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Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bibles Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics -- and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway
“A penetrating analysis of political extremism, with a moving and at times hilarious account of growing up in one of the Christian right’s most influential families. Few writers command Frank Schaeffer’s intimate understanding of right-wing radicalism, and even fewer are able to share their insight as entertainingly and with as much moral weight as he has in Sex, Mom, and God.”—Max Blumenthal, author of Republican Gomorrah “Mom was a much nicer person than her God. There are many biblical regulations about everything from beard-trimming to menstruating. Mom worked diligently to recast her personal-hygiene-obsessed God in the best light.” Alternating between laugh-out-loud scenes from his childhood and acidic ruminations on the present state of an America he and his famous fundamentalist parents helped create, bestselling author Frank Schaeffer asks what the Glenn Becks and the Rush Limbaughs and the paranoid fantasies of the “right-wing echo chamber” are really all about.
Here’s a hint: sex.
The unforgettable central character in Sex, Mom, and God is the author’s far-from-prudish evangelical mother, Edith, who sweetly but bizarrely provides startling juxtapositions of the religious and the sensual thoughout Schaeffer’s childhood. She was, says Frank Schaeffer, “the greatest illustration of the Divine beauty of Paradox I’ve encountered … a fundamentalist living a double life as a lover of beauty who broke all her own judgmental rules in favor of creativity.”
Here’s a hint: sex.
The unforgettable central character in Sex, Mom, and God is the author’s far-from-prudish evangelical mother, Edith, who sweetly but bizarrely provides startling juxtapositions of the religious and the sensual thoughout Schaeffer’s childhood. She was, says Frank Schaeffer, “the greatest illustration of the Divine beauty of Paradox I’ve encountered … a fundamentalist living a double life as a lover of beauty who broke all her own judgmental rules in favor of creativity.”
Charlotte Gordon, the award-winning author of Mistress Bradstreet, calls Sex, Mom, and God “a tour de force . . . Sarah Palin, ‘The Family,’ Anne Hutchinson, adultery, abortion, homophobia, Uganda, Ronald Reagan, B. B. King, Billy Graham, Hugh Hefner—it’s all here. This is the kind of book I did not want to end.”
322 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 26, 2011
30 people are currently reading
708 people want to read
About the author
Frank Schaeffer
51 books146 followersFrank Schaeffer is a New York Times bestselling author of more than a dozen books. Frank is a survivor of both polio and an evangelical/fundamentalist childhood, an acclaimed writer who overcame severe dyslexia, a home-schooled and self-taught documentary movie director, a feature film director of four low budget Hollywood features Frank has described as “pretty terrible.” He is also an acclaimed author of both fiction and nonfiction and an artist with a loyal following of international collectors who own many of his oil paintings. Frank has been a frequent guest on the Rachel Maddow Show on NBC, has appeared on Oprah, been interviewed by Terri Gross on NPR’s Fresh Air and appeared on the Today Show, BBC News and many other media outlets. He is a much sought after speaker and has lectured at a wide range of venues from Harvard’s Kennedy School to the Hammer Museum/UCLA, Princeton University, Riverside Church Cathedral, DePaul University and the Kansas City Public Library.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 90 reviews
July 7, 2012
I just read one of the most spiritually, politically, and psychologically significant books I have ever read: Frank Schaeffer’s 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 God, America needs this book. We need it like a slap in the face, like a long cold drink of water, like a goodnight kiss on the crown of our beloved heads from a long-lost father. We need this book to heal.
I realized just how important this book was going to be when I read the following passage, on page 50:
“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 and social debates. Why? Because sexual politics (American style) illustrates how deranged societies become when ideas about Sex are based on literal interpretations of the biblical ‘account’ of the ‘facts’ of existence.”
BAM. Now that is succinct. And revelatory.
Then, on the very next page, I encountered this:
“…what started in the 1950s and 1960s as an attempt to balance sexual fear with sanity tumbled into yet another example of dysfunctional American extremism. This happened because the practitioners of three American belief systems (that are so intense they might as well be religious) unwittingly colluded: Progressives (absolutist believers in unregulated Free Speech), conservatives (absolutist believers in unregulated Free Enterprise), and conservative Christians (absolutist believers in the uncleanness of Sex between anyone not married in a heterosexual ‘traditional’ marriage) created a sordid monster—Porn-Gone-Nuts.”
Damn, y’all. Who says stuff like this—who sings this kind of truth? Frank Schaeffer, that’s who.
