Theology and Disaster Studies:
From ‘Acts of God’ to Divine Presence
Niels Henrik Gregersen ().
1. Introduction
Since the early 1950s, disaster research has emerged as an academic field firmly based in the social sciences. Whether or not disasters happen as a result of natural hazards, technological accidents, or intentional acts of violence, social scientists have taken the lead in framing the field from its beginnings and up to today. A recent review article states without further ado: “Disaster studies address the social and behavioral aspects of sudden onset collective stress situations typically referred to as mass emergencies or disaster” (Lindell 2013, 797).
I take this to be a fairly correct description of the field as hitherto developed.Accordingly, other disciplinary approaches to disaster studies will be asked about their particular input to understanding the disaster cycle of prevention, preparedness, short-term response, and long-term reconstruction. In this essay, I lay out what I think is the added value of theological reflections in relation to sociological disaster studies, while also pointing to some structural limitations in current disaster research. For even though sociology is rightly regarded as the queen of disaster studies, any discipline has its blind spots. So, what is basis, and what is bias, in prevailing paradigms of disaster research?
While section 2 points to some disciplinary limitations of sociological disaster research, section 3 points toobvious areas of shared interests between disaster studies andtheology. In section 4 I discuss the potential value of bringing academic theology into future disaster research, both as an added value and as a structural expansion of research areas.I here argue that disaster researchers may be better equipped to understand the importance of religious communities, both as victims and as agents of recovery, while also listening to theirinterpretative frameworks. How do people of faith understand disasters from religiously informed perspectives? What I hope to show is that the pragmatic repertoires of religious disaster response are linked to more comprehensive semanticrepertoires of religion, that is, to the potentials of faith-based interpretations of reality. Religious responses to disasterstend to have a wider scope than often acknowledged, involving both a psychological preparedness for “passive” endurance and “active” sources for helping victims in overcoming disaster-related traumas. What theology might bring into the interdisciplinary poolis a better understanding of the complexity of religious responses to disasters – in a continuum reaching from the small-scale local traditions tooverarching religious patterns of meaning. A religious semantics may thus nurture a variety of attitudes simultaneously, such as (a) seeing disasters as imbued with potential meaning, (b) motivating people for overcoming post-disaster effects, and (c) understanding human social existence as entangled withnatural conditions, leadingto personal tragedies and commonly experienced disasters.
In section 5I move into the domain of philosophically reflected second-order theologies, as exemplified in the tradition of theodicy. How are religious beliefs in the love and might of God compatible with experiences of threatened and devastated life conditions? While criticizing the Enlightenment viewthat we live in “the best possible world”, epitomized in Leibniz’ Theodicyof 1710, I argue that theodiciesmay continue to play more humble roles in contemporary theological reflections on disasters, provided that they acknowledgethat chaos and cosmos, creativity and destructivity, inevitably go together in the package-deal of creation. From this perspective, the theodicy-expectation of living a smooth life beyond dangers and risks may be part of the problem rather than of itssolution. Theodicies are thus not able to provide answers to the kind of unanswerable questions that we as human beings continue to ask, Why me?, Why us?
Howcan such questions be addressed theologically without falling into a religious narcissism? In a more normative vein informed by the resources of Christian theology, I propose that the constructive task of theology is not to explain away the experience of damage and evil within cleverly contrived theodicies, but to help disaster victims to move on.Rather than seeing disasters as particularistic “acts of God” (like adverse miracles), I propose to see disasters as situations, in which people of faith both experience and appeal to a sensed divine presence – in, with, and under the disastrous happenings themselves. But lived religion is also involved in the processes of recovery and reconstruction following upon disaster experiences. In this context I refer to some recent proposals for a theology of trauma – a theology developed for victims rather than evil-doers.
