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The Truth About the World's Number One Scum: Rupert Murdoch

guardian.co.uk Media User comments Web NewsSportCommentCultureBusinessMoneyLife & styleTravelEnvironmentTVBlogsDataMobileOffersJobsNewsMediaPhone hackingPhone-hacking scandal: is this the tipping point for Murdoch's empire?

For decades the US mogul has held sway over British media and political life – but last week all that seemed to change

reddit thisJamie Doward, Toby Helm, James Robinson, Richard Wachman, Vanessa Thorpeand Paul Harris in New Yorkguardian.co.uk, Saturday 9 July 2011 23.11 BSTArticle historyRupert Murdoch in Sun Valley, Idaho, on Thursday – the day the News of the World was axed. Photograph: Julie Jacobson/AP

Shortly before nine o'clock on a Saturday evening last month an elderly man wearing a woollen jumper and slacks escorted a flame-haired woman to the back of a dining room in a Cotswolds pub. The sun was emerging after a day of rain and the jolly mood in the Oxfordshire gastropub was shared by the couple. Laughing, they settled side by side behind a stripped pine table and examined their menus.

Fellow diners scrutinising the couple attentively could have been forgiven for mistaking them for father and daughter, such was their age gap and the way they seemed to be extremely comfortable in each other's company. Whatever their relationship, clearly they were close. At one stage the woman could be seen wiping fluff off her companion's jumper.

They were still at their table, chatting casually to locals, two hours later. If they had pressing matters on their minds, they did not betray them. Only the chauffeur-driven car waiting outside the honey-stoned pub might have given a clue that they were a little out of the ordinary.

That Rupert Murdoch had chosen to spend a rare evening in the UK outside London with Rebekah Brooks, chief executive of his News International UK subsidiary, says much about the relationship between the two.

While many of their friends and colleagues, including Brooks's racehorse-training husband, Charlie, were attending George Osborne's 40th birthday party, Murdoch had chosen to spend his evening with his most loyal lieutenant, who lives close to the Kingham Plough pub, near Chipping Norton. Murdoch, who can expect presidents and prime ministers to fly all the way round the world to court him, was dropping in on his employee. The mountain was coming to Muhammad.

Although, only two days earlier, Brooks had been at Murdoch's annual summer party in London, where she had rubbed shoulders with David Cameron and the Labour leader Ed Miliband, the two would still have had much to talk about.

That party was notable for the fact that several Tory ministers, including culture secretary Jeremy Hunt, had opted not to attend, concerned about being seen to be too close to Murdoch at a time when his holding company, News Corp, was seeking a full takeover of satellite broadcaster BSkyB, a deal that rival media companies warned would cripple competition.

The putative takeover was framed by the backdrop of never-ending allegations of phone hacking at Murdoch's News of the World newspaper, which had given the media mogul's enemies plenty of ammunition to use against his BSkyB bid. How could the government endorse such a deal when one of the jewels in the crown of the Murdoch empire had been engaged in such criminality, critics asked. How could Brooks apparently have not known what was going on?

The same questions were repeated vociferously last week as evidence emerged that the phone of murdered teenager Milly Dowler had been hacked, as well as those belonging to the families of the 7/7 victims.

But Murdoch would not give his critics what they wanted: Brooks's head. For a man often labelled ruthless, it was an extraordinary defence of an employee. It was also costly. News Corp's share price dropped as analysts warned the Sky deal might be delayed.

The saga was spiralling out of control, threatening not only the Sky deal but also long-term damage to Murdoch's US interests such as Fox News and the Wall Street Journal. According to one insider, the crisis has dismayed Prince Alwaleed bin Talal whose Saudi-based Kingdom Holdings sovereign fund owns 7% of News Corp.

In a belated attempt to show how seriously it was taking the allegations, News Corp revealed that Brooks has been replaced as the head of a team investigating the phone hacking. Instead, two experienced lawyers, Joel Klein and Viet Dinh, who both sit on News Corp's board in New York, will lead the inquiry.

But it was not nearly enough. Murdoch, who was attending a conference of media bigwigs in Sun Valley, Idaho, found himself surrounded by reporters last Thursday, baying for answers. Flanked by his wife, Wendi, the ageing mogul cut a diminished figure, battling through the throng and belligerently saying he had nothing to add to a statement he made earlier in the week.

With shareholders and politicians vying to express their fury, it was left to Murdoch's son, James, News Corp's chief operating officer, to deliver the coup de grâce.

But, astonishingly, it was not to be Brooks's head on a plate. Instead it was the newspaper she edited between 2000 and 2003. The News of the World, Britain's bestselling Sunday paper, was to be axed after 168 years, Murdoch Junior revealed in an email sent to all News International staff. A fleeting visit from Brooks to the paper's newsroom, in which – soft-voiced, dry-eyed and rambling – she spoke of her affection for the paper, confirmed its demise to the few shell-shocked staff who were there to hear her.

As a damage limitation exercise, it was as brutal as it was unprecedented. But in sacrificing its massively profitable Sunday title, the Murdoch empire has triggered more questions than answers. Questions that will now dismantle what became an unholy alliance of politics, press and police.

Talk to former News of the World journalists and ask where it all went wrong and they are likely to start with Phil Hall. The combative hack, who now runs his own PR company, started his career on the Dagenham Postand became the News of the World editor in 1995. Hall inherited a paper with a circulation above four million that enjoyed a formidable reputation as a gutsy breaker of big stories. Some were famously salacious, but many involved exposés of the great and the not-so-good, big league criminals, dodgy politicians and corrupt officials.

"It was a proper paper 20 years ago," one former employee told theObserver. "We turned over drug dealers, immigration rackets, things like that. Really good, hard-hitting stories. It also made people laugh; there was lots of fun stuff in it. Sure, there was a touch of spin to it all, but the stories were genuine. We were not saints. We bent things, but it was only to get the guys who deserved to be got."

Part of the paper's success lay in the near symbiotic relationship it enjoyed with the police, the two institutions swapping tip-offs and working together on major stories that ensured a win-win for all involved: the cops got the glory; the paper the headline.

But after Hall came in things went in a different direction. Journalists were under increasing pressure to bring in stories. "The focus became celebrity and then all the other papers followed and so it became even more competitive," the former hack said.

Andy Coulson, who took over as editor in 2003, was cut from the same cloth. The man who would go on to become Cameron's spin doctor, and was arrested on Friday in relation to allegations of phone hacking and corruption, appeared to be a firm believer in the macho politics of the newsroom. A 2008 industrial tribunal found he had presided over a culture of bullying at the paper that forced one his reporters to go on long-term sick leave because of stress-related depression.

Coulson had cut his teeth on the Sun's Bizarre column, another high-octane environment. "People were having nervous breakdowns left, right and centre," recalls one former employee. "There were people crying in the toilets. Every day you put your body on the line."

Little changed when Coulson arrived at the News of the World. "Everyone felt that pressure from the executives down," said one News International employee. "Conference could be incredibly tense sometimes and maybe that pushed some people to do stupid things, but it was never overt. It was never something that people talked about it. If it was happening, and I suppose it clearly was, then people were going off to do it somewhere on their own. Andy was a really good editor and wanted good stories. He was passionate. It was tough."

Some of the staff may have felt uncomfortable, but the culture reaped dividends with the News of the World bringing in scoop after scoop that left rivals trailing in its wake well into the new millennium, when Brooks took over, editing the paper for three years before moving to the Sun.

Even if, in common with other papers, its circulation was declining, the sensational stories ensured about 7.5 million people continued to read the paper, of whom 2.7 million were the wealthy ABC1s beloved of advertisers. The News of the World was a cash cow for Murdoch, who used its profits to help shore up his other newspaper interests such as the Times and theSunday Times, which gave him huge political leverage.

What has now become clear is that the provenance of a large number of those stories can be traced to private investigators employed by News International, several on six-figure contracts.

At the outset, in the 1980s, much of their work – such as obtaining ex-directory numbers or helping find addresses – was relatively routine. Sometimes it involved covert surveillance, even though it was not always for reasons that could be justified in the public interest. An outside agency was employed to establish that Freddie Mercury had HIV. One former journalist told how the bar belonging to the brother of a television personality was bugged. "Half the dressing rooms on [the television soap] Eldorado were also done," he said.

