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

the spirit of connection S 133
at the feet of unrepentant Israelites? Or that of the Old Testament
prophets, who called wayward people to task with unsparing honesty?
Or that of Jesus, who tossed the money changers out of the
temple with no particularly “constructive dialogue”? Or would
it be that of Martin Luther nailing his 95 theses to the door of
the Castle Church in Wittenberg? Or perhaps that of Dietrich
Bonhoeffer, who railed against “cheap grace” and willingly died as
a witness? Or is it the style of Martin Luther King, who spared no
words to describe the connection between racism and the war in
Vietnam? Or that of theologian and lawyer William Stringfellow,
who once identifi ed the United States as the heir to “the ethos and
mentality of Nazism” (Stringfellow, 1973, p. 125)?
Said differently, at what point in the 1930s did the politeness
of the German Church become the obsequiousness and then the
full-blown cowardice that Pastor Martin Niemöller later famously
lamented? 5 I do not know. But I do wish to inquire how best to
converse with those much enthralled by the prospect of an end
time, rapture, Armageddon, and the establishment of an American
Taliban. Christians, evangelical and mainstream alike, have no business
being in any alliance with the vendors of war, weapons, torture,
corporate power, injustice, and ecological ruin (Wink, 1984, 1986,
1992). What is at stake now—the death of the ecological conditions
that permitted humankind to fl ourish—calls for a higher level
of honesty, directness, and spiritual wisdom suffi cient to shift the
perceptions, loyalties, and behavior of an entire nation. We should
dialogue constructively when possible, but we must speak truth as
clearly as we can see it and as unequivocally as we can say it.
If honest dialogue is not possible, should we perhaps dispense
with religion altogether, as proposed by Richard Dawkins (2006)
and others? Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith (2004), for one,
proposes that “The problem that religious moderation poses for all
of us is that it does not permit anything very critical to be said
about religious literalism . . . [It] closes the door to more sophisticated
approaches to spirituality, ethics, and the building of strong