2. Blind spots of disasters studies?
In a highly self-reflective study on the social and historical factors affecting the early development of disaster research, E.L. Quarantelli(1987) points to the extent to which the external funding conditions influenced academic disaster research since its beginning in the 1950s. The major programs of disaster research (located at the Universities of Chicago, Ohio, and Delaware) were all funded by the US military system in order to investigate social and psychological effects of a possible use of nuclear and chemical weapons. Quarantelli speaks of a “wartime orientation” of early disaster studies, which lasted well into the 1960s. The sponsors wanted to know, for example,whether victims tend to act selfishly orpro-socially, andhow to handle post-disaster situations.This background, as Quarantelli points out,may be responsible for choosing major earthquakes, volcanoes, or tornadoes as “the prototype of a disaster,” rather than the more “diffuse emergencies” related to the recurrent disasters with long-term effects such as “famines or droughts or epidemics, and even large scale riverine flooding” (Quarantelli 1987, 301).
Another institutional background for the development for disaster studies, also highlighted by Quarantelli, is the predominant role of sociologists in the field:“disaster is primarily a social phenomenon and is thus identifiable in social terms”; more precisely, “most of the disaster research by sociologists has been of an organizational nature” (QuarantelliDynes 1997, 24 and 30).This already applied to the so-called dominant paradigm of disaster research reigning from the 1950s to the 1970s. While gradually bracketing the issues pertaining to post-atomic catastrophe, disasters were defined as events with wide-ranging damaging effects on societies, to be counteracted by technological and organizational interventions. This view was eminently captured by Charles E. Fritz in his famous definition, according to which a disasteris “an event concentrated in time and space, inwhich a society or one of its subdivisions undergoesphysical harm and social disruption, such that all orsome essential functions of the society or subdivision are impaired” (Fritz 1961, 655).
Around 1980, the so-called vulnerability paradigm emerged. In several regards, its advantages areobvious. By emphasizing the vulnerability of societies, the focus shifts from singular outbreaks of catastrophe to cycles of recurrent emergencies such as drought, famine, and epidemics, including also the long-term process of climate change with its “dispersed causes and effects” (Gardiner 2011). The vulnerability paradigm points tonatural hazards as amplifiers of already existing “normal” conditions; disasters are not just rare, extreme and sudden outbreaks. Moreover, vulnerabilities are not equally shared in terms of economic and social resources – some are more vulnerable than others. Finally, the vulnerability paradigm rightly point out that a society remains responsible for the effects of disasters, even if they emerge “naturally”.
Gradually, the vulnerability paradigm also opens up to the importance of cultural factors such as social capital. As argued by Dara Nix-Stevenson,
I contend that social capital is a key factor in moving toward a culture of disaster prevention and risk reduction and that social capital can generate both the conditions necessary for mutual support and care and the mechanisms required for communities and groups to exert effective pressure to influence public policy (Nix-Stevenson 2013, 1).
With the inclusion of cultural factors, also the role of faith communities comes into view. Social resilience has many layers– from national and international agencies to individual and community-based capacities. The question is here, Who cares? Who are prepared to care for whom?
Thus, also the vulnerability paradigm may have its limitations, and perhaps we are currently on the move towards a resilience paradigm (Dahlberg et.al., forthcoming). Resiliencehas many levels, from social capacities to ecological and geophysical systems (Nix-Stevenson 2013, 8).These“spatial”aspects of natural systems should be addressed by the natural sciences. Similarly, the focus on social capital, including the religious sense of meaning and vocation, may lead us to take a broader view on the cultural traditions that shape mentalityand capacitybuilding over time. Social capital is not a stuff which is just there to be utilized. It takes the work of generations to nurture the repertoire of attitudes important for coping with disaster-effects.