But the arrival of the mobile phone added a new dimension. "It used to be much easier to listen to live phone calls when it was the old analogue cell system," one former journalist said. "In the early 1990s there used to be an advert in the Exchange and Mart from a mobile shop in Bridgend which offered for sale an old Motorola carphone-type phone which had been doctored with a serial cable that could be connected to your PC. With the software provided you could use it as a live scanner showing people's numbers and listen in to calls via the PC."

Soon journalists across Fleet Street were well versed in how to listen in to the new phones and to access their voicemails. "It became more of a question of journalists listening in to other journalists' phones from rival papers," the ex-journalist said. "One journalist would deliberately leave false messages to throw people off the track of where he was and what he was doing."

Some private detectives on contract to the paper were like Glenn Mulcaire, the former footballer at the centre of the hacking scandal and a newcomer to Fleet Street. "Working for the News of the World was never easy," Mulcaire said last week. "There was relentless pressure. There was a constant demand for results. I knew what we did pushed the limits ethically, but at the time, I didn't understand that I had broken the law."

Many others were like Sid Fillery, a former member of Scotland Yard's flying squad, who worked for a private detective firm, Southern Investigations, run by his friend Jonathan Rees. The two men were accused of being involved in the unsolved murder of Rees's business partner, Daniel Morgan, but walked free after the case against them collapsed earlier this year, with the police accused of misconduct by the judge.

It is this type of complicated relationship between the police, the papers and private investigators that is likely to yield further scandal as the three sides turn on each other.

Fillery, who now runs a pub in Great Yarmouth, Norfolk, confirmed to theObserver that the agency had worked with the News of the World on a string of legitimate stories while he was in the Met. But, in a development that promises to throw more fuel on the fire, he said he intends to sue his former force. A spokesman for his solicitors, Pannone, said: "We can confirm that a partner at the firm is advising Mr Fillery on an action against the Metropolitan police for malicious prosecution."

The Met, meanwhile, is scouring all the evidence it has accumulated on Rees to establish if his firm was also involved in carrying out illegal activities on behalf of newspapers. There are said to be at least 11,000 pages of material relating to Rees in the Met's possession, none of which has yet been disclosed and some of which is thought to relate to key public figures who so far have been mentioned only on the periphery of the scandal.

Significantly, while it is confirmed that Rees was paid by the News of the World, the Observer understands other newspaper groups used his services far more extensively.

The names of other investigation agencies are likely to emerge soon as Operation Weeting, the Met's investigation into phone hacking, continues. "There were lots of other agencies working for the papers; I know of at least three more," one private investigator said.

So far the arrests have been confined to reporters and editors, but how did the investigators obtain the mobile phone numbers to hack into in the first place? One obvious line of inquiry is the illegal accessing of the police national computer, suggesting corrupt officers were involved. The paper has already confirmed that several Met officers were paid for information.

But there will be others outside the force. "I should imagine there are some ex-BT engineers that have done extremely well over the years performing dark arts via third parties," said one former News of the World employee.

A News International insider said that claims an estimated 4,000 phones may have been targeted could tell only part of the story. There are suggestions that the paper was interested in as many as 80,000 phone numbers over the past decade. How many were hacked or bugged is a subject for the police investigation, but by the mid-1990s it appears hacking had become endemic and no one was considered out of bounds. From the families of 7/7 victims to Milly Dowler, all were targets. John Cooper, a barrister who represents the families of soldiers killed in the Nimrod disaster in Afghanistan and the RAF Hercules explosion in Iraq, as well as those who died at Deepcut barracks, confirmed on Saturday night that his clients were concerned that they may have been the victims of telephone hacking.

Even the nearly dead were apparently fair game. In the winter of 2004, when his most famous client, George Best, was dying of liver failure, agent Phil Hughes could not understand how the press appeared to be outside the right hospitals at the right time.

"Somehow the News of the World always seemed to understand who was visiting and would always have photographers there," said Gerald Shamash, Hughes's solicitor, who has asked the Met to hand over any information it has relating to his client.

"Phil is convinced his phone was substantively hacked by the News of the World. The situation became very difficult, particularly in the latter months of George's life. It was very upsetting for both of them."

As the story switched last week from hacked celebrities to vulnerable members of the public, the mood noticeably shifted. In the City, BSkyB's shares took a pounding as Ofcom, the media regulator, said it would consider whether News Corporation would make a "fit and proper" owner of BSkyB. By the end of the week the shares were down nearly 12%, wiping £1.8bn off BSkyB's market value as hedge funds bet the deal would be bogged down for months to come.

The fit and proper person test applies to any owner of a TV station in the UK. The regulator indicated it would invoke the test only if a director of BSkyB were to be charged with criminal offences, such as phone hacking.

But other legal concerns are brewing. There is speculation that illegal acts by company executives in London could potentially be prosecuted in America under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act which is aimed at stopping US firms from engaging in bribery abroad.

At the same time, the idea has been floated that News of the Worldjournalists, or those working at News Corp organisations in the US, might have broken the law in pursuit of stories across the Atlantic. The US has extremely strict laws on phone hacking and many ambitious prosecutors might like to make a name for themselves by pursuing such a case.

In the face of massive public opprobrium and a City backlash, James Murdoch's decision to kill off the title was portrayed as a kneejerk reaction, an emergency amputation to keep the News International patient alive. But this may not be true. One well-placed source has suggested Murdoch has had a team working on plans to replace the News of the World with a Sunday Sun for at least three months. This belief is shared by former journalists on the paper. "What happened on Thursday was a cynical exercise to save Murdoch money, sack staff and turn the Sun into a seven-day operation," said one. "Thirty years ago this would have been a trade union issue, but Murdoch did for that."

Analysts were quick to pronounce that closing the News of the World was a small price for Murdoch to pay. True, the paper is highly profitable, making an estimated £12m of profit in 2010 and generating almost £50m in advertising revenue. But Sky, in which News Corp owns a 39% stake, is forecast to make more than £1bn profit in 2011-12.

On Wall Street, Richard Greenfield of US broker BTIG said Murdoch's other media interests in cable television – Fox News and his numerous other operations – were far more valuable in the eyes of investors than print.

Greenfield spoke for his fellow analysts when he said: "Many of us believe newspapers are a sunset industry and wouldn't give a damn if Murdoch decided to get rid of them."

Murdoch's audacious overnight transfer of his newspapers to Wapping, east London, in 1986 proved he hated the trade unions, but what he likes is more difficult to pinpoint. In an interview with the Village Voice newspaper in 1976, seven years after he bought the News of the World, he gave a rare insight into his psychology. He painted himself as an outsider, someone who rubbed up against the grain.

"I just wasn't prepared to join the system," he said. "Maybe I just have an inferiority complex about being an Australian … you join the old school-tie system and you're going to be dragged into the so-called social establishment somehow. I never was."

His status as an outsider was confirmed shortly after he acquired the News of the World when it published the diaries of Christine Keeler at a time the shamed minister, John Profumo, was trying to put the scandal behind him. However, it was Murdoch's purchase of the Times, waved through by Margaret Thatcher in 1981, and the paper's subsequent move to Wapping that saw him become a member of the establishment he professed to loathe.

Murdoch and Thatcher were ideological soulmates who espoused free markets, loathed Europe and were impatient to dismantle the UK's creaking old institutions. For once, Murdoch seemed to have genuine affection for a politician, usually seeing them as useful allies in his quest to expand his interests.

This political pragmatism plays to Murdoch's advantage, allowing him to back winners – and oppose losers. It was only in 1992, when John Major won a surprise election victory over Neil Kinnock's Labour party, that the full extent of Murdoch's influence became evident. Kinnock had looked on course for victory but the Murdoch press led a strident campaign against him in the final days.

On the morning of election day the Sun front-page requested that, "If Kinnock wins today will the last person to leave Britain please turn out the lights". As he licked his wounds amid the wreckage of a fourth consecutive general election defeat for Labour, Kinnock blamed the media and the Murdoch stable in particular for turning the tide against him. "It's The Sun Wot Won It" ran the paper's triumphant headline.

From that moment, Labour's modernisers – Tony Blair, Peter Mandelson, Gordon Brown, Alastair Campbell and Jonathan Powell – knew that if the party was to break the Tory stranglehold on power there no more important task than to get Murdoch and his papers onside.

