From BBC – Link to full article
By Greg Wood and Sandra Shmueli
BBC News, New York
Rocky Twyman says God, not market forces, brought prices down
A prayer group in Washington DC is claiming the credit for the recent sharp drop in the US price of petrol.Rocky Twyman, 59, a veteran community campaigner, started Pray At The Pump meetings at petrol stations in April.
Since then, the average price of what the US calls gasoline has fallen from more than $4 a gallon to $3.80.
“We don’t have anybody else to turn to but God,” Mr Twyman told the BBC. “We have to turn these problems over to God and not to man.”
His first pilgrimage to the pump was prompted by fellow volunteers at the First Seventh Day Adventist Church in Petworth, a working-class neighbourhood of the US capital, who were struggling with higher gasoline prices.
He led them down the block to the local Shell gas station to pray. And over the months since then, he has held similar prayer meetings at pumps all over the US.
Prayer warriors
“We were down in Huntsville, Alabama. We finished praying,” Mr Twyman said. “Immediately the owners came out and changed the gas prices. They brought it down. We had marvellous success down in St Louis, Missouri.”
This week the group returned to the site of their first prayer meeting to celebrate. Singing “We shall overcome,” they changed the words of the well-known hymn to “We’ll have lower gas prices”.
Mr Twyman is sceptical that market forces might be responsible for the lower prices. But he and his prayer warriors have changed their motoring habits.
“We believe not just in prayer – because we believe that faith without works is dead. So we’ve encouraged people to car-pool more and organise their days more, because it’s a combination of faith with these other factors.”
Pray At The Pump plans to build on its success and drive gasoline prices even lower. In the words of Rocky Twyman: “We just thank God for blessing us with small victories and we expect greater things to come.”
Only in America….
This is a worrying indication of both how little control over their own lives, and their nation, that common people in the US feel they have, as well as how little action or influence the expect their government to exert over domestic issues.
The almost paranoiac fear many Americans feel about allowing their government even the slightest powers to intervene in many domestic issues, from health care and welfare to firearms and any kind of intervention in the market, has led to a libertarian “small government” approach that leaves the people very vulnerable to market fluctuations (and pure bad luck) to the extent that instead of looking to their rulers for a practical solution to the price of petrol, they turn to… God…
Tags: america, Current Affairs, gasoline prices, god, god's oil, libertarianism, Modern Culture, oil prices, religion, religion in america, small government, united states
August 22, 2008 at 5:21 pm
We here in Nepal have the problem like everywhere around. We don’t have good per capita income neither we have such type of government subsidy fo the general people so that we can have easy access to the availability of the petroliums and gasolines.
Moreover we are facing the black market that create scarcity in the market which have made the daily living more complicated. Some months back, the then government raised the price on these petro products to meet the hike in the international market.
The government is still on its way of formation and we are facing this problem since a year back but we don’t know when is it going to end?
August 22, 2008 at 11:22 pm
If recent news ia nythign to go by, the worst may be over, for the time being at least… As you say though, nations that can’t afford the “world market” prices have been hit the hardest. I think our American friends may not realise how fortunate they are. The cost of their fuel at the pump is less than half the cost of it here in the United Kingdom! I just thank the gods that I don’t drive…