Bush, God, and the Hurricanes
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

While leading the logistical work of disaster preparedness and recovery connected with Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, President Bush has been doing some important yet little-noticed theological work as well, helping a nation of believers in a benevolent God grapple with the age-old “problem of evil.”
Mr. Bush has eschewed any suggestion that Katrina is a punishment by God for, as several of our enemies have suggested, fighting Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan. Neither has Mr. Bush paid notice to the suggestion of several of our own clergymen who have suggested the storm is divine retribution for tolerating a “decadent” lifestyle at home.
Rather, Mr. Bush in his remarks has seen fit to associate God with the rescue and relief efforts rather than the cause of the hurricane. In remarks to a dinner marking the 350th anniversary of the arrival of Jews in America, Mr. Bush spoke of the work of Jews helping victims of Katrina. “These are the good works of good people relying on the wisdom of the Good Book, a book that tells us how God rescued life from the flood waters,” Mr. Bush said. “And like Noah and his family, we have faith that as the waters recede, we will see life begin again.”
The Good Book tells not only of how God rescued life from the flood waters, but also records that God caused the flood because he saw “how great was man’s wickedness on earth.” It is not a point on which the president has dwelled. Rather than a vengeful God, the president has portrayed a merciful God. In his primetime speech to the nation from Jackson Square, New Orleans, Mr. Bush said that the trials posed by Katrina “remind us of a hope beyond all pain and death, a God who welcomes the lost to a house not made with hands.”
The president confronted the theological issues most directly in remarks last week at Washington National Cathedral. “Through prayer we look for ways to understand the arbitrary harm left by this storm, and the mystery of undeserved suffering. And in our search we’re reminded that God’s purposes are sometimes impossible to know here on Earth,” he said, resorting to the idea of God’s purposes as mysterious and unknowable – a more modest view than that of those who claim to know that the hurricanes were a divine punishment for a specific transgression.
Even then, rather than leaving this perhaps difficult thought as a final note, the president quickly moved to a more reassuring line of explanation. “Yet even as we’re humbled by forces we cannot explain, we take comfort in the knowledge that no one is ever stranded beyond God’s care,” Mr. Bush said. “The Creator of wind and water is also the source of even a greater power – a love that can redeem the worst tragedy, a love that is stronger than death.”
This thinking about God after death and destruction is a tradition that goes way back in American life. We think of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address, in which the president explained the Civil War in which nearly 500,000 Americans were killed by saying, ” The Almighty has His own purposes” and going on, further, “If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him?”
We think, as well, back to colonial America, and the great earthquake that struck New England in 1727. As the Yale historian Harry Stout records in his book “The New England Soul,” ministers channeled the fear that followed that earthquake into a frenzy of reform against drunkenness, profanity, oppression, and injustice.
How Americans react to President Bush’s view of God and the hurricane will no doubt depend on their individual religious beliefs. But in recognizing that the theological dimension of the disaster is one that requires reckoning with, Mr. Bush is once again displaying his knack for connecting with so many Americans of faith. Just as he succeeded in explaining the liberation of Iraq to the American people during the 2004 presidential campaign – “freedom is not America’s gift to the world, it is the almighty God’s gift to every man and woman in this world” – so our president, facing the hurricanes, is again seeking a language and a deeply felt value framework he can use to help Americans try to make sense of the challenge. Or to help us understand as best we can, given the mystery of which Mr. Bush spoke.