Frank Schaeffer's Blog, page 10

Daily Beast on Michele Bachmann (Francis Schaeffer and Frank Schaeffer)

That's exactly what happened with Bachmann, who campaigned for Carter in 1976—she and Marcus even went to one of his inaugural balls—but soon tacked sharply rightward. A key moment in her political evolution, as for many of her generation, was the film series How Should We Then Live by the theologian Francis Schaeffer, who is widely credited for mobilizing evangelicals against abortion, an issue most had previously ignored. A Presbyterian minister, Schaeffer argued that our entire apprehension of reality depends on our worldview, and that only those with the right one can understand the true nature of things. Christianity, he argued, is "a whole system of truth, and this system is the only system that will stand up to all the questions that are presented to us as we face the reality of existence." Theories or assertions from outside this system—evolution, for example—can be dismissed as the product of mistaken premises.

This accounts for some of the bafflement that occasionally greets Bachmann's statements. "Michele Bachmann says certain things that sound crazy to the general public," says author Frank Schaeffer, Francis Schaeffer's son and former collaborator. "But to anybody raised in the environment of the evangelical right wing, what she says makes perfect sense."

Read the rest HERE

Where the "Crazy" Far Right Comes From

(This is also on Huffington Post as "Ralph Reed and the People Who Want to Impose a "Christian" Version of Shariah Law on America"
Reconstructionists are not about to take over America, the world, or even most American Evangelical institutions. But their influence has been like a drop of radicalizing flavoring added to a bottle of water. As reported in the Huffington Post, a Pew Research Center poll showed that 42 percent of tea party supporters said they agree with the religious right.
Most Americans have never heard of the Reconstructionists. But they have felt their impact through the Reconstructionists' profound (if indirect) influence over the wider (and vast) Evangelical community. In turn, the Evangelicals shaped the politics of a secular culture that barely understood the Religious Right, let alone the forces within that movement that gave it its edge. As a result people ask themselves; "Where on earth do people like Michele Bachmann get their wacky ideas from?"
I'll tell you.
The Americans inhabiting the wider (and more secular) culture see the results of Reconstructionism without understanding where those results have come from -- for instance, how the hell George W. Bush got elected and then reelected, or the Ralph Reed comeback. Without understanding the Reconstructionists a person would not understand this Washington Post story:

"What's likely to happen is what a lot of us have wanted to see happen for a long time -- a social conservative movement that speaks to a broader set of issues but which never strays from the foundational issues of life and family and marriage," said longtime political operative Ralph Reed, who as a baby-faced 33-year-old leading the Christian Coalition in 1995 was dubbed "The Right Hand of God" on the cover of Time magazine.

Reed suffered a fall from grace and a defeat in his 2006 bid for Georgia lieutenant governor, hurt by his association with the scandals surrounding former lobbyist Jack Abramoff. But he is back again as head of a new organization called the Faith and Freedom Coalition.
But what is behind this?
As I explain in my book, Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics -- and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway , if you feel victimized by modernity, then the Reconstructionists have the answer in their version of biblical interpretation.
Ralph Reed is a follower of my late father Francis Schaeffer and as I know from conversations with him many years ago was highly influenced by the Reconstructionists.
Reconstructionists want to replace the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights with their interpretation of the Bible. In the Reconstructionists' best of all worlds, Eddie Izzard would have been long since executed for the "crimes" of inappropriate wardrobe, not to mention "blasphemy." If given the chance, they would burn people like my Evangelical leader mother (Edith Schaeffer) at the stake for her "heresy" of explaining away the nastier bits of the Bible or at least not living by its meaner rules.
Most Evangelicals are positively moderate by comparison to the Reconstructionists. But the Reconstructionist movement is a distilled essence of the more mainstream Evangelical version of an exclusionary theology that divides America into the "Real America" (as the Far Right claims only it is) and the rest of us "Sinners."
And it was those "Real Americans" who were Bush's base and are now trying to turn the 2012 election into a religious contest about "values." The Reconstructionist worldview is ultra-Calvinist but, like all Calvinism, has its origins in ancient Israel/Palestine, when vengeful and ignorant tribal lore was written down by frightened men (the nastier authors of the Bible) trying to defend their prerogatives.
In its modern American incarnation, which hardened into a twentieth-century movement in the 1960s and became widespread in the 1970s, Reconstructionism was propagated by people I knew and worked with closely when I, too, was a Jesus Predator claiming God's special favor.
The leaders of the Reconstructionist movement included the late Rousas Rushdoony (Calvinist theologian, father of modern-era Christian Reconstructionism, patron saint to gold-hoarding haters of the Federal Reserve, and creator of the modern Evangelical homeschool movement), his son-in-law Gary North (an economist and publisher), and David Chilton (Calvinist pastor and author).
Writer Chris Hedges has called this the rise of "Christian Fascism," where "those that speak in the language of fact... are hated and feared."
Anyone who wants to understand American politics had better get acquainted with the Reconstructionists. Reconstructionism, also called Theonomism, seeks to reconstruct "our fallen society" and/or in the words of Sarah Palin "take America back."
Its worldview is best represented by the publications of the Chalcedon Foundation (which has been classified as an antigay hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center).
According to the Chalcedon Foundation website, the mission of the movement is to apply "the whole Word of God" to all aspects of human life: "It is not only our duty as individuals, families and churches to be Christian, but it is also the duty of the state, the school, the arts and sciences, law, economics, and every other sphere to be under Christ the King. Nothing is exempt from His dominion. We must live by His Word, not our own."
Until Rushdoony, founder and late president of the Chalcedon Foundation, began writing in the 1960s, most American fundamentalists (including my religious leader parents parents) didn't try to apply biblical laws about capital punishment for homosexuality to the United States.
Even the most conservative Evangelicals said they were "New Testament Christians." In other words, they believed that after the coming of Jesus, the harsher bits of the Bible had been (at least to some extent) transformed by the "New Covenant" of Jesus' "Law of Love."
By contrast, the leaders of Reconstructionism believed that Old Testament teachings -- on everything from capital punishment for gays to the virtues of child-beating -- were still valid because they were the inerrant Word and Will of God and therefore should be enforced. Not only that, they said that biblical law should be imposed even on nonbelievers.
This theology was the American "Christian" version of the attempt in some Muslim countries to impose Sharia (Islamic law) on all citizens, Muslims and non-Muslims alike.
It's no coincidence that the rise of the Islamic Brotherhoods in Egypt and Syria and the rise of North American Reconstructionism took place in a twentieth-century time frame -- as science, and modern "permissiveness" collided with a frightened conservatism rooted in religion.
The writings of people such as Muslim Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna and those of Rushdoony are virtually interchangeable when it comes to their goals of restoring God to His "rightful place" as He presides over law and morals. According to al-Banna, Islam enjoins man to strive for a segregation of male and female students, a separate curriculum for girls, a prohibition on dancing, and a campaign against "ostentation in dress and loose behavior." Islamic governments must eventually be unified in a theocratic Caliphate. Or as the late Reconstructionist/Calvinist theologian David Chilton (sounding startlingly al-Bannalike) explained:

The Great Commission to the Church does not end with simply witnessing to the nations. . . . The kingdoms of the world are to become the kingdoms of Christ. . . . This means that every aspect of life throughout the world is to be brought under the lordship of Jesus Christ: families, individuals, business, science, agriculture, the arts, law, education, economics, psychology, philosophy, and every other sphere of human activity. Nothing may be left out. Christ "must reign, until He has put all enemies under His feet" (1st Cor. 15:25). . . . Our goal is a Christian world, made up of explicitly Christian nations. How could a Christian desire anything else? . . . That is the only choice: pagan law or Christian law. God specifically forbids "pluralism." God is not the least bit interested in sharing world dominion with Satan. (Paradise Restored: A Biblical Theology of Dominion, 6th ed. Tyler, TX: Dominion Press, 1999, 271)

It was my old friend, the short, stocky, bearded, gnomelike, Armenian-American Rousas Rushdoony who in 1973 most thoroughly laid out the Far Right/Religious Right agenda in his book The Institutes of Biblical Law. Rushdoony changed the definition of salvation from the accepted Evangelical idea that it applies to individuals to the claim that salvation is really about politics.
With this redefinition, Rushdoony contradicted the usual reading of Jesus' words by most Christians to mean that Jesus had not come to this earth to be a political leader: "My kingdom is not of this world" (John 18:36).
According to Rushdoony, all nations on earth should be obedient to the ancient Jewish/Christian version of "God's Law," so that the world will experience "God's blessings." Biblical salvation will then turn back the consequences of The Fall, and we'll be on our way to the New Eden. To achieve this "turning back," coercion must be used by the faithful to stop evildoers, who are, by definition, anyone not obeying all of God's Laws as defined by the Reconstructionist interpretation of the Bible.
How far would the Reconstructionists go? North, writes,

"The question eventually must be raised: Is it a criminal offence to take the name of the Lord in vain? When people curse their parents, it unquestionably is a capital crime (Exodus 21:17). The son or daughter is under the lawful jurisdiction of the family. The integrity of the family must be maintained by the threat of death. Clearly, cursing God (blasphemy) is a comparable crime, and is therefore a capital crime (Leviticus 24:16)." (The Sinai Strategy: Economics and the Ten Commandments Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1986), 59-60.)

Doctrinal leaders (notably Rushdoony, North, and Bahnsen) call for the death penalty for a wide range of crimes in addition to such contemporary capital crimes as rape, kidnapping, and murder.
Death is also the punishment for apostasy (abandonment of the faith), heresy, blasphemy, witchcraft, astrology, adultery, "sodomy or homosexuality," incest, striking a parent, incorrigible juvenile delinquency, and, in the case of women, "unchastity before marriage."
According to North, women who have abortions should be publicly executed, "along with those who advised them to abort their children." Rushdoony concludes: "God's government prevails, and His alternatives are clear-cut: either men and nations obey His laws, or God invokes the death penalty against them."
Here is how I imagine a Reconstructionist version of the Sermon on the Mount would read, inclusive of Reconstructionist "inside" theological/political code words like "Law-Word":
Blessed are those who exercise dominion over the earth: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are those who deport the immigrants: for they shall be comforted. Blessed are those who agree that the significance of Jesus Christ as the 'faithful and true witness' is that He not only witnesses against those who are at war against God, but He also executes them: for they shall inherit the earth. Blessed are those who subdue all things and all nations to Christ and His Law-Word: for they shall be filled. Blessed are those who say that those who refuse to submit publicly to the eternal sanctions of God must be denied citizenship: for they shall obtain mercy. Blessed are the Calvinist Christians who are the only lawful heirs to the Kingdom: for they shall see God. Blessed are those who know that turning the other cheek is a temporary bribe paid to evil secular rulers: for they shall be called sons of God if they bust their enemies in the chops. Blessed are those who have taken an eye for an eye: for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven. Blessed are ye when ye know that the battle for My sake is between the Christian Reconstruction Movement and everyone else. Rejoice, and be exceedingly glad: for great is your reward in heaven. For so we are to make Bible-obeying disciples of anybody who gets in our way, and kill those who resist.

