AURORA — For almost every person who believes God protects you in your darkest hours — even interfering with a bullet’s path — there is another who wonders if it’s not only delusional but even offensive to think God personally intervenes to spare one innocent but not another.
Victims of the July 20 Aurora movie-theater shooting — 12 died and 58 were injured — have spoken often of faith, prayer, God’s plan and their part in it.
Evil acts on faith, sometimes stripping it away but more often, experts say, deepening what one already believes about God and a divine role in tragedy.
Ninety-five percent of Americans believe in God, according to several recent religious surveys.
But what kind of God? About 55 percent of Americans believe in a God whose eye is on the sparrow, while 40 percent believe in a creator who is far more remote.
Aurora shooting victim Pierce O’Farrill, a 28-year-old evangelical Christian who attends a Baptist church, has said he perceived the mass murderer’s entrance into the theater as “an evil presence,” but then God arrived, he said, and the gunman stopped shooting at people.
God jammed his gun, many have since asserted. Yet a skeptic would ask why God arrived late.
Finding peace in God
People of faith seldom lose it because of horrible events. Pastors, priests, rabbis, imams, gurus and others will tell you: In desperate times, people turn to faith with renewed passion.
“We’re not asking God why he did or didn’t do this or that on that night,” said Tom Sullivan, father of Alex Sullivan, who died from a gunshot that night, his 27th birthday. “We’re thanking God for the gift we have in Alex. You have to enjoy every day of life. I’m not bitter.”
This resonates with belief in the Sikh community, the latest devastated by mass murder — a man invaded an Oak Creek, Wis., temple Aug. 5 and killed six worshipers, wounded three people and took his own life.
“We are taught to accept God’s will with grace,” whether it’s understood or not, said Simran Jeet Singh, a Sikh and Columbia University religion scholar.
Singh spent an anxious day waiting to hear from family members who attend the Oak Creek gurdwara. He couldn’t reach them, as it turned out, because they were away on a camping trip.
“If God is all good and all powerful, why do bad things happen? As a Sikh, I would complicate that equation a little,” Singh said. “Our perspective is that God is all good, all powerful, all loving and active within the world. The Sikh does not perceive anything in the world as bad. Yes, there is tragedy and suffering — we feel it — we don’t perceive it to be from evil.”
Sterling Copeland, 23, spoke at a church an hour before he left for a late-night showing of “The Dark Knight Rises” at the Century Aurora 16 on the night of the movie massacre. His talk was titled: “God’s Plans Don’t Always Make Sense.”
The former Colorado Rapids soccer player turned Promise Keepers minister doesn’t believe God was playing favorites at the movie theater by saving some and not others, yet, Copeland said: “God has a purpose for all of us.”
He and his girlfriend were in theater 8, where bullets from next door pierced a wall and panic ensued. Later, while detained in a theater parking lot for hours, he said, he felt God nudge him to start praying with people.
He started a prayer with five in a circle. When he looked up, there were 10. He feels he made a difference that night.
Americans have frequent personal encounters with God, say Baylor University researchers Paul Froese and Christoper Bader in their 2010 book, “America’s Four Gods.” They report that about 45 percent of Americans have even said they “felt called by God to do something.”
Even more, almost 80 percent of Americans believe in miracles — but describe everything from nature’s beauty and coincidences to hearing God’s voice as evidence of supernatural incursions into our daily lives, according to a 2008 Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life survey.
Sullivan believes God and Alex’s spirit were with him days after the shooting in an elevator stuck between floors at an Aurora police station.
While stranded, Tom Sullivan had tried to calm the nerves of other elevator passengers, including Alex’s young widow, his own wife and several others — family members and officials — by joking around and playing music on his cellphone.
The theme song to the TV show “Rescue Me” just happened to be on when firefighters pried open the doors, he said. It struck him as the sort of funny little coincidence his playful son might engineer to lighten the mood and bring people closer together.
“There was the presence of God in there — and of Alex,” Sullivan said.
Four versions of God
Americans’ image of God and a divine role in tragic or disastrous events depends a great deal on which of four predominant versions of deity one believes in, Froese and Bader say, and these beliefs don’t line up neatly by denomination.
