God Is Not In Control

God is NOT in control.

I still believe in God. I think. At least, I believe in the teaching of Jesus, which is part of the reason my heart is crushed at the results of yesterday’s election.

If God were in control, he’d be as much a monster as the orange one my country elected yesterday. If I thought God was someone smugly pulling the strings while horrible things happen, I would hate him.

Was God in control during the Holocaust? Was he in control when women in the Sudan were raped and saw their children brutally murdered? Or a million other human-induced calamities throughout history?

The only people who can say “God is in control” are people who have lived relatively comfortable lives to begin with. What they mean is that nothing much is going to change, for them.

I’m straight and white and have a decent job and probably nothing much is going to change for me, unless Trump tanks the economy, as economists have predicted.

But I’m not going to kid myself and say it’s because “God is in control.” God didn’t saddle us with this orange monster. God has no “great plan” for him. A large number of us (not the majority) for our own selfish reasons, chose this evil, stupid man, just as a large number of Germans (not the majority) chose Hitler. We will have to live with the consequences of our obsession with purity in other people’s sex lives, of our fear of gays and immigrants and anything different, of our selfishness, of our complacency, our feeling that we “worked hard & played by the rules” to get the privileges our families helped us to get. We will have to live with what happened because we couldn’t vote for someone who wouldn’t enshrine our Church’s beliefs about sexual morality into law.

(Interesting thing about that phrase: what happens if you don’t work hard and never play by the rules? As long as you’re a white man and can convince people you have money, you can get elected president! )

If good comes out of this evil, it will be because we make it happen. Because we work twice as hard to get back rights that will be taken away. Because we work to get back the health care that will be taken away from people who can’t afford it – and I don’t even blame The Orange One for this; it’s probably not an idea he would’ve bothered to come up with on his own. Other monsters, monsters in Congress who claim to be “Christian,” have worked hard to make that happen so that their own pockets can continue to be lined by the Koch brothers and private insurance companies. And because they and apparently a huge number of their constituents are activated by that Americhristian, nothing-to-do-with-Jesus ethic that basic human needs should be satisfied only if you are “deserving.”

And, sadly, it may only happen  when some of the comfortable people who supported the orange monster begin to suffer – when they  feel the effects of his idiocy. And that won’t happen until the suffering of those groups who opposed him is at least trebled:both because the pseudo-Christians in Congress have it in for them, and because Trump likes to punish his enemies. Yes, he’s that kind of guy, and those who voted for him, or abstained from voting for the one person in a position to defeat him, knew it.

I hope there is a God. But if there is, the best we can hope for is that he will help us in this fight. He’s not “in control.” I refuse to believe that – because that would make him an asshole.