Religion has clouded a smoke-filled sky, yet again

Lucia Kelly

It is morally reprehensible for people to use fire and ash to fuel their own religious agendas: a tragedy does not justify propaganda, and propaganda does not justify tragedy.

I have never known the fright of flame. Growing up in Tampa, Florida, the yearly, sometimes monthly, calamity that knocked against my shores were hurricanes; those large swaths of wind and rain that abused the peninsula I called home. It was always a tragedy, and it was always a routine, hurricane season becoming an overlapping fifth season. 

I have learned enough about these strange oceanic beasts to categorize them as the scientific phenomena they are, that their increasing temper is the result of warming waters due to climate change, nothing more. So, having left Florida, when I see news of a hurricane preparing to crash into the state I was born in, the state I grew up in, I am awash with understanding and grief, but never surprise.  

Waking up on January 7 to the demoralizing news of the Palisades and Eaton fires making the effort to destroy Los Angeles, California, I felt surprised. Surprised and fearful: the news from The New York Daily reporting the fires destroying 12,000 structures, burning 37,800 acres, and killing 24 people searing into my mind and memory. Even now, I remember the hopeless ennui crawling over me as I watched news anchors emblazon themselves in front of soaring flames.  

Having this horror ignite in me, I grew very angry and defensive when I went on social media to see people (religious zealots) use these fires to draw comparison to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah in the Book of Genesis: God burned down these ancient cities due to their inhabitants’ sin. In these zealots’ minds, L.A. Los Angeles is a perfect metaphor for these biblical atrocities: a city of sin.  

I will forever be surprised by the ire of people, especially religious people, in the face of tragedy, especially when it serves political momentum. Of course people are taking cheap shots at L.A., a well-known Democratic county, but are there plentiful “thoughts and prayers” for red states affected by hurricanes or heat waves? Growing up in Florida, I never received half the justification L.A. has dealt with; sure, water and wind have less of a symbolic tug than fire does, but still. 

It is morally reprehensible for people to use fire and ash to fuel their own religious agendas: a tragedy does not justify propaganda, and propaganda does not justify tragedy. Most of my childhood was cultivated by the influences of my Southern Baptist relatives in Cleveland, Mississippi, and even at their moral worst, they would never preach of exalting a city of its sins through fire and sulfur. And that’s because religion has been diluted, plainly and simply, by the ashes of a burning democracy. 

The Republican party has been able to skillfully maneuver the American people to claim that they are abiding by the Bible, that their inability to support people of different races, genders, sexualities and classes is the “sinful” nature in their behavior.  

Much like God’s judgement of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Republican party believes they have the right to control and eliminate their opponents based on what they consider morally wrong. The fires in Los Angeles have made it ever clear that religion has been commodified and manipulated to the point where there are only embers of the original message that people employ; religion is rhetoric in the hands of politicians and nothing more. 

Who knows, maybe we could take the Palisades and Eaton fires to allow ourselves to become born anew. We could become phoenixes reincarnated into a rejuvenated society. But I doubt it. Unless we change our framework, all I can see is our future being devoured by flame, with fierce religious chanting echoing over the burned rubble.