Religion, science and Hurricane Katrina

Religion, science and Hurricane Katrina

Joseph Kay World Socialist Web Site, September 19th 2005

 In his address to the nation from New Orleans last Thursday, Bush  repeatedly invoked religion and religious organizations. The maudlin  appeals to God went beyond even the president’s stock-and-trade  sermonizing.   Speaking of those who had welcomed in evacuees, he emphasized the  role of “religious congregations.” He spoke of the “armies of  compassion,” a term that has been used with increasing frequency by  the administration as a pseudonym for Christian fundamentalist  organizations. These armies, Bush said, “give our reconstruction  effort its humanity.” He asked people to donate “to the Salvation  Army, the Red Cross, and other good charities and religious  congregations,” deliberately putting an organization associated with  religious ideology before the secular Red Cross.   Bush declared that the devastated region would be rebuilt because of  “a core of strength that survives all hurt, a faith in God no storm  can take away…” He concluded with the declaration that the country  would rebuild as it did after earlier natural disasters. “These  trials have also reminded us that we are often stronger than we know,  with the help of grace and one another,” he said. “They remind us of  a hope beyond all pain and death, a God who welcomes the lost to a  house not made with hands.”   Bush declared Friday to be a National Day of Prayer and Remembrance.  During much of the day, the television airwaves were saturated with  coverage of religious services and vigils. This was followed by  Bush’s weekly radio address on Saturday, which was punctuated with  references to “God’s grace,” “God’s comfort,” and the “strength of  the Almighty.”   Significantly, the official day of prayer came on the same day as a  new report in the journal Science documenting the correspondence  between an increase in the number of severe hurricanes and global  warming.   Researchers at Georgia Tech and the National Center for Atmospheric  Research found that the number of category four or five hurricanes  has nearly doubled over the past three decades. Since 1990, the world  has averaged 18 such hurricanes per year, up from 11 a year during  the 1970s. When it struck Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama,  Hurricane Katrina was a category four storm.   The scientists pointed to rising surface sea temperatures as a factor  in the increased incidence of severe hurricanes, with one co-author  noting that the study provides “increasing confidence” that there is  a connection between global warming and the greater number of intense  storms.   Bush’s efforts to chloroform public opinion with superstition and  fatalism are meant to distract attention from the actual scientific  understanding of events such as Hurricane Katrina. The administration  has repeatedly sought to deny, or at least call into question, the  existence of global warming, in the face of overwhelming scientific  evidence. It has scuttled even the most limited international  agreements to reduce CO2 emissions, which cause global warming and  are produced mainly through the combustion of fossil fuels.   In doing so, the US government has acted as an agent of the American  energy industry and other corporate interests. As with many of the  environmental problems the country and the world now face, the  findings and warnings of scientists on global warming cut across the  profit interests of dominant sections of the American ruling elite.   The denial of environmental problems has disarmed the population in  the face of real dangers. A serious attempt to deal with global  warming would require not only a major shift in the sources and  methods of energy production, but a massive investment in social  infrastructure to guard against disasters such as Hurricane Katrina,  something the American ruling elite is unwilling to carry out.   There is, of course, a more immediate and sordid aspect of the appeal  to religion. It is used to justify the funneling of federal monies to  religious groups, in particular to right-wing Christian  fundamentalist outfits that are close to the Republican Party and  serve as a principal base of the Bush administration. Bush announced  in his speech that part of the money that is being raised by former  presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton will go to religious  organizations.   Increasingly, the Republican Party has sought to use religious  organizations to drum up support on the basis of “moral issues” such  as abortion and homosexuality. This has not been limited to the  traditional churches of the Republican right. In the most recent  election, the Bush campaign sought to appeal to clergymen of  predominantly black congregations in an effort to increase the  Republican vote among African-Americans.   Earlier in the month, it was revealed that the Federal Emergency  Management Agency (FEMA) included prominently among its list of  recommended charities Operation Blessing, an organization with links  to Pat Robertson, the right-wing evangelist who recently called for  the assassination of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Of the dozens  of organizations that FEMA recommended, the vast majority were  religious outfits of one form or another.   The administration sees the devastation of Hurricane Katrina as an  opportunity to push its efforts to integrate church and state and to  promote government financing of “faith-based” groups in place of  social programs for those most severely crushed by the workings of  the capitalist system.   Aside from these more immediate political calculations, the  administration’s relentless promotion of religion serves the  long-range goal of undermining science and polluting the public  consciousness with superstition and backwardness. To the extent that  mystification of both natural and social processes gains the upper  hand, the masses of people who are victimized by the policies of the  government and the financial elite are ideologically and politically  disarmed.   Invocations of God serve to impede a serious examination of the  causes of the Katrina disaster-above all, those which arise not from  nature, but from the dysfunctional and socially destructive workings  of the capitalist system, and the role of the parties, media organs,  and government institutions that uphold that system.   Where did this disaster that has befallen the people of Louisiana and  Mississippi come from? It was not primarily the product of blind  natural forces, an “act of God.” It not only could have been  foreseen, it was foreseen.   Engineers, scientists and others had warned for decades that the city  of New Orleans, lying below sea level and protected from the  surrounding water by an inadequate levee system, was not safeguarded  from a category four or five hurricane. With global warming  increasing the number of such hurricanes, it was inevitable that the  region would eventually be struck, and there have been several close  calls over the past decade.   But no preparations were made. None of the measures required to  protect the city and the entire region were implemented, even though  doing so would have cost a fraction of the outlays required to  address, even in the most rudimentary way, the devastation caused by  Katrina and the government’s failure to respond.   Nothing was done because over the past several decades the American  ruling class, under administrations of both political parties, has  sought to systematically cut all social spending, including spending  on public infrastructure. Bound up with deregulation, privatization  and the dismantling of social programs, this policy was designed to  enrich a tiny minority of the population at the expense of the  American people as a whole. In this, it has succeeded to the point  where the United States is the most socially polarized of all the  major industrialized countries.   Hurricane Katrina has laid bare the ugly face of American capitalist  society-the enormous social inequality, the impoverishment of broad  sections of the population, and the looting of society by a financial  oligarchy. These are the realities that the sanctimonious invocations  of God and religion are meant to obscure.   In championing religion, Bush is speaking not merely to his own  right-wing constituency. To the hundreds of thousands of people who  have been affected by the hurricane, and the millions more who have  looked on with shock and horror, he is saying: Do not look to society  and politics for the cause, or the solution, to your problems. Do not  look to me and the interests I represent for an explanation or  accounting, let alone restitution. Look to God.   In the guise of providing conciliation to those who are suffering,  this shameless purveyor of lies and wars is pointing to the heavens  to defend the most earthly and material of social interests.

This article was originally posted to the World Socalist WebSite at http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/reli-s19.shtml