Devil's Bargain
by digby
Having Good Friday and Earth Day coincide brings up the interesting question about why the Religious Right are climate change deniers? To me, this makes no sense. At worst, they should be neutral, leaving the Rapture in God's hands. But they are actively hostile to the very concept with an intensity that's hard to understand.
I have wondered about this before in terms of the right in general and linked to Amanda Marcotte's excellent answer, which I still think gets to the nub of it. But Right Wing Watch has put together a great analysis of the religious right's anti-environment crusade that shines a whole new light on the subject. Turns out, like everything else, there's money involved:
As Republican officials accelerate their efforts to weaken environmental regulations and attack climate scientists, energy corporations are reaping the benefits of a decades-long effort to put a more benevolent, humanitarian, and even religious spin to their anti-environmental activism. Among their most valuable allies are the Religious Right organizations and leaders who have emerged as ready apologists for polluters and critics of efforts to protect the environment. The Religious Right’s attacks are intended to lend credence to the efforts of corporations and the GOP to quash the Environmental Protection Agency and chip away at state and federal environmental safeguards. And increasingly, Republican leaders themselves are echoing the same misleading arguments and themes of the Religious Right’s corporate apologists.
Buoyed by corporate finances and a radical ‘dominion theology,’ the Religious Right has become more aggressive and fanatical in its defense of corporations and denial of climate science. Trying to combat the increasing number of evangelical Christians who are part of the “creation care” movement that is calling for a greater commitment to combat climate change, the Religious Right is working to misrepresent the environmental movement as dangerously deceitful, harmful to the poor and destructive to Christianity.
Read on. This coalition has been together for years, basically pushing radical capitalism for the haves and social conservatism for the have-nots.(And there have always been scam artists working the faithful.)But this funneling of vast amounts of wealth to the top is empowering them more than ever.
This is when I usually reach for my dog-eared copy of Margaret Atwood's masterpiece and take a few hours off.
Update: And then there's this ... Good Lord.
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