If you’ve ever lived in Los Angeles or if you have loved ones who do, you know that the January wildfires have felt especially like hell—a unique experience even in a city as well acquainted with disaster as LA. Such experiences have unsurprisingly drawn biblical comparisons. As Zev Yaroslavsky, a long-serving LA politician and child of Russian Jewish immigrants told the New York Times’ Shawn Hubler: “It was biblical.” The wildfires in LA can indeed be understood as “biblical,” though not, I would argue, as an example of supernatural wrath, as Yaroslavsky suggests, but rather as a natural disaster exacerbated by human choices.
Typically when people refer to a disaster as “biblical” it’s meant to suggest a horror of otherworldly proportions (if not origins). Indeed, while some on the Right have sought to blame diversity, a “globalist plot to wage economic warfare & deindustrialize the Untied [sic] States,” or even a small endangered fish called Delta Smelt, others have seen the wildfires as supernatural punishment for California’s policies on LGBTQ or women’s rights.
I want to reclaim the biblical language that Yaroslavsky and some on the Right have mobilized to imply that the wildfires were divinely mandated and argue that what’s biblical here is the human experience and the human role in shaping it. To begin with, divine wrath is a stretch given the lack of a clear issue or target—its victims come from a diverse range of communities, spanning numerous ethnic backgrounds, income levels, and political affiliations. Plus, as Justin Ray argues for the San Francisco Chronicle, “If California’s progressive stances really had invited divine wrath, what about the conservative states that were also suffering from natural disasters?”
But the Bible does offer up a potent referent for this ongoing tragedy. After all, so much of what we think of as the Bible was forged in the wake of world-ending disasters. In fact, biblical texts come to us because of communities who survived great catastrophes. The Book of Genesis, for example, concludes with the nascent community of Israelites living as environmental refugees, having fled to Egypt due to catastrophic famine. As biblical scholars have long argued, the stories in Genesis don’t come to us directly from those famine survivors but from those who survived and struggled with subsequent catastrophic destruction and forced displacement. Survivors who were forced to leave their homes behind centered the writing and sharing of so many of the traditions that are central to the Torah and to prophetic literature.
Even the Book of Revelation, the foundational Christian text of disaster in US myth-making (also foundational to disastrous US immigration policy, as Yii-Jan Lin powerfully demonstrates), speaks, at least in part, to the memory of catastrophe, trading as it does on the history of the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem. In using Babylon as a stand-in for ancient Rome, the Book of Revelation relies upon a legacy of survival in the face of human-made catastrophes; the text suggests that just as the community survived Babylonian destruction, so too can communities survive Roman destruction and outlast an evil empire.
Likewise, many modern survivors of catastrophe have connected with biblical themes and traditions. As scriptural theorist Vincent L. Wimbush describes, enslaved African Americans found a mirror for their own experiences in different biblical texts. Many found meaning and hope in the Exodus narrative, for instance, which is reflected in some popular spirituals like “Go Down Moses.” Those who’ve had to survive epic tragedies like these wildfires might find comfort, or at least a mirror, in biblical testimonials of survival and the ways that previous generations have found to survive and make new meaning in the face of world-ending horror.
But I think of the LA wildfires as biblical in a different sense. The Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem as remembered in Revelation has not only served as a comforting testimonial of survival, it’s also been used to shape the horrors that others must survive. Since at least the time of Constantine I, biblical texts have been used to justify imperial violence, genocide, and environmental destruction.
Some on the Right, for example, have read Genesis’s depictions of human dominion alongside Revelation’s promise of a new heaven and new earth as a justification for environmental abuse. That mindset, which filtered down to the secular Right, was articulated most crudely by pundit Ann Coulter who, in 2001, declared: “Earth is yours. Take it. Rape it.” While many factors have contributed to the horrors of climate change we’re now living in, this relationship to biblical traditions is surely a prominent one.
Wildfires in Southern California are to some extent natural, though we make natural disasters worse because of how we as humans relate to the environment. When the Spanish first colonized the region, they built missions that tried to inscribe Revelation’s New Jerusalem onto California’s landscape. But to build these New Jerusalems, missionaries sought to transform Indigenous Californian cultures, including Indigenous relationships with the landscape.
It’s become more commonplace to recognize that the Tongva mitigated wildfires better before European settler colonialism, especially with their practice of controlled burns; even in this year’s Eaton fire, Tongva property sustained relatively less loss because of their caretaking practices. In building the eighteenth and nineteenth-century missions as New Jerusalems, Spanish colonization interrupted Tongva practices and developed a system of proprietary relationships to water and agriculture that fundamentally reshaped California’s landscape, exacerbating the risks of wildfire. As the nations of Mexico and then the U.S. claimed the land, they further disrupted Indigenous relationships and practices with California’s natural environment.
The remains of missions that dot California’s coastline remind us that the biblical nature of California’s wildfires has more to do with how humans have used biblical texts and how these usages have contributed to this hellish firestorm. Far from an example of divine wrath, California’s firestorms are, in many ways, a consequence of human choices. One of those choices that we must confront is how people have used the Bible to justify abuse of the natural environment, a choice that’s had devastating consequences for people around the world. How we define “biblical,” in other words, has consequences.