And that is one of the most beautiful things about this book: it was written by a man, a former member of the Religious Right. Other people could have said the things he has said—the truths are there to be read and spoken, as surely as the words my grandmother used to scrawl on the back of her hand, personal notes for the world to see—but to hear them spoken by someone who used to promote the distorted world views that have contributed to the problem of American sexual dysfunction? That’s significant.
Here is a writer who is both very brave and very necessary, a voice of reason who gives depth and shape to what can seem like a reasonless landscape. I underlined and starred and put exclamation points by so many passages in this book—passages about religion, about women, about human conceptions and misconceptions of God. Part self-deprecating memoir, part searing political commentary, the book invites you in, makes friends with you, and then gets brazenly, breathtakingly real.
Obviously, I could go on and on. This was one of those rare books that opened my eyes to new horizons, whatnot like a trip to Europe. Mr. Schaeffer educated me about abortion and Evangelical Christianity (he even explained Sarah Palin, God bless him), and the book resonated with me both spiritually and intellectually. I believe this book needs to be read by a very wide audience—there are many people, like me, who don’t entirely “get” what it means to interpret the Bible literally, and therefore have trouble wrapping their minds around the things that are happening to women’s rights in this country.
While the author’s politics are clear—he certainly isn't aligned with the Republican party anymore—this book lives according to its own values. For example, when discussing the Left’s view of abortion, Mr. Schaeffer says: “Pro-choice advocates made some mind-bogglingly dumb (and extreme) choices in the tactics they used to pursue abortion rights.” (p. 144) And then there’s this: “The Right and Left seem agreed on one thing: Fighting over Roe is easier than struggling for education rights and tax and social reform to help the poor women who are the people who have most of the abortions.” (p.212)
Commentary like this—that calls both parties out on their political posturing—is what this country needs to move forward on just about every issue there is. What we need to have a real conversation, with real results. You know why?
It speaks the truth. And, as Jesus said, the truth shall set you free.
I realized just how important this book was going to be when I read the following passage, on page 50:
“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 and social debates. Why? Because sexual politics (American style) illustrates how deranged societies become when ideas about Sex are based on literal interpretations of the biblical ‘account’ of the ‘facts’ of existence.”
BAM. Now that is succinct. And revelatory.
Then, on the very next page, I encountered this:
“…what started in the 1950s and 1960s as an attempt to balance sexual fear with sanity tumbled into yet another example of dysfunctional American extremism. This happened because the practitioners of three American belief systems (that are so intense they might as well be religious) unwittingly colluded: Progressives (absolutist believers in unregulated Free Speech), conservatives (absolutist believers in unregulated Free Enterprise), and conservative Christians (absolutist believers in the uncleanness of Sex between anyone not married in a heterosexual ‘traditional’ marriage) created a sordid monster—Porn-Gone-Nuts.”
Damn, y’all. Who says stuff like this—who sings this kind of truth? Frank Schaeffer, that’s who.
And that is one of the most beautiful things about this book: it was written by a man, a former member of the Religious Right. Other people could have said the things he has said—the truths are there to be read and spoken, as surely as the words my grandmother used to scrawl on the back of her hand, personal notes for the world to see—but to hear them spoken by someone who used to promote the distorted world views that have contributed to the problem of American sexual dysfunction? That’s significant.
Here is a writer who is both very brave and very necessary, a voice of reason who gives depth and shape to what can seem like a reasonless landscape. I underlined and starred and put exclamation points by so many passages in this book—passages about religion, about women, about human conceptions and misconceptions of God. Part self-deprecating memoir, part searing political commentary, the book invites you in, makes friends with you, and then gets brazenly, breathtakingly real.
Obviously, I could go on and on. This was one of those rare books that opened my eyes to new horizons, whatnot like a trip to Europe. Mr. Schaeffer educated me about abortion and Evangelical Christianity (he even explained Sarah Palin, God bless him), and the book resonated with me both spiritually and intellectually. I believe this book needs to be read by a very wide audience—there are many people, like me, who don’t entirely “get” what it means to interpret the Bible literally, and therefore have trouble wrapping their minds around the things that are happening to women’s rights in this country.
While the author’s politics are clear—he certainly isn't aligned with the Republican party anymore—this book lives according to its own values. For example, when discussing the Left’s view of abortion, Mr. Schaeffer says: “Pro-choice advocates made some mind-bogglingly dumb (and extreme) choices in the tactics they used to pursue abortion rights.” (p. 144) And then there’s this: “The Right and Left seem agreed on one thing: Fighting over Roe is easier than struggling for education rights and tax and social reform to help the poor women who are the people who have most of the abortions.” (p.212)
Commentary like this—that calls both parties out on their political posturing—is what this country needs to move forward on just about every issue there is. What we need to have a real conversation, with real results. You know why?
