I’m not entirely surprised here. I’ve been predicting the cooptation of American political institutions by the Religious Right for years. Back in the 1970s, I heard the first whines among my junior high school classmates who were reading comic books distributed by their churches that damned anyone who believed in evolution or equal rights or separation of church and state.

The propaganda campaign which resulted in the political merger of the Fundamentalists and the atheist kooks of the Right remains a study to be undertaken. It never ceases to amaze me how some Christians have so completely renounced Christian values because of overriding prejudices and fears.

The children of whom I speak, so carefully indoctrinated by their religious leaders of the time, are the voters of today. Look to the schools: see what is being passed out in those places and you will have a hint of the future — barring a consciousness clearing catastrophe that will restore them to the paths of virtue and righteousness on behalf of Jesus’s people, the poor and the helpless of the earth.