Journalist par excellence Bill Moyers, recently retired from PBS’s “NOW” news magazine, is still as relevant as ever. A brilliant writer and progressive voice, Moyers took time out from writing his memoir of the LBJ presidency to share a terrifying look at the relationship between Christian fundamentalism and environmental policy. His contention is that a significant number of Americans “believe that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed - even hastened - as a sign of the coming apocalypse.”

That’s right — the rapture index. Google it and you will find that the best-selling books in America today are the 12 volumes of the “Left Behind” series written by the Christian fundamentalist and religious-right warrior Timothy LaHaye. These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative that has captivated the imagination of millions of Americans.

Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer George Monbiot recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted to him for adding to my own understanding): Once Israel has occupied the rest of its “biblical lands,” legions of the antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon.

As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to Heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow.

While I have heard this position articulated before, it never ceases to amaze me how pervasive it has apparently become. George Monbiot is a fantastic writer and thinker with a great blog. His article “Apocalypse Please” explains how deeply this madness has infected the US.

We can laugh at these people, but we should not dismiss them. That their beliefs are bonkers does not mean they are marginal. American pollsters believe that between 15 and 18% of US voters belong to churches or movements which subscribe to these teachings.(8) A survey in 1999 suggested that this figure included 33% of Republicans.(9) The best-selling contemporary books in the United States are the 12 volumes of the Left Behind series, which provide what is usually described as a ?fictionalised? account of the Rapture (this, apparently, distinguishes it from the other one), with plenty of dripping details about what will happen to the rest of us. The people who believe all this don?t believe it just a little; for them it is a matter of life eternal and death.

And among them are some of the most powerful men in America. John Ashcroft, the attorney-general, is a true believer, so are several prominent senators and the House majority leader, Tom DeLay. Mr DeLay (who is also the co-author of the marvellously-named DeLay-Doolittle Amendment, postponing campaign finance reforms) travelled to Israel last year to tell the Knesset that ?there is no middle ground, no moderate position worth taking.?(10)

So here we have a major political constituency ? representing much of the current president?s core vote ? in the most powerful nation on earth, which is actively seeking to provoke a new world war. Its members see the invasion of Iraq as a warm-up act, as Revelations (9:14-15) maintains that four angels ?which are bound in the great river Euphrates? will be released ?to slay the third part of men.? They batter down the doors of the White House as soon as its support for Israel wavers: when Bush asked Ariel Sharon to pull his tanks out of Jenin in 2002, he received 100,000 angry emails from Christian fundamentalists, and never mentioned the matter again.(11)

This kind of fatuous fantasy is dangerous not only in its practical effect on policy but also because it threatens to undermine the rational exchange of ideas upon which a democratic polity so richly depends. When one side of the discussion is willing to accept this kind of sophism as Unquestionable Truth, cooperation and consensus-building are impossible. Science and reason don’t warrant consideration from the rapturists, leaving the rest of us without the vocabulary or frame of reference from which to engage them and their arguments (if they can even be called that).

Christian Scherer’s article (the one referenced by Moyers) in Grist Magazine is indeed excellent. In his dissection of the Christian Right’s apocalyptic worldview, Scherer explains the disjuncture between the two sides of the environmental debate.

So weird have the attempts to hasten the End Time become that a group of ultra-Christian Texas ranchers recently helped fundamentalist Israeli Jews breed a pure red heifer, a genetically rare beast that must be sacrificed to fulfill an apocalyptic prophecy found in the biblical Book of Numbers. (The beast will be ready for sacrifice by 2005, according to The National Review.)

It can be difficult for environmentalists, many of whom cut their teeth on peer-reviewed science, to fathom how anyone could believe that a rust-colored calf could bring about the end of the world, or how anyone could make a coherent End-Time story (let alone national policy) out of the poetic symbolism of the Book of Revelation. But there are millions of such people in America today — including 231 U.S. legislators who either believe dispensationalist or reconstructionist doctrine or, for political expediency, are happy to align themselves with those who do.

That’s troubling, because the beliefs in question are antithetical to environmentalism. For starters, any environmental science that contradicts the End-Timer’s interpretation of Holy Writ is automatically suspect. This explains the disregard for environmental science so prevalent among Christian fundamentalist lawmakers: the denial of global warming, of the damaged ozone layer, and of the poisoning caused by industrial arsenic and mercury.

More important, End-Time beliefs make such problems inconsequential. Faith in Christ’s impending return causes End-Timers to be interested only in short-term political-theological outcomes, not long-term solutions. Unfortunately, nearly every environmental issue, from the conservation of endangered species to the curbing of climate change, requires belief in and commitment to an enduring earth. And yet, no amount of scientific evidence will likely shake fundamentalists of their End-Time faith or bring them over to the cause of saving the environment.

“It’s like half this country wants to guide our ship of state by compass — a compass, something that works by science and rationality, and empirical wisdom,” quipped comedian Bill Maher on Larry King Live. “And half this country wants to kill a chicken and read the entrails like they used to do in the old Roman Empire.”

Those who doubt the dangers of such faith-based guidance need only recall the 9/11 hijackers, who devoutly believed that 72 black-eyed virgins awaited them as their reward in paradise.

Pretty scary stuff.