Sins that ruin a nation

Like many of us, I have been pondering the question of Covid-19 and God’s judgment.

The Anglican Book of Common Prayer (BCP) is clear in its prayers for such occasions that natural disasters are something ‘we for our iniquities have worthily deserved’ and that ‘we do most justly suffer for our iniquity.’ Death, famine, plague and sickness are all instruments of God’s ‘wrath’ through which we are ‘for our sins punished’ and ‘justly humbled’.

Yet the BCP does not zero in on any particular sin as if it alone was responsible for a specific act of judgment. That, after all, would take the kind of prophetic insight possessed and demonstrated by the Old Testament prophets, which it is somewhat dangerous to claim for ourselves. I’ve noticed that people who do presume to do this will often say God is judging us for all the things other people are doing (but not them), and which they themselves have often complained about before. Clausewitz famously said that ‘war is the continuation of politics by other means’; for many, plagues are too.