In a Clash of Cultures, We’ve Put God in the Middle

Where is God?

Was he there in Somerset, Pa.--as one of the jubilant rescue workers insisted he must have been--when, in the wee hours of Sunday morning, they pulled the nine trapped coal miners from the pitch depths of the flooded shaft they’d been trapped in for more than 74 hours? It suits us well to think so, but it shouldn’t.

The townspeople have hailed the dramatic and unlikely rescue as nothing less than a bona fide miracle, a compensation, some have suggested, for the loss of the brave passengers aboard United Airlines Flight 93, the hijacked plane that crashed in a field only 10 miles from Somerset on Sept. 11.

The media snapped up the miners like a godsend, the television news anchors were all over the best feel-good story they’d gotten their hands on in weeks, particularly when it comes to God.

The Pledge of Allegiance, after all, was bowdlerized last month, the offending words “under God” having been declared unconstitutional by a federal appeals court sitting in California. Everyone is in a panic that the phrase “In God We Trust” on our currency may be next on the chopping block.

Meanwhile, the god of Mammon seems to have taken righteous offense, sending the stock market into fits of bipolarity that only the ravages of divine distemper seem able to explain.

Then, of course, there has been the rash of child abductions across the country in the last few weeks, leaving us unbelieving that any God could countenance the unspeakable suffering of a 5-year-old girl, sexually assaulted, murdered and left propped up on the side of the road. Where was our miners’ God then? Was he there when Samantha Runnion lay frightened and in pain beyond enduring? Is he there by the side of Elizabeth Smart, wherever she may be? Or was he only there in Philadelphia when mercy was shown to 7-year-old Erica Pratt, who escaped to safety by chewing through the duct tape with which her captors had bound and gagged her?

Maybe God has been busy in Pennsylvania.

Or maybe we’re just custodians of a cheap and bribable faith. Maybe we’re just the kind of fair-weather believers who pray for the winning Lotto ticket or the outcome of an election or who cross themselves in the batting box and the end zone because they think God cares about a timely touchdown or home run. Maybe we’re the kind of folks who, as some have argued in recent weeks, make blasphemous common coin of God’s name by printing it on our money, or mixing it up with our idolatrous love of country. Maybe our “god” is just a word after all, something we use and discard depending on the outcome of our bets.

And so I repeat, where is God? Where is our God? And what is he? Is he just a euphemism for getting what we want, a capricious projection of our selfish wants, a good day for a rescue crew or, like the Islamist’s Allah, a convenience we invoke to sanction our victories?

In these times, the answers to these questions matter more than ever because we are in a religious war with militant Islam, every bit as much as we are caught in a clash of civilizations, and God is in the middle of it.

Our God should be constant, the God both of tears and laughter, not the God of good fortune at the race track. If we can make of God nothing more than a name to be cut and pasted haphazardly into oaths, or praised only on the auspicious days, then we have lost the faith this nation--under and trusting in God--was founded on and, moreover, the faith that makes it worth defending.

Happy endings have nothing to do with it.