YOU DIDN’T HEAR many people saying that “it was God’s will” a few years ago when a kid fell into the gorilla exhibit at the Cincinnati Zoo. Instead, you saw memes featuring the gorilla, Harambe, and the words “I’m dead because a bitch wasn’t watching her child.”
Sympathy for the gorilla, who was shot and killed, makes total sense. Outrage against the mom doesn’t, unless you think she should have been on constant high alert against this and every other one-in-a-billion accident.
Unfortunately, that’s how we’ve begun to think. Alan Levinovitz, a professor of religious studies at James Madison University, has a theory for why that is. Religion, he says, used to govern almost every aspect of our lives: what we ate, read, said, and wore—and how we raised our…