Lance Price, a journalist and ex-spin doctor who worked at No 10 as Campbell's deputy, recounts how Blair and Campbell took to heart the advice of the Australian prime minister, Paul Keating, on how to deal with Murdoch.

"He's a big bad bastard and the only way you can deal with him is to make sure he thinks you can be a big bad bastard too," he said. "You can do deals with him, without ever saying a deal is done. But the only thing he cares about is his business and the only language he respects is strength."

Throughout his years in power, Blair had regular secret meetings with Murdoch, many abroad, and was in regular telephone contact. Price has gone as far as to claim that Murdoch "seemed like the 24th member of the cabinet".

Blair insisted no record was ever kept of the meetings or calls, so they were totally deniable. Cherie Blair has said that her husband's decision to go to war in Iraq in 2003 was a "close call". So it was – and there is evidence that the final decision was taken only after Murdoch's encouragement was received and his blessing given. Blair talked to the media tycoon three times on the telephone in the 10 days before the US-led invasion. Details obtained under freedom of information show Blair called Murdoch on 11 March, 13 March and 19 March 2003. British and US troops began the invasion on 20 March, with the Times and Sun voicing total support.

The Murdoch penetration into the heart of political life has accelerated under Cameron. His links to the Murdoch empire are arguably even closer than those of Blair or Gordon Brown, whose wife, Sarah, helped to arrange Brooks's 40th birthday party.

The contact between the Tory leader and the likes of Michael Gove, the education secretary and an ex-Times journalist, are not merely professional but also social. They mix in the Oxfordshire political and media set. Cameron, who has been a guest at Brooks's Cotswolds home, made his own visit to see Murdoch in August 2008 on his yacht off the coast of Greece.

But after last week's momentous events some are questioning whether the umbilical cord between Murdoch and Britain's politicians has been snapped. Some commentators wonder whether, in an era of declining sales, the hegemony of the press, and in particular that of Murdoch, has been overstated. The rise of new media is allowing politicians to convey their message without needing newspapers as an intermediary. Advertisers are shifting their spending from conventional media brands to social networking sites.

MPs, who last year were accused by Lib Dem deputy leader Simon Hughes of being "too scared" of Murdoch's News International to testify in court that their phones had been hacked, are lining up to denounce the mogul. "We are in a totally new world now," said one shadow minister. "This is unbelievable. The Murdoch empire, in a matter of hours, has gone from being one which politicians wanted to do everything they could to please, to one they were desperate to disown and condemn. Murdoch has turned from asset to liability."

The replacement of the Press Complaints Commission with an independent regulator, after the watchdog was roundly criticised for failing to get to grips with the scandal, will further curtail the power of newspapers.

Two official inquiries, one into phone hacking, the other, with a wider remit into press ethics, promise uncomfortable headlines for Fleet Street over the coming months. So too does Scotland Yard's continuing investigation, the results of which will extend far beyond the News of the World and phone hacking to other newspapers and criminal acts like bugging and email interception.

Brooks herself hinted there was much more bad news to come, telling staff they would only understand why the plug had to be pulled on their newspaper a year down the line – presumably when criminal investigations have concluded.

Last Thursday evening, stunned News of the World staff made their way to the Cape bar in Wapping where they watched constant updates of their demise flash up on large television screens. It must have been a strange feeling. Used to making the news, they were the news.

A ripple of applause from the table occupied by staff on the paper'sFabulous magazine greeted an announcement on Sky News that subeditors at the Sun had briefly walked off the job in protest at their sister paper's closure. Most of the anger was saved for a solitary figure – Brooks. Picture editors vied with subs and young reporters to say the same thing: they had been sold down the river by the Murdoch family to save her skin."There are young people with families," one said. "What are they going to do?"

Their mood is unlikely to be helped by the disclosure, presumably made by a disgruntled, recently unemployed member of staff, that Brooks regularly enjoys the services of a helicopter to fly her from Battersea heliport to her Cotswolds home. Her use of a private jet for a breakfast meeting in Venice is also the subject of discussion by Wapping veterans.

"This is about what happened under the old regime," volunteered a senior reporter gesturing to the pub's television screens. "Look at most of these people. They weren't even around when all this happened. Colin Myler [the paper's editor] might have his faults but he was trying to turn it round. We've all been sacrificed to save Rebekah Brooks."

Their anger raises an important question. How will reporters and editors of other Murdoch titles such as the Sun and the Times feel about continuing to work under Brooks, especially after Cameron in effect called on her to stand down, saying: "It's been reported that she had offered her resignation in this situation, and I would have taken it." His comment again threw into question Murdoch's increasingly quixotic desire to protect Brooks. As the seasoned media commentator Raymond Snoddy observed on the MediaTel Newsline Bulletin: "Her famed political access will be no more. You can hear the doors already slamming in her face."

But her weakened stature will mean little to the 250 staff on the paper now out of work at a time when none of its rivals is hiring.

In an email to staff yesterday, Myler said: "You have made enormous sacrifices for this company and I want you to know that your brilliant, creative talents have been the real foundation for making the News of the World the greatest newspaper in the world."

On Saturday night, as Murdoch prepared to fly in to Wapping to tackle a crisis that refuses to die, the News of the World was doubling its print run to five million, anticipating a surge in demand from readers keen to buy a piece of history. Whatever plans he has for its replacement, it was a curtain coming down. Not just for the News of the World but for all of Fleet Street.

Arti

Jane Smiley Reviews My New Book In the Washington Post (and Likes It!)

BooksCelebritiesComicsGoing Out GuideHoroscopesMoviesMuseumsMusicPuzzlesTheater & DanceTVBlogs & ColumnsIn the NewsShuttle launchWarren BuffettEric FehrMichele BachmannKrauthammer Jane Smiley reviews Frank Schaeffer's 'Sex, Mom, and God' Text SizePrintE-mailReprintsBy Jane Smiley, Friday, July 8, 4:14 PM

That Frank Schaeffer started out as a pest and has matured into a provocateur is evident from the title of his latest memoir/argument, "Sex, Mom, and God." What decent American puts these three words in the same phrase, especially with "sex" first? Well, Frank will do or say just about anything. And I call him "Frank" not because I know him, but because his novels and memoirs have a way of winning a reader's friendship. Better to be his friend than his parent, though, because he was one of those kids (dyslexic, he says) who spent all day either asking questions or investigating sexual mysteries.

He had a lot of questions because his parents, Francis and Edith Schaeffer, preached the inerrancy of the Bible. And he had a lot of sexual mysteries to investigate because he was surrounded by young women who boarded with his parents at L'Abri, a famous Christian commune in Switzerland. Edith was attentive to Frank's religious education, and there was no cruel or inconsistent Bible verse that young Frank let pass.

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(Da Capo Press) - '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. Da Capo. 298 pp. $26

In "Sex, Mom, and God," Frank makes the case that he and his parents were prime movers behind the political rise of the religious right in the United States, and he further makes the case that their home life was about as nutty as it could be. Those who have read his previous memoir, "Crazy for God," or his trilogy of novels, "Portofino," "Zermatt" and "Saving Grandma," will be familiar with some of this material, but in this new book, Frank puts it together in a slightly different way. As is appropriate for someone born into the evangelical world, his inner life is a series of revelations; this time, he is bearing witness to what he has learned from his grandchildren.

If that remark sounds condescending, I don't mean it to. Schaeffer is a good memoirist, smart and often laugh-out-loud funny. For those of us not raised in religious homes, he is like a visitor from another planet who marvels at things that we take for granted — like letting children form their own opinions. He also brings news of alien beings for whom the biblical passage about God ordering the slaughter of the Midianite male infants and enslaving the rest of the population is a child's bedtime story (I should say that although I never met Frank, I did visit a friend at L'Abri in 1973 and overheard with astonishment a serious argument about the presence of Satan in our world — and it wasn't about whether Satan was among us, it was about which of our associates he was).

