On the morning of June 15, Americans woke up to the surprising story that "Touchdown Jesus" – or, as some called it, the "Big Butter Jesus" – a six-story Styrofoam sculpture along an interstate in Ohio, had been struck by lightning and quickly burned to the ground. Only the steel frame remained, a freaky Terminator-like skeleton.

Touchdown Jesus was kitsch; it was religion; it was both at the same time. Commentators in the press, attentive to this rich mix, were quick to say that the lightning strike was no accident. "Thor is mad"or maybe even Zeus. And of course God was regularly cited as the source of this thunderbolt – all that was left to figure out was the meaning. Was God grossed out by the statue's buttery aesthetics? Was God mad about the unchecked oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Had God just had a bad day?

The tongue-in-cheek snark that assigned God some active role in the statue's demise was not met happily by other religion writers or the ministers at the church that had erected it. The builder of "Touchdown Jesus" flatly stated that the lightning strike was not an "act of God." God wasn't – and isn't – mad at the statue, or at anyone.   
 
This is an odd, if understandable, statement. In American contract law, the phrase "acts of God" refers to hurricanes, earthquakes and lightning strikes. In other words, to natural events outside of human control. Thus in a sense the lightning strike was just such an act.

As this little kerfuffle demonstrates, in American life "act of God" has two meanings that unsteadily coexist. We do not need to be reminded of the ways that religious figures have assigned divine agency and moral meaning to Katrina, Haiti's earthquake or the Deepwater Horizon petrochemical geyser. There seems to be no opportunity lost to call attention to the angry divinity standing behind these natural events. And, likewise, to call attention to the presumably morally repugnant human acts that call down divine retribution. And then there is the secular version of this narrative, where wasting the earth's resources or scoffing at climate change bring dire consequences. One way or another, Judgment Day is coming.

The Ohio lightning bolt struck less than 24 hours before President Obama weighed in on the oil spill with an address to the nation from the Oval Office. There was most certainly a religion story in that speech: most observers focused on the President's call to prayer, what some deemed a "hail Mary" pitch. Yet listening closely to the speech, we can also hear how Obama answered the act-of-God question – an attempt to frame our understanding of the nation's degree of collective responsibility for the disaster.

Recounting the story of the "Blessing of the Fleet" that takes place each year in the Gulf, Obama noted that clergy gather with fishermen to ask for a blessing. The blessing, he notes "is not that God has promised to remove all obstacles and dangers. The blessing is that He is with us always," a blessing that's granted "...even in the midst of the storm." Obama worked to reassure the nation not only that God is not mad at us but that we're not really to blame for the dismaying scene unfolding beneath, within and around the Gulf. It is like a storm or a lightning strike. It is not a sign of divine displeasure.

I believe that it is going to be difficult to convince either secular or religious Americans that what happened in the Gulf is unequivocally one kind of act of God or another. The language of "signs" and the semiotics of lightning strikes are simply too religiously, psychologically and culturally complex to be contained by bland assurances of God's gentle presence. Following the story of how we reckon with our collective responsibility for an environmental calamity will be ongoing work, but it begins with the observation that public discussion of God's acts has a more serious side than coverage of religious comment around events like Touchdown Jesus (or Katrina or Haiti) often allows.

Courtney Bender is an associate professor of religion at Columbia University. She is the author of the forthcoming The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination (Chicago, 2010) and Heaven's Kitchen: Living Religion at God's Love We Deliver (Chicago, 2003) as well as the co-editor (with Pamela Klassen) of After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagements (Columbia, 2010).