We can agree that an extraordinarily strong earthquake is the very last thing that Haiti, already the Western hemisphere’s poorest country, needed. The death toll is surpassing initial projections of 35,000, there are untold thousands of injured without doctors to care for them or hospitals to bring them to, and relief workers are stymied by an already-weak infrastructure completely unable to handle both the magnitude of the crisis and the magnitude of help available. The physical, economic, social and public health ramifications of this disaster will be felt for decades.
My prayer is that Haitians were too distracted by the earthquake to take note of Rush Limbaugh’s foaming-at-the-mouth racism in commenting that Barack Obama responded to the disaster there because the victims were Black; in Limbaugh’s sick and twisted world, the President’s need to curry the support of other Blacks was what got him jumping in response to the earthquake, which is a cynically bigoted hypothesis of the kind we’ve not heard since, oh, the last time Limbaugh opened his mouth. And I truly hope that in the turmoil, no Haitian, Christian or non-, had to consider 700 Club and Christian Coalition founder Pat Robertson’s idiotic announcement that a “deal with the devil” during the French Revolution brought Haiti under a curse from God, the latest manifestation of which is this week’s earthquake. That nugget of pastoral wisdom dealt a seismic blow to the witness of the Gospel in Haiti and beyond, the ramifications of which will likely be felt also for decades.
We have here the unexpectedly polluted waters of the political and the pastoral, gurgling from fonts equally foul and splattering the shoes of all who hear. There’s no question that Limbaugh’s and Robertson’s words are beyond stupid. But how do you account for their influence among religious conservatives? How is it that both men command media empires? How do you describe an American political and theological landscape that’s elevated these two to positions of anything even close to respectability?
I’ll take “Beyond Stupid” for a thousand, Alex.
Limbaugh and Robertson embody two characteristics common to the Religious Right in the United States, neither of which looks at all like Christ or can be defended from Scripture. Limbaugh is the pugnacious bully who hates the same people most “Christian” conservatives do; Robertson is the guy who hijacks Bible study through sheer dint of a vacuous charm that masks an utter lack of smarts, maturity, or judgment. In better times, Limbaugh would be evangelized as an obdurate bigot — if the Church still thought bigotry was a sign of not knowing Christ as Savior — and Robertson would be taken under the wing of a more mature Christian and schooled in the virtues of silence until wisdom and prudence chase out the rash and the reckless. As it is, Robertson reigns as conservative Christianity’s pastor emeritus and Limbaugh lurks as its date to secular festivities of power, and the world outside wonders how devotion to Jesus could possibly allow for devotion to either of them. It won’t change, though, until Christ’s followers start asking themselves the same question and, in answer, showing them both the door. That can’t happen soon enough.