Frank seems to have been born irreverent, but his memoirs have a serious purpose, and that is to expose the insanity and the corruption of what has become a powerful and frightening force in American politics. He considers himself an eyewitness to the insanity during his childhood, and an eyewitness to the corruption during his early adulthood. The root of both, according to this book, is the perverse and destructive view that the "God-of-the-Bible" takes of women and sexuality — that women are inherently corrupt and that their sexuality must be controlled by men. Frank's point in "Sex, Mom, and God" is that female sexuality is at the heart of the abortion debate that energized the religious right, and he asserts, from his experience of both his very troubled father and himself, that profound anxiety about women and hypocrisy about the sex drive shape the evangelical bid for power in the United States. (He is particularly informative about R.J. Rushdoony and the Christian Dominionists, who are working to transform the United States into a theocracy.)

Frank contemplates women primarily through his mother, a beautiful daughter of missionaries and the organizer and enabler of L'Abri and of the career of Francis Schaeffer. Frank makes the case that Edith has lived the distortions of Biblical discourse for her entire life — she is now 96 — and has accommodated them by shading over the cruelest instructions or ignoring them entirely. She has, for example, used birth control in spite of biblical prohibitions against Onan spilling his seed, and she has been kind and compassionate toward lesbians, the unsaved and Frank's own wife, whom he impregnated when they were unmarried teenagers — no stoning for Edith. As a result, Frank considers his mother to be a better spiritual model than the God-of-the-Bible, and he would like other evangelicals to understand this, too. As for himself, one bookmarkable passage toward the end of "Sex, Mom, and God" is the detailed letter he wishes he could have written to his wife when they first met, warning her to stay away from him for her own good.

Frank has been straightforward and entertaining in his campaign to right the political wrongs he regrets committing in the 1970s and '80s. As the author of 10books since 2000, and plenty of articles and blogs, he has been more than industrious. As someone who has made redemption his work, he has, in fact, shown amazing grace.

Jane Smiley is the author of "Private Life," "A Good Horse" and many other books.

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Username: Password: Forget your Password? » Sign Up HOMENEWSEVENTSMUSICA & EDININGBLOGSCONTESTSEXTRASCLASSIFIEDSHome / Arts / Books / Sex and Mom and God ShareThursday, July 7,2011Sex and Mom and GodA Memoir of the Christian RightBy David Luhrssen The literature of self-rebuke is not as voluminous as it should be, given the catastrophes inflicted on the world by literate people with big ideas. Frank Schaeffer, who emerged in the 1980s with the Young Turks of the Christian Right, has grown into rueful middle age with his sense of sarcasm sharpened. He explored some of this territory before in his previous memoir,Crazy for God, an account of his uncommon upbringing during the '60s at an evangelical Christian commune in Switzerland. His parents, who became stars of the Moral Majority, were literate and sophisticated people forever trying to square their love of culture with their love for the misshapen God of John Calvin.

Eventually, the contrary pull between his creative imagination (Schaeffer has been painter and filmmaker as well as author) and the theo-political agenda of the Christian Right tore him apart. He repented, did an about face by the mid-'90s and has since waged verbal war on his former comrades in intolerance.

Schaeffer's latest memoir, the provocatively titled Sex, Mom and God (Da Capo), dips into the same well as Crazy for God and draws irony and venom from its depths. But none of the venom (and only a spoonful of irony) is meant for mom. Edith Schaeffer "was the greatest illustration of the Divine beauty of Paradox I've encountered," he writes. "She was a fundamentalist living a double life as a lover of beauty who broke all her judgmental rules in favor of creativity."

Schaeffer can add that unlike many sweaty palmed, guilty fundamentalists: "I also think that Mom—bless her—LIKED sex." It's just that her family's odd ideas bout God, a supreme being who doesn't especially like sex and predetermines eternal damnation for the majority of humanity, painted her into an awkward corner.

After coming of age, Schaeffer joined in the family business of evangelism and found a wider audience through the media-adept Moral Majority and its parallel universe of big ideas and institutions. In the "abandonment of the country they call home," as Schaeffer puts it, the American evangelicals erected a true counterculture of radio and TV channels, bookstores, rosters of "Christian professionals" and universities. The evangelicals favored home schooling to keep their children from the clutches of public education. They had no regard for the American commonwealth beyond their own ghetto, fenced by their notion of a raging, intolerant deity.

Schaeffer nails the connection between their angry dogma and the violence of Timothy McVeigh as well as the ballot-driven crusade of the Tea Party. "What the Religious Right did was contribute to a climate in which the very legitimacy of our government—perhaps any government—was questioned." Although the libertarian wing of the Tea Party doesn't share all the presumptions of the evangelicals, the Christian Right cleared the field where the weeds of distrust could flourish.

Hungry for a better God than the deity of his parents, Schaeffer converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, a faith that has produced its portion of fanatics over the millennia but whose essence is expressed through the arts of painting and music and whose inescapably mystical dimension has enriched many lives through fostering a sense of connection with the universe and all those other people stumbling with a candle through the darkness of the unknown.

As for the Christian Right and its mobilizing issue, abortion, Schaeffer declares that the average member has been duped and never realizes "that the logic of their 'stand'… played into the hands of people who never cared about human lives beyond the fact that people could be sold product." While these sincere folks waved their "Abortion is Murder" banners or stood in line to buy Sarah Palin's book, "it was the denizens of the corner offices at Goldman Sachs, the News CorporatIon, Exxon, and Haliburton who were laughing."

Deluded Religious Belief In Being "Chosen" Is the Root Of Global Disaster

A version of this article was first published on Alternet

By Frank Schaeffer

The earth bursts with life. Far right exclusionary religion bursts with death. If there is a creator of life He/She/It must hate fundamentalist religion.

The countries in the world that are the most fundamentalist and religious, and/or those whose identity is most religion-based, are the world's greatest troublemakers. Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the USA, Vatican City and the state of Israel come to mind.

Just take one example of religion's baleful influence: President Woodrow Wilson's messianic religion-inspired intervention in World War One. "My life would not be worth living" Wilson wrote, "if it were not for the driving power of religion, for faith, pure and simple." (Letter to Nancy Toy, 1915.)

Wilson's religious views were the driving force in his political career, informing his quest for world peace. And like all fanatics he decided to achieve this "peace" through war. The devout Woodrow Wilson upset fellow Presbyterians as he moved the nation toward entering World War One, including William Jennings Bryan, who quit as secretary of state in protest.

What did Wilson's religious idealism actually achieve? Germany's loss of World War One led to the rise of Hitler, and the Second World War. Wilson picked sides between two equally tarnished nationalistically-inspired colonial contenders and weighed in. So Wilson set the stage for the rise of Hitler and World War Two. With no World War Two there would be no Israel because there would have been no holocaust. Zionism would have simply become a forgotten quirk. And there would have been no Cold War either, maybe not even a Soviet Union.

The twentieth century began with wars rooted in religion and nationalism and ended as the century of wars rooted in ideological atheism led by the likes of Stalin, Hitler and Mao. Now the twenty first century seems to be shaping up to be the age of renewed wars of religion led by fundamentalist fanatics on all sides who believe in the divine destinies of their nations and/or religions.

These fanatics – they are all of the far right – have ranged from the Ayatollah Khomeini to George W Bush, from the far right leaders of the state of Israel to far right American fundamentalist like Michelle Bachmann who – if she and her fellow travelers have their way – would replace the Constitution and Bill of Rights with the Bible and turn America into a (Reconstructionist) theocracy.

The deluded religious belief that any people or nation or church is a "chosen" people is the root of almost all our troubles. So is the lunacy of believing in "Truth" revealed through one special prophet to one special peoples and/or tribe, be they Jews, Muslims or American Evangelical Christians, or conservative Roman Catholics who believe in the special primacy of their popes.

Eliminate willful self-serving tribal religious delusion from the globe and there might be hope for the survival of the human race. Combine tribalism and religious conviction with nukes and the "right" to exploit the earth and disaster looms.

It's no accident that the most dangerous cultures today are also the most religiously observant societies. The ultra-religiously observant USA embraces perpetual war as a way of life. With our notion of "exceptionalism," we fear the "other" who might challenge our notion of having been chosen by God for some special task.

Like the USA the state of Israel has become an intransigent provocation to the world as it slides inexorably toward becoming the next apartheid state taking up oppression based on race and tribe where South Africa left off. Israel is the place where a demographic minority of the "chosen" already represses (and/or has expelled) the majority of the "un-chosen."

