The devil made me do it

It was comedian Flip Wilson on his ’70s show that popularized the phrase in our title. A woman possessed in Dallas, Texas, told family members that she thinks the “devil” is in her after she drowned her five children in a bathtub. A variation of the same theme is the current “God Made Me Do It” routine.

Marc Hartzman, who likes the bizarre and writes with humor, published God Made Me Do It: True Stories of the Worst Advice the Lord Has Ever Given His Followers, where he narrates how a woman was instructed to direct traffic—topless. There was one who performed surgery on himself, of folks told to be cannibals, rid of their car insurance, let God fill their gas tanks, and have the divine root for the Minnesota Vikings. 

The news is replete of incidents where the divine is used as the source of instructions. According to court testimony, an 18-year-old woman from Georgia was accused of stabbing her cousin to death, using “God made me do it” as a defense. In this case, the step-cousins were good friends but one inhaled a substance that got them into a quarrel, and the smoker ender up chasing the cousin in the street with a butcher knife, hacking her four times.

A 21-year-old mother from Connecticut killed her 8-month-old son in the belief that her son will rise from the dead if her faith was strong enough. It appears that it wasn’t.

Faith as a motivating factor for questionable acts was dramatically portrayed in the movie Elmer Gantry. Also, an Iranian construction worker was indicted for the scarf-strangling death of 19 prostitutes for God’s sake, to protect religion and the corruption of people. His neighbors reportedly gathered outside his home chanting, “Killer, we support you.”

A paranoid schizophrenic mother of 40 killed her 16-year-old daughter in their home; she suspected the daughter to be possessed by Satan and God wanted her to cleanse her home of satanic influences. She told police that her daughter’s last words were: “Mama, don’t shoot me, I love you,” for which Mama replied, “I know, baby, but I have to do the Lord’s will.”

A naked man driving a car pelted a woman walking her dog and struck her with the car, telling police that “demons wanted to destroy the woman” and he was driving naked “so he could enter the kingdom of God.” Happily, the woman survived.

A Bible-toting man committed a five-hour crime spree when he beat his brother and raped his girlfriend, broke into a house, tried to run over a convenience store clerk twice after robbing her, and at a second store, reportedly shot the husband-and-wife owners. He was sentenced to two life terms.

A 31-yeal-old man, in the midst of struggling to change religious affiliation, fatally stabbed his son, wife, and mother-in-law in an assault in the middle of the night.

A mob summoned by a church bell beat a man to death next to a Mexican police station because the victim was trying to steal the patron saint idol of the neighborhood.

Of course, we are all familiar with folks stealing in the name of God. “Affinity fraud” in building trust through religious loyalty has been reported in 27 states, of 90K investors scammed by religious con artists to the tune of $1.8 billion. In five year, 13K investors lost $450 million on religion-based fraud.

A founder of a ministry was sentence to 27 years in prison for a Ponzi scheme; he took $580 million on the promise to 20K investors that their money would double through “divinely-inspired investments.” A high profile case involved a foundation that raised $590 million through 120 shell corporations. 

A female ward from China prays daily to God to determine the course of her day, a bug she caught on Saipan after coming from Hainan. I tried to get her to create a timeline, reflect on the events, people, places, and significance of her first 24 years of life, and do the same on her projection of the next 24. Grounded on the real, she had a context on how to run her life daily, the exercise done at least once a year, adding a year on both end each time. She prefers perpetual dependency on the divine.

And why not? Knowing the infinite mystery of The Way Life Is (YHWH) is a religious preoccupation we learned from the Jews. The Muslims’ most solemn word is Anshallah, “God willing.” Pinas’ que sera sera, translated as bahala na, comes from Indo Bathala na, “God willing.” Variations guide branches of the Christian church. “God will provide” was my mother’s pat response after she exhausted the application of her wit and skill. In deeply religious Saipan, “it is in God’s hands” is a most repeated phrase.

G-O-D as an external Santa Klaus in the sky is passé, no longer taken seriously among theologians of note, though the metaphor remains popular. God allegedly rooted for the Crimson Tide at the College Football Championship Ball.

One of the 9th graders at a private school asked if I was an atheist. Another student answered: “No, he simply decided to be responsible for 86 years of his life.”  Amen.