On Sunday, millions of Americans sat around their dinner tables with family, celebrating Christ’s return from the dead, or giant rabbits, or the invention of the Snickers bar or something.

But families in Texas had an additional reason to address their Divine Creator, a task laid out for them by another higher power, Gov. Rick Perry.

Texas is burning. More than 800 wildfires have scorched 1.8 million acres of the Lone Star state. As firefighters continue a courageous effort to contain the blaze, Perry thought he would do his part by issuing a proclamation last Thursday urging “the people of Texas (to) join together in prayer to humbly seek an end to this devastating drought and these dangerous wildfires.”

After laying out the destruction the fires have wrought in the state, Perry concludes: “Now, therefore, I, Rick Perry, Governor of Texas, under the authority vested in me by the Constitution and Statutes of the State of Texas, do hereby proclaim the three-day period from Friday, April 22, 2011, to Sunday, April 24, 2011, as Days of Prayer for Rain in the State of Texas. I urge Texans of all faiths and traditions to offer prayers on that day for the healing of our land, the rebuilding of our communities and the restoration of our normal way of life.”

This is troubling for a number of reasons. It treads pretty close to crossing the First Amendment ban on state-sponsored religion. It disregards the many Texans who are not people of faith (they exist, I have met them).

Some will argue that I’m missing the point. Prayer is harmless, and brings comfort to a lot of people. No one is required to pray. He is just encouraging people of faith affected by the wildfire to use their prayers to help heal themselves and each other.

The problem is that Perry is perpetuating a delusion that will not benefit the people of Texas.

Prayer does nothing to put out the fires raging through Texas. It is frightening to think that the person making decisions for the second-largest state thinks god is waiting for the people of Texas to petition him before he stops the fires that have killed several people and hundreds of homes.

The combined prayers of every Texan does less to stop the fires than the actions of a single volunteer firefighter.

True leadership would have been a proclamation urging those who are young and fit enough to volunteer their weekend to fight the fires.

The greater irony is that Perry’s environmental policies may be perpetuating the very droughts that made these fires possible. The National Academy of Sciences have predicted “increases in aridity throughout the southwestern United States due to anthropogenic climate change.”

One should always be careful not to use a single drought, storm, cold snap or heat wave as concrete evidence of climate change, but definite trends are emerging throughout the Southwestern U.S.; chief among them is less water and more fire.

Perry has been an outspoken critic of climate science. But instead of reflecting on his climate-change denialism, he apparently believes his best course of action is to encourage Texans to do rain dances over Easter weekend.

If Perry consulted his bible, he would see that when Moses saw the burning bush, he took action to save his people.

Dave Balson is a junior journalism major. He can be reached at 581-2812

or DENopinions@gmail.com