I have been struck lately by the spate of columns written by religious people struggling to explain how it is that a just God permits things like the Indian Ocean tsunami to occur. And perhaps it’s coincidence, but two columns written by conservatives (the NY Times’s William Safire and the Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby) conclude that it’s OK to be angry with God when things like this happen — that, in fact, we should "angrily question" God (in Jacoby’s words) for these kinds of events.
So I found this NY Times letter by George Woolfe of North Carolina to be quite insightful:
In his column explaining the Book of Job, William Safire allows that "it is not blasphemous to challenge the highest authority when it inflicts a moral wrong." Neither, I might add, is it unpatriotic to challenge our highest authority when he commits the nation to a moral wrong.
Very well said, Mr. Woolfe. Our friends on the right — John Ashcroft, most famously — often seem to be of the view that is unpatriotic at best to question our leaders, even when, in our opinion, their policies are misguided and will only worsen the problems they are purportedly designed to solve. (Recall also Bush’s ex-press secretary Ari Fleischer’s infamous comment that Americans need to "watch what they say, watch what they do.") And Jeff Jacoby is a big Ashcroft fan who objects to Ashcroft’s "lynching" at the hands of the American left. Yet this same Jeff Jacoby tells us that we should angrily question God when God does something (or allows something to happen, depending on your theology) that seems unjust.
So let me get this straight, Jeff: we can angrily question God, but not George Bush?
Probably because Jacoby is on the White House payroll a la Armstrong Williams. God doesn’t sign the checks, so ask all the questions you want.