KIRKUS BOOK REVIEW INTERVIEWS FRANK SCHAEFFER

Why I Wrote Sex, Mom and God How Sex (and Anthony Weiner) Betrayed...

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.

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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