As for the ultra religious state of Pakistan it was actually founded on self-aware religious difference! Pakistan is now the leading exporter of terror worldwide alongside Iran. Both Iran and Pakistan's intelligence agencies are the purveyors of terror. And both countries (when not busy condemning people to death for the crime of heresy etc.,) see themselves as having special prophetic religious destinies.

The Saudis – "keepers of the Holy Places" -- don't need nukes because they have oil. They threaten destruction to the rest of us every bit as catastrophic as war by funding terror, not to mention exporting the most intolerant forms of Islam worldwide into tens of thousands of madrassas.

If Israel, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Vatican and the USA changed their essential neuroses and accepted a role of "ordinary" nations filled with just folks or saw their religions as a way, not the way, the world would take a giant step toward peace.

But to admit this, let alone to say it publicly, is to court the condemnation of being anti-Semitic, and/or anti-Islamic, anti-Catholic and/or anti-Christian, even anti-American...

….which is a little ironic because…

…the sort of right wing religious Americans who fancy themselves as "pro-American" and "pro-Israel" regularly get our men and women in uniform killed and maimed by starting wars of choice. So who is the patriot here?

Let's get one thing straight: Iran, the USA, Israel, Pakistan, the Vatican and Saudi Arabia aren't special, except in the religion-addled brains of the members of their religious right wings and ruling elites. They're just geographical areas like any others filled with ordinary people like any others, no better and no worse.

Someday these "special" and "chosen" countries will cease to exist as will all nation states. Someday they will not even be remembered because all things pass from time into oblivion, nor will their "holy" books and "holy" places exist forever, simple geology will take care of that. What makes them dangerous today is their shared religious delusion that they are somehow essential and eternal.

The delusion is this: "We're chosen, special and enlightened, and only we have The Truth."

Birds of a feather…

So…

…it is no coincidence that the USA has a "special" relationship with Israel, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and special "respect" for the Vatican and a soft spot for religion in general, for instance giving religion tax deductions. And thus it is no coincidence we are at war without end.

Certainty is a killer. And tolerance of certainty is, by nature, intolerant when it comes to results.

For instance; we tolerate Zionism and Christian Zionism and so messed with the Middle East, because we picked sides in a religious war and decided to back one "chosen people" (Jews) over another "chosen people" (Muslims). This picking of sides between two equally ridiculous pre-science claims to divine selection is the real -- and only -- reason for 9/11 and all that's followed.

America needlessly meddled in a tribal religious Middle Eastern war of religion and has paid and is paying the consequences.

Meanwhile the world's most pressing problems, from global warming to endless wars relate to the self-"chosen" nations and tribes and countries. Of course China and India et al are involved in global warming too, mostly because they imitated the West. Of course others start wars too. But I'm talking about first causes of war and threatened global destruction.

If and when we're plunged into capitalist/consumer global ecological destruction chances are future generations – if any – will have right wing fundamentalist religion of all kinds to thank for "justifying" the rape of the earth.

And if and when we're plunged into an age of nuclear terror, lose Washington DC or New York or London chances are that the fateful moment will be rooted in Middle Eastern/American tribal-religious war. We'll have the states of Israel, Pakistan, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the Vatican and/or the USA to blame for putting humanity on a collision course with reality.

The Jews gave us a book that commands the "dominion" of the earth. The Muslims picked up this theme in their book and predicted the dominion of their one and only "true" religion over the earth, a global "caliphate" that -- for instance -- the Pakistani extremists and Iranian "holy men" in charge of their nukes (or soon to be in charge of their nukes) are working to implement with the same religious ferocity as that displayed by the Israeli "settlers" as they "justify" stealing another Semitic tribe's land.

Meanwhile along with American Evangelicals, the Vatican still holds out a misogynistic/homophobic vision of "progress" and still claims that it and it alone is God's special envoy on earth. The very existence of such exclusivist claims – we'll go to heaven, it's hell for the rest of you! -- is a threat to human survival.

And the United States, the inventor of the bomb, the only country to ever use it, is the granddaddy of the exploitation of the earth in the name of economic growth, as something "given" by God to us as "natural" and "right." And now we Americans run a worldwide war making machine par excellence, sure that we are the "good guys."

The Wilsonian ideological perspective -- advocacy of "the spread of democracy," the spread of Capitalism, in favor of intervention to help create "peace" and the "spread freedom," is rooted in an older religious tradition: we're special a "city set on a hill." This insanity goes back to the very religious foundation of the American colonies that were peopled by Calvinist cranks from England and Holland who thought that they were too good, too theologically pure and too "chosen" to co-exist the likes of ordinary folks. So they left those bad folks behind and soon were burning Pequot Indians to death in the name of their Old Testament "God."

That same intolerant Puritan inheritance drives us today and divides America into "Real Americans" as Sarah Palin calls herself and her followers, and everyone else. This is the "saved" and "lost" model of theology directly applied to politics. Result? We "Real Americans" believe we're so special that we can and should police the world!

The "holy books" all the religious cultures mentioned here follow are compendiums of Bronze Age tribal self-serving myths, adopted and updated by ignorant tribes in order to try to make sense of their places in the universe pre-science. Today they are the source of war and the rape of the earth.

It's time to stop being polite about the religions that are motivating the self-deluding right wing Israelis, the self-deluding right wing Saudis and the self-deluding right wing Iranians, Americans and popes. They may all hate each other, but below the surface they all share one dreadful and silly conviction: the unfounded belief that they and they alone (and their tribes) are morally right and that the rest of us are the "other" to be suppressed, converted or sometimes killed. And they all say God is on their side.

If there is a God – I happen to believe there is, but I could be wrong -- a creator, a force responsible for the magnificent diversity of nature and human aspiration, then that actual God, by definition, must despise exclusive-type religion and tribalism and the black and white world of "in" or "out" and "saved" and "lost."

Guessing what God might actually be like by what we see around us, He, She or It is big, generous, non-ideological, wonderful and all encompassing. Just open your eyes to the earth below and heavens above and try to reconcile what you see, hear and feel with petty popes, Ayatollahs and preachers or the books they call "holy"!

If there is no creator (and who can say there is or isn't?) then nature's diversity and adaptability is a silent and powerful rebuke to exclusivity. Put it this way; the Rockies don't know they're part of an "exceptional" country and the Negev desert doesn't know it was "given" to anyone! Nor do the sands of Medina know that they're "holy" much less does the dust of Iran's "holy city" of Qom know it's "sacred," or the plaster under the paint in the Sistine Chapel know it's "owned" by the Vatican and the "one true church!"

The religions and tribalism of those who threaten the world the most - Iran, the state of Israel, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the Vatican and the USA -- is small, inward looking and backward. It's time to tell the truth and say that maybe it is possible to love God – if there is such an entity -- but it's not possible to love God and love the sort of tribal exclusionary religions that are taking us all down.

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

My Wild Goose Report (Best 4 Days in Years!)