It speaks the truth. And, as Jesus said, the truth shall set you free.
December 22, 2012
An angry little man rants about his childhood. It ranges from uncomfortable to incomprehensible. Half the time it seems that Frank wants to shock the reader with his opinions and the other half he just wants to lay down on a sofa and talk about how he feels about his mother. At some level, I think he really wants to talk about the intersections between politics and religion, but he can't seem to get over how personally affected he was by the whole thing, darn it.
On one level, it might make for some interesting Joycian stream-of-consciousness reading, where thoughts about political movements, beach vacations, and your parents having sex blur find themselves in a single paragraph. It would make for pretty good parody material if you didn't know otherwise.
Lack of editing aside, Mr. Schaeffer can't make a point without tying it to a snide ad hominem. Those looking for an honest look at post-evangelism should go elsewhere. Even if all you wanted was a name to attach to you current beliefs, you can do far better than this hack.
On one level, it might make for some interesting Joycian stream-of-consciousness reading, where thoughts about political movements, beach vacations, and your parents having sex blur find themselves in a single paragraph. It would make for pretty good parody material if you didn't know otherwise.
Lack of editing aside, Mr. Schaeffer can't make a point without tying it to a snide ad hominem. Those looking for an honest look at post-evangelism should go elsewhere. Even if all you wanted was a name to attach to you current beliefs, you can do far better than this hack.
March 14, 2020
Frank’s Schaeffier’s , 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 Kindle (Edition) is the single worst thing I have read in many years. I came into this book having read and enjoyed his Calvin Becker Trilogy and liked his autobiography, Crazy for God. (Given how much Sex, Mom and God is about his youth, it is almost unintelligible unless you have read at this book first.) Mostly I agree with his politics and much of what he says about religion. The problem? It is very badly written.
Those who most need to read it will either never get close to it, or read more than a few pages. Those who least need to read it may enjoy hearing the echoes of what they already think. Then comes the muddled logic, repetitious whining, hectoring denigrations and his very odd recollections of his personal role in creating the modern, politicized religious right. Not just odd, but oddly self-congratulatory. Why so much detail about how much money he made writing and producing and cooperating with (Name drop here)?
On the good side he repeats what are intended to be panegyrics in favor of his wife, children and in particular his new respect for and love of his aging mother. Not so much for his abusive religious firebrand father. Taken together they could be read as precious and while never maudlin they have a vibe of being formulaic. I do not doubt his sincerity in his feelings towards his nearest and dearest. I question his motive in using them to cloak whatever he is discussing at the time he falls back on how wonderful is his family.
He is self-depreciating. Given some of what he has done with his life, and how much of it he regrets; that is motive enough for this book. However, his new, more enlighten positions are where the muddle gets deepest. He rejects much of the politics of the religious right, while clinging to many of its goals. He shames literal Bible believers, but his case is emotional rather than substantive. Much of this is his angriest material and here he is often shouting rather than being insightful. No new arguments, just the old ones, loud.
The driving issue that his earlier self and his father had used to from the religious right as a political block was abortion. He is at once pro and anti-abortion, never mind making sense of it. He seems to feel that no one has ever sought common ground between the pro and anti sides. They have. They agree that abortion is like being pregnant. It is hard for a person to be slightly pregnant and it is hard for that person to submit to being slightly aborted.
He would toss Roe V Wade, not because it was wrong but because it set a standard for the US in one step. His preference would have been to ignore all of the conditions that he would count as justifiable to allow women to have choices be selectively available based on the happenstance of geography. Obviously (he thinks), the historic forces were pro abortion and once allowed no state would ever rethink that position. Meantime whatever suffering having a choice would have ended is to be ignored because, well because he can or could have.
In other words, has no comfort for the Pro-Life person and barely an appreciation for the Pro Choice person. He calls for a middle ground and never defines it. Whatever your take on the issue, he neither echoes your beliefs nor bridges the gap.
His solution for his readers? People can and should be willing to live miserable lives, not doing or being what they could be because one day they - Might be grandparents! Being a grandparent solves everything. How Cute.
Those who most need to read it will either never get close to it, or read more than a few pages. Those who least need to read it may enjoy hearing the echoes of what they already think. Then comes the muddled logic, repetitious whining, hectoring denigrations and his very odd recollections of his personal role in creating the modern, politicized religious right. Not just odd, but oddly self-congratulatory. Why so much detail about how much money he made writing and producing and cooperating with (Name drop here)?
