The Texas Flood was not "An Act of God." It was a Natural Disaster.
Pressed by journalists regarding the Trump Administration’s budget cuts to the National Weather Service in the aftermath of last weekend’s floods in Texas, Trump’s Press Secretary, Karoline Leavitt, offered the following response on Sunday: “Well, the alerts imminently were sent out before the flood when people were sleeping because the flood hit in the very early hours of the morning. So, people were sleeping in the middle of the night when this flood came. That was an act of God—it’s not the administration’s fault that the flood hit when it did.”
At the time of my writing, over 120 people have died as a result of this tragedy, with over 160 people still missing. 27 of these were children and counselors at Camp Mystic, a Christian camp for girls along the Guadalupe River. As the mother of a three-year-old who cannot advance to the next level of her swim lessons for fear of putting her head underwater, sifting through the images of the flood’s aftermath in that Camp has led me to tears. As an American citizen, I am angry that 600 jobs were cut from the National Weather Service prior to this flood, even as I am enraged that the current Presidential Administration seems incapable of accepting responsibility for our social welfare in its devastating aftermath. I am further disgusted that right-wing news outlets like Fox News have been able to highlight an almost gloating response from progressives surrounding the tragedy—namely, from those who have either explicitly or implicitly declared that the devastation caused by the flood is the obvious consequence of a vote for Trump, that “you get what you pay for,” or “we told you so.”
It is as a theologian, though, that I currently feel compelled to say something in light of all these reactions. Even if I know no one actually reads this corner of the internet, it must be said and said again; especially given Leavitt’s careless remarks on Sunday, those of us professing any sort of faith must affirm: the floods in Texas were not an act of God.
Suggesting otherwise—whether explicitly from the podium of the Press Secretary in her effort to defend the Trump Administration from justified criticism against it, or implicitly (but just as nefariously) from progressive Christians who might be tempted to see this as some sort of judgment against those evangelical nationalists who voted the current Administration into power—blasphemes the name of God and scapegoats all those who died this past weekend.
When I taught introductory courses in theology to undergraduate students, one of the most meaningful texts we explored together was the book of Job. One of the oldest texts in the Hebrew Scriptures, this story was used by many in the evangelical circles of my youth to justify an unquestioning acceptance of suffering as “part of God’s plan.” These theologies offered an image of Job as a “patient” person of faith accepting the death of all his children and the loss of his worldly goods with no remorse or, for lack of a better phrase, “hard feelings” towards God.
This common and all too simplistic understanding of Job as “the patient sufferer,” however, directly contradicts the narrative of his story as recounted in Scripture, which rather presents Job as faithfully and righteously questioning the goodness and justice of God in light of these disasters. As the liberation theologian Gustavo Gutiérrez once summarized in his book On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent, Job is surrounded by friends who attempt to comfort him, but these become “sorry comforters” who blame Job for his own suffering in an attempt to justify their own preconceived notions about God.1 Surely, they tell him, this is divine punishment for some wickedness for which Job has yet to repent. Job insists upon his innocence against his companions’ bad theologies, ultimately leading him to an encounter with God at the text’s conclusion that usually left my students with more questions than answers.
Like Job’s “sorry comforters,” the grotesque suggestion that the floods last weekend were “an act of God” proposes that the dead died beneath the hand of divine retribution; or perhaps even more simply, it proposes that there was some sort of unknown divine purpose to such suffering. Either proposition would imply that God willed the deaths of all those who lost their lives in this tragedy, and that God somehow intended such devastation and pain to fall upon those whom Scripture instead tells us were created in the very “image and likeness” of God. Would we thus blaspheme the God of Job so easily? Would we thus accuse those who have so recently died? Would we thus suggest that Texans deserve this for their vote in November? Those who profess the Christian faith must resist such statements at all costs as they, like Job, resist the false theologies that would justify their own earthly politics.
Scripture assures us that God in Christ suffers with those creatures he loved into Being as the Word-within-God, and just as Christ cried from the Cross, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”, so may we offer what the theologian Johann Baptist Metz once called a “lament unto God” before all such unspeakable and senseless suffering in light of the Crucified’s cry.2 It is to this cry alone that I turn in moments like this, because it is here that I am humbled before the God of Compassion—the Divine mystery at the center of all Being who empties Godself in order to suffer with and alongside all those who thus cry out from the place of their affliction.3 Those who profess faith in this God are called, like Christ, to embody such compassion in all our actions towards one another on this shared earth, our common home, and we resist this call to our own peril.
I cannot stop thinking about another video I would often show undergraduate students after we’d read through the book of Job. In a recorded lecture following the release of his popular book, When Bad Things Happen to Good People, the late rabbi Harold Kushner asked his audience to resist seeing the hand of God in famines, fires, and floods; these, he said, were no “act of God,” but natural disasters. This feels an appropriate response to all those sorry comforters who will inevitably but falsely try to place these floods within some sort of sadistic divine intention in the days, weeks, and months ahead.
These days, given our collective complicity within the social systems that warm our planet, Kushner’s statement to this effect feels almost prophetic: how dare we blame God and attribute such horrific agency to the Divine, when it is our own social sin regarding the reality of climate change that prevents us from embodying the compassion for our shared home and one another that might yet save us all.
As the floodwaters rise and subside and inevitably rise again in the face of such horrors, I can indeed only look to the cross and cry unto God with God, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken us?” The overwhelming compassion of the Cross there meets our grief to help us resist all those shallow, inhumane theologies which speak nothing of the God who chooses to answer our unanswerable questions with Love alone.
On Job, (Orbis Books, 1987).
His article, “Suffering unto God,” (though frustratingly dense for my undergraduate students, who still faithfully read it at my obnoxious professorial urging), is a must-read; how, wonders Metz, can we even talk about God after the Holocaust? See his “Suffering unto God,” trans. J. Matthew Ashley, in Critical Inquiry 20.4, “Symposium on God,” (Summer 1994), pp. 611-622.
If you have not read Dorothy Soelle’s Suffering (Fortress Press, 1975), you should: https://www.fortresspress.com/store/product/9780800618131/Suffering.