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

the spirit of connection S 129
foretold in the book of Revelation. In their view, there is no choice
to be made between life and death because the Earth and all unbelievers
are doomed anyway. The origins and evolution of this article
of belief deserve closer scrutiny. 3
A great deal of the purported Biblical justifi cation underlying
belief in the end times is due to the fertile theological imagination
of a 19th-century Englishman, John Nelson Darby (Rossing,
2004, pp. 22–25). Darby’s ideas, including the doctrine of dispensationalism,
were later propagated in the Scofi eld Reference Bible
distributed widely throughout the American South and subsequently
broadcast far and wide by a herd of blow-dried electronic
televangelists and propagated through the writings of Hal Lindsay,
author of The Late Great Planet Earth, and the 12 volumes of Tim
LaHaye’s “Left Behind” series, which reportedly has sold more
than 50 million copies (Rossing, 2004; Bawer, 1997). Darby’s followers
include the tireless merchants of fear and divine vengeance
frothing on “Christian” radio across the heartland and theologians
at right of right institutions such as Bob Jones University. After
more than a century of considerable effort, the net result is that
83 percent of Americans say they believe the Bible to be either the
literal or the inspired word of God (Harris, 2004, p. 230). Many
of these also believe in the LaHaye doctrine of a fi nal confl ict
between good and evil, the end times, the return of Christ, and
the rapture that will gather the saved into the bleachers to watch
the agony of the unbelievers burning down below in a lake of fi re.
There are helpful Web sites by which one can track precisely how
close we are to the rapture, and bumper stickers warning that the
car to which it is attached may be suddenly rendered driverless,
creating diffi culties for the passengers left behind and for insurance
companies that will have to sort out liability issues.
There is also a more elite fundamentalism, hidden from public
scrutiny, that has wormed its way by stealth into high places in
government. In Jeff Sharlet’s words, “elite fundamentalism, certain
in its entitlement, responds in this world with a politics of