On the good side he repeats what are intended to be panegyrics in favor of his wife, children and in particular his new respect for and love of his aging mother. Not so much for his abusive religious firebrand father. Taken together they could be read as precious and while never maudlin they have a vibe of being formulaic. I do not doubt his sincerity in his feelings towards his nearest and dearest. I question his motive in using them to cloak whatever he is discussing at the time he falls back on how wonderful is his family.
He is self-depreciating. Given some of what he has done with his life, and how much of it he regrets; that is motive enough for this book. However, his new, more enlighten positions are where the muddle gets deepest. He rejects much of the politics of the religious right, while clinging to many of its goals. He shames literal Bible believers, but his case is emotional rather than substantive. Much of this is his angriest material and here he is often shouting rather than being insightful. No new arguments, just the old ones, loud.
The driving issue that his earlier self and his father had used to from the religious right as a political block was abortion. He is at once pro and anti-abortion, never mind making sense of it. He seems to feel that no one has ever sought common ground between the pro and anti sides. They have. They agree that abortion is like being pregnant. It is hard for a person to be slightly pregnant and it is hard for that person to submit to being slightly aborted.
He would toss Roe V Wade, not because it was wrong but because it set a standard for the US in one step. His preference would have been to ignore all of the conditions that he would count as justifiable to allow women to have choices be selectively available based on the happenstance of geography. Obviously (he thinks), the historic forces were pro abortion and once allowed no state would ever rethink that position. Meantime whatever suffering having a choice would have ended is to be ignored because, well because he can or could have.
In other words, has no comfort for the Pro-Life person and barely an appreciation for the Pro Choice person. He calls for a middle ground and never defines it. Whatever your take on the issue, he neither echoes your beliefs nor bridges the gap.
His solution for his readers? People can and should be willing to live miserable lives, not doing or being what they could be because one day they - Might be grandparents! Being a grandparent solves everything. How Cute.
June 18, 2012
Why did I pick this up? I had no idea who Frank Schaeffer was before I noticed the title of this book at my local library. I'm not a member of the Religious Right, and neither am I an Evangelical. But it was interesting, nonetheless. As a moderately liberal agnostic, I have wondered why the Right is so vehement about its positions, why it's so rabid and hate-filled, why it refuses to admit that America is much more than its religious beliefs. Schaeffer blames the schism in America between the Far Right and the rest of us on the abortion debate, one he championed from the Far Right's side for many years before he abandoned his Evangelical beginnings. I found this quote particularly telling: "In denial of the West's civic-minded, government-supporting heritage, Evangelicals (and the rest of the Right) wound up defending private oil companies but not God's creation, private cars instead of public transport, private insurance conglomerates rather than government care of individuals. The price of the Religious Right's wholesale idolatry of private everything was that Christ's reputation was tied to a cynical union-busting political party owned by billionaires. It only remained for a Far Right Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court to rule in 2010 that unlimited corporate money could pour into political campaigns -- anonymously -- in a way that clearly favored corporate America and the superwealthy, who were now the only entities served by the Republican party. The Evangelical foot soldiers never realized that the logic of their "stand" against government had played into the hands of people who never cared about human lives behind the fact that people could be sold produce. By the twenty-first century, Ma and Pa No-Name were still out in the rain holding an "abortion is Murder!" sign in Peoria and/or standing in line all night in some god-forsaken mall in Kansas City to buy a book by Sarah Palin and have it signed. But it was the denizens of the corner offices at Goldman Sachs, the News Corporation, Koch Industries, Exxon, and Halliburton who were laughing."
One can hope that eventually both sides of the political spectrum will realize they can only survive by abandoning their extremes. But unfortunately I don't see that happening. The Religious Right has an "us against the world" mentality that is almost impossible to surmount, as "the world" is far too sinful and worldly. I admit that as a young, moderate-thinking woman, I fear for the future of my nation. It's starting to become quite a scary place.
I found the passages that focused more on Schaeffer's own life and experiences to be easier reading than his exposition of politics in America as seen from the Right's point of view. Though I enjoyed this book, I'm not sure I need to read any more of Schaeffer's work.
One can hope that eventually both sides of the political spectrum will realize they can only survive by abandoning their extremes. But unfortunately I don't see that happening. The Religious Right has an "us against the world" mentality that is almost impossible to surmount, as "the world" is far too sinful and worldly. I admit that as a young, moderate-thinking woman, I fear for the future of my nation. It's starting to become quite a scary place.
