We may never know why bad things happen to good people,
but most Americans — except evangelicals — reject the idea that natural
disasters are divine punishment, a test of faith or some other sign from God,
according to a new poll.
The poll released March 24, by Public Religion
Research Institute in partnership with Religion
News Service, was conducted a week after a March 11 earthquake triggered a
devastating tsunami and nuclear crisis in Japan.
Nearly six in 10 evangelicals believe God can use
natural disasters to send messages — nearly twice the number of Catholics (31
percent) or mainline Protestants (34 percent). Evangelicals (53 percent) are
also more than twice as likely as the one in five Catholics or mainline
Protestants to believe God punishes nations for the sins of some citizens.
The poll found that a majority (56 percent) of
Americans believe God is in control of the earth, but the idea of God employing
Mother Nature to dispense judgment (38 percent of all Americans) or God
punishing entire nations for the sins of a few (29 percent) has less support.
From Noah’s fabled flood to 21st-century disasters
like Hurricane Katrina and the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, some people blame incomprehensible calamities on
human sinfulness.
Such interpretations often offend victims, however.
Public outcry prompted Tokyo Gov. Shintaro Ishihara to apologize for calling
the disaster a “divine punishment” for Japanese egoism.
“It’s interesting that most Americans believe in a
personal God and that God is in control of everything that happens in the world
… but then resist drawing a straight line from those beliefs to God’s direct
role or judgment in natural disasters,” noted Robert P. Jones, CEO of Public
Religion Research Institute.
The poll found that most racial and ethnic minority
Christians (61 percent) believe natural disasters are God’s way of testing our
faith — an idea that resonates with African-Americans’ history of surviving
through slavery and racial discrimination.
(Japan’s population is predominantly Shinto or Buddhist —
religions that view nature as a force beyond our control or understanding — but
the poll could not get a representative sample of those groups in the United States.)
In other findings:
- Most white evangelicals (84 percent) and minority
Christians (76 percent) believe God is in control of everything that happens in
the world, compared to slimmer majorities of white mainline Protestants (55
percent) and Catholics (52 percent).
- Nearly half of Americans (44 percent) say the
increased severity of recent natural disasters is evidence of biblical “end
times,” but a larger share (58 percent) believe it is evidence of climate
change. The only religious group more likely to see natural disasters as
evidence of “end times” (67 percent) than climate change (52 percent) is white
evangelicals.
- Across political and religious lines, roughly eight
in 10 Americans say government relief aid to Japan is very important (42
percent) or somewhat important (41 percent), despite our current economic
problems.
“After one of these disasters, people turn to their
clergy and their theologians and they look for answers, and there are no great
answers,” said Gary Stern, author of Can God Intervene? How Religion
Explains Natural Disasters.
“But almost every group believes you have to help
people who are suffering.”
The question of God’s role in, and humans’ response
to, disasters has long vexed the world’s major religious traditions, Stern
said, even as answers often remain elusive.
Prompted by the 2004 tsunami that devastated Southeast Asia, Stern interviewed dozens of American ministers,
priests, imams, rabbis, monks, professors and nonbelievers about their
theories. They offered disparate views, sometimes at the same time: forces of
nature are impersonal; God is all-knowing but not all-powerful; nature is destructive
because of original sin or collective karma; victims are sinners; suffering
helps test our faith and purify us.
“The evangelical world is definitely focused on
original sin and on the general sinfulness of our world … and it won’t end
until Christ returns,” Stern said. “In the mainline world, their theology is
not well-suited to why God allows these things to happen, so their emphasis is
on looking for God in the rescue efforts. And Catholics feel that suffering
makes us holy, and there are mysteries that we can’t answer in this life, and
we’ll find the answers in the next life.”
But among evangelicals, there’s a wide gulf between
the fundamentalist perspective that sees disasters as proof of God’s wrath and
the moderate view that sees “a distinction between an earthquake as part of
God’s plan and God causing that earthquake,” said R. Douglas Geivett, a
religion professor at Biola University in California.
“There are a lot of things that I wouldn’t cause to
happen to my children to teach them certain lessons, but I might allow them to
happen, so they might learn the lesson,” said Geivett, a former president of
the Evangelical Philosophical Society.
“This is tragic, but if you ask (why God allows)
earthquakes, you have to ask it anytime that people die. We would have to be
prophets of God to know that.”
(EDITOR’S NOTE – The PRRI/RNS Religion News Poll was
based on telephone interviews of 1,008 U.S. adults between March 17 and 20. The poll has a
margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.)
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