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

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noblesse oblige, the missionary impulse married to military and
economic power. The result is empire. Not the old imperialism
of Rome or the Ottomans or the British navy . . . Rather, the soft
empire of America that across the span of the twentieth century
recruited fundamentalism to is cause even as it seduced liberalism
to its service” (2008, pp. 386–387). It is the fundamentalism of
expensive prayer breakfasts in Washington, D.C., small cliques of
the ardent and sophisticated in expensive suits constituting a network
of “congressmen, generals, and foreign dictators who meet
in confi dential cells to pray and plan for a leadership led by God.”
The goal of what is known as “The Family” is the “maintenance
of a social order through the salvation of souls,” not the reform of
the public order, or eradication of poverty, or improvement of the
conduct of the public business (p. 382). Elite fundamentalists, like
free marketers, focus on the individual, whether the rational actor
of economic theory or the individual soul. But, as Sharlet points
out, “Both deny possessing any ideology; both inevitably become
vehicles for the kind of power that possesses and consumes the
best intentions of true believers” (p. 383). And both have made
their peace with the status quo and the powers that be.
A lot of religious nuttiness is loose in the land, and it might
be dismissed as a matter of interest only to sociologists of religion
and psychologists were it not for the fact that many practitioners
have managed to become a large part of the political “base” of
the Republican Party and of the most destructive U.S. presidency
in history—one contemptuous of science, environmental protection,
international law, human rights, and world opinion, and
much enamored of secrecy and the use of military power. During
the Bush presidency, as David James Duncan puts it, “American
fundamentalists . . . predominately support an administration that
has worked to weaken the Clean Air and Clean Water Acts and
gut the Endangered Species and Environmental Policy Acts; this
administration has stopped fi ning air and water polluters, dropped
all suits against coal-fi red power, weakened limits on pollutants