God Provides?

There is a very old and rather cliched joke about a devout Christian who was warned on the radio that the river next to his house was rising and would flood the town and that all of the residents should evacuate their homes. The man saw no need to evacuate. "I'm religious," he told himself. "I pray. God loves me. God will save me." So time went by and the river swelled and flooded the first floor of his house. A neighbour in a row boat came along and, seeing him through the second story window, shouted, "Hey, you in there! The town is flooding. Let me take you to safety." But the man shouted back, "I'm religious. I pray. God loves me and God will save me." The waters continued to rise and soon the man was forced up on to his roof. A helicopter came by and lowered him a rope ladder. The pilot shouted down to him in a megaphone, "Hey you, down there. The town is flooding. Climb up this ladder and I'll take you to safety." But the man shouted back that he was religious, that he prayed, that God loved him and would take him to safety. The man drowned and standing at the gates of St. Peter, he demanded an audience with God. "Lord," he said, "I’m a religious man, I pray. I thought you loved me. Why did this happen?" God said, "I sent you a radio report, a helicopter, and a guy in a rowboat. What the hell are you doing here?"

Following up on the last topic of prayer, another promise religions seem to make is that God is watching out for us and is there to provide for us. This is a common theme reiterated time and again to tired, frustrated parishioners from the pulpits. The Bible is full of promises that if one lives a moral life (according to Yahweh) or has faith in Jesus, they will be rewarded.

Televangelists often attempt the argument that if a person gives their heart and mind to Jesus they ought to demonstrate that trust with their pocketbooks. Trust God with your finances, they say, he wants you to be wealthy and happy. I'm thinking of Joel Osteen and his prosperity gospel but there are many others, the minister in my local pentecostal church, for example. If you give ten percent of your income to God, he will give you a return on that investment in terms of the blessings he will shower upon you.

This is probably an instance where the "man-made" aspect of religion shines through a little stronger than others. Interestingly, though not at all surprising, religions never use this psychology on themselves. The local Roman Catholic church decided that due to the high volume of parishioners it now claimed, a building expansion was required. So a committee was struck to approve the plans and begin fundraising. Then parishioners were called on to donate money directly through mail campaigns, as extra at collection, and through special fundraising events. All of these activities were completely orchestrated by humans, driven by a goal.

So where is God in all of that? It seems strange to preach to the congregation that God looks after your finances and will bless you and make you wealthy, yet at the same time, when his own house needs fixing, he relies on his followers to do EVERYTHING. You would almost think, if religion wasn't entirely false, that God might throw in some money of his own or he could just make a new building appear for them and save them the trouble. I guess the age of such miracles is past us, but why are we now reduced to "finding God" in the work of human beings? If one contractor donates the materials out of a sense of religious and civic duty, praise is given to God. God should only be given praise for things he actually did, by himself, without the aid of humans. But then what would that leave?

The common rebuke of the religious is that God works through human beings. He uses us (like puppets?) to do his good works. That contractor must have done the good deed because God made him do it, a claim the contractor might discount. Or we can take a less direct and less objectionable approach by diluting God and his powers down to being synonymous with any good deed. We find evidence of God in good works or God is the good works of others. This means nothing, it is purely semantics; a rhetorical trick where one changes the definition of God to equal good deeds and then can successfully argue that because good deeds exist, then God also must.

To return to the opening narrative about the religious man, either the helicopter and the rowboat pilots were compelled by God to go help the man, in which case free will has been decimated. Or they felt a compulsion based upon their own moral convictions, in which case they themselves were responsible for attempting to rescue the man. How then did God, "send" them? This is a question with implications beyond the scope of this post, but it is enough to point out that the joke's punchline does not, at a closer, more theological view, provide a simple easy answer to the question of why God seemingly does not provide for his people.

I think it would show greater faith, if the particular Roman Catholic church I spoke of before, or any such religious center in general, rather than do the work themselves to build and rebuild the temporal lodgings of the divine, simply prayed for God to provide for them. If prayer, trust and faith are enough for the faithful, they should be good enough for the priests, right?

There is, of course, an example where the faithful did exactly that. There was a certain United Church that fell on tough times. It had a long and proud history, from humble beginnings meeting in a tiny one room church at the turn of the century, to growing into a large congregation, having multiple additions to the building, suffering the deaths of many members during the First and Second World Wars, and continuing to grow throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, managing to make it to its 120th anniversary. As the east end of London began to decline and families generally moved to more affluent areas, church attendance and revenue began to decline. When the minister retired, the church committee prayed hard and long before selecting a replacement, hoping that God would aid them in their decision and send a saviour. The replacement minister was not a success and through his dull sermons and offensive manner, drastically swelled the decline. By the end of the decade, after much prayer and reflection, as well as heated debate, he was forced out by the saddened parishioners and replaced with another minister, who promised to get the job done of increasing attendance. A few years later the church closed, having failed to bring in new regularly attending members, and unable to afford the rather costly maintenance bills for such a massive centennial building. What remained of the church membership was amalgamated with another more successful church in a different part of town.

How does the closing of this church and the loss of so much of its history and members, factor into God's plan? Where was he? When the church committees prayed for God's aid and guidance, why did he not offer it? If he did, it was faulty. Why did he want a church to grow and then die? Obviously such questions are silly. This church's problems were demographic not theological, but yet it raises them nonetheless. Why couldn't the church afford its bills to stay open and provide community services for the local people of the east end? Why couldn't God have aided them? Why didn't God provide? No explanation was ever requested, nor provided.

United Church members are among the most liberal and worldly of the protestant denominations and never questioned the fact that it was worldly factors which led to the church's closing. The faithful are very reluctant to blame God today for effects which have causes which we can clearly identify scientifically as having natural explanations, without any sort of supernatural requirement.

Clearly from countless examples across the world, God does not provide for his people. His people still suffer and lose their wealth and he does nothing. They pray and ask for guidance and instead, his churches close and discontinue important social services. They grow and require structural improvements and he does nothing, so they do it for him. God does not provide because God does not exist and what is most interesting is observing the dissonance between how the faithful insist he does, yet are forced to live their lives as though he does not, taking matters into their own hands whenever something useful must be done. God helps those who help themselves, the proverb goes, and today the faithful are subconsciously aware that much like the religious man on the roof, failure to acknowledge the laws of nature means death. Unfortunately, there is no God waiting on the other side of death with a humorous punchline.