The President’s response to Hurricane Sandy was important to 4 in 10 voters, according to a Fox News report; and of that group, two-thirds voted for re-election. The storm took Mitt Romney virtually out of the news for days. Republican pundits have complained especially about the visual effect of New Jersey’s Republican governor working shoulder-to-shoulder with the President after the storm.
It’s quite possible that these factors turned the election. If so, how should we think about them?
The storm was unique in our history; it was undeniably an act of God.
Whether or not Barack Obama had manipulative political intentions for working with Gov. Christie, I wouldn’t presume to say, and for the question I’m raising now it doesn’t matter. Whether the timing of the governor’s praise for the President was politically expedient or not, the fact is that is that he was practicing high-integrity leadership in placing hurricane relief above politics. Or so it appears from here, at any rate.
If an act of God and a Republican doing essentially the right thing contributed materially to a Democratic President’s re-election, we who believe in God and are social conservatives should be slow to assume that God’s will was thwarted yesterday.
As if it ever could be.
November 7th, 2012 | 11:18 am
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November 7th, 2012 | 11:46 am
How is the idea that God caused a hurricane in order to re-elect Obama any different from the view that God caused the hurricane to punish the United States for its sins? Perhaps the two views can be reconciled if one believes Obama is also a punishment for our sins?
November 7th, 2012 | 12:00 pm
That’s reading more into the post than I wrote. All I said, and all I meant to say, was that God’s will was not thwarted, and any believer tempted to assume that it was so thwarted is mistaken.
As Matthew Schmitz has already said, the hurricane was an act of God in the same degree that every event in creation is an act of God. It certainly wasn’t something God whipped up just for the occasion. To think it was would be (among other serious faults) a crassly Robertson-esque interventionist view of God’s relationship to his creation.
How it reflects God’s will is a mystery beyond my understanding, but I know he is sovereign, and that is the word of encouragement I was trying to speak.
November 7th, 2012 | 12:09 pm
Pangloss: Yes, for all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
November 7th, 2012 | 12:21 pm
How is the idea that God caused a hurricane in order to re-elect Obama any different from the view that God caused the hurricane to punish the United States for its sins?
Sally Rogers,
As I noted elsewhere, there have been election novena’s for the last two presidential elections asking God to influence the outcomes. That implies (or assumes) God can affect the outcome of elections. If that is so, why couldn’t he use a hurricane to do so? If we pray to God to protect us from storms, the clear assumption is that God can lessen the intensity of a storm, change its path, and any number of other things. It seems to me it raises many problems if you assume God intervenes in certain ways, but it raises many problems if you assume he doesn’t.
Of course, one might argue that God could use a hurricane to punish a certain population, but that it is theologically unsound to claim that God punishes people in this life. That wouldn’t prevent God from using a hurricane for other purposes.
It simplifies matters to believe that God doesn’t intervene in human affairs, but that would make a great deal of prayer pointless. I think at minimum we have to get away from the idea that praying can “change God’s mind” to do something he would not otherwise have done.
November 7th, 2012 | 12:22 pm
Further: I don’t know how it is God’s will that Barack Obama was re-elected. I don’t get that part at all, for I believe Obama’s leadership has been taking us in wrong and ungodly directions. I am greatly encouraged by knowing that God knows how to sort out his own mysteries.
November 7th, 2012 | 12:51 pm
The traditional understanding is that God eternally (i.e. outside time) decrees, not only the things that come to pass, but the causes of them and the order in which those causes operate.
We pray, not to change the eternal counsels (which is impossible) but to obtain those benefits which God has eternally decreed shall be the effect of our prayers.
As for God willing the result of an election, St Augustine says that God is the most good creator of good wills and the most just exploiter of evil ones [Sicut naturarum bonarum optimus creator, ita voluntatum malarum justissinus ordinator” De Civ Dei XI 17] Every creature fulfils the divine will, but those who do the devil’s work must work for his wages.
November 7th, 2012 | 1:22 pm
But don’t we technically thwart God’s will personally every time we sin? I mean, in the sense that we work directly against God’s will? I am not saying this situation fits the bill for sin, but it seems like if sin thwarts God’s personal plan for your life, and if it were a sin to vote for a specific candidate because they were bad ENOUGH, a people could thwart God’s will collectively by collectively sinning.
November 7th, 2012 | 2:28 pm
Michael PS,
A few years ago, we had an interesting discussion of these ideas over on Commonweal, and this is a message posted by Fr. Komonchak that I am still grappling with:
November 7th, 2012 | 3:07 pm
Although He could accomplish all things without us, God wants us to pray because He wants to grant His children the dignity of causality.
