UPDATE (April 8, 2024 10:30 a.m. ET): Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., doubled down on her comments on Sunday, posting on X that "eclipses are predictable and earthquakes happen and we know when comets are passing by, however God created all of these things and uses them to be signs for those of us who believe.”
Millions of Americans (and potential amateur solar scientists) will find themselves in the path of a total eclipse of the sun on Monday. A rare earthquake shook New York City and the surrounding region Friday, with another aftershock that afternoon. Also, Monday’s darkening sky could possibly reveal the so-called “devil comet” that is making a once-in-71-years appearance in our corner of the solar system.
In an earlier, more superstitious time, any one of these events would have been widely taken as a dark omen requiring serious repentance.
In an earlier, more superstitious time, any one of these events would have been widely taken as a dark omen requiring serious repentance. Taken in combination, I joked on Friday soon after the earthquake hit, these kinds of signs could take down a whole dynasty. But as is so often the case these days, reality overtook satire, courtesy of Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who wrote, “God is sending America strong signs to tell us to repent. Earthquakes and eclipses and many more things to come. I pray that our country listens.”
Whoo, boy. That view isn’t surprising coming from someone who once suggested forest fires had been started by Jewish space lasers. Conspiracy theories often take advantage of the human brain’s desperate search for explanations even in ways that defy reality. It’s the same quality that helped early humans piece together stories to explain the natural world: What better to explain, say, thunder than to give it an unseen manufacturer?
Seeing these kinds of phenomena as judgments on human morality extend back almost as far. The flood myth, one that is most popularly told through the story of Noah’s Ark these days, can be linked back to the ancient Sumerians, if not further. Likewise, as I mentioned in a recent piece on the man-made nature of famines, the Torah and other books of the Hebrew Bible see God’s wrath in the natural ills that befall mankind and in the darkening of the sun and moon.
Seeing these kinds of phenomena as judgments on human morality extend back almost as far.
Greene was likely referencing the prophecies about the end times that Jesus handed down in the Gospels. Luke 21:11 finds him telling his disciples that the kingdom of heaven will come in a time when there “will be great earthquakes, famines and pestilences in various places, and fearful events and great signs from heaven.” A few verses later, Jesus notes that there “will be signs in the sun, moon and stars” as well.
For centuries, Christians, be they kings or commoners, used the Bible as a way of interpreting omens like comets and earthquakes to determine whether Judgment Day was at hand. But the idea that natural disasters can foretell the fate of rulers is one that crosses cultures. The Friday earthquake had many New Yorkers joking that Mayor Eric Adams had “lost the Mandate of Heaven,” a reference to ancient China, where the emperor was believed to have been appointed by the heavens and events such as floods and eclipses were taken as evidence that he’d lost that divine right to rule.
We know better now. We know that giant shifting plates that make up the Earth’s outer layer are why the ground shakes. We know that the orbit of the moon around the Earth can bring it into the path of the sun to create a solar eclipse. We know that a comet arcing through the sky is on a small part of a very long journey, not a messenger of looming destruction.
And yet, there are those like Greene who would still seek to harness natural events as tools of dominance and control. Pastor John Hagee saying that Hurricane Katrina was a punishment for New Orleans’ wickedness comes to mind. So does the late televangelist Pat Robertson’s claim that the 2010 earthquake in Haiti was caused by Haitians’ “pact with the devil.” (Hagee later retracted his statement. Robertson didn’t.)
Even if Greene got her way and America transformed into an evangelical Christian nationalist’s paradise, there’d still be earthquakes. There’s no amount of churchgoing that will stop the moon in the sky from occasionally hiding the sun. A comet’s return is no more a sign of who will win the next election than stepping on a crack can sever your mother’s spinal cord. Anyone who says otherwise in this day and age is trying to force the universe to fit into their very narrow mold.
But there are things that people do have control over. We can learn how to prepare for earthquakes and design buildings to withstand them. We can build telescopes to study the movements of comets and wait for them to return like old friends. And we can choose to share in the splendor that a solar eclipse brings for a brief moment, confident that the moon will eventually move on and that people like Greene will be stuck in place and shouting at the stars in vain.
