The Agnostic Pentecostal

To Pat Robertson, anyone else at CBN, and other Christians who might be reading:

I felt a mixture of deep sadness and white-hot anger when seeing this…

I watched Sanjay Gupta interview the president of Haiti (watch from 0:50), and one line that struck me was when Sanjay asked President Preval why he was staying at the Port Au Prince aiport, to which he simply replied, “My palace collapsed.”

It’s powerful to see the contrast between a proud man prognosticating in front of a camera in his ivory tower and a broken leader not knowing what to do with hard facts.

Why do we humans, the religious especially, feel compelled to have an answer for everything?

Never mind the fact that the facts to which you (Pat Robertson) referred are debatable. The reference to Hatian leaders making a pact with the devil  centuries ago has been improperly used for years by some Christians to support whatever claims to authority they feel they have. Apparently this information has been passed from religious leader to religious leader without anyone thinking to re-check the facts. Several years ago, a Haitian-born minister (and PhD ) discussed his own research of the related facts on his blog, so there’s no need for me to go in depth here. But I must say, from the perspective of someone familiar with ministry, that ministers have a terrible habit of latching on to things they read or heard from other preachers who heard it from other ministers who possibly heard it from someone else who either adjusted the facts to fit their message or even made it all up. Besides this, you also might want to realize that there are also many Christians in Haiti…some of which might even watch and donate to CBN. Were they cursed too? …But that’s another story.

My primary issue is not about the validity of your facts, it’s about why you said them in the first place. I just want to strongly recommend that you step out from in front of the camera and keep quiet for a few years at least. Take a cue from people like Franklin Graham in this situation. Your words are heard by millions, so you must choose your words wisely. If you have a hard time with that, just please keep your mouth shut, or at least just keep your opinions off-camera. This is for your own good. I know you are surrounded by an inner circle of yes-men and yes-women, so they probably haven’t told you this, but you have lost your credibility. Most of the world thinks you’re crazy. Sure, you can argue against that on the basis of your Bible or what you think your God has told you or that you think what you say will save people. But, just so you know, and I say this as a recovering Christian who is trying to maintain balance in his perception of preachers like you … YOU’RE NOT HELPING!

If God is anything like the picture you paint of him — a god who is bound by some sick sense of justice; an “almighty” god who would somehow be bothered if a small group of slaves at one point were willing to do anything to have their own land and freedom back; a god who would hold that against the people of that nation for centuries; a god who didn’t have the power to overrule some pact with a devil to offer grace and help to suffering islanders; a god who, apparently still bound by old-covenant law rather than the love his new-testament son gave away freely, thought it better to destroy thousands of poor people than to urge a wealthy Christian TV mogul to shut his fucking mouth and go get his hands dirty helping people — if that is the case, your god must die, because no one in their right mind needs another god like that. The actions of Al Qaeda have proven that already.

So please wake up. You do not have divine right to this world. And you do not have all the answers. Even if you think you do, we do not want them. The fact that you seem to have a difficult time with is that most answers are conjecture. Answers are not truth.

But perhaps there is the possibility of truth. Perhaps there’s one answer that might wake you up. And that’s the day when you realize that you are only human and when the world asks you for your perspective, your answer will be simple: “My palace collapsed.”

[Now, I apologize for writing in such an angry tone. For a far better, more mature reaction to Pat Robertson's comments, check out Donald Miller's blogpost about it.]