Michael Parenti

Fundamentalist reactionaries believe that concern for our planet's future is senseless because it has no future; we are on the eve of the Apocalypse when Jesus will make a grand reentry, and the righteous shall be elevated to heaven, while sinners and skeptics will roast in hell for all eternity. In the face of that breathtaking scenario, melting icecaps are of no great moment—if anything, they are welcomed as evidence of the impending Judgment Day “Rapture,” the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.3

Today's right-wing religionists fashion a god wedded to their moralistic and political agendas. As already mentioned, their definitions of sin and virtue are seldom associated with the inequities of socioeconomic reality. Thus a worker who filches something from the business firm is a thief and has thereby sinned. But the corporate owners—who plunder the environment, market unsafe commodities, impose cuts in wages and benefits, and expropriate workers’ pension funds—are not likely to be considered culpable by any luminaries of the religious Right.

For years church leaders clung to the “few bad apples” argument, treating the charges as hysterical exaggeration. Courageous priests who called for investigations of the problem sometimes had their careers blocked. Some church officials hid pedophilic fugitives from the law, arguing in court that criminal investigations of church affairs violated the free practice of religion as guaranteed by the US Constitution—as if pedophilia were a sacrosanct religious practice