The impact of Reconstructionism (often under other names) has grown even though Rushdoony has largely been forgotten even in Evangelical circles, let alone the wider world. He made the Evangelical world more susceptible to being politicized -- and manipulated by some very smart people.
The ultimate irony is this: members of the Religious Right say they fear Muslims imposing Shariah Law on America. This isn't about to happen. But what is taking place is a home grown movement -- led by fundamentalist Evangelicals and conservative Roman Catholics -- to turn America into their version of a modern day theocracy -- say, Iran.
Frank Schaeffer is a writer. his latest book is Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics--and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway.

First published by The Internet Review of BooksReviewing ...

First published by The Internet Review of Books

Reviewing recent books in the fields of science, social science, history, art, music, current affairs, and fiction with attitude and passion: An Intelligent Guide for Intelligent People.

Wednesday, June 8, 2011 BUY THIS BOOK Nonfiction
Why'd God make it like that?

SEX, MOM, and GOD:
How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics—
and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway
By Frank Schaeffer
281 pp. Da Capo Press

Reviewed by Sue Ellis

Frank Schaeffer's latest book is a fond and sometimes hilarious look back at his mother's child-rearing methods and the effect they had on him—especially her forthright interpretations of God's will in regard to sex.
I only had the stamina to explain sex to my children once. I gathered them into a group and gave them the scientific version as succinctly as I could. My son asked, "That's dumb. Why'd God make it like that?" I had no answer, and I never brought it up again. The author's mother left me in her dust. Edith Schaeffer is to sex education what Julia Child was to French cooking, and sounds every bit as dauntless and charming. She used the Bible as a reference, but rearranged the written word whenever she encountered passages she didn't like.
I winced at the author's honesty. He's not easy on himself as he recalls his zealous experiments with girls—even an anatomically correct snow maiden he sculpted for himself and then 'dallied' with. I cringed for him, laughed with him, and identified with his fallibly human self.
Sex, Mom and God also reveals the author's regret for his involvement in the anti-abortion movement in the 70s and early 80s. It's clear that the regret is not only for the political ramifications of his work, but for any impression he might have given that women are second-class citizens. To understand why his change of heart is so remarkable, you have to understand his roots:

My late father, Francis Schaeffer, was a key founder and leader of the Religious Right. My mother, Edith, was herself a spiritual leader, not the mere power behind her man, which she also was. Mom was a formidable and adored religious figure whose books and public speaking, not to mention biblical conditioning of me, directly and indirectly shaped millions of lives. For a time I joined my Dad in pioneering the Evangelical antiabortion Religious Right movement. In the 1970s and early 1980s when I was in my twenties, I was my own right. And I wasn't just Dad's sidekick; I was also Mom's collaborator in her mission to "reach the world for Jesus."

His was an unusual childhood. He spent much of it in Switzerland where his parents established L'Abri Fellowship ministry—a place that became a retreat for young women; a place where they could find forgiveness and wise counsel. In contrast, the author routinely witnessed his father hitting his mother, and also heard her disapprove of his father's fiery sermons.
Schaeffer writes about the people and experiences that have influenced him, and how he eventually began to question the written word. It's a considerable thing for a man like him to publicly proclaim his disillusionment with the way the Bible was written. I respect that, and I like that he does it while maintaining his love for Jesus and for his mother. After reading about her, I'm not surprised that he comes across as a sensible and nice guy. Edith Schaeffer once wrote:

Children are meant to understand compassion and comfort because they have received compassion and comfort – and this should be in the family setting. A family should be a place where comfort is experienced and understood, so that the people are prepared to give comfort to others.

Frank Schaeffer's journey demonstrates that the world could be a better place if we were all able to reassess our beliefs and values—to examine them closely and glean only those worth saving. When all is said and done, I hope he decides to stop kicking himself. Maybe it would comfort him to know that not all of us were paying heed to his message anyway. There are a fair number of us who are adroit at switching channels or dodging a preacher's visit. A friend of mine from a small town in northeast Washington liked to giggle about the time her dear, tangle-tongued old dad answered the door to a couple of crusaders armed with pamphlets. Believing them to be Jehovah's Witnesses, he blurted, "No thanks. We're all prostitutes here."
To order "click" on the title here:
Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics--and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anywayat Wednesday, June 08, 2011

How Sex (and Anthony Weiner) Betrayed the Left

(First published on Huffington Post)

The Weiner Problem is a bigger problem (no pun intended) than one man's sick folly: It is a metaphor for a whole post-60s generation of American progressives that became more interested in winning culture war battles and fucking around personally, than in the traditional lefty agenda of unions, organizing, workers, change, political voting rights, and a fair economy.

There was a time when the Left was all about jobs, unions, working men and woman, racial equality and protection of civil liberties, not to mention protection of children, fairness and progressive tax codes, regulation of business, worker safety and - of course -- a commitment to the Democratic Party.

Then the Left became all about Sex and Greed, right along with the rest of American corporate "culture."

Yes, this is a generalization. Yes, as Rachel Maddow says - it's also "punching the hippie." But it's also true.

As Chris Hedges points out in his important book Death of the Liberal Class, the Left went inward in the 1960s. After the American Left became involved with legalizing abortion, gay rights, women's rights, as in reproductive rights, the cool thing to do was to embrace one form or another of sexual liberation , gender issues, etc., as the new lefty agenda.

Don't get me wrong: I believe in abortion rights and gay rights. But I don't believe in the Left's allowing sexual liberation to trump every other concern as a priority.

