Tahlequah, OK, USA – Perhaps hoping for the sort of instant notoriety gained last year by Quran-burning Florida pastor Terry Jones, a little-known clergyman in the Ozark Mountain foothills says, “God has changed my heart: I now do believe that the Almighty does use disasters to punish the sinful and ungodly.”
For decades, The Rev. Martin Thrasher had dismissed the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson when they claimed that calamities such as AIDS, Hurricane Katrina, and the Haiti earthquakes were visitations of God’s well-deserved judgment on the disobedient and degenerate of the earth.
“I didn’t used to believe God worked that way”, he explained, “Because innocent people were getting hurt, too.”
But events of last week have brought on a conversion experience for this small town, liberal preacher. He says God has revealed to him that the Heavenly Father has taken off his belt and is “givin’ a whippin’” to unrepentant evil-doers through the earthquake and hurricanes that recently punished the Washington, DC area.
“I had no regard for the conservative, televangelist types when they patronizingly shook their heads at the news of New Orleans’ destruction. I thought they were just confusing their theologies with the political prejudices of their Republican-leaning donors…and that is as charitable as I can manage to be about them.
“But how can anyone deny God’s hand in the timing of these events? The unholy alliance of mainstream ‘no new taxes’ conservative Republican leadership with the new heresies of the ‘no government is good government’ Tea Partisans has clearly become too great for God to look the other way any longer.”
Regarding the budget cuts demanded by the GOP in recent right-to-the-brink debt ceiling negotiations, Rev. Thrasher points to what he says is God’s holy writ on the matter. He claims there are hundreds upon hundreds of passages in the Christian Bible that pronounce condemnation and judgment upon governments and wealthy business owners who “steal what little the poor, sick, and elderly have.”
“Kings in the Old Testament are not judged to be ‘good’ or ‘bad’ by their loyalty to political ideologies, but by whether the people prospered under their reign. If the ruler obeyed God’s commands, he created charity and adjudicated in favor of the poor over the rich when their claims were legitimate. As a consequence, there would be peace and health in the society,” Thrasher claims.
Thrasher believes the slide toward invoking such Heavenly wrath has been a decade or more in the making. “Somehow, ‘compassion’ has become an evil in Washington, DC, while war without sacrifice and the selling of influence to the wealthiest Americans has become a virtue.”
According to Thrasher, reducing the taxes for the rich has never been Biblical doctrine. Jesus sounds neutral on the issue of paying taxes to Rome. He befriended tax collectors, urging them to be fair in the assessment and collection of taxes. As wise and revered a king as Solomon was the champion of high taxes, especially on the wealthy and on transnational business.
“It seems to me that, after all these years, the GOP and Tea Party had this double-whammy coming,” said Thrasher.
But what about the injured innocents that used to make him scoff at the “God’s Wrath” theory of natural disasters.
“Well, that is still a hard thing for me to accept. Falwell and Robertson would say that the benefit of God’s destruction of the wicked must outweigh the tragic loss of innocent life. And besides, if the obedient believers didn’t see the signs and decide to ‘shake the dust off their sandals’ as they got out of those dens of iniquity, then they aren’t that innocent.
“I guess if that logic suits them when the zip code votes Democratic, they will have to concede the point when God ‘smites’ the concentration of Republican power in the Capitol Building, too.”
Rev. Martin Thrasher is the entirely fictitious alter (altar??) ego of the author, who is also an ordained minister in the United Church of Christ.