Is God Smiting Texas?

When disasters strike in the United States, Republican evangelicals are quick to blame liberals and their wanton ways for bringing God’s wrath onto the land.

In 2001, Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell blamed the ACLU, feminists and gays, among others, for the 9/11 attacks. In 2005, Pastor John Hagee of Texas, John McCain’s Catholic-hating buddy from the 2008 campaign, asserted that God smote New Orleans with Hurricane Katrina because it was the site of Southern Decadence, an annual gay event in the French Quarter.

And yet — as we have noted here (and here, here and here) — evangelicals are always silent when disasters hit them in their own backyards.

Rachel Maddow picked up on this theme on her MSBNC show last night, reporting that Cindy Jacobs — a self-proclaimed prophet and theocrat who pals around with Republican presidential frontrunner Rick Perry — has proclaimed that because Perry hosted a prayer meeting, which he called “the Response,” in Houston on Aug. 6, God has healed the state of Texas:

CINDY JACOBS: You study the area and you find out what happened? What did the indigenous people worship? If they did blood sacrifice, like we found some areas that were very, very violent because the former culture was a murderous, violent area, like in Texas here and all of the coast around Houston and Galveston and some of that area, the Native American people were cannibals and they ate people.

And so you can see a manifestation of that in the churches where people turned against people and kind of cannibalized other people’s ministries. So there’s been a lot of prayer over that in Houston, Texas, they’ve done a lot of intercession over that and broke the curses on the land. We just had a prayer meeting in Houston a little a week ago, the governor of Texas, really as an individual instigated this, and 35,000 people showed up to pray and it was only a prayer meeting called within three months, three month period of time. So what happened? The land is starting to rejoice, you see, because of that prayer.

The problem here, of course, is that — while Perry’s meeting may well have exorcised the demon ghosts of cannibals — since the meeting,Texas has been besieged with vast, slow-burning wildfires and a deadly persistent drought for which there is no end in sight.

The bill of particulars that could be invoking God’s wrath against Texas and its governor is quite extensive. Texas is famous for passing laws that are anti-Christian. It loves executing people almost as much as Iran, a bona fide theocratic state. Jesus instructed his followers to serve the poor, house the homeless and heal the sick. But Texas laws promote the interests of its wealthiest residents while forcing millions of Texans, including young children, to live in poverty, without adequate housing or access to health care. And Texas is famous for its pro-polluter “regulations” that are designed to exploit, not conserve, its environmental and natural blessings.

The group Jacobs belongs to is the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR), an international Christian extremist organization that believes that its 80,000 or so members worldwide are at war with the demons that possess everyone on the planet who is not aligned with the NAR. This is not a joke. It’s what they believe — and, yes, billions and billions of people, including you, dear reader, as well as your sweet old granny, are demon-possessed.

On a much more insidious level, the ultimate mission of the NAR is to overthrow all national governments worldwide, including the U.S. democratic republic, and install a one-world theocratic government with themselves as overlords. Again, this is not a joke.

Although the NAR is not yet that well-known, some of its members have made news over the last few years. Jacobs once suggested that the mysterious sudden death of flocks of birds in Arkansas was a sign of God’s wrath over former Arkansan Pres. Bill Clinton’s signing Don’t Ask Don’t Tell into law in the 1990s.

A video of Kenyan NAR member Thomas Muthee casting a spell on Sarah Palin at the Wasilla Assembly of God church to protect her from witchcraft made the rounds during the 2008 campaign. It was a NAR preacher who recently accused Oprah Winfrey of being an emanation of the Whore of Babylon from the book of Revelation. And it was American NAR members who inspired Uganda’s “kill the gays” laws.

The precise nature of Rick Perry’s relationship with NAR is unclear. But whether he is a card-carrying member or not, the fact that he has been seen palling around with what is on its face a seditious, anti-democratic movement, will undoubtedly become a campaign issue if he becomes the Republican nominee.

For the present, however, the burning question, so to speak, is whether the drought afflicting Texas is divine retribution for Gov. Perry’s palling around with a bunch of seditious haters.

The answer, of course, is above our paygrade.