Oklahoma City Blast Leaves Residents With Questions About Faith : Tragedy: Many voice age-old concerns about why God would allow disasters to occur. And in the community’s healing, Muslims, Jews and blacks feel excluded by white Christians.

Upstairs at the First Christian Church, where families awaited word of their loved ones, there was little talk of God.

Then a chaplain began to help notify a family that a baby had died in the federal building bombing; the baby’s two grandparents were missing and presumed dead. It was, the chaplain said offhandedly, one of God’s miracles that so many people had survived.

“And one of the uncles of the baby, a son of the two people who were missing, just almost got violent over that statement because he did not feel God’s grace in these three loved ones that were dead,” said Roger Ford, a United Methodist funeral director volunteering as a crisis counselor.

“God,” Ford said, “was not a popular subject where I was working.”

In the days after the April 19 bombing, God seemed to be everywhere in Oklahoma City--in quiet moments of individual prayer, and in the public memorial services of a community struggling to endure.

Nearly two months after the explosion, however, the story is no longer a simple one of faith overcoming tragedy in the Bible Belt.

Not for the thousands whose lives were changed forever by the deaths of 168 of their friends and relatives. And not for many Jews, Muslims and black Christians, who feel as excluded in tragedy as they often do in everyday life.

In scores of conversations cutting across race, age and denominational lines, a more complicated picture emerges of a city grappling with central questions of faith.

If God permitted this unparalleled act of domestic terror to take place--as many people here have come to conclude--what sign was the Creator sending to a community once so self-assured in its faithfulness?

“We have, to some degree, been stripped of our innocence in the Midwest,” said the Rev. Keith Arledge, pastor of Trinity Baptist Church.

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In the middle of the destruction that first terrible night, the Rev. Steve Vinson remembers a deafening silence and, for the first time in his ministry, asking the question: Where was God?

“And then I looked up and I saw the cross on the building in the background and just a peace like I have never experienced in my life flooded, flooded me,” he said.

In this city of nearly 1,500 churches, where billboards proclaiming “God Bless Oklahoma City” greet visitors from the outskirts all the way downtown, it is understandable that many residents immediately began looking for God’s role in the bombing.

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Deaths caused by human evil shatter all the assumptions individuals hold in their hearts that living a good life will protect them from evil, said Ann Kaiser Stearns, a psychology professor and author of “Living Through Personal Crisis.”

“This is why there is so much anger, and why it’s appropriate to have so much anger, even at God,” she said.

But what Kaiser Sterns calls the inevitable human question--how could God do this?--is not easily broached in this theologically conservative city.

“My God does not kill children. My God is not responsible for the death of children,” said the Rev. Nicholas Harris of First United Methodist Church, which was badly damaged in the bombing.

He has mentioned the tragedy only once in Sunday services.

“It could have been me. If it was, I hope they would say, ‘Hey, he’s in a better place,’ and I wouldn’t want them to grieve over me,” Harris said. “It’s a faith statement. It’s not callousness. It’s what I believe.”

Many others search deeper for why mass murder on such a scale would occur here.

If God rules over creation, they say, then God must have allowed this act of terror to occur. And there had to be a reason God chose one of the most religiously observant areas in the nation, where nearly three-quarters of the population belong to churches or regularly attend services.

The answer emerging in varying forms in local churches is that the city was put to the test--and passed.

“What Satan meant for evil, we really have wrought for good,” Marsha Waldo said during a Bible study class at First United Methodist Church.

“It’s like it had to happen in Oklahoma, in the Bible Belt, where people are neighbors and we do give,” said John Davis of Trinity Baptist Church. “We’re the innocent of the world, of America.”

“Together in the Heartland” was the banner over the local newspaper stories, and members of the two dominant religious groups in the city, the United Methodists and Southern Baptists, echo that persistent theme.

But talk with groups of Muslims, Jews and blacks and there is another story, one of exclusion even in the midst of universal heartache.

One wall of the Islamic Center of Greater Oklahoma City is lined with boxes of blankets and food sent by Muslims around the country. In the center of what also doubles as a gymnasium, a large prayer mat is set up for Friday services.

Before the bombing, three huge mats covered the floor, serving 300 worshipers. But two days after, only 100 people showed up for services.

Harassed at their homes, schools and workplaces because of rumors immediately after the bombing implicating terrorists from the Middle East, many Muslims were afraid to appear at their house of worship, said Imam Shams-U-Diin Abdus-Sabur.

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And Rabbi Daniel Shevitz said the community is attempting to transform the tragedy into a story of Christianity triumphing over evil.

As evidence, he points to a letter to the editor in a suburban newspaper in which state Rep. Ray Vaughn said the tragedy serves as a reminder of “the duty . . . of a Christian nation to select and prefer Christians for their rulers.”

And in the “Heroes in the Heartland” benefit poster endorsed by Gov. Frank Keating’s wife, he and others note, a cross is in the middle of an outline of the state.

“There is a state religion in Oklahoma. That’s the way it’s being marketed to the rest of the world,” said Michael Alpert, a member of Emanuel Synagogue.

In the Muslim community, a woman suffered a miscarriage when stones were thrown through the windows of her home, and a teacher from the Islamic Center was hauled handcuffed through a London airport because he aroused suspicion by flying out of Oklahoma City soon after the bombing.

When Muslims asked to be part of the April 23 interfaith prayer service to promote healing in the community, they were rejected.

Nor were any local black ministers part of a nationally televised service with President Clinton and Billy Graham. The black Christian community felt so excluded that ministers brought in the Rev. Jesse Jackson for a separate memorial service.

The Rev. Leodis Strong, pastor of Avery Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Church, said the community’s response takes him back to 1968, when he was on a bus in Arkansas that stopped for an accident.

For a few moments, he said, no one’s skin color mattered as people pitched in to care for the injured.

“Once people got back on that bus,” Strong said, “we faced the same thing.”

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If the first great theological question to come out of the bombing was, “Why us?” the second is, “What do we do now?”

Some religious leaders see an extraordinary opportunity to build a more caring community, one that renounces violence and embraces its neighbors.

Abdus-Sabur said he and other Muslims were hypocritical in their reluctance to condemn the terrorist bombing of a bus in Israel, while at the same time loudly condemning terrorism in Oklahoma.

“We are not innocent. All of mankind is guilty for this. We can turn on the television and see violence. We can walk down the street and see violence. We can look into our homes and see violence,” he said.

Imam Jihad Ahmad of Iqraa Amerika Mosque said the religious community here needs to come to the point of self-examination.

“Is our Lord saying something to us through this madness? Until people of faith start asking this question, well, forget it.”

But many people in Oklahoma City are already looking to move on. A terrible thing happened, they say, but it tapped deep springs of kindness, goodness, sacrifice and compassion.

As ministers and lay people sat around a long table recently discussing the bombing, Ford listened patiently as others tried to find in the city’s response a divine purpose behind the bombing.

One minister said he thought the people died for a city and a nation that needed to experience love overcoming evil. A laywoman said that “Satan’s worst” was more bombs and more people killed, but that God intervened with quick action by law enforcement.

But Ford, who sat with the victims’ loved ones from the first day until the 167th body was identified, was not ready to agree that God was in any way responsible for mass murder, even if a great deal of good came out of it.

“It that was God’s plan,” he said later in his soft voice, “it was a very cruel test.”