It’s a hard rain

Your Father which is in heaven … maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.

— Matthew 5:45

Atlanta had about 1/5 of an inch of rain yesterday, which brings the city’s total to about 1/2 an inch since Gov. Sonny Perdue gathered “lawmakers and ministers on the steps of the state Capitol to pray for rain.”

I can’t fault Gov. Perdue for trying. The drought strangling the Southeast is so severe I wouldn’t blame him if he’d called in Starbuck* or summoned Georgia’s Cherokees to the statehouse for a rain dance. (Unfortunately, Georgia kicked out the Cherokee, even after the Supreme Court ruled in their favor. Maybe that’s the problem.)

“Pray for rain,” is something that I think the governor of Georgia ought to be saying — and doing — at this point. I’m just not sure that a semi-official vigil on the steps of the state Capitol was the best way to go about this. You want to pray, go to church or “go into your room, close the door and pray.” Prayer as political press conference seems more like an effort to demonstrate piety than an earnest supplication.

“When you pray,” Jesus said, “do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full.”

Part of that reward, it turns out, is also creating a situation in which you invite the conflation of the above measurement of precipitation with an alleged measurement of your God’s potency, your personal/communal righteousness/worthiness and/or the efficacy of prayer in the abstract.

I’m also not real keen on the way this semi-official vigil blurs the line between church and state, so I appreciate why the Atlanta Freethought Society decided to protest the prayer session. But like the vigil itself, this objection might have been wiser and more effective had it been conducted in some other, less public fashion that wouldn’t make it seem like they were protesting the possibility of rain as much as the mingling of prayer and politics.

Let’s just hope it rains and the drought ends, then everybody — church, state and Freethought Society alike — is better off, right? Then, if he likes, the governor can thank God for the rain (thus implicitly blaming God for the drought) and the freethinkers can protest his doing so, but at least that bit of theater won’t be taking place against the backdrop of a crippling drought.

In the meantime, if you’re going to pray for rain, then be sure you take an umbrella.

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* That’s a Rainmaker reference and not a coffee, Battlestar Galactica or Moby Dick reference.