Hedges writes:

"Those who chase the glittering rainbows of the consumer society, who buy into the perverted ideology of consumer culture, become, as Dante knew, moral cowards. They are indoctrinated by our corporate systems of information and remain passive as our legislative, executive and judicial branches of government--tools of the corporate state--strip us of the capacity to resist. Democrat or Republican. Liberal or conservative. It makes no difference. ...We must defy the cant of consumer culture and recover the primacy in our lives of mercy and justice."

The sexual selfishness of the New Left and their self-involvement didn't play well with the old union types, replete with their dismissal (for instance in 1968 in Chicago) of the New Left, as a "bunch of fags" (to quote one union boss) and or a "bunch of communists" (to quote another union boss). Yes, the old back room boys were a bunch of homophobes, misogynist Neanderthals. They also had pushed the Democratic Party to ban child labor, keep workers' wages high, curb the uglier side of capitalism.

As Kevin Drum writes in a very important article in the Mother Jones:

"By the end of the '60s,... New Left activists derided union bosses as just another tired bunch of white, establishment Cold War fossils, and as a result, the rupture of the Democratic Party that started in Chicago in 1968 became irrevocable in Miami Beach four years later. Labor leaders assumed that the hippies, who had been no match for either Richard Daley's cops or establishment control of the nominating rules, posed no real threat to their continued dominance of the party machinery...

Why does this matter?... Over the past 40 years, the American left has built an enormous institutional infrastructure dedicated to mobilizing money, votes, and public opinion on social issues, and this has paid off with huge strides in civil rights, feminism, gay rights, environmental policy, and more. But the past two years have demonstrated that that isn't enough. If the left ever wants to regain the vigor that powered earlier eras of liberal reform, it needs to rebuild the infrastructure of economic populism that we've ignored for too long. Figuring out how to do that is the central task of the new decade."

As for all those "draft-dodging hippies," (as the old union types thought of them) they more or less dropped out of traditional American politics when it came to unions, workers rights, fair pay issues and stuck to themes of personal -- mostly sexual-- liberation. Fucking (and/or abortion rights, no fault divorce etc.,) was just so much more interesting than the growing gap between the super rich and everyone else.

Enter the living embodiment of the 1960s, Bill Clinton, and today's "Clinton," Anthony Weiner. Then there's John Edwards. They follow in a long line of liberals more interested in fucking than governing, with the granddad of them all being Edward Kennedy.

Sure the ever-more-disgusting "family values" Right has done the same thing, talked values but then done whoever is nearby. But just Dominique Strauss Kahn betrayed the French socialists, what Weiner has done is to not just betray himself or his party but to vote with his penis for a "lefty" agenda that is more about selfishness than anyone's rights, much less the good of the working people of America.

Chris Hedges is correct: the "liberals" and the American Left have been betrayed by people more interested in selling out to corporate America (who have been busy selling Sex to us, and sexualized all selling) than in workers rights or the economy.

Like the French that, in the name of progressive liberation and open-mindedness, wink and lousy male sexual predatory behavior, the American Left should now start to take sexual scandal seriously as betrayal of a bigger agenda. The American Left should also consider the lost war for workers rights in view of the culture battles they have won.

The Left won the culture wars. Porn is everywhere, and Fucking is deregulated. But so is Wall Street.

Maybe it's time to re-regulate Wall Street and the banks, and reintroduce something shocking to progressive sensibilities-- a few taboos.

For instance, maybe it isn't cool to seek sexual pleasure outside of an intimate, loving grown up relationship. And even if it's okay to screw around, maybe it's time to pay more attention to electing mature adults more interested in the larger progressive agenda -- say how do we stop the top 1 percent of the wealthy from clinging to more wealth than the bottom 80 percent of the population -- than in the "right" to personal sexual selfishness.

Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His new book is Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics--and How I Learned to Love Women

KIRKUS BOOK REVIEW INTERVIEWS FRANK SCHAEFFER

Frank Schaeffer: 'Sex, Mom & God'by John Rather on June 1, 2011 | Nonfiction (First published by Kirkus Reviews)[image error]

Author and lapsed pro-life ideologue Frank Schaeffer was just 8 years old when his beloved Evangelist mother Edith handed him her diaphragm. That and a sensible black negligee, she explained, was what a Christian woman faithful to the Bible needed for family planning and to keep a husband from strange women, the author recounts in his latest title, Sex, Mom, & God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics—and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway.

Read more new and notable June nonfiction titles.

The memoir, the third and last in Schaeffer's God trilogy, unfolds in lucid anecdotal excursions probing the chinks that later became gaping holes in the fundamentalist walls that penned him in. Here, Schaeffer tells us about the fallibility of holy screeds, the current state of the religious right and his own long road from fundamentalism to agnosticism.

That's a pretty jarring title—you don't often see sex, mom and God lumped together.

Titles are meant to get somebody's attention so I think it does that. But the title in this case actually reflects what the book is about because my contention is that the whole environment of the culture war, where my family emerged in the 1970s and the 1980s as a force to be reckoned with, really revolved around sex. And if you look, for instance, at all the big debates of the day that came out of the culture war—abortion, the gay rights movement, views of marriage—everything relates back into personal sexual relationships.

