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Fundamentalism is to religion what sub-prime is to mortgages: a very expensive con game.
Fundamentalism makes incredible promises - salvation with no money down. Just say the magic words (sign here) and you're saved. No credit checks. No saving up. Move right in to your spiritual mansion.
But as soon as the fundies get the sucker into their church, they start "readjusting the interest rate". Of course, there is tithing. And then they set things up so that if you don't have a lot of kids you can't possibly afford, you're some kind of sinner. And they start wanting you to spend every spare minute being part of their "loving community". You know, being an obnoxious, in-your-face evangelizer, picketing abortion clinics, writing letters to Congressmen, sending money to TV evangelists, attending Justice Sunday.
Pretty soon, the sucker has to give up the rest of their life in order to service this sub-prime "bargain" religion. The alternative is to declare spiritual bankruptcy and just walk away. Leave their community, perhaps leave their equally looney spouse, leave the kids. Or maybe, the sucker is a woman, like Andrea Yates, and the bankruptcy is her sanity and the lives of her children.
Sub-prime religion discredits honest religions, the same way subprime mortgages polluted the whole financial industry. And, the honest religions are just as culpable as the honest banks. The non-fundamentalist religions have not blown the whistle on the blatant fraud of fundamentalist spirituality, much less the predatory greed and naked political ambition of the phony ministers who run these scams. The honest religions have benefitted from the epidemic of religiosity flooding our corporate media and being spouted by fundamentalist politicians and TV evangelists. But, do you ever hear a TV show where a mainstream minister stands up and denounces fundamentalism for the racket that it is?
Just like finance, an unregulated free market in religion brings out con-men, fraud, and criminality. And just like finance, the honest players have sunk themselves by going along with the con. We used to have the common sense to hold onto our wallets around people who play games with money; but we seem to have lost that sense about mortgages and about people who play games with "salvation".
Unfortunately for America, when religion is debased, so is morality. The result is acquiesence in wars of aggression, in massive civilian deaths in Iraq, in torture, in the destruction of the rule of law, in massive economic looting. As a nation, we are spiritually bankrupt.
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