Whether you’re an atheist or not, you should be alarmed by the sight of elected officials making a big public show of praying during a crisis. It’s not that prayer itself does anything one way or the other – it’s that their beseeching the gods for help is a good hint, not just that they have no ideas, but that they’ve given up even trying and are staking their hopes on a miracle. Which is why this story, about the man who happens to be the most recent entrant in the Republican presidential field, is even more disturbing than the usual drumbeat of Christian privilege:
A few months ago, with Texas aflame from more than 8,000 wildfires brought on by extreme drought, a man who hopes to be the next president took pen in hand and went to work:
“Now, therefore, I, Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, under the authority vested in me by the Constitution and Statutes of the State of Texas, do hereby proclaim the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas.”
Then the governor prayed, publicly and often. Alas, a rainless spring was followed by a rainless summer. July was the
hottest month in recorded Texas history… In the four months since Perry’s request for divine intervention, his state has taken a dramatic turn for the worse. Nearly all of Texas is now in “extreme or exceptional” drought, as classified by federal meteorologists, the worst in Texas history.
In fact, as reported in a later article, the economic losses from Texas’ severe and ongoing drought have now topped $5 billion, setting a record. What conclusion should we draw from this story? Should it be that Perry was praying to the wrong god and the real one got angry and worsened the drought? (Maybe he should try praying to other gods – bowing toward Mecca, say, or sacrificing a bull to Zeus – just to see if one of them will help out.) Or maybe Rick Perry himself is just bad at praying. Maybe he’s committed some secret sin that God is punishing him for, and any state or country that he governs will be afflicted by drought and devastation. Or, of course, maybe it’s just that God doesn’t exist or doesn’t answer prayers.
An empirically-minded voter would at least consider all these possibilities. But as a Republican, Perry has the advantage of a huge faction of constituents who think that ostentatious public displays of piety are the same thing as character and virtue, and who can be counted on to remember the prayer and forget the result. The inconvenient fact that his praying didn’t help will be filed in a mental drawer and forgotten, just as they’re used to forgetting all the times prayer made no difference in their own lives. On the other hand, if he had issued a prayer proclamation and the skies had opened up the day afterward, it would be a miracle remembered for decades, and Perry would probably be using it in his campaign literature right now. From a politician’s standpoint, it’s a win-win situation (which explains why Georgia’s governor tried the same thing in 2007, with equally pathetic results).
The elephant lurking in the room is that these increasingly extreme swings of weather are likely due in part to global climate change. But rather than taking effective action, like shutting down coal-fired power plants or offering tax incentives for alternative energy, the anti-science evangelicals would prefer to squeeze their eyes tightly shut and pray for God to magically rescue them from the crisis of their own making. In fact, they’re dead set on continuing to foster antiscientific ignorance.
When hurricanes strike our coasts, the religious right won’t call for engineers to build seawalls or restore barrier reefs, they’ll bow their heads and try to pray the next storm away. When drought and wildfire strikes, they won’t call for more efficient water use, they’ll just beg God to send more rain so they can continue their wasteful ways. When the economy plunges, they won’t vote for government stimulus to put people back to work, they’ll just kneel and implore God to fix it (how they expect this to happen, they never quite say – this one is especially mysterious).
As a growing human population presses against the limits of what our planet can sustain, nothing is more important than steering our course wisely through the next few decades if we’re going to thread the needle of survival. This will be difficult enough if we rely on science, but the religious right, having amply demonstrated how relying on faith has worsened their own lives, now wants to have a faith-based civilization. This is like taking a road trip by blindfolding yourself before you get in the driver’s seat, spinning the steering wheel at random, and trusting that God will see to it that you end up where you want to go. Unfortunately, we’re stuck on the same planet as them, which makes it all the more urgent for those of us who don’t share this suicidally irrational faith to loudly and fearlessly defend science and reason.