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Why I Wrote Sex, Mom and God

(This article was first posted on Huffington Post)

The 5,000-plus emails and letters generated by my memoir Crazy for God (about why I left a leadership position in the religious right) made it clear that I still had questions to answer about my family's role in the rise of the American extremism, even violence.
People liked the book but some people knew that I'd ducked some questions, like the fact we were responsible for the murder of several abortion providers. It takes a while to work up the courage to be honest and after I got Crazy for God off my chest I wanted to take another step (and my gloves off) before moving on.
The reason I've written my (just published) new book Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics -- and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway is because of the insane rightward tilt of the Republicans post-Obama's election has meant that the path taken by the religious right (the movement that most informs the present day Republican Party) was something I felt needed to be better understood and exposed... from the inside.
When I'd be interviewed on NPR or by Rachel Maddow it often seemed to me that the questions asked about the Religious Right showed that even at best there is a lack of understanding of what it is that has pushed America in the direction of a theocracy where people like Michele Bachmann and Sarah Palin, Glenn Beck et al seem to want to turn the US into a "Christian" version of Iran.
In Sex, Mom and God, I use my life as a lens through which to view a larger narrative: the rightward lurch of American politics since the 1970s.
What is happening in America is an expression of mass sexual dysfunction "inspired" by the allegiance of millions of individuals to the Bible. That is all the culture war really is. I wanted to write a book about this but told as a personal story.
In Sex, Mom and God I go back to where I -- and millions of others -- began our journeys: in the grip of our bedtime Bible stories! From a child's perspective peering out at the larger world from deep in the cocoon of a "Bible believing home," every word of the Bible is understood to be true in ways that nothing else is or ever will be even if, years later, that child grows up and changes his or her mind.
To be true to what I hope is the heart of the best of the universal religious message, I want to say that redemption through selflessness, hope, and love necessitates a new and fearless repudiation of the parts of holy books and traditions -- be they Jewish, Christian, Muslim (or other) -- that bring us messages of hate, exclusion, racism, ignorance, misogyny, homophobia, tribalism, and fear. To find any spiritual truth within any religion's holy books, we must mentally edit them by the light God has placed in each of us. As Anne Hutchinson put it at her trial, "The Lord knows that I could not open scripture; he must by his prophetical office open it unto me."
Those who wish to live as Christians, Jews, Muslims, agnostics, or atheists by following the humble thread of what I'll call divine uncertainty, as opposed to those who wish to force others to be like them by using Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or doctrinaire secularism as a weapon, must shift from unquestioning faith in their books, the Bible, Koran, Torah, (or science) to a life-affirming message of transcendence.
The "big issues" really do boil down to sex, mom and God. "Modernity" has changed nothing. We human animals seek out meaning that transcends the sum of our physical parts. That never changes. And we make the same mistakes in every age. What has changed is that the stakes have gotten intolerably high because of our growing capacity to do global harm.
Anyone raised in a home where one or more parent or sibling was driven by a sense of passionate mission, be that of the left, right, religious, political or social will "get" my book. How does one separate one's self from a driven tribe? That's the individual's question. Our larger societal question is: How do we box in, contain and then reverse the evil the American right is doing to our society? For instance, if anyone can look at the way religion has treated and treats women and not be pissed off they have something wrong with them.
I intend on pissing off every misogynist homophobic religious conservative and/or empire-building neoconservative imperialist supporter of our permanent war economy stuck in the ideological straight jacket that I used to so proudly wear.
I'd also like to plant a seed that changes a few minds.
Sex, Mom and God also makes an argument for rediscovering the human values that are what is far more important than politics. Or put it this way; at age 58 I've discovered that nothing beats a tea party with a two year old who loves you unconditionally.
Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His latest book is Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics--and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway

Saudi "Royals" and Republican Hypocrites

The Republicans share something with the Saudi royal family: Their shot at ruling depends on codling religious extremists while flouting everything those extremists believe in, in other words perfecting the art of gross hypocrisy.
The Saudi royals have apartments in London, drink, cavort, live like the secularists they are, but rule a "conservative" country stuck in the Middle Ages that is willfully even proudly backward. Ditto the Republicans who are really all about big business and greed, but talk "family values" to easily duped traditionalists who are living in their hermetically sealed religious universe.
The House of Saud, and the House of Republicanism play the same game.
The "princes" of the House of Saud get away with living like Hugh Heffner's younger, dumber, hornier little cousins -- while residing anywhere but in Saudi Arabia -- while also presiding over the holy places of Islam and exporting funding for hard line Islam worldwide. They can do this because while they're at home they empower the extremist fringe of the Muslim world: the Wahhabist wing of fundamentalist Islam.
The Wahhabis advocate the mix of state power and religion through the reestablishment of the Caliphate, the form of government adopted by the Prophet Muhammad's successors during the age of Muslim expansion. What sets Wahhabism apart from other Sunni Islamist movements is its historical obsession with purging Sufis, Shiites, and other Muslims who do not conform to its twisted interpretation of Islamic scripture.
Sound familiar?
Let me re-word that description a la USA and the Republican Party in its Michelle Bachmann/Sarah Palin incarnation:
Like most Evangelical fundamentalist movements, the American Religious Right advocates the fusion of state power and religion through the reestablishment of the "Christian America" idea of "American Exceptionalism" (i.e., a nation chosen by God), the form of government adopted by the Puritan's successors during the age of early American colonialism. What sets the Evangelical Religious Right apart from other Christian movements is its historical obsession with purging other Americans who do not conform to its twisted interpretation of Christian scripture.
In the 1970s and early 80s my late father (Francis Schaeffer) and I (as I describe in my new book Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics--and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway ) were part of the leadership structure of the American version of the Wahhabis. We advocated the fusion of state power and religion. We were there inspiring Pat Robertson, James Dobson, Jerry Falwell and the others when the Republican Party gradually struck its "Saudi" compromise with the American Religious Right.
The unstated agreement goes like this: Republicans will pander to the Religious Right on the social issues - abortion, gay rights, prayer in schools, creationism in text books, etc., etc., as long as the Religious Right turns a blind eye to the fact that the Republican Party will A), do nothing substantive to change any of these things, and B) sell the soul of the country to corporate America, a place where one percent of the population grab as much wealth as the lower 50 percent... just like Saudi Arabia.
And just as the Wahhabists would spread terror through the world by being the major financial contributors to extremist Islam, the American Religious Right would also sign on to the export of endless wars (often motivated by so-called Christian Zionism), militarism without end, and direct violent action here at home, for instance in the killing of abortion providers and other acts of domestic terror.
The Wahhabist/Evangelical/Republican-type "understanding" goes like this: religious extremists rule the people under their thumbs, as if it's the year 1012, and in return they let our real rulers -- the corporations and their plutocratic masters -- live any way they want and rob the rest of America blind.
So a Newt Gingrich can run up his half a million dollar tab for jewelry, and a Donald Trump can own his casinos, and both men can have all the wives and women they want... as long as they say they are "pro-life" and will fight to restrict women's rights at home and support endless military expansion abroad.
This mode of operating: call it massive hypocrisy, won't work forever in Saudi Arabia or here in America. With the implosion of the Trump "presidential" "birther" run, the Gingrich debacle, the defund-Medicare fiasco, et al, we see just why the Republicans don't stand a chance in 2012.
You see they are up against a president who actually walks the walk on family values, national security, and the economy. President Obama lives the clean, sober, thoughtful, soft spoken reasonable kindly life the Evangelicals talk about, while supporting money-grubbing philandering cast of characters (from the C-Street adulterers club to people with big Tiffany accounts) and the Koch brothers et al.
The strain is showing.
The House of Saud is doomed in the long term. Picture the world when oil is gone and/or replaced with other energy sources. And the Republican Party is also doomed.
The marriage of moralistic rigidity with a total sell out to greed and Wall Street won't work here any more than the Wahhabis/Royals "deal" will work forever in Saudi Arabia.
Eventually the party that makes the Goldman Sachs rape of the world possible, but depends on voters who say they believe every word in the Bible, will have to come to terms with Bible verses like this one: "Jesus answered, 'If you want to be perfect, go, sell your possessions and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me.'" (Matthew 19:21).
As for the general public, the Republicans are wearing out their welcome. Most Americans don't want idiots who pander to creationists, global warming deniers, secessionists, birthers, believers in the right to life of stem cells etc., etc., running the country.
Frank Schaeffer is a writer and his new book is Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics--and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway.