November 7th, 2012 | 3:12 pm
David,
Based upon all of scripture, it would seem that God’s will is for the growth of his church (both temporal and universal).
As the bride of Christ, the Church’s well-being is his utmost concern.
If it’s true that persecution causes the flourishing of the church (refining is another word) and that as it says in scripture, “Blessed are you when people curse you in My name.”, then God’s will has been accomplished.
A president who supports religious freedom/discourages abortion/respects the definition of marriage and does not seek to confine faith to the private sphere is a president where we can truly trade our worn, dirty rags for robes of the purest white.
November 7th, 2012 | 7:27 pm
That final paragraph should read:
“A president who…is NOT a presidency where we can truly trade our worn, dirty rags for robes of purest white”
Mea Culpa
November 7th, 2012 | 10:38 pm
I heard a conversation at church this weekend which speculated that God sent the hurricane to NY, where Mormonism was born, to prevent the election of a Mormon president.
I thought that was ridiculous. But then I do not presume to know the mind of God. The hurricane was sent to the East Coast for a reason. The result was the defeat of Mitt Romney. I don’t know why it happened.
November 7th, 2012 | 11:24 pm
Scripture tells us even though God knows what we need, ‘Your Father Who is in Heaven knows what you need.’ He wants us to pray for what we need….in the Our Father we say, ‘….give us this day our daily bread…’ etc……God already KNOWS we need food every day. Prayer is not designed to inform God, but to give man a sight of his misery; to humble his heart, to excite his desire, to inflame his faith, to animate his hope, to raise his soul from earth to heaven, and to put him in mind that There – above in heaven – is his Father, his country, and inheritance.
November 8th, 2012 | 4:44 am
jfm: you’re certainly right to conclude that the comments you heard were ridiculous. The notion that God actively and directly causes such events is profoundly offensive to any right thinking person. We see, sadly, thousands of people, suffering in unimaginable ways. This was not an act of God. He did not will the death and suffering of these people.
To believe otherwise, is to accept the fallacy that God works primarily in nature. He could, of course, being all powerful, but he doesn’t, because he’s all moral, or all good, among other reasons. Aquinas has effectively argued that God God doesn’t directly cause what occurs in the natural world.
And yet, we still have, in the popular culture, and even among some educated, sophisticated thinkers, the belief that God “sent” the rain, or the sunshine, or the hurricane, either to “punish” are “reward” certain humans. This view is not only morally offensive in that it makes God responsible, directly, for the suffering a nd death of innocents, it also is laughably lacking in theological sophistication.
November 8th, 2012 | 4:53 am
I would just add that, clearly, the notion that God causes natural occurrences directly, is widely held, and understandable. After all, people pray all the time for the weather, for example, to be good. And, in an excellent example of incorporating the fallacy of post hoc ergo hoc, conclude that, if the weather turns out lovely subequent to the prayer, God must have caused it.
Certainly it makes sense that God created the mechanisms that allow for natural causes to exist, and he could stop natural occurrences that result in human suffering (and animal suffering for that matter) if he wished, and why he doesn’t, is a profound and morally troubling mystery, but this is distinct from him causing or them to occur.
November 8th, 2012 | 7:51 am
According to Bañez, it is precisely in God’s premotion or predetermination of everything that comes to pass that the medium of the Divine knowledge by which God’s omniscience foresees infallibly all the future acts, whether absolute or conditional, of intelligent and unintelligent creatures is found.
For just as certainly as God in His predetermined decrees knows His own will, so certainly does He know all the necessarily included determinations, including determinations of the free will of creatures, be they of absolute or conditional futurity.
God, respecting the nature of things, moves necessary agents to necessary, and free agents to free, activity — including sin, except that God is the originator only of its physical entity, not of its formal malice
November 8th, 2012 | 10:08 am
If Hurricane Katrina ushered in the possibility of Barack Obama becoming the president of the United States and Hurricane Sandy cemented his second term, who are we to question the outcome of those acts of God?
November 8th, 2012 | 12:40 pm
Haven’t seen the exit polls state by state but I would guess that voters who esp. approved of Obama’s handling of Sandy were in NY and NJ mostly. States that were already pro-Obama.
God endorses Obama might be more plausible if the hurricane, say, hit LA and TX with the response so impressive that solid red states suddenly turned blue.
November 8th, 2012 | 2:29 pm
Does anyone actually think God’s plans can be thwarted? And by us?
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