It was heartening to see the hand-wringing of the world’s religious apologists in response to the unfolding Haitian tragedy of the last two weeks: It meant that the believers still have the capacity to ask questions when the situation demands. More heartening still was the swiftness with which that behavior ceased. There were perhaps five or six days when it seemed every news organ in the universe felt compelled to address the role a deity might have played, or failed to play, in the earthquake and its aftermath. Then sleeves were rolled up, and the most bizarre plurality of people — basketball players, Reese Witherspoon, the hapless Pat Robertson — set about doing the good work no deity has yet attempted. (It has been suggested, here and there, that the human response was “God’s” work. If so, “God” isn’t very discriminating in choosing His implements.)
For the believers themselves, the hand-wringing may, in retrospect, prove at least a little embarrassing. Their sophistry had the look and feel of hasty improvisation. As Randi’s article about Bishop Sentamu of York demonstrated, serious tragedy has the ability to turn even the most erudite believers into little children. (Unless I am very much mistaken, Semantu’s argument was that the Christian god allows earthquakes to occur specifically so he may share in our suffering, thereby enjoying a bonding moment with his creatures. Counselors who work with battered women might have something to say about that relationship dynamic.) But that’s okay. Stress brings out the worst in plenty of people, and Bishop Semantu seems like an otherwise good guy. Perhaps the decent thing would be to let go of last week’s sillier theological questions and pious proclamations, and to write off Pat Robertson’s hateful early stance on the tragedy as a product of senile dementia. I’d like to — especially since I’m on vacation right now, and find thoughts of Pat Robertson inclement to the pursuit of R&R — but I can’t, quite, until someone points out two obvious facts. (Missed by both Robertson's critics and the small few who actually defended his stance.)
First: If Robertson’s initial statement on the quake was accurate, then his subsequent fundraising efforts for Haitian relief have been accomplished in opposition to his deity’s wishes, and he owes his many fans an explanation for his sudden anti-Christian turn. So obvious is this point that it needs no further elucidation.
Secondly: Robertson’s early stance was no mere effusion of misanthropy. It was fiercely, malignantly racist.
It has been said that Haiti is eighty percent Catholic, twenty percent Protestant, and 100% vodoun. As may be divined by this fishy math, voodoo is not practically incompatible with Christianity. Rather, it is a syncretism of the Catholicism of Haiti’s long-dead French slave owners and the traditional religions of Haitians’ African forebears. It is the latter component with which Robertson and his defenders take issue — not the component that was forced upon those long-gone Haitians on pain of death by international kidnappers, rapists, and murderers. Haitians, so the logic goes, would be better served today if they had followed those pirates’ examples more closely, and if their ancestors had submitted more completely to the cultural extermination that was nearly visited upon them.
Fair enough. Perhaps Robertson would argue that gospel is gospel, no matter whence it comes. But if he believes that, then he should take care to remain consistent. Voodoo is hardly the only, or even the most popular, pagan-flavored syncretism in the world today. That would be Roman Catholicism, which includes among its pagan deities the reconstituted Celtic goddess Brigid (now known as Saint Brigid), the reconstituted Greek goddess Demeter (Saint Demetrios), the Latin deity Mars (Saint Martin), and many others. As we speak, Catholics in every country on Earth are praying for the intercession of saints in much the same way that Haitian voduns now pray that, against all odds, another few lives will be salvaged from the ruins of Port au Prince.
That Pat Robertson remains silent on the evils of syncretism when disaster strikes more purely Catholic countries indicates either a profound ignorance of history or else a particular antipathy to paganism as it is practiced by those of duskier hue. I imagine that, without realizing it, he judges European and African paganisms very differently — finding in the remnants of the former a somewhat disturbing but fundamentally benign reminder of Europe’s cultural roots, and in the remnants of the latter a dangerously foreign belief system that defies (his) understanding.
There is something to be said for charitably writing off the prejudices of the terminally ignorant, but not when they have a TV show. Pat Robertson should be dragged over every available coal until he loses his bully pulpit. Don Imus got the same treatment for less.