Provided that theology is a second-order reflection of living faith traditions, theological reflections tend to keep alive a wide-scope view of the natural roots of disasters, while also taking alonger view on socio-cultural processes. This longer historical view is at odds with the attitude of a secular supersessionismexpressed by some sociologists who see religion as tied up with a “premodern” fatalistic attitude, whereas sociologists take themselves to be more “modern” or managerial in attitude, if not even “postmodern” in analytical orientation. Earlier I have questioned the simplistic tripartite scheme of premodern “fate”, modern “control” and postmodern “constructivism” in the risk theories of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens(Gregersen 2006). A similar schemeseems at work within sociological disaster research, where one finds the idea that an “Act of God”perspective is successively replaced by an “Act of Nature” perspective, which finally is superseded by an “Acts of Men and Women” approach (Quarantelli, cit. Merli 2010, 106). Nonetheless, in face of disasters we are, as it were, placed in a pre-modern situation in which major events are falling upon us. Even while attemptingto control disasters, we should be aware that all our constructive efforts presuppose an entanglement of physical forces and social conditions, inevitably involving many future contingents. In brief, by taking a longer historical view anda wider view of the human entanglement with cosmic forces, theological reflection presupposes that we simultaneously live in a premodern, modern and postmodern mentality.Not the one without the other!
3. Shared areas of interdisciplinary contact: The pragmatics of faith traditions
The Liverpool geologist David K. Chester has rightly called for a much needed dialogue between theology and disaster studies (Chester 1998; 2005). Let me here point to twoobvious areas of contact.
First, religious communities tend to be committed agents of recovery. Alongside governmental institutions (police, fire departments, local or national emergency agencies, and the army), religious communities serve as non-governmental organizations (NGOs) capable of empathizing, offering help in first phases of emergencies, and coping with long-term disaster effects. Many NGOs are FBOs, faith-based organizations.
Asnoted by Martin A. Smith,“In the past, studies of community disasters and disaster recovery have tended to ignore the activities of religious organizations” (Smith 1978, 133). Yet Martin was able to show the extent to which the collection and distribution of food, shelter, cloth, money etc. was in fact organized by religious communities. In Xenia, Ohio, no less than 86 local congregations worked in a post-tornado setting. After Hurricane Katrina (2005),Harold G. Koenigoffered a comprehensive analysis of the North American situation. The book, In the Wake of Disaster (Koenig 2006),evidenced that in the USalone more than 50 FBOs are consistently involved in disaster response, including one Hindu and one Jewish organization. While the Lutheran Disaster Response, the Catholic Charities Office, and the Salvation Army are the largest organizations in terms of staff and resources, also smaller communities sometimes play a significant role. For example, the Church of the Brethren responded to the Hurricane Agnes in 1972 with no less 2,203 volunteers assisting 725 affected households in the town area of Wilkes-Barre in Pennsylvania (Koenig 2006, 59).
It would be a task for future research to gain an overview of the different forms of faith-based disaster response worldwide. Usually FBOs work in tandem with humanitarian organizations such as the Red Crossor Red Crescent.While some religious groups still differentiate between true believers and sinners (Merli 2010), most FBOs follow universalistic humanitarian principleswhen helping victims regardless of class, gender, and religion. Thus Actalliance, a worldwide alliance of 140 churches,states unreservedly in its “Guide on community-based psychosocial support” (retrieved October 9, 2014):“Evangelisation and proselytising during an emergency is inappropriate and cannot be permitted”(bold in original).
Second, religious people are not only agents of recovery, but among the victims of disasters. By 2010, about 84 % of the world’s population described themselves as religiously affiliated (PewResearch, December 18, 2012). Since human beings can be described as “self-interpreting animals” (Taylor 1985), it should not come as a surprise that also catastrophic events are over again interpreted in religious terms. In a recent study using the big data provided by the World Values Survey and the European Values Survey, the Copenhagen economist JeanetSindingBentzenhas shown that disaster experiences may even trigger religiosity. Testing no less than 800 regions of the world, and excluding potential confounders (such as income, education, demography, religious differences and country-dependent factors), it appears that regions located closer to disaster turn out to be significantly more religious than other regions(Bentzen 2013, 2).Meanwhile, other studies indicate that people of faith tend to recover better in post-disaster settings than non-religious individuals (see Koenig 2006, 29-42). The jury is still out, however, on how exactly to measure the religious factor in terms of long-term coping, and how to balance negative and positive coping aspects of different forms of religiosity.
