Bo - I think it was me and Kitsap who were talking about Stephen King a while back; he always portrays Christians as wacky or zealots. In Carrie, the mom was a freak. In Needful Things, the two churches were battling. In the Mist, Carmody had her own interpretations of the bible and were educating everybody in the store (who seemed to know nothing at all about the bible). He's a strange duck.
He got stranger after his accident.
BTW: They changed the ending of The Mist for the movie. The book-version has a different ending (what he calls an Afred Hitchcock ending).