By Steve Weatherbe

IN ITS modern beginnings in the 19th century, religious studies tended to dismiss the supernatural claims of religions as beyond the scope of science.

At the same time, the worldly institutions and practices of faith were eagerly subjected to empirical study from every perspective – from economics and evolution to psychology and women’s studies.

But religious studies scholars from all over the province and the American Pacific Northwest, who assembled for three days in early May at the University of Victoria, demonstrated that differing beliefs in God make for concrete differences in the real world.

A Sunday morning session discussed how the differing theologies of Eastern and Western Christianity produce different responses to natural disasters.

The takeoff point was a statement by American Christian broadcaster Pat Robertson, who notoriously interpreted Hurricane Katrina as God’s punishment for New Orleans citizens’ recourse to abortion.

More recently, Robertson asserted the massive Haitian earthquake was also a punishment, this time for a centuries-old pact with the devil – which, according to Haitian folklore, won the country independence from France.

The presenters from Pacific Lutheran University argued that Robertson was not a marginal figure in Christianity, but rather an individual who spoke for a large section of the American population – and did so from well within Christian teaching.

Ethicist Kevin O’Brien said Robertson “was part of the Western Christian tradition,” which saw in natural disaster a sign from heaven that human behaviour needed fixing. “Robertson was saying ‘Let’s fix it.’”

Americans could prevent more hurricanes by abandoning abortion; Haitians could  dedicate their country to God. But, significantly, Robertson and his audience didn’t have to do much of anything.

Co-presenter Brenda Llewellyn Ibssen of Pacific Lutheran University said the belief that God can intend natural disasters can be found in St. Gregory of Nazianzus, a fourth century Asia Minor bishop and theologian. But how Gregory responds, and wants his congregants to respond, is quite different from Robertson.

Part of that difference, she said, comes from the quite different view of original sin in the Eastern Orthodox church.  According to Ibssen, individuals do not, in Eastern Christian thinking, inherit original sin. But ‘the fallen world’ corrupts all relationships, including those between the rich and poor, men and women, parents and children.

“The Christian’s duty, and the church’s duty, is to restore God’s order,” said Ibssen, adding that Gregory – preaching on a series of natural misfortunes that had struck the community – said God was punishing the community for the injustices of the powerful.

Reform of unjust pricing of grain and corrupt officials – not so much individual sexual behaviour – would restore God’s favour. “He was preaching this to a big room of people, including both the rich and the poor,” observed Ibssen.

The presenters also noted that victims of Hurricane Katrina, interviewed afterwards, did not generally blame God. Those, however, that did believe the event was somehow part of God’s provision, were happier than those who were angry at people or governments,  or who thought Katrina was wholly natural. “It was comforting for victims to believe it wasn’t random, but was coherent,” said Anna Duke.

UVic political science, history and sociology professor Andrew Wender challenged the prevailing belief that religion ought to be separated from politics, as he does at every opening class for his course on religion and politics.

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“We are saturated with this cultural message. It’s just in the air,” he said. “It’s the question I put to the students: ‘Is it really possible, or even desirable, to live our religion in privacy – and act in a publically acceptable way, according to a different set of beliefs?’”

Wender answers: “If we are religious, it informs everything that we do.”

Wender reported that his students are surprisingly open to his challenge – as, increasingly, are academics.

Another discussion centred on the evangelical Protestant response to the State of Israel. Mae Cannon, a former assistant pastor currently studying for a doctorate at the University of California-Davis, said there were several evangelical responses to Israel, not just one.

“In fact,” said Cannon, “there have always been evangelicals critical of Israel because of unjust treatment of Palestinians – from the time the modern state of Israel was created in 1948.”

On the other hand, Christian Zionism – the organized evangelical Protestant support for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Palestine – got going in the late 1800s in England, as part of the development of dispensational theology.

“This taught that for the current age to be brought to an end and Christ’s Second Coming to be initiated, the Jews would have to return to the Holy Land.”

Evangelicals in the British government, negotiating the Treaty of Versailles ending the First World War, pushed for a British protectorate over Palestine in order to further this vision.

American evangelicals followed British ones into Christian Zionism, and became avid supporters of Jewish settlement in Palestine – though the motive of bringing on the Second Coming receded.

She suggested the 1925 Scopes ‘Monkey’ trial about teaching evolution in the public schools split Protestantism into liberals and fundamentalists. The latter saw America as a less hospitable nation because of the Scopes Trial, and increasingly viewed the Jewish homeland as the recipient of God’s favour instead of the United States.

Israel’s stunning victory in the Six Day War in 1967 confirmed for pietistic evangelicals that God favoured that nation.

But the social justice wing of evangelicalism – represented by such scholars as Wheaton University’s Gary Burge, author of Whose Land? Whose Promise?, and Ray Bakke, co-founder of Seattle’s Bakke University –  criticized Israel’s treatment of Arab Christians and Muslims all the more. They also criticized evangelicals who supported Israel.

Stephen Sizer, in Christian Zionism, said Christian Zionists had made Israel the new “Bride of Christ,” relegating Christianity to the status of “concubine.”

Commenting on how evangelicalism was more complicated than even evangelicals understood, professor Bruce Hiebert of the University of the Fraser Valley said academics too often preferred simple, or “thin” understandings because these were easier to turn into theses.

But reality, he said, “is thick and complex, even incoherent.”

The reality of the three-day conference was certainly complex, though hardly incoherent – as dozens of scholars strove to make sense of many religions, examined through many disciplines.

June 2010