I found the passages that focused more on Schaeffer's own life and experiences to be easier reading than his exposition of politics in America as seen from the Right's point of view. Though I enjoyed this book, I'm not sure I need to read any more of Schaeffer's work.
July 1, 2011
Why did I read this? A pal sent...knowing there are some Religio Rt nuts on the estate, still to be smothered. Author Schaefer eviserates the religio right (and therefore the ReThug Party). He can do it: his parents were ministerial stars of the Relig Right. The writing is 3-stars, the content 6-stars. He strips bare key Rt points effectively. He damns the Neo-Cons (Normie Podhoretz & Co), but he's most effective on YouTube - don't miss. Now in his 60s, I ask: why did it take him til his 30s to see the Light? Bet it was family money -- gathered from the Cause. Still: Let's not ask for the moon when we have the stars, eh?
Billy Graham, he notes, became less political as the years passed. Son Franklin ('typical of nepotistic Protestant leadership') became one of the "shrillest of the Far Right Repubs, adding to the fear about the Muslim 'Other.' He embraced overt politics." It's all part of the balderdash that we should be obedient to the 'ancient Jewish-Christian version of God's Law.' The Far Right & the Repubs meet in a smarmy screw, baby!
Billy Graham, he notes, became less political as the years passed. Son Franklin ('typical of nepotistic Protestant leadership') became one of the "shrillest of the Far Right Repubs, adding to the fear about the Muslim 'Other.' He embraced overt politics." It's all part of the balderdash that we should be obedient to the 'ancient Jewish-Christian version of God's Law.' The Far Right & the Repubs meet in a smarmy screw, baby!
August 17, 2011
I think I'd like to have a beer with Frankie Schaeffer, while at the same time being very happy he's not a relative. His father was an architect of the Religious Right; this book is more about his mother, who sounds like someone I really missed by not knowing. The cultivated woman who wore Chanel, knew poets and loved great music -- from Bach to BB King -- also took her Gospel Walnut for witnessing on Italian beaches. Frankie's taken a lot of heat for showing the less attractive side of L'Abri and his father, and for rejecting his youthful right-wing politics, but he's an engaging writer, who conveys his love for his very unconventional family while at the same time noting that they weren't marble models. For those of us who still love God and our churches but cringe at much of what passes for Evangelical culture (Christian bookstores, where "WWJD" bracelets are the most tasteful things on sale!) these days, Schaeffer is an excellent friend and mentor.
May 28, 2012
Really poignant book. I'm from that fundamentalist background which is so very damaging to anyone, especially a child or young person. This book will enlighten anyone who is wondering about how people in the plethora of fundementalist evangelical churches became that way, and why they are leading the Republican party down a dead-end road.
Mr. Schaeffer writes with warmth, humor, and a disarming passion for honesty.
Mr. Schaeffer writes with warmth, humor, and a disarming passion for honesty.
August 6, 2011
It is unfortunate that someone who grew up reading the Bible failed *completely* to understand it. The Bible is most decidedly not anti-women, anti-sex, pro-slavery, or any of the other things Schaeffer thinks is it anti or pro. It's stance on slavery, for instance, must be seen from the perspective of when it was written. Ancient-world slavery was not in any way comparable to the modern American's idea of slavery. Ancient-world slavery was meant to be a temporary state, during which the 'slave' was fed and educated, and at the end of that period often was married into a good family or became a part owner in the former master's business. People sold *themselves* into slavery, because it was understood to a way into a better life. There is no comparison to the slavery that occurred in America (and is still occurring in America and elsewhere.)
Meant to be funny, but mostly is just uneducated and sad.
Meant to be funny, but mostly is just uneducated and sad.
January 23, 2020
I feel I relate to Frank's stories so much. This one is not for everyone. It's rambling and way too confessional in that perpetual teenaged sex-crazed boy way. And yet it's his frankness (pun intended) that I find endearing. He's not sugarcoating his experiences or unhealthily downplaying his struggles. That was what he would have done in his former Evangelical days. Instead now, he's living a fuller, more genuine life outside that old church world.
There's a large section in the middle which tackles abortion rights in a way I hadn't heard before, regarding how Roe v Wade came about and it's implications for progressive politics. I found it very compelling and challenging.
The final two chapters and epilogue are beautiful, classic Frank Schaeffer. He talks about apophatic theology, given his new path in life as an Eastern Orthodox convert. It's not the path, as he would say, but a path. This resonates with me.