(First Published in the Huffington Post)
By Frank Schaeffer

I just got home from the 4-day Wild Goose Festival held in Shakori Hills, N.C. Peeing in the woods at night was better than using the porta potties and when the breeze died down it was hot and humid. But with a beer tent, old friends from the UK to drink with and a three-hour lunch with Jim Wallis and his stunningly wonderful wife Joy plying us with paper cups full of wine as we talked -- what's not to love?
Gareth Higgins (who invited me and was a founding organizer of the festival), Tony Jones, Jim Wallis, Fr. Richard Rohr, Brian McLaren, Scott Teems, Anna Clark, Vincent Harding, Diana, Butler Bass, Samir Selmanovic, Paul F. Knitter and 30 or so other progressive religious (or sort of religious, or mostly religious, or almost religious) writers, authors, whatever, spoke. Richard Rohr gave a fantastic talk on human character development. Jim Wallis called us movingly, sanely well to organize, march and provide the wind behind Obama's sails in order to change his priorities from war to education, compassion and justice. I did my bit introducing 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," and people seemed to like what I said, so that was nice.
The promo material said Wild Goose would be "transformational" and it was. I discovered my new favorite singer songwriter there -- the sublime Lydia Ruffin and her album The Feast of Life. Many if not most of the 1,200 or so of us were/are renegades, rejects and runaways from one or another sort evangelical background. The rest of us were between the ages of newborn to 12, so for every "grownup" there were two kids, a happy mix that provided a blur of painted faces, balloons and laughter. Music was the soundtrack echoing through the woods, past horse barns and farms.
Nice!
We understood each other, understood why it was a big deal that some of us were gay, open and happy in spite of everything, understood why some of us still wanted to follow Jesus, even though the world we came from -- far right, hate-and-fear-driven wacko religion -- had done its best to turn Jesus into Attila the Hun and/or Michele Bachmann.
There was something new going on at Wild Goose: no separation of the "famous" speakers and authors, we "stars" and performers and the "ordinary" people who'd come to hear us. We all just milled around under the stars and giant oaks in the same space. McLaren slept in a tent. Tony Jones invited everyone to his RV. Sure, Jim Wallis and Brian McLaren were followed by their readers/groupies. But so what? There was no "green room" or other places to be hustled off to while people waited in line, because there were no lines, just us. We all stood in the same lines buying a slice or singing hymns in the beer tent. For four days we lived on a level playing field.
I did my two talks, but spent most of each day -- from 8 a.m. to past midnight -- talking to old friends, and new acquaintances, from all over the U.S. (and places like New Zeeland, too) about why I still believe in God, even though I don't most of the time. And the odd thing is that that nonsensical paradoxical phrase -- belief through doubt -- made sense to them, because you have to have been there, done that escaping from a religious background to "get" it, and they did.
Wild Goose Festival is going to grow into the largest, best run, most dynamic religious happening in the U.S. There are lots of smart spiritually hungry people with their eyes open.
Next year, be there. And if you're an atheist, agnostic, whatever, you'll like it too because you'll be amongst those rare sort of religious people who will admit that we're all in the same boat and that certainty is a killer and humility is all that works, if, that is, you want to live and let live instead of using ideas as weapons.
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."

Daily Beast Reviews "Sex, Mom and God"

Now, though, he has a new message. The Christian right, he says, is fundamentally motivated by an anxious, terrified obsession with sex, an obsession that once drove him as well. "Since the 1970s, the American culture wars have revolved around a fear of sex and women no less insane and destructive than any horror story to come out of Afghanistan," he writes in his intriguing if hyperbolic new book,Sex, Mom and God.

Of course, to many critics of the religious right, Schaeffer's argument is a truism. To sympathizers of the movement, it will probably seem, at best, condescending and simplistic. But his privileged view of the Christian right's sexual weirdness makes his account particularly interesting, and helps explain why the aggressively pious so frequently destroy themselves with sex scandals.

Sex, Mom and God is actually Schaeffer's second memoir about his odd hothouse coming of age. His first, 2007's Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back, was built around his larger than life father. This one is centered on his adored, paradoxical mother, Edith Schaeffer, an author who wrote books for Christian women like The Hidden Art of Homemaking. Edith was a fascinating character, at once a strict fundamentalist and a sophisticated, warm-hearted aesthete. "Mom was a much nicer person than her God," Schaeffer writes.

Amazon ; Alexandra Wyman / Wireimage

Their household was far from what one would imagine as a seat of evangelical royalty. His parents had gone to Switzerland in the late 1940s as missionaries, and in 1955, Francis Schaeffer founded L'Abri—French for "The Shelter"—a Christian community that was part fundamentalist compound, part intense intellectual salon, and part hippie commune. Growing up there, Frank Schaeffer wrote in Crazy for God, "it was not unusual to find myself seated across the dining room table from Billy Graham's daughter or President Ford's son, or even Timothy Leary."

While the Schaeffers promulgated an austere Calvinist theology, they were also art-loving sensualists who holidayed by the sea in Portofino, Italy. (Edith would instruct young women, "[A]lways remember that there's no reason that Real Christians can't look like Vogue models!") In his son's telling, Francis Schaeffer was a man given to terrible rages who regularly hit his wife. He was also sexually voracious. The book's creepiest passages feature Edith regaling her young son with the details of her sex life. "Your father demands sexual intercourse every single night and has since the day we married because he doesn't want to end up like King David!" she announces, telling him about the patriarch's sinful dalliance with Bathsheba. When Frank was 8, she showed him her diaphragm.

Schaeffer loves his mother a great deal, and reading his book, it's not entirely clear that he grasps how wildly inappropriate her confidences were. Rather, he sees her fulsome interest in sex as a small rebellion against the fundamentalist world that she was born into. "Who was Mom as she might have been if part of her brain had not been crippled by her missionary parents' indoctrination of her, just as the bones of the feet of little girls in China were once deformed by food-finding?" he wonders.

"

"Your father demands sexual intercourse every single night and has since the day we married because he doesn't want to end up like King David!" [Schaeffer's mother] announces.

"

Of course, there are always gaps between people's private lives and public selves. But Schaeffer insists that among those who imagine themselves God's elect, they're more like chasms. "I don't really know anybody on a big leadership scale in the evangelical world who I would say have survived a little scrutiny," Schaeffer says by phone from his home in Massachusetts. "The mix of power, money and fame is noxious. When you add in that you are the voice of God on top of it, it's the most toxic mix you can imagine."

Part of what's at work, he says, is a powerful elitism. For his father, using pornography was just a small personal vice, even if he saw the society-wide spread of porn as a harbinger of moral collapse. "What he would wink at individually or indulge in himself, becomes anathema when it's part of a wider social problem," says Schaeffer.

Having grown up around this sort of hypocrisy helps him to understand the endless parade of social conservatives who've been caught up in sex scandals. "What people don't understand is they really mean it when they say society would fall apart if everybody did this. When it came to themselves, it's OK—this is just my little personal sin here."

But the alternative to hypocrisy—fidelity to impossible standards—has its own dangers. The rage of many fundamentalists, he suggests, comes from a Sisyphean struggle against the body's demands. "You must 'stand against all compromise'; you must hate every 'deviation' because you are in a constant battle with temptation," he writes. "Maybe your temptations lead you to question what you say you believe…So you don't open a door to doubt; rather, you just yell all the louder to drown out the nagging thought that you may, after all, be no better than anyone else and may be just as 'Lost' as the next guy.

Like The Daily Beast on Facebook and follow us on Twitter for updates all day long.

Michelle Goldberg is a senior contributing writer for The Daily Beast/Newsweek. She is the author of The New York Times bestseller Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism and The Means of Reproduction: Sex, Power and the Future of the World, winner of the 2008 J. Anthony Lukas Work-in-Progress Award and the Ernesta Drinker Ballard Book Prize. Goldberg's work has appeared in Glamour, Rolling Stone, The Nation, New York magazine, The Guardian (UK) and The New Republic. Her third book, about the world-traveling adventuress, actress and yoga evangelist Indra Devi, will be published by Knopf in 2012.

For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast at editorial@thedailybeast.com.

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June 24, 20117:06 pm

TAGS:BooksRELATED STORIES Paid Distribution4 Restaurants Where You'll Never, Ever, Get a Table(The Daily Meal) Congressional Gym: Hidden Facility Where Anthony Weiner & Congressmen Get Buff - The Daily Beast Paid DistributionTalking to Your Doctor About Hypertension(EverydayHealth.com) Woman Dies at Her Own Funeral: Report - The Daily Beast COMMENTSLogin or signupYou must be logged in to commentPOSTredneck22 Minutes AgoIve read a couple of pieces by this author- and it strikes me that she doesnt really understand Fundamentalist Christians- She prefers to think of Christians as more homogenous than they really are.
Her piece on Michelle Bachman describes how two women "try to talk to" the politician while she is in the restroom- then portrays Bachmans response as somehow hysterical- sort of glossing over the distinct possibility that Bachman might be taking a dump or something like that and might not want two lesbians to "try to talk to" her about politics in such a private setting.
In this piece she seems to find it hypocritical that someone can be both a fundamentalist Christian and somehow be comfortable discussing their sexuality to a degree not in sync with Ms Goldberg's idea of what is acceptable.
Some guys mom showing him her diaphragm and discussing their sex life in terms of frequency might be shocking to Ms Goldberg- but I dont see a thing wrong with a parent, in certain contexts might make a similar decision as a means of instructing a young person on birth control. I dont automatically see hypocrisy in such a situation and find Goldbergs impromptu moralizing on it to be a little wack.
I grew up in the bible belt, went to church three or more times a week for much of my upbringing and can honestly say that, while I am secular now, Fundamentalists are not so easily stereotyped - our household was quite open and what Ms. Goldberg would call "wildly inappropriate" - that didnt make them hypocrites- many fundamentalists posit that sin is sin- its all simply a propensity to miss the mark, make mistakes, and it typically presents itself in similar guises over and over again. Many Christians are indeed assholes or hypocrites- like many secular people- but also many Christians will tell you - they are subject to the same desires many of us have less of a problem with- they just believe that forgiveness is possible and every day is a new chance to live a better life. Pretty simple at its core.
but this gotcha ism Ms Goldberg displays towards religious right is just ordinary bigotry in the middle of otherwise mainstream journalistic style. A bigot is a bigot- if Ms.Goldberg wants to slam the Christian right- if thats the thrust of her work- she should go ahead and get to know them better and try to be more objective- or at least just admits she's a simple hater. I dont support Bachman, or have any interest in the agenda of the Christian Right- but I also dont like ignorant sounding bias coming from people who should be smarter than that.REPLY

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Still Time to Join Us!

