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In listening to contemporary fundamentalist Christian religious programming, suffering and submitting are two prominent themes. The third major theme is grace. If a person 1) suffers but does not abandon, betray, deny, forsake, or renounce God and 2) submits to God’s will, regardless of how harmful that will may be, then that person will receive the grace of God. From the contemporary perspective of social justice, however, this reasoning promotes and reinforces unjustified hierarchical relationships and preventable suffering. The people who believe in the aforementioned fundamentalist religious reasoning fall into one of two categories: 1) people who distribute the message then distribute the collection plate, or 2) people for whom the message is salient and are willing to contribute to the collection plate. Additionally, these messages increase, not decrease, the number of sinners. Religious people speak frequently of faith in God, but faith in God does not transfer to faith in those who claim to know and understand God’s thoughts and actions. If God is truly all-knowing, all-seeing, all-benevolent, all-present, and all-powerful, then how could any person speak for God with any reasonable accuracy or respectable utility; unless, of course, they were claiming to be closer to God themselves, which is clear evidence of the most deadly of sins– pride. Additionally, the distributors of these fearful messages commonly engage in other deadly sins such as greed (e.g., collection plates) and wrath (e.g., promoting the Rapture or as one Christian orator said “Only God can put a whoopin’ on them [the nonbelievers]”). The author does not definitively know of the validity or invalidity of the proposed sins or the messages; though based on history the evidence supports that sin has been a changing construct across time and has been used as a method of social control. However, for believers, these sins are real. Given this context, the audience of these Christian orators must also be at least guilty of the sins of envy and sloth. If sin is in fact true, then both the orators of these messages and the audience are guilty of several deadly sins. Karl Marx wrote that “Religioun is the sigh of the oppressed creature…” Why are people currently sighing so loudly and with such fervor? Although the number of non-believers has increased drastically in the United States in the last 15 years so has the number of zealous or fanatical religionists. Why do people have to suffer and feel disempowered to a point where they renounce the natural world and turn solely to the supernatural or more specifically the orators of the supernatural for solace? Marx also wrote that religion “is the opium of the people” and and that religion created the illusion of happiness for the people. When Marx wrote of “the people,” he wrote of the disempowered and impoverished. Marx encouraged destroying the illusions to offer space to reality.  As an aside and to reduce the emotional reaction that some may have to quotes by Karl Mark, keep in mind that Karl Marx explained that he “was not a Marxist.” The reality is that charlatans have taken advantage of the poor and disempowered for centuries, especially when the gospel of prosperity has been more popular than the social gospel as is the case in contemporary American culture.  Although the social gospel had important impacts on public health and empower (e.g., the civil rights movement, establishing hospital and educational opportunities), the gospel of prosperity has tended to divide people, focus on the ego of individual’s, and increase the gap between the empowered and disempowered.  One must understand, however, that unless the charlatans work threatens the wealthy and empowered, the charlatan goes unchecked. By peddling messages of accepting suffering and submission in the natural world, contemporary charlatans receive praise, not scorn, from the wealthy and empowered. In psychology, Seligman wrote on learned helplessness based primarily on experiments with animals receiving chaotic behavioral punishments. The contemporary charlatan adds a cognitive or attributional addition to learned helplessness—sermoned helplessness meaning that the natural world delivers suffering to disempowered people, but the charlatan preaches that the natural world is outside of people’s control and only God’s agency and not their own can change suffering and hierarchical position. The charlatan promises grace when God punishes the infidels. The charlatan explains that America will soon turn into a theocratic dictatorship in which Christians will reign and many people will die at the hands of God. However, in the United States, this model not only displaces democracy but typically misinterprets history as well. The charlatan will explain that America was founded on Christian values. However, a simplistic historical review shows that this is not the case. Thomas Jefferson stated that “Christianity neither is, nor never was a part of the common law.” John Adams declared that “The government of the United States is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion.” One can easily see how the contemporary view of Christianity’s role in the United States drastically differs from the view of those who founded the country. It is unfortunate and shameful how religion is currently being used by some and has been used to promote “sin” instead of reduce it. By sin, I mean acts that clearly offend common sense of reasoned and examined people.  Fundamentalist religion clearly undermines contemporary perspectives of social justice.