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LORD, DO UNTO THOSE GUYS, GOOD AND HARD

August 23, 2007

If this works, the IRS is really going to have staffing troubles. A preacher is urging his flock to "imprecatory prayer" against those who want the IRS to revoke his church's tax exemption. The pastor had urged his congregants to support Mike Huckabee's presidential campaign.

That naturally leads to the question: what is he talking about? The TaxProf says the preacher, Wiley S. Drake, is "calling on his followers to pray for the deaths" of two leaders of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the outfit leading the effort to yank the church's tax exemption.

It's not so clear to me that he wants the offenders smote. It seems likely that any of the conventional biblical plagues will do. As Eugene Volokh notes, Mr. Drake's call for imprecatory prayer invokes Psalm 109, which includes this passage:

Let his days be few;
and let another take his office.
Let his children be fatherless,
and his wife a widow.
Let his children be continually vagabonds, and beg:
let them seek their bread also out of their desolate places.
Let the extortioner catch all that he hath;
and let the strangers spoil his labor.
Let there be none to extend mercy unto him:
neither let there be any to favor his fatherless children.
Let his posterity be cut off;
and in the generation following let their name be blotted out.

Pretty stern stuff. Yet the same Psalm also says:

Let mine adversaries be clothed with shame;
and let them cover themselves with their own confusion, as with a mantle.

So perhaps a range of curses is available. Another explanation also seems to permit a range of divine retribution options:

Imprecatory prayer is a last resort appeal to God for justice. The so called 'curses' are simply the just penalty called for in the scriptures for the alleged crime. Imprecatory prayer is an appeal to the court of divine justice (1) for protection and (2) the appropriate punishment for the criminals.

Imprecatory prayer is most often used when the criminals are the rich and powerful or corrupt men in government. The prayer asks God to solve the problem and bring the criminal to repentance, or to judgment.

I'm not sure I understand all this, but it does seem like it can be an appeal for whatever divine punishment is approprate, from the whole array of divine punishments available. Maybe it's a single cricket that just won't shut up when you are trying to sleep, in the case of a minor offense, or a whole plague of locusts for a more serious violation of divine justice. If it catches on among people who feel wronged by IRS, and if it works, the Orkin Man might have to move in at IRS headquarters.

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