American conservative leaders have often argued that greed is good, and controls on capitalism are ungodly.  The logic is thus:  Stalin was an atheist.  Stalin liked socialist policies.  Ergo, socialism is against religion.

This, of course, makes no logical sense whatsoever but the Powers That Be in the economic world gladly used it in the same way Stalin used communist promises to keep the people in their place.  The right used religion to further its aims.  People who believed that abortion and gay rights were against God could easily be swayed to also believe that welfare and controls on capitalism were also evil, since look, the same people who are on God’s side are also on the side of the bankers and billionaires.  Clearly, therefore, all bankers and billionaires were Godlike.

Well, this new Pope is throwing all that out the window, and boy, is the right wing up in arms.  Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh are now attacking religion with a fervor never before seen, and are apparently claiming that they have more authority than the Pope about what Jesus would want.  (You remember Jesus — that guy who threw the moneylenders out of the temple and said that the rich could not get into heaven?)

For years, the right has proclaimed that we are a “Christian nation” (despite all evidence to the contrary) and yet now, when the leader of the largest Christian organization in the world tells us what we should be doing, suddenly Christian values are not important to us.

“As long as the problems of the poor are not radically resolved by rejecting the absolute autonomy of markets and financial speculation and by attacking the structural causes of inequality, no solution will be found for the world’s problems or, for that matter, to any problems,” the Pope said.  He’s talking about uncontrolled capitalism, about markets that crash and hurt the poor because the rich are gambling with our future, about the ridiculous idea that money “trickles down” to improve everyone’s lot.

Maybe it’s time that the Christian right started acting like Christians.