There's a large section in the middle which tackles abortion rights in a way I hadn't heard before, regarding how Roe v Wade came about and it's implications for progressive politics. I found it very compelling and challenging.
The final two chapters and epilogue are beautiful, classic Frank Schaeffer. He talks about apophatic theology, given his new path in life as an Eastern Orthodox convert. It's not the path, as he would say, but a path. This resonates with me.
October 2, 2011
Did not finish this one. I was enlightened about some things but did not enjoy the writing. Frank Schaeffer seems to have an axe to grind and some of it read like a tabloid magazine. Some of his criticisms seemed overly harsh and almost vindictive. What's that phrase about the newly converted or unconverted? It has been 20 years since he left the faith and I don't think he has made peace with himself yet. Hard reading compared to Carolyn Brigg's Higher Ground.
April 3, 2012
I really enjoyed this book. Frank Schaeffer is the son of Evangelical missionaries who went into the "family business," and in the process helped to create the pro-life movement, the Moral Majority, and the religious right as political powerhouses. However, with age and experience comes humility and wisdom, and he grew to disagree with the way that evangelicals were being used as money machines for the Republican establishment and came to understand that you cannot believe that every word in the Bible is the literal, inerrant, and complete truth of God without being more than a little crazy. The book begins with a discussion of misogyny in the Bible; how women are "unclean" for half their lives and the originators of sin, and between comparing Evangelical Christianity as it is preached and how his mother lived it (with a great deal of grace and strength) he came to the conclusion that Biblical literalism is an untenable way of life. I admire Schaeffer's strength in being able to change his mind and admit it in public.
April 7, 2013
As someone who grew up within the fundamentalist milieu, I recognize much of what Frank Schaeffer writes. It has an unmistakable ring of truth, so much that it can be hard to read. On the other hand, sometimes it seems more like gossip, such that I feel excited to read about the sins of others and revulsion at my enjoyment of other people's heartache.
Schaeffer has a tendency towards polemic, one of his least endearing qualities. He has been unable to live down nor move beyond his political past; whereas in the 80's he was full of right wing bombast, today his bombast comes from the left. So in a sense it is like nothing has changed. On the other hand, Schaeffer is a much more humane person today, and seems like someone it might be worth knowing. In that sense he has moved well beyond the person he once was. Age has a habit of doing that.
Schaeffer has a tendency towards polemic, one of his least endearing qualities. He has been unable to live down nor move beyond his political past; whereas in the 80's he was full of right wing bombast, today his bombast comes from the left. So in a sense it is like nothing has changed. On the other hand, Schaeffer is a much more humane person today, and seems like someone it might be worth knowing. In that sense he has moved well beyond the person he once was. Age has a habit of doing that.
December 28, 2011
Frank is a substandard writer, his content is creepy (I don't care about his childish sexual escapades nor his adult fantasies) and this book was a complete waste of an audible.com credit. Uggghhh... Try Joan Didion's "Blue Nights" or Donna Johnson's "Holy Ghost Girl" Now there are a couple of real writers! I am not quite at the f/u stage of life that Frank brags about but I am close enough to say that this book is a revelation of nothing more than Frank's justifications of his own shortcomings.
May 22, 2011
This is an amazing book by an amazing person (Frank Schaeffer). We need to study (and even make heroes of) those individuals who have the courage to change their minds. We have a ridiculous culture war raging on, both sides populated with people who could never admit to the slightest possibility they might be wrong about anything. Schaeffer is an insider from one side of the culture wars, and he describes his history, the history of the Christian Right in America, and his own "conversion."
August 15, 2011
Not terrible, but not entirely original. I sort of get the feeling that the author is coasting off of his past reputation and and past writing with this one as this reads like a somewhat recycled version of what's already in Crazy for God.
October 22, 2011
Really three and a half stars. I'm glad I'm in good company with my confussion. The conversations with mom are a riot, I laughed so hard. The end of the book gets a little preachy. But Magical Menstral Mummies is just priceless.
August 29, 2020
If you want to have a glimpse into the history of how the Republican Party got so intertwined with Christianity, this is the book to read, or at least start with. It was very eye-opening and I ended up finding quotes/passages that I wanted to refer back to later on 77 pages.
June 2, 2012
113 SEX, MOM, AMD GOD, Frank Schaeffer, Da Capo Press, Cambridge, MA, 2011
Note: If you're a "friend" on FB, there is a link to my Blog: "Bits of my Reading." It's a little better looking site and all 3,864 words are presented. Read pages 263 and 278 for sure. Then tell me what you think.