Nearly 85 percent of Americans believe in a loving God, and many envision God as “a protective and loving parent” who invites us into a one-on-one relationship, Froese and Bader wrote. Americans overwhelmingly believe that God “cares deeply for the safety of humanity.”
Yet believers vary greatly in views of how much God interacts or intervenes with the world, Froese and Bader concluded after analyzing in-depth surveys by Gallup Polls for Baylor’s Institute for Studies of Religion in 2005 and 2007.
They concluded:
• Most Americans who believe God is highly engaged in the details of this life embrace an “Authoritative God (31 percent),” who can be loving but also very judgmental and punishing — perhaps piloting a tornado or hurricane. He is often imagined as a literal humanlike father. Many evangelical Christians are in this category, but they fall into others too.
• Some Americans envision a “Benevolent God (24 percent),” not always meting out justice but always involved — inspiring, directing or even physically saving his children — with divine handiwork evident everywhere. Their God doesn’t cause disasters but perhaps allows some and prevents others for good reason. But many in this group alternatively think God is neutral, playing no role in causing bad events.
• Those who think God doesn’t interfere much here on Earth embrace a “Distant God (24 percent),” a creator or more abstract cosmic force not concerned with daily minutiae or attending movies with us but one we can perhaps personally experience through intuition, prayer, meditation, grace or some other tap on the divine. Their God doesn’t start or stop disasters.
• About 16 percent of Americans envision a “Critical God,” who, while probably not engaged day to day, could judge souls in the afterlife or otherwise ultimately balance cosmic scales. Most in this group believe God plays no active part in causing cataclysms.
Boston University religion scholar Stephen Prothero asked readers of CNN’s Belief Blog: “Where was God in Aurora?” Over a few days, he received more than 10,000 responses, which he distilled into seven basic answers in a July 26 post:
“There is no God. Don’t blame God, blame Satan. Don’t blame God, blame us (free will). God was behind the massacre, and it was just. God was present at the massacre, but with the victims, not the perpetrator. Which God? (a personal, human-like God is a myth). Who knows? It’s a mystery.”
While some believers in Authoritative God accept that “He” allows or even causes harm to come to us to punish or teach us, most Americans refuse to believe God, even if all-powerful, is responsible for human suffering, Froese and Bader found.
It’s Satan’s fault. It’s evil. It’s the result of our sins. It’s mental illness. Or it just happens — to some but not others.
“I don’t know why some were lost and some were spared. I don’t know that,” said Michael Walker, senior pastor at Church in the City, whose congregation includes some moviegoers that fateful night.
“God’s ways are not my ways,” Walker said. “But for those who know him and have a relationship with him, they have an eternal future. We have hope in a God who will help get us through. God’s people shine brightest in the darkness of evil.”
“Good from evil”
Terry Oliver’s granddaughter, 13-year-old Kaylan, went to “The Dark Knight Rises” with an older cousin and friends, including 6-year-old Veronica Moser-Sullivan, the youngest fatality among the Aurora killings.
Kaylan, who sometimes baby-sat Veronica, stayed near the fallen girl in the theater, called 911 and tried to perform CPR. But Veronica didn’t seem to be breathing, and she was hard to reach under her badly injured mother’s motionless body, Kaylan told Oliver.
“The enemy meant it for evil, but God will make it for good,” Oliver said of the tragedy. “That’s what we’re all praying for — good from evil.”
Oliver’s own faith has grown as a result of the tragedy, she said.
“God covered my grandchild that night,” she said. “We will move closer to God. We don’t know why bad things happened to other good people there, but we have to trust God will make it right.”
Oliver said Kaylan’s therapist says the girl’s recovery from the trauma is “on schedule,” but she still mostly wants to stay in her room. However, she is smiling a little again, and she did want to go with her grandmother to Church in the City to serve food to the homeless — something they have always enjoyed.
“Knowing Kaylan, this experience will encourage her to help people even more,” Oliver said.
Electa Draper: 303-954-1276, edraper@denverpost.com or twitter.com/electadraper
