Mecca to Roseburg, Two Sides of the Same Hopeless Fatalism

Last updated on: October 4, 2015 at 6:21 am by Robert Hunt

Mecca to Roseburg, Two Sides of the Same Hopeless Fatalism 2015-10-04T06:21:29-06:00 Robert Hunt

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Congress needs to get off its knees and back to work.

Another shooter, another group of young people turned to corpses, and another group of American politicians feeling terrible sorry and praying for the families of the deceased. And as it turns out, more proof that American Christian congressmen are really no different from Saudi Muslim princes. When tragedy strikes they just shrug their shoulders and blame it on someone else. They fail to act, but accept no blame for their inaction.

Well there is a difference, because while preventable tragedies happen only every three or four years on the Hajj, they happen a couple of times a month in the US.

In my previous blog I suggested that those unwilling to accept responsibility for their inaction should be honest and say “buyer beware” to those who depend upon them. And perhaps that’s the sign Congress should post. “Americans beware, we would rather see your children killed than do our job.”

Because the reasonable expectation of politicians is that they make laws, not pray and feel sorrow. Prayer is the resort of the powerless and grief is the privilege of those whose children and friends have died. These are the right response for communities and families that are victims of preventable violence. Coming from the mouth of a lawmaker these are pure cowardice, the refuge of the lazy and the heartless. When God gives you a job to do you do it, you don’t pray that God will somehow mitigate the effects of your incompetence and grieve for the tragedy you helped create.

(The media are all too complicit in this fatalism. NBC newscaster Thomas Roberts, reporting on Oct. 3, tried to pour sugar on the tragedy by telling us that the love and concern poured out by neighbors insured that the shooter had no victory. What fatalistic nonsense. Leave us with the real story: a deranged killer armed to the teeth because of a failure of lawmakers to act as gun violence spirals out of control.)

Of course it can be argued that Congress merely reflects the will of a divided public when it comes to gun control. And certainly much of the American public remains in the grip of a theologically induced fatalism with deep Calvinist Christian roots. It is a strangely morphed Calvinism, because instead of yielding to the inevitability of God’s will it yields to a specious reading of the US constitution in which it becomes an all powerful deity to whom Americans are obliged to sacrifice tens of thousands of young lives a year.

But surely that same constitution didn’t invite Americans to elect poll-driven puppets. We elect men and women we expect to lead, men and women who don’t cave in to fatalism but seek to build a better destiny for us all. And if that is our expectation then we must realize that Congress has failed. Indeed it is an utter failure in doing its most important task, insuring our national security. It is now more dangerous to walk into your school or business in America than to drive in a car. But while we continue to make cars safer and airports terrorist proof our politicians pass laws that make our streets, homes, schools, and businesses more dangerous.

It is time for people of all faiths to wake up and realize that this fatalism, this resort to prayer and grief by congressmen, governors, and even presidents is not a religious virtue. It is a sure sign of their failure to be faithful stewards of the task that God has given them. Congress needs to get off its knees and back to work. Only then will they actually be yielding to God’s will.

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