Frank Schaeffer on Magical Menstruation

Frank Schaeffer on Magical Menstruation
Please click on this title and read
Magic Menstrual Mummies
on one of my favorite websites;
KILLING THE BUDDHA

DEADLINE THEOLOGY

France to Legalize Rape In Order To Save Its Most Important Leaders from American Cowboy Style Humiliation

When the CIA (taking time out from murdering bin Laden and/or faking his murder) agreed to help place thousands of young women agents in every luxury hotel in America in order to entrap any and all French political leaders who might challenge the worldwide corporate hegemony of America, the idea was diabolically clever.
As noted by the New York Times:

"Suspicions are widespread in France that Mr. Strauss Kahn may have been set up. On Wednesday, a poll conducted by CSA showed that 57 percent of people surveyed think he was 'the victim of a plot.' Seventy percent of respondents from his Socialist Party also agree with the theory."

It turns out that French left-leaning socialists share the same world view as that found amongst New Jersey's Republican voters. In a poll - one out of every three New Jersey conservatives were found to think that Obama could be the anti-Christ. To be precise, 18% of self-identified conservatives affirmatively say that Obama is the anti-Christ, with 17% not sure. Among the self-identified Republican label, it's 14% who say Obama has the number 666 hidden underneath his hair, plus 15% who aren't sure.
Or as French author Bernard-Henri Levy put it

"I am troubled by a system of justice modestly termed 'accusatory,' meaning that anyone can come along and accuse another fellow of any crime--and it will be up to the accused to prove that the accusation is false and without basis in fact. I resent the New York tabloid press, a disgrace to the profession, that, without the least precaution and before having effected the least verification, has depicted Dominique Strauss-Kahn as a sicko, a pervert, borderlining on serial killer, a psychiatrist's dream."