MONDAY, JUNE 20, 2011By Yonat Shimron, Religion News ServiceDURHAM, N.C. — It's summer. It's hot. It's the South.That must mean it's time for an old-fashioned camp meeting.
Starting Thursday, the bygone staple of the tent revival will be reincarnated on a bucolic North Carolina farm as The Wild Goose Festival . Nearly 10 years in the making, the festival is an attempt to reimagine Christianity for the 21st century under a bigger, wider more inclusive tent.
The four-day festival is expected to draw thousands of young campers and some of the leading lights of the so-called Emergent Christianity movement.
With musicians such as David Wilcox and Michelle Shocked, and speakers such as Brian McLaren, Jay Bakker, and Shane Claiborne, festival leaders hope to establish the premier venue for 20-somethings who love God but aren't thrilled with institutional Christianity, particularly the religious right.
"We want to look each other in the eye and say, 'We may not agree on everything but we're going to recognize our essential humanity,'" said Mike Morrell, a blogger in Raleigh, N.C., and festival spokesman.Festival planners are a diverse bunch. They include more traditional evangelicals alongside emergent church leaders, neo-monastics and progressive Christians. Organizers want to distance themselves from the politicized versions of Christianity, and re-engage in social justice work — particularly prison reform, a topic of some of the sessions.
They will converge on Shakori Hills, a 72-acre tract of forest and meadows in North Carolina's Piedmont region, better known as the site of an annual roots music festival.
Wild Goose leaders share a conviction that there are multiple streams of Christianity flowing into one river.
"We gather to learn what Jesus came to teach us, which is not how to be a Christian, but how to be human," said festival organizer Gareth Higgins, a writer and film critic based in Durham, N.C.
Unlike other high-profile Christian events, the Wild Goose Festival will try to reverse the traditional dynamic between speakers and their audience. At least 20 of the speakers will frame questions for the audience and then sit among them as they listen to possible answers.
The festival is modeled on Greenbelt, a British Christian rock festival now in its 37th year. The term "wild goose" is a Celtic metaphor for the Holy Spirit: noisy, passionate, not easily tamed and tending to flock together.
Already, the festival has drawn the ire of more conventional evangelical bloggers who don't like its inclusive nature or openness to gays and lesbians, though festival leaders have not taken any formal positions on such issues.
"The wise Christian will have nothing to do with these neo-Gnostic fools who've unbuckled themselves from the Word of God and have embarked upon their Wild Goose Chase of subjective experience," wrote Southern Baptist blogger Ken Silva of New Hampshire-based Apprising Ministries.
Although there are several other annual U.S.-based Christian music festivals — Creation, Cornerstone, Fishnet, to name a few — Wild Goose is pitching bigger theological stakes. Franciscan friar Richard Rohr will lead a workshop; as will "recovering evangelical" writer Frank Schaeffer, son of the 1970s evangelical icon Francis Schaeffer.
Unlike other Christian music festivals, the musicians invited to perform at Wild Goose are not members of the praise-and-worship music pantheon or even crossover artists. They are mainstream secular musicians who happen to be Christian.
The festival's most impressive feat may be that all the speakers and performers have waived their fees, essentially appearing for free.
"There's something moving here," said David LaMotte, a Raleigh songwriter who works on peace issues for the North Carolina Council of Churches, a co-sponsor of the event. "We've created a vision. I hope it comes to pass."

Rick Perry and His Prayer Pals

According to governor Rick Perry of Texas what America needs is prayer. We need to pray in order to restore our moral direction. And the people he wants to lead those prayers are conservative Evangelicals, Roman Catholics and Jews, or at least the good kind of Jews: observant, conservative Orthodox and Republican-voting, Palestinian/Islam bashing. They, unlike all those godless Democrats -- people like crotch-exposing Anthony Weiner -- will bring us back to God. And also help The Good Real Born-Again Americans take back America from the uppity "not one of us" black man in the White House.
Who are these moral prayer leaders who will beseech God to shine His favor on us once again?
They are the sort of people I used to be.
I remember my reaction when back in the mid-1980s I heard the first rumblings about the Boston Diocese's sex abuses before the scandals broke wide open. At that time I was still an Evangelical right wing anti-abortion leader. I had several friends who had recently converted or were about to convert to the Roman Catholic Church because it seemed like a haven of traditional morality to them.
Conditioned by years of poor-little-us Evangelical victim-think -- that blames everyone else the secular media, science, liberals etc., for our failings -- I assumed that somehow the priests and bishops were being "badmouthed" and had been set up by "Them."
This must be another wicked plot by the Liberal Elite, I thought, and the other enemies of the pro-life pro -- family values movement!
I remember talking over my sense of the bishops having been "set up" with my friend Thom Howard, a well-known Protestant author and convert to the Roman Catholic Church. (He lost his job teaching at Protestant Gordon College because he became a Roman Catholic.) What neither of us asked each other at the time was why both communities -- Evangelical and Roman Catholic -- were continually mired in sexual scandal and (as was even then becoming evident) criminal behavior. Nor did I wish to ask myself why I thought that conservative religionists like me had a right to "speak out" on moral sexual issues, as if my "kind" were somehow in a morally superior place.
The hypocrisy I participated in continues as I expose in my new book Sex, Mom, and God.
Roman Catholic bishops in North America have led the "moral" crusade against gay marriage and stem cell research with no sense of irony. And much of the abuse of children that took place worldwide was on Pope John Paul II's watch. And he did all he could to cover up Cardinal Law's activities in Boston, and even rewarded him with a plum assignment in Rome! Notwithstanding, a Vatican ceremony (early in 2011) moved John Paul II one step closer to "sainthood!"
Meanwhile Roman Catholic bishops -- while presiding over the bankrupting of their "church" from lawsuits and while fighting off prison sentences for themselves and/or their priests -- found time to denounce President Obama's health care reform, which aimed at helping 34 million uninsured poor people, as "proabortion."
And how were those moral "family values" Old Testament Jews Rick Perry so ardently supports as a leading "Christian Zionist" doing in their modern Levitical incarnation? (Perry was given the "Defender of Jerusalem" award. So Perry and his wife flew first class to Israel at more than $5,000 per ticket. The governor's security detail of four Department of Public Safety officers was also along for the trip.)
According to National Public Radio (to cite just one of scores of reports), in 2009 four ultra-Orthodox rabbis in Brooklyn were sued and/or arrested for abusing boys. As NPR reported, "That's a tiny fraction of the actual abuse, says Hella Winston, author of Unchosen: The Hidden Lives of Hasidic Rebels. She says that in researching her book, she encountered dozens of alleged victims who told her sexual abuse is an open secret in the Hasidic community. But the community is so insulated and the rabbis are so powerful that few dare to come forward."
And according to the same story:

Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes says he has 10 active sexual abuse cases involving Orthodox Jews--including a school principal. . . . And Hynes says there could be many more. Yeshivas are private schools, which means they don't have to report accusations of sexual abuse to civil authorities.

