cities, the extra heat acting as fuel to propel them to ever stronger gusts and sustained winds. Disruption of ecosystems lead to minor, localized, and sometimes even broader extinctions. There's no need for this little blog to catalog a list of the terrors that our collective sin of environmental negligence. The projected problems are rearing their heads and will continue to do so until we listen.
---
* If you need a primer on the difference between climate and weather, Neil has you covered.
Florida--southeast Florida, to be exact--has a special place in my heart: I served my two-year long mission in Miami-Dade and Broward counties. While I never personally went farther south than the Kendall/Hammocks area, my mission boundaries included everyone in Key West up to West Palm Beach, with the Everglades on the east and the Bahamas out in the west. So though the hurricane is currently pummeling the western part of the peninsula, the areas where I served thirteen to fifteen years ago are in rough shape.
So, even though Hurricane Harvey's deluge of Houston was in my country, and my heart, thoughts, and prayers went out to them, seeing my other 'home' of southern Florida beneath such furious winds and water is a more personal tragedy. Since it's Sunday, I find myself wondering if some of the people I knew back in the early aughts are still attending, still active, still working. Did they cancel church meetings? Are they helping with the relief efforts? I'm hopeful they've moved apartments since I was there--some were pretty horrible--but are the sisters and elders safe? Are the people there going to be okay? Are all my Cubanos safe on Calle Ocho and in Hialeah? Is the beautiful chapel on Miami Beach a place of safety, or has it evacuated? Images of the hurricane blot out the entirety of my mission (save the islands), an eclipse of water and wind.
These types of events--the fires in L.A. and, closer to home, throughout the state of Utah--can take on an apocalyptic feel, which can lead people to read into it a divine wrath or retribution. In other words, this type of destruction is considered a "sign of the times", an indication of the end of the world.
I'm not going to jump into that reading of scripture. Instead, I want to look at the idea that what we're seeing is a punishment for the sins of America. I don't mean to caricaturize conservativism, but I often hear two themes from the political Right: One, God hates and punishes sinners, especially those who commit the "sin" of homosexuality; and two, climate change is a hoax that isn't corroborated by hard data.
These two assumptions conflate when you look at this tweet by Ann Coulter, a conservative mouthpiece. (While it should go without saying, it's obvious that Coulter's conservative point of view doesn't reflect everyone who espouses conservativism, but, based upon whom conservatives elect, it seems clear to me that most of the Right agree with Coulter's stance.)
 |
| This is a screenshot of her tweet, in case it's deleted later. |
So let's take that at face value. While I disagree that climate change isn't credible (it's now reached an overwhelming consensus), let's go with the idea that God punishes people for the sins they've committed through sending hurricanes, fires, floods, and other natural disasters.
This leads to a question of the gravity of particular sins. Let's say that there are some people in southern Florida who are good people, undeserving of catastrophe--they don't "elect a lesbian mayor" or some other sin of...uh, toleration, I guess? They aren't beating their kids, smoking, drinking, or doing anything lascivious. They get the punishment anyway, right? Bad things happen to good people, that's established, no big deal (except it's a huge deal, but we're not getting distracted today). So we have our hypothetical people inside a country that's doing "bad things" and that's why the hurricane comes.
Okay, but what if we're misunderstanding what the "bad things" are. What sin could all of America be condemned of? It certainly isn't being gay--the latest thought is that 4% of the population is gay, which is about double the amount of people who claim to be LDS--because being heterosexual (and heteronormativity) is the vast majority of our preferences here in the U.S. The idea, then, that God is punishing America for the gays' sake is, statistically, at least, a distortion.
As a Mormon, I think drinking is a sin, and Americans love to drink, right? That has a broader impact: it's estimated that 84.6% of Americans drink. That's a bigger number than homosexuality, that's for certain. Maybe it's smoking that brings such tempests upon us? Well, that's below 20%, so that doesn't fit. Sports on Sunday? This last Superbowl pulled in about one out of three Americans, with over 111 million people watching. Are these enough of a sin that God is smiting us?
We're still sitting on our primary supposition that God punishes the wicked, after all. But that question of what sin we're all committing could, perhaps, be one relating to the very Earth we all inhabit. One way of reading Genesis 2:15 is that the requirement for tending and "keeping" the Garden is expanded outwards to all of Creation. If taking care of the creations of God is one of the things on which we're judged, then America, as a whole is flat out violating God's commandment. We make up only 5% of the world's population, yet our impact vastly outnumbers our demographics. Due to the cult of capitalism, we've pillaged the planet for profit, the result of which has now made it a political statement to say that human behaviors are affecting the climate.*
If God punishes the wicked for their sins, and polluting, deforesting, exploiting, and spoiling the Earth is a sin, then we are not being punished by God so much as by ourselves. We live in the natural consequence of denying our stewardship in the face of profits, and that consequence is everything that climate scientists have been saying for years. Increased global temperatures will melt ice caps, which adds water to the overall climate systems. Overheated oceans now pour their hot water into hurricanes that ravage our coastal cities, the extra heat acting as fuel to propel them to ever stronger gusts and sustained winds. Disruption of ecosystems lead to minor, localized, and sometimes even broader extinctions. There's no need for this little blog to catalog a list of the terrors that our collective sin of environmental negligence. The projected problems are rearing their heads and will continue to do so until we listen.
---
* If you need a primer on the difference between climate and weather, Neil has you covered.