Perhaps the Strauss Kahn conspiracy and the Obama/Birther conspiracy are one and the same. Stories were planted in the Hawaii press "documenting" Obama's "birth" in 1961 in anticipation of his run for the US presidency in 2008. Then in 2009 the Sofitel hotel chain hired an un-named Nicolas Sarkozy plant on the off chance that his rival for the French presidency would stay at it's midtown New York flagship hotel three years later.
Some people might find this hard to believe until they consider the fact that when the World Trade Center was constructed in the early 1970s it was pre-wired with explosives by the CIA and Mossad to be exploded by George W Bush in 2001 in order to help him deflect attention from the West Bank settlements.
American operatives knew that the French are more relaxed about so-called extramarital affaires than the prudish Americans with their "Anglo-Saxon" tradition of moralist prudery. They counted on the fact that the leaders that they would set up and/or entrap with false rape allegations would have -- in all probability -- relaxed and civilized French attitudes and thus have actually have actually "raped," many women over years of good living and/or molested or otherwise harassed significant numbers of women in the past, thus lending credibility to the trumped up charges.
"We French deal with sex and romance in a manner that reflects our culture," said an outraged, humiliated French socialist leader, who asked to remain un-named because she feared her house was being watched by Mormons, California wine moguls bent on addicting the world to wines lacking in the role of the wine maker to bring out the expression of a wine's terroir and/or the CIA.
"Since the Americans have plotted to destroy us with trumped up charges of 'rape' and will continue to do so our only defense will be to de-stigmatize so-called rape in order to liberate all human beings from Anglo-Saxon oppression," continued the highly placed French anonymous source while standing outside the French government's Ministry of Culture and Communication, where she works.
Leading French feminists are taking up the call to liberate their leading French men from so-called moral constraints. "In France within our relaxed culture most liberated women actually enjoy what cowboy Americans refer to as 'rape,' " said one socialist feminist leader on a France 24 talk show, who also asked to remain un-named fearing being targeted by the USA and "Those diabolical Navy Seals."
"It is most certainly outrageous that a leading French political figure of the enlightened French left be subject to the treatment reserved for ordinary men who fly coach," said French feminist, and author of the three thousand page treatise Discovering My Marquis de Sad in the Inner Woman-- Liberation Through Perpetual Humiliation.
The French public is showing strong support for new proposed legislation that will make it illegal to accuse any member of the French government, or any leading French man and/or best selling author, and/or winner of the coveted Ordre national de la Légion d'honneur or any French man who has flown business class or first class on Air France within any calendar year from the date of the accusation of rape-- of rape.
"In any case the attentions of our leading intellectuals and political figures paid to some otherwise unnoticeable female should be seen as an honor by this female," said a well known actress and human rights French feminist (who asked to remain un-named).
France will therefore soon decimalize rape when these "rapes" are really no more than the accepted French expression by leading French men taking what is rightfully theirs. France's spokesman for the top court, the Constitutional Council, explained, "We do not think in illogical inches and yards but in centimeters here. It is time for America to become logical."
"We hope Americans may learn from this example and put their barbaric house in order. It is a terrible thing to see extraordinary men treated as they would be if they were simply ordinary people," said leading culture critic and forward thinking writer who asked to remain un-named.
Given the change in the law made today by the Constitutional Council from today in France, all sex with prominent officials will from now on be automatically categorized as consensual-- in fact -- obligatory.
Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His new book is Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics--and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway.

My Religion Dispatches Interview on Sex, Mom and God

Instead of trying to explain why I wrote "Sex, Mom and God" to people who like the book, or to those who hate it via email, please indulge me as I post an interview I did on Religion Dispatches, that will at least offer what the author -- me -- thinks of his book and offer a bit of context for what is sure to be a wild ride.
This was first posted on RD May 18, 2011 at
Religion Dispatches

