The definitive question in Christian radio during this time of natural disaster is: "Was Hurricane Katrina a judgment of God?" Although most of my on-air callers said no, most of my off-air e-mailers said yes. People are a little ashamed to say that God killed so many people out of anger, and no prominent Christian leader did.

		Graphic: Hurricane deaths -- Top 10 years

Unsurprisingly, the angry left was less restrained. No less than the heir apparent to the nation's most famous Democratic dynasty played the global warming card, and greenhouse-gas-bashing was not rare in the blogosphere. An angry God is beyond the pale to this crowd, but an angry goddess (Gaia) is now mainstream opinion in leftie circles.

For myself, I am aggressively uninterested in whether such discussion is "beyond the pale" or simply not civil enough for public consumption. I am interested in knowing whether claims like this are true of false. To find that out, you have to look at evidence.

The chart at right shows that the worst hurricane fatality rate in U.S. history was in 1900. This is pretty inconvenient to both the hard religious right and loopy environmental left. Americans were in the midst of re-electing William McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt; the former was a conservative hawk who is Karl Rove's favorite U.S. political figure. The latter was about to begin his career as president, and he was simultaneously very religiously conservative and pro-environment.

Roosevelt was a believing evangelical, and a serious student of the Bible who opposed not only abortion, but contraception as well. He actually proposed a constitutional amendment to define marriage as between one man and one woman (the target being polygamy, not homosexuality), and any reader of his public pronouncements would have to acknowledge that he was not trying to kick God out of American life.

I mention this latter point because it's a common assertion among members of my tribe that "we kicked God out of America," and so "God has removed his hand of protection (against things like hurricanes) from America." But American civil religious observances were near their high watermark in 1900, and yet that year a whirlwind took an astonishing 8,000 souls.

The rest of the top five years for hurricane deaths are (in order): 1893 (under a religiously conservative Democrat named Grover Cleveland), 1928 (under conservative Republican Herbert Hoover), 1881 and 1915.

There's some research floating around out there which says that after prayer was removed from public schools, all manner of evils struck American society. When you look at social trends, a lot of terrible things did indeed happen to us, but not hurricanes; at least, not any more than before. The average rate of tropical storms went up ever so slightly from 1965-2004 compared with 1955-2004, but that's probably because they started counting sub-tropical storms, too, after 1967. The number of hurricanes stayed the same and the number of major hurricanes went down.

For the record, the Gaia worshippers don't do any better. The identifiable warming trend begins about the same time (in the 1970s), and no pattern of significant growth in hurricanes can be seen.

Geography is as unkind to the "judgment of God" school as meteorology: Almost all the big ones hit us in the Bible Belt. The worst: Texas. The second worst: Florida. In fact only two out of the top 10 killers are up in the less traditional-values-oriented Northeast. If God wanted to punish gays, why hit three of the most religiously conservative states in America?

This month, the latest survey from Barna Research Group, which focuses on evangelicals, found the highest percentage of born-again Christians in Alabama. Louisiana is as Catholic as any state of the Union. Mississippi is intensely religious and generous, too.

For that matter, if God was to hurl burning jet fuel down on the heathen liberals, why did those planes hit buildings full of stock brokers and investment bankers on Sept. 11, 2001? Why did the other plane hit our heroes in the U.S. military, under which duty, honor, and country are upheld and open homosexuality and adultery are criminal offenses?

If you want to make the case against abortion and gay marriage on the merits, I'll join you. However, if you want to draft off of the news cycles which are generated from a major catastrophe instead of doing the hard work of making your case, you'll have to do it without my help. The data just isn't on your side.