"I've got no way to know if there's a pattern of concealing the conduct," he says.
Hynes says the Jewish leaders--like Catholic bishops--try to handle these affairs internally, through a rabbinical court. It's practice that infuriates him. "You have no business taking these cases to religious tribunals," Hynes says. "They are either civil or criminal in nature, or both. Your obligation is to bring these allegations to us and let us conduct the investigation."
And how are women treated by these most "observant" of "Real Believing Jews," as far right Evangelicals like Perry call them as opposed to those "secular Jews" or "liberal Jews" they don't like?
Esther Rachel Russell's 2006 documentary about domestic abuse in the Orthodox Jewish community, Shame, Shanda, and Silence, reveals a sad fact:
Orthodox Jewish women tend to stay with violent abusive partners. And abuse is rampant in this biblically patriarchal enclave of devotion to God.
As for the "moral authority" of the North American Evangelicals, one of their leading organizations and the organizers of the annual presidential prayer breakfast, the Family (or the Fellowship), ran a residential "ministry" for many years before it drew unwelcome media scrutiny in 2009 and 2010.
The Family specialized in housing and indoctrinating members of Congress in its Washington, D.C., C Street residence in order to "take back" the world for Jesus. The Family also had worked actively for years to influence both American politics and foreign leaders and had done sowith great "success."
Several leading Family members -- Senator John Ensign of Nevada, governor of South Carolina Mark Sanford, and former representative Chip Pickering of Mississippi -- were all found guilty of adultery.
This would be meaningless to anyone but their wives except for that all three defined their political careers by loudly advertising their so-called Christian family values. Sanford admitted to an affair with a woman in Argentina. Ensign admitted that his family had paid $96,000 in hush money to his former mistress and her family. Pickering is said to have conducted his adulterous affair within the walls of the Family's C Street complex. Then there was George Rekers, who played an important role in many of the most extreme Evangelical assaults on gay people's rights. His career started in 1982 with his publishing a homophobic "textbook," Growing Up Straight: What Families Should Know About Homosexuality. Rekers was a co-founder with James Dobson of the gay-bashing Family Research Council.
In 2010 Rekers was found to be "in a class by himself" when it came to sexual hypocrisy (as New York Times columnist Frank Rich noted).
A Baptist minister with a bent for "curing" homosexuality, sixty-year-old Rekers was caught by a Miami New Times reporter with a twenty-year-old male escort at Miami International Airport.
The "couple" was returning from a ten-day trip to London. Rekers's only mistake, he told Christianity Today magazine, was to hire a "travel assistant" without proper vetting. Rekers said, "[My assistant] did let me share the gospel of Jesus Christ with him, with many Scriptures in three extended conversations."*
Sex scandals seem to be the only actual interdenominational ecumenism that exists; perversity unites many Christian groups, as does their propensity to judge others. We've arrived at the point where I think I may (only half-jokingly) safely say that all Evangelical anti-gay activists and all conservative Roman Catholic bishops are probably closeted gays hiding behind their loud anti-gay public proclamations and/or that all these same "traditional family values" leaders will eventually be shown to have committed adultery and/or enabled child molesters -- when not calling press conferences to denounce "godless Liberals," gay rights, and stem cell research!
These "family values" Republicans, will gather in Texas on August 6 and be praying they can defeat President Obama, a family man, parental role model and education reformer in order to "save" America for Jesus... or at least for the Koch brothers.

American Humanist Magazine Reviews "Sex, Mom and God"

(First published in the Humanist magazine) BOOK REVIEWSex, Mom & GodHow the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics—and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway
by Frank Schaeffer
(Da Capo Press, 2011)
320 pp; $26.00

Review by: Rob Boston

Published in the July / August 2011 Humanist

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Frank Schaeffer is an apostate, and apostates can be a lot of fun. Individuals who are raised in a restrictive religious environment and later decide to reject it usually have interesting tales to tell. Schaeffer is no exception.

But Schaeffer has one other thing going for him: he's a professional writer. This means his stories aren't just interesting, they're also well told. In his new book, 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, Schaeffer serves up an intriguing combination that's part sexual memoir and part exposé of religious right extremism. It's a strange combination to be sure, but in the hands of a gifted wordsmith like Schaeffer it works.

For those who aren't familiar with him, Schaeffer is the son of Francis Schaeffer, a highly influential evangelical theologian who played a pivotal role in the creation of the modern religious right.

In the 1970s, Francis Schaeffer penned a series of best-selling books on issues we would today recognize as manifestations of the "culture war." His emphasis was on abortion, and he played a key role in getting evangelical Protestants involved in opposing Roe v. Wade, largely through his 1979 book Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (The tome, co-authored with C. Everett Koop, was later made into a successful film).

Frank Schaeffer followed in his father's footsteps and for several years made his living thundering against liberals and secularists at religious right gatherings. But in the late 1980s, Schaeffer began to have doubts. In his 2007 book, Crazy for God, he recounted his decision to leave the religious right.

Sex, Mom & God focuses pretty much on what the title promises. Schaeffer's mother, Edith, shared her husband's conservative theology but wasn't exactly prudish when it came to matters of sex. In fact, she may have been too frank in discussing the matter with her children. Schaeffer writes about his mother showing him her diaphragm when he was just eight years old; she also told him how often she and her husband had intercourse.

Indeed, Edith Schaeffer believed in a robust sex life—but only within the context of marriage. The family lived in a Christian mission in Switzerland called L'Abri, which was frequently visited by young pilgrims seeking enlightenment from the Schaeffers. Edith Schaeffer never hesitated to offer detailed advice to the young women who came through—right down to the type of nightgown they should buy for their wedding night.

But, as Frank Schaeffer writes, Edith's views didn't carry the day among many fundamentalists, who grew increasingly puritanical about sex. As Schaeffer writes, "Since the 1970s the American culture wars have revolved around a fear of Sex and women no less insane and destructive than any horror story to come out of Afghanistan. The issues of gay rights, abortion, premarital sex, virginity, abstinence, and the 'God-given role' of women (make babies, love Jesus, and shut up) have dominated our political/social debates. Why? Because sexual politics (American style) illustrates how deranged societies become when ideas about Sex are based on literal interpretations of biblical 'accounts' of the 'facts' of existence."

As he surveys the cultural landscape bequeathed to us by the religious right, Schaeffer doesn't hesitate to explore the role played by the lunatic fringe—activists who have had more influence than they should, considering their daft views. He speaks of Christian Reconstructionists who would base American law on the harsh legal code of the Old Testament. He tells of women raised in a movement called "Quiverfull," some of whose adherents argue that girls shouldn't even be educated because it just gets in the way of their main goal of producing large families. He talks of extreme Roman Catholic activists who are confident that papal decrees give them the right to meddle in the intimate affairs of others.

Alongside the analysis of the religious right is an unusually frank memoir of Schaeffer's awakening sexuality. He writes about the flocks of "nubile" girls who flocked to L'Abri (and his reaction to them), his misguided attempt to engage in carnal acts with an ice sculpture at age ten, how he impregnated a young woman (now his wife) at age seventeen and even his attraction to other women, despite his happy marriage.

These portions of the book are revealing. If you're bothered by a blunt discussion of sexual matters, this may not be the tome for you. But if you're curious about how human sexuality is handled in many fundamentalist communities and why so many far-right Christians continue to obsess over this issue, Sex, Mom & God provides some answers.

After leaving the religious right, Schaeffer joined the Greek Orthodox Church. It's clear he still grapples with theology. (For more on that, see his 2010 book, Patience with God.) But his search is an honest one. Schaeffer is not a humanist, but he's forthright enough to embrace his doubts. Few believers these days have the courage to admit they even have them.

Humanists won't agree with everything Schaeffer has to say in this book. I found his comments on abortion to be somewhat jumbled, but his reflections on gay rights were quite poignant—especially his discussion of a Washington, DC, press conference he took part in that was attended by a Ugandan gay rights activist who had to speak while wearing a paper bag to avoid being murdered later.

Frank Schaeffer has seen the religious right from the inside. Indeed, his father helped birth it. Humanists would do well to listen to him. As someone who knows the movement well, Schaeffer also understands its weaknesses. That's critical information for those of us working to stop the theocrats who yearn to control not just our sex lives but indeed all aspects of our existence.

TO ORDER the book click HERE

Rob Boston is senior policy analyst at Americans United for Separation of Church and State and a board member of the American Humanist Association.