INTERVIEW May 18, 2011Mass Bible-Based Sexual Dysfunction as Root of Culture Wars? Frank Schaeffer Breaks It Down Novelist and ex-fundamentalist talks about growing up with Bible bedtime stories, his debt to a free-spirited mother, and the meaning of American religion's rightward turn.
By FRANK SCHAEFFER
Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics--and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) AnywayFrank SchaefferDa Capo Press (2011)
What inspired you to write Sex, Mom, and God?
First, the 5000-plus emails and letters generated by my memoir Crazy for God made it clear that I still had questions to answer about my family's role in the rise of the religious right. People liked the book but some people knew that I'd ducked some questions. It takes a while to work up the courage to be honest, and after I got Crazy for God off my chest I wanted to take another step (and my gloves off) before moving on.
Second, in three novels, Portofino, Saving Grandma, and Zermatt and in two nonfiction works, Crazy for God and Patience with God, I'd included my mother's life and/or used her as a point of departure for inventing the fictional character of Elsa Becker. I felt I'd failed to do mom justice. Elsa Becker was too much like my mother on the one hand and too little like her on the other, and in my memoirs she'd played second fiddle to my father. She deserved better. I once got a letter from one of my mother's followers telling me that, having just read my novel Portofino (a work of humor where the missionary mother's character, "Elsa Becker," is like my mother--in some ways), she was sure it would "kill your mother because of the hatred for Jesus that drips from your SATANIC pen!"
Coincidentally, that fan letter (received in the early 1990s before I was using e-mail) arrived in the same post delivery as a note from Mom asking me for another dozen signed hardcover copies of that novel so that my mother could send out more to her friends. Mom's follower had signed her letter "Repent!" My mother signed her note "I'm so proud of you." Attempting to unravel the mystery of how my mother managed to have attracted such "fans" (through her many books) and who she really was (and is)--a life-embracing free spirit--nagged me into writing this book. Like many evangelicals, mom was a better person than her theology warranted. Through her I wanted to explore why the "worse" a person is, in terms of consistency to their fundamentalist faith, the better a human being they become.
Third, the rightward tilt of the Republicans after Obama's election has meant that the path taken by the religious right (the movement that most informs the present day Republican Party) was something I felt needed to be better understood. For instance when I'd be interviewed on NPR or by journalists on MSNBC, it often seemed to me that the questions being asked about religious people and beliefs showed that even at best there is a lack of understanding of what it is that has pushed America to the hard right. I felt that I could explain the issues from the point of view of someone who could say "been-there-done-that" and give an insider's perspective.
Lastly (and this is harder to explain), I felt that the story of the religious right has been told badly because it's been treated as either an academic subject (for instance when "explaining" the Reconstructionists in terms of American religious history) or a political subject (say the way MSNBC treats religion as it relates to the Tea Party or so-called culture war).
From my perspective, understanding the larger political story necessitates delving into the accumulated impact of thousands of individual stories. I use my life as a lens through which to view a larger narrative: the rightward lurch of American politics since the 1970s. What is happening in America is an expression of mass sexual dysfunction "inspired" by the allegiance of millions of individuals to the Bible. That is all the culture war really is. I wanted to write a book about this but told as a personal story too and told as a novelist tells stories--i.e., in a way that breaks down the door between fact and emotion.
What sparked your interest?
At 58, as a father of three and a grandfather of four, I'm still trying to figure out how it is that I think I know certain things (say, that I don't know anything), but still have such a strong emotional tie, or rather am bound to, a way of seeing the world as if I was still back in my fundamentalist days. In Sex, Mom and God I go back to where I--and millions of others--began our journeys: in the grip of our bedtime Bible stories!
From a child's perspective peering out at the larger world from deep in the cocoon of a "Bible believing home," every word of the Bible is understood to be true in ways that nothing else is or ever will be even if, years later, that child grows up and changes his or her mind. That former child's grown-up incarnation may be willing to admit nuance and paradox, but the emotional "weight" of the absolutely true Word lingers. The actual words in the Word are still the very fabric of a whole private universe inhabiting those raised inside the hermetically sealed tunnel of absolutist faith, "truer" than all the other words he or she will ever hear, say, read, or think put together--truer than any later reasoned evidence. And on top of that the words of the Bible, or even a few notes of an old hymn, cast a shadow of bittersweet nostalgia that defies reason as thoroughly as a whiff of perfume reminds a man of his first lover and evokes a longing that cuts to the heart.
I used to think I'd someday sort out the difference between what I believe "for myself" and how I was conditioned to think. These days I don't believe that clarity is possible. For one thing belief is a snapshot of just that day since beliefs change and we also change our minds. So instead I use the fundamentalist chains binding my brain as a point of creative departure, as the context that generates (as it were) letters from prison sent to the outside world.
What's the most important take-home message for readers?
To be true to what I hope is the heart of the best of the universal religious message, I want to say that redemption through selflessness, hope, and love necessitates a new and fearless repudiation of the parts of holy books and traditions--be they Jewish, Christian, Muslim, or other--that bring us messages of hate, exclusion, racism, ignorance, misogyny, homophobia, tribalism, and fear. To find any spiritual truth within any religion's holy books, we must mentally edit them by the light God has placed in each of us.
As Anne Hutchinson put it at her trial, "The Lord knows that I could not open scripture; he must by his prophetical office open it unto me." Those who wish to live as Christians, Jews, Muslims, agnostics, or atheists by following the humble thread of what I'll call divine uncertainty, as opposed to those who wish to force others to be like them by using Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or doctrinaire secularism as a weapon, must shift from unquestioning faith in their books, the Bible, Qur'an, Torah, (or science) to a life-affirming message of transcendence.
Anything you had to leave out?
I'll reverse that question and answer it this way: I forced myself to include certain things in order to conform to the publishing reality these days that is less and less favorable to fiction or even to books!
In the best of all worlds, I'd find a way to tell all my stories as stories to people who love books as books. It was a compromise to meld the personal with the political. I'm very pleased with the result, but the parts of my book I enjoyed writing most were the stories not the explanations of those stories. It feels like a letdown to go from the freedom of storytelling (say, about why and where I had sex with an ice sculpture) to having to "prove" points by dragging facts onto the page (say, about my meetings with Rousas Rushdoony, the founder of the Reconstructionist movement and/or talking about working with Ronald Reagan on his "pro-life" book project).
What are some of the biggest misconceptions about your topic
I think they are the same misconceptions that infect all political/religious/moral "topics" these days: the illusion of progress. Chris Hedges says (rightly, I think) that we mistake advances in science for moral progress. So the misconception is that there is such a thing as modernity.
Dig a little and under every modern "issue" is a basic narrative that never changes. This is why Shakespeare is always on the cutting edge and always will be.
At risk of being too cute I'll add that life and the "big issues" really do boil down to sex, mom, and God. "Modernity" has changed nothing. We human animals seek out meaning that transcends the sum of our physical parts. That never changes. And we make the same mistakes in every age. What has changed is that the stakes have gotten intolerably high because of our growing capacity to do global harm.
Did you have a specific audience in mind when writing?
Anyone raised in a home where one or more parent or sibling was driven by a sense of passionate mission, be that of the left, right, religious, political or social. How does one separate one's self from a driven tribe?
Are you hoping to just inform readers? Give them pleasure? Piss them off?
All of the above. There is plenty to be informed about: religion and how it changes lives and shapes childhoods is basic information that social and political commentators ignore at their peril. (Think of all the relevant news stories the New York Times has not covered--say the early rise of the religious right--just because somewhere back there the Times' owners decided that religion wasn't relevant any longer!) The fact that I worked on this book for two years flat out for 15-plus hours a day, and took it through 28 full drafts shows that (besides being nuts), I certainly have done my utmost such as it is to give pleasure to readers. And if anyone can look at the way religion has treated and treats women and not be pissed off they have something wrong with them.
So, yes, I intend on pissing off every misogynist homophobic religious conservative and/or empire-building neo-conservative imperialist supporter of our permanent war economy stuck in the ideological straightjacket that I used to so proudly wear. But I'd also like to plant a seed that changes a few minds. I hope that someday a few right wing evangelical's anger gives way to the grudging thought "maybe Frank had a point." Maybe my book will help lead a few people to a better place: the embrace of blessed paradox. Or as I say in the book: "No one ever blew up a mosque, church, or abortion clinic after yelling, `I could be wrong.'"
What alternate title would you give the book?
Sex, Mom and God was my first and only title, though at one point I was thinking about another subtitle: "A Religiously Obsessed Sexual Memoir."
How do you feel about the cover?
Jonathan Sainsbury who designed it is brilliant. I love it.
Is there a book out there you wish you had written? Which one? Why?
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. It inspired me when I was a teen, made my mind race then and still does now. It's one of the best novels of the twentieth (or any) century and achieves a devastating and darkly funny social commentary informed by a spiritual intuitiveness that has not been matched.
What's your next book?
Perhaps something for or about children since the only part of each day that I enjoy with no second thoughts is when I play with my grandchildren. Nothing beats a tea party with a two-year-old who loves you unconditionally.