Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is from Nigeria, not New Orleans. But the reaction to his attempted bombing of up a Northwest Airlines jet can only be understood in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina.
After Katrina America underwent one of the most significant spiritual crises in our nation’s history. In the face of catastrophe our religious faith was shaken and we wondered where we could put our trust. We cried out to our god, wondering why our people had been forsaken and why more had not been spared. Even the followers of Jehovah, Allah, and Jesus wondered why our national deity—our government—let us down.
The claim that we make an idol of our government is provocative, disconcerting, and impossible to deny. Idolatry occurs when we take anything within God’s creation and elevate it above the boundary separating Creator from the creature, and make it a kind of God. Political philosopher (and Evangel blogger) David Koyzis has explored this concept in detail, examining how ideologies can become idols:
If ideologies deify something within God’s creation, they inevitably view this humanly made god as a source of salvation. Thus each of the ideologies is based on a specific soteriology, that is, on a worked-out theory promising deliverance to human beings from some fundamental evil that is viewed as the source of a broad range of human ills, including tyranny, oppression, anarchy, poverty and so forth.
Our view of governance has not only attained this level of ideological belief, but has become rather commonplace. For instance, one of the most consistent, though often unstated, themes in the discussion about the disaster in New Orleans is that the government could have saved everyone. Some blamed the local government, which had hundreds of unused buses that could have been used for evacuation, while others placed the blame on the federal government, which is believed to have almost unlimited resources at its disposal.
Either one or both of these allegations could very well be true. But undergirding such claims is the foundational assumption that someone somewhere could have done enough to ensure almost universal salvation after the disaster. Nearly everyone could have been spared if only the government had responded in the right way. Because this belief is rooted in a strong faith in the capabilities of the system, no evidence either for or against such claims is needed. Faith is truly considered to be “evidence of things not seen.”
The spectrum of this belief is remarkably broad and applied to almost every policy issue, ranging from health care reform advocates who believe thousands of people will die without government action to the TSA critics who think that error-free screening is attainable if only President Obama would make it a priority. These types of faith-based views of government share a common root form of Gnosticism. As Koyzis explains,
Gnostics are dissatisfied with the world, which they deem “instrinsically poorly organized.” They believe that salvation from the world’s evil is possible within the immanent historical process and that this will require a structural change in the “order of being”; finally, they believe that the means of effecting such change necessitates seeking special knowledge— or gnosis —available only to the Gnostics themselves (p. 29)
These believers in Gnostic governance do not doubt that salvation is attainable; that is an unquestionable tenet of the faith. But there are broad ranges of views on how the Gnostic tendency is manifested. Some conservatives, for example, believe that the problem is that the system is “intrinsically poorly organized” and the governmental structure is simply too inefficient to carry out the task. Others believe that those with the special knowledge refuse to use the gnosis because of malicious motives. When rapper Kanye West made his infamous remark after Katrina that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” he was expressing just such a belief. In West’s deluded mind, Bush is truly able to save all of the people trapped in the city but chooses not to because he has no concern for black people.
As becomes apparent, the Gnostic deification of governance resembles the Roman god Zeus more than it does Jehovah or Allah. The Gnostic government is omnipotent, but not omniscient; transcendent and also immanent; impersonal and yet represented in various human forms (i.e., President Bush, President Obama). The god is also arbitrary and showers blessings on those it loves (the rich, welfare recipients, white men) and ignores those who it despises (the poor, minorities, white men); able to save all and yet arbitrarily chooses limited atonement. It is a fickle god that commands our succor but is unworthy of adoration.
Over the next few days the Abdulmutallab incident will lead numerous people on both the left and right to ask “Which part of the government is to blame?” The discussion will be hashed over by the various Gnostic sects the way Lutherans and Presbyterians argue over baptism. A few heretics (like me) may step forward to claim that maybe—just maybe—these things aren’t completely preventable and the government really can’t save us all. After an audible gasp, we apostates will be shouted down and ushered to the door by a stern deacon. We’ll stand outside the gates of the public square, shrugging and casting bemused looks at one another as we reflect on the nature of government and remember where our true salvation lies.