Standard academic discourse usually describesdisasters in purelyscientific terms. However, “religious explanations of disasters not only persist, but also transcend religious tradition and place” (Chester & Duncan 2010, 87). Investigating a material comprising 59 natural hazards occurring between 1902 and 2004, Chester and Duncan showed that only 17 disasters were not couched in religious terms in non-academic disaster reports. Moreover, inquiry into intentional divine agency seems as widespread in the more recent disasters as in earlier times, sometimes even stronger, even though Chester and Duncan (2010, 88-90)also note that religious explanations in terms of a divine judgmentappear more in less economically developed societies than inother countries.
Religious responses to disaster are inherently complex. Even strong religious explanations in terms of divine judgment may well be accompanied with an active involvement in disaster relief efforts(Chester & Duncan 2010, 90;Rokib 2012).In her study of local religious responses to an earthquake in Java, May 2006, anthropologist Judith Schlehe notes,
[T]he Javanese are not any more ‘superstitious’ or in any categorical sense more inclined to believe in supernatural explanations for disasters than people elsewhere. They know very well that there are scientific, geological reasons behind an earthquake. Besides tectonic activity, though, for many Javanese causality is rooted in the spiritual realm as well. They see more dimensions …. Thus, people everywhere can and do combine and negotiate manifold co-existing explanations and coping strategies in an enduring entanglement of secular and religious interpretations of natural hazards and disasters (Schlehe 2010, 113).
This combinatorial capacity of religious interpretation should not come as a surprise; similar features come up in otherexamples of crisis-related religion, for example, among cancer-survivors (Johannesen-Henry 2010). Provided that the task of theology is not so much to categorize religious beliefs as to understand their meanings, there is here a natural affinity between theological and anthropological approaches. Just as theologians aim to interpret religious life also from their internal perspectives, so anthropologists practice an ethics of “ethnographic listening”. Schlehe again,
I advocate an ethics of dialogue and engagement based on a detailed understanding of the ways in which various local figures and communities deal with disasters. This is meant to emphasise the importance of ethnographic listening, a way of focusing attention on people's knowledge and beliefs, imaginations and interpretations. A culture-specific and site-based reading of the discourse on a natural disaster exemplifies that disaster-linked cognitive coping strategies are always unique and contingent formations in response to local culture and politics. Notwithstanding, local culture and politics must be seen in their larger global context (Schlehe 2010, 113)
While theologians wish to share an ethics of listening, they wouldprobably add that religious views are not “always unique and contingent”; even local disaster-responses make use of semantic repertories stemming from the major religious traditions. The task of anthropologists and theologians may here be said to be complementary to one another: While anthropologists give privilegeto local traditions, theologians prioritize the wider traditions. Obviously both aspects should be addressed and coordinatedas far as possible.
4. The question of the meaning of disasters: The semantic dimension of theology
The analysis of the semantic repertoires of the major religions constitutes a third area, in which theology may contribute to disaster research. Religions, ancient and modern, foster myths and metanarratives about the order-and-disorder of the universe, and produce what may be termed ‘moral cosmologies’ about preferential roads to take in view of impingent dangers.
The task of the discipline “systematic theology”is exactly to reflect upon the meaning of such large-scale views of reality, and on their contemporary uses (and misuses) by people of faith.Also here the semantics and pragmatics of faith traditions belong together. Just as religious worlds of meaning can be interpreted in various ways (some more illuminativethan others), so also religious practices may take a variety of forms (some more helpful than others). In theology, as well as in philosophy, normative questions cannot be eschewed. Accordingly, academic theology has atwo-fold representative role in contemporary society: representing religious concerns and commitments to the wider culture, and representing the concerns and commitments of the wider society to religious practitioners.