God's Turn in the Barrel?

To judge from our political and spiritual leaders, there is nothing we could go to mitigate the death and destruction from the catastrophic July 4th floods. It's all God's fault, apparently.

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Saturday, July 19, 2025

On Tuesday, I published an essay about the July 4th storms, flooding and loss of life in the Texas Hill Country region, particularly on the Guadalupe River near Kerrville. The title was “Tragedy in Central Texas” and the subheading read:

God sent devastating floods to Central Texas. Humans compounded the damage in almost every possible way. Is God the only one we will hold accountable?

As I always do, I posted a link to the essay on my Facebook page. The link prominently displayed the subheading. That FB post engendered 33 comments, more than twice is many as the “likes” for the actual post on Substack. (This suggests that most of them did not read the post itself, but simply riffed off the Facebook teaser.)

Most of the comments were directed at my accusation that God had caused the floods. For example, from a good and smart friend of mine:

God did not send. He did create idiots that failed to provide leadership. God is a loving god. He wil comfort us in our time of despair but he in NO WAY KILLED ALL THOSE PEOPLE.

Or another:

I don’t know what kind of idiot believe (sic) that God sent those floods to drown all those people.

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These comments, well-meaning as they were, missed the point. I was not really suggesting that we blame God, but that we hold His human agents accountable for their nonfeasance, misfeasance and malfeasance.

Just to be clear: I do not believe God caused that flooding, death and destruction. In fact, I do not believe in a God who could, or would, cause all that flooding, death and destruction. But many — in fact, most of us — do, and that belief comforts us when we don’t take responsibility for our own mistakes. And it is rampant in our society and in what passes for political discourse in America.

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, offended at the mere suggestion that Trump-directed budget cuts might have contributed to the catastrophe, knew where the blame truly lay: “That was an act of God,” she pontificated.

Gorvernor Greg Abbott, who has adopted his wife’s Catholicism but understands nothing of its spirit, argued for the power of prayer:

“There is a word that’s been the most common word that’s been spoken over the past 36 hours. And that is the word ‘prayer.’ It’s been repeated by the people who are watching this as we speak right now. It’s been repeated often on social media. Through phone calls, through texts. And those prayers are answered in so many ways. Answered by the child who is being swept down the river, and happened to find a tree to cling on and was able with uncommon strength to be able to remain clinging to that tree until a helicopter was able to descend upon her and lift her out of that harrowing situation. It could have been the reason why water stopped rising into a home or a cabin or something that would have caused an entire building to float away. It could be the reason why there have been many people have been located wherever they were down the river basin. It could be something that prevented somebody from getting into the water to begin with. All we know is that prayer does work. Your prayers have made a difference. We ask for continued prayers as we continue our efforts to locate everybody who’s been affected by this. And pray so much for the families who have lost a loved one, who are going through challenging times that they never imagined on the 3rd of July, that something like this would happen. Prayer matters. We thank God Almighty. God has blessed Texas, and will continue to bless our great state.”

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Abbott is more than ready to give God credit for the little moments of success and grace during the floods, although he plays it cagey about whether God actually caused, or sent, or whatever Old Testament phrase you want to use, the floods that have claimed 135 lives so far. Like many of my Facebook friends, he does not want to blame God for the scourge of death and destruction that the July 4th floods wrought, but he is happy to give God credit if He saved a life or two along the way.

This is a quintessentially American response to any disaster: we thank God for the little miracles that happen while absolving Him of any blame for the disaster itself. Well, which is it?

A God powerful enough to do little favors must also be powerful enough to cause incalculable death and destruction. Either God is omnipotent, or He’s not.

And herein lies the deep cynicism with which most people, and virtually every politician in America, deals with God’s role in human affairs. “It was God’s grace that got my daughter into Vanderbilt University, but God had nothing to do with the death toll in Gaza.” “It was God’s intervention that helped me beat my breast cancer, but it is not God’s will that thousands of people die of AIDS because of PEPFAR funding cuts.”

This hypocrisy runs deep and true in American culture. And no one practices it more and better than Texas politicians, who use it not just to summon God’s divine grace but to remind people that, no matter what happened, it wasn't their fault.

And that’s the problem: a once-in-lifetime flood was made much more deadly by years of bad human decisions, from building cabins too close to the river to declining federal grants to install a warning system to waiting 72 hours to dispatch federal emergency resources to Texas. And the humans involved would much rather we blame God than hold any of them accountable for their actions or inactions. And we reward their incompetence and cowardice when we nod our heads at magical thinking about how “if only we’d prayed harder …”

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I don’t know if, or when, God plans to send more deadly floods to ravage the Hill Country. But I do know there is nothing we can do about them; not even prayer will stop them. (Of course, storms and flooding have become demonstrably worse because of climate change, but who wants to talk about that?) What we — humans with the divine sparks of intelligence, free will and agency — can do is minimize the damage from future storms by taking responsibility to make our communities as safe as we can.

Go ahead, Governor Abbott — you go first.