Excerpts
ix-x
Mom divided everything into Very Important Things, say, Jesus, Virginity, Japanese Flower Arrangements, Lust, See-through Black Lingerie (to be enjoyed only after marriage), and everything else, say, those things that barely registered on my mother’s To-Do List, like home-schooling me. So I’ll be capitalizing some words oddly in this book, such as Sin, God, Love, and Girls, and also words like Him when referring to God. I’m not doing this as a theological statement but as a nervous tic, a leftover from my Edith Schaeffer-shaped childhood and also to signal what Loomed Large to my mother and what still Looms Large to me.
4
. . . 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.
30
I wasted ten years or so of my life chasing “success” in Evangelical and other right-wing circles. Other than collecting material for future novels (and memoirs), I regret every moment I spent selling myths to the deluded, or I should say that I regret selling myths to myself and then passing them on to people as deluded as I was. Then I escaped, or maybe not. I’m still writing about those experiences.
33
Mom was not alone in struggling to make sure people knew that just because she believed in Jesus and was a fundamentalist (in the sense that she held to a literal six-day creation, a universal flood, and so forth) didn’t make her crazy. Believing in invisible things breeds an inferiority complex among people competing with science for hearts and minds. Many religious fundamentalists feel under siege by the secular world and harbor a deeply paranoid sense of victimhood. I think of those who turn their sense of victimhood into material and political success and their claims of persecution into strategies of achieving power as Jesus Victims. I don’t mean they are victims of Jesus, accruing power through the rhetoric of sacrifice and persecution and grasping at conspiracy theories about how the nefarious “World” and all “Those Liberals” are out to do them in. It is this Jesus Victim note of self-pity that ties together “These People,” as some smug secularists might label all conservative religious believers.
51
In reaction to the fear and loathing of Sex, women, and intimacy that resulted from the biblical teachings against premarital Sex, let along against women’s vile uncleanness, a rebellion took place. This rebellion against fear and antisexual prejudice was ushered in by the “free love” prophets-for-profit like Hugh Heffner. But what started in the 1950s and 1960s as an attempt to balance sexual fear with sanity tumbled into yet another example of dysfunctional American extremism. This happened because the practitioners of three American belief systems (that are so intense they might as well be religions) unwittingly colluded: Progressives (absolutist believers in unregulated Free Speech), conservatives (absolutist believers in unregulated Free Enterprise), and conservative Christians (absolutist believers in the uncleanness of Sex between anyone not married in a heterosexual “traditional” marriage) created a sordid monster – Porn-Gone-Nuts.
73
There is another choice: To admit that the best of any religious tradition depends on the choices its adherents make on how to live despite what their holy books “say,” not because of them. “But where would that leave me?” my former self would have asked. “I’d be adrift in an ocean of uncertainty.” Yes, and perhaps that’s the only honest place to be. Another name for uncertainty is humility. No one ever blew up a mosque, church, or abortion clinic after yelling. “I could be wrong.”
83-84
The books written by “New Atheists” like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris attack God by attacking religion. But that’s not an argument that even begins to address the question of God (or some other outside power’s meddling in the formation of the Universe, let along first causes in cosmology). The New Atheists’ arguments make sense only as attacks on religion. There’s plenty to attack. But who says religion as practiced today, let along as “revealed” in holy books, has anything to do with an actual Creator? As Vincent Bugliosi writes in his remarkable book Divinity of Doubt, “Harris (like Hitchens) seems to believe something that is so wrong it is startling that someone of his intellect wouldn’t see it immediately, that gutting religion (as Harris tries to do my his technique of decimating faith that fosters religion), does not, ipso facto, topple God.”
85
. . . by the time the writers of the New Testament were remembering forty, fifty, sixty years later what Jesus had said, they were also building a self-interested organization based on His life. They were settling disputes and splits among themselves. What better way to strengthen their arguments than to draft The Master, in 20/20 hindsight, into supporting them in various Early Church turf wars and their fights with each other. How better to win theological battles than to “quote” Jesus about the “correct” view of celibacy or how to “deal with” the Jews or how to scare the faithful into remaining faithful or how to encourage them to stay faithful in the face of Roman persecution?
86-87
Thom Stark begins his book The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide it) like this: “In the beginning was the Argument, and the Argument was with God, and the Argument was: God. God was the subject of the Argument, and the Argument was a good one. Who is God? What does God require of us?”
Stark explains, “The doctrine of biblical inerrancy dictates that the Bible, being inspired by God, is without error in everything that if affirms, historically, scientifically, and theologically.” Stark develops a strong argument against this Evangelical/fundamentalist doctrine of inerrancy. Here’s Stark’s conclusion:
The scriptures are not infallible. Jesus was not infallible, or, if he was, we have no access to his infallibility. So where is our foundation? Upon what do we build our worldview, our ethics, our politics and our morality? The answer is that there is no foundation. There is no sure ground upon which to build our institutions. And that is a good thing. That is what I call grace.
An infallible Jesus, just like a set of infallible scriptures, is ultimately just a shortcut through our moral and spiritual development. To have a book or a messenger dropped down from heaven, the likes of which is beyond the reach of all human criticism, is a dangerous shortcut. It is no wonder humans have always attempted to create these kinds of foundations. And it is a revelation of God’s character, from my perspective, that cracks have been found in each and every one of those foundations.
Maybe (if Stark is right) God feels slandered by the Bronze-Age-to-Roman-era “biography” of Him that, it turns out (judging by the insanity that makes up so much of the Bible), wasn’t an authorized biography, let alone an inspired one. It seems to me that as far as the best parts of Christianity go, traditions of beauty in art, music, and literature and the humanism expressed in the abolition of slavery movement and so forth, what might be called the good results are proof that enlightened believers have been picking and choosing all along when it comes to what they take seriously in the Bible. For instance, many Christians were abolitionists in the fight against slavery. Since the Bible, at best, cancels itself out on this subject, the clearly proslavery bits in juxtaposition to the enlightened do-unto-others bits, the Bible wasn’t the only source of the push for freedom. That enlightenment came from within the hearts of men and women who then cast around for any supporting argument they could find, including some verses taken out of the general context of the proslavery sentiment expressed in the Bible.
To reject portions of the Bible is not necessarily to reject God or even the essence of Christianity. A great deal of the Bible is contradicted by the Love that predates it and, more importantly, survives in you and me. And that Love edits the Bible for us. Call that editing the Holy Spirit, or call it a more evolved sense of ethics and human rights, but most people know what to follow and what to reject when it comes to how they live. Sacrifice for others, not sacrifice of others, is the message of the “better angels” of spiritual faith.
88
The fact that religion has time and again been awful is no more here nor there when it comes to God than the fact that humans have damaged everything we’ve touched is an argument for the liquidation of every human being. Indeed, how could religion be anything but a mess? We invented it! That doesn’t mean that the longing for meaning that drove us to invent religion isn’t a reflection of something real: a Creator Who many of us sense is there but Who is also beyond description.
I think that the best argument for God’s existence is that humans long for meaning. A corollary is that the word “beauty,” however indefinable, means something real to most people. And then there’s that question about the origin of everything, to which, I think, the only sensible answer is a resoundingly agnostic “We’ll never know.” Meanwhile science truthfully explains our evolution from single-celled organisms. But it doesn’t tell me why I know Bach’s Partita 1 en Si Mineur Double: Presto is more important than a jingle for MacDonald’s Corporation. And even if brain chemistry unravels this secret, it will reveal the how, not the why. But you and I know that when the MacDonald’s Corporation is long forgotten, chances are Bach’s music will have survived. Our longing for God (by whatever name) will also be there as one constant in a future that otherwise may not be recognizable.
100-101
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 to bully women, murder rival tribes, and steal land. (These justifications may have reflected later thinking: origin myths used as propaganda to justify political and military actions after the fact, such as the brutality the Hebrews said God made them inflict on others and/or their position as the “Chosen People.”)
Note: If you're a "friend" on FB, there is a link to my Blog: "Bits of my Reading." It's a little better looking site and all 3,864 words are presented. Read pages 263 and 278 for sure. Then tell me what you think.
Excerpts
ix-x
Mom divided everything into Very Important Things, say, Jesus, Virginity, Japanese Flower Arrangements, Lust, See-through Black Lingerie (to be enjoyed only after marriage), and everything else, say, those things that barely registered on my mother’s To-Do List, like home-schooling me. So I’ll be capitalizing some words oddly in this book, such as Sin, God, Love, and Girls, and also words like Him when referring to God. I’m not doing this as a theological statement but as a nervous tic, a leftover from my Edith Schaeffer-shaped childhood and also to signal what Loomed Large to my mother and what still Looms Large to me.
4
. . . 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.
30
I wasted ten years or so of my life chasing “success” in Evangelical and other right-wing circles. Other than collecting material for future novels (and memoirs), I regret every moment I spent selling myths to the deluded, or I should say that I regret selling myths to myself and then passing them on to people as deluded as I was. Then I escaped, or maybe not