We just finished the first season of the television adaptation of Margaret Atwood's novel, The Handmaid's Tale. It is brilliantly dystopian and speaks with chilling insight to the to the state of a world in political transition with totalitarian leaders rising up everywhere, including Gilead...excuse me, the United States of America.
What is different about the repressively religious Gilead is that in on a post-apocalyptic planet where human and plant fertility has failed, this country has returned to environmentally friendly practices -- or so it is claimed. The commander of the handmaid Offred (played by the remarkable Elizabeth Moss) brags to a Mexican trade delegation that Gilead has moved to organic food production. There seems to be no shortage of food in this bleak society.
Still, Atwood made her point at a time in the 1980's when we were first awakening to climate change and the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster had occurred only years before. Circumstances have only become more ominous and the current American regime dismantles environmental regulations by the hundreds. Millions of conservative Christians support this direction and any passages of scripture inviting us to live humbly in God's Creation are willfully ignored and the now ousted EPA director, Scott Pruitt cited the bible to support the fossil fuel industry.
As I've noted before Margaret Atwood isn't anti-religion. She supports the Sojourners Christian social justice community in the States and has worked with the Leah Kostama and A Rocha Green Christian organization as well. She is a truth-teller just the same, and knows that religion can be a toxic substance in the wrong hands.
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