Down to the wire : confronting climate collapse / David - Index of

128 S connections
exerted great infl uence on U.S. politics and are said still to intend
a fundamentalist takeover of the U.S. government “whatever the
cost” (Moser, 2005). The result, in Bill McKibben’s words, is that
“America is simultaneously the most professedly Christian of the
developed nations and the least Christian in its behavior” (2005).
It is imperative, therefore, that we understand what extreme fundamentalists
intend and what that portends for our democracy
and our collective prospects.
Evangelicals and fundamentalists, however, are not all of one
accord. 2 Fundamentalism, as historian of religion George Marsden
points out is a “mosaic of divergent and sometimes contradictory
traditions and tendencies” (2006, p. 43). The difference between
evangelicals and fundamentalists, according to Marsden, is “their
relative degrees of militancy in support of conservative doctrinal,
ecclesiastical, and/or cultural issues” (p. 235). Many evangelicals,
including Richard Cizik, the former vice president for government
affairs at the National Association of Evangelicals, and Jim
Ball of the Evangelical Environmental Network, are constructively
engaged in “creation care,” building alliances between churches
and the environmental community to good effect. The problem,
in the words of evangelical theologian Ronald Sider, is that:
Tragically, Christian political activity today is a disaster. Christians
embrace contradictory positions on almost every political issue.
When they join the political fray, they often succumb to dishonesty
and corruption . . . At the heart of the problem is the fact
that many Christians, especially evangelical Christians, have not
thought very carefully about how to do politics in a wise, biblically
grounded way . . . [The result is] contradiction, confusion,
ineffectiveness, even biblical unfaithfulness, in our political work.
(2008, pp. 11, 19)
My concern, accordingly, is with the more-fundamental-than-thou
brand of fundamentalism, and specifi cally with those at the extreme
who profess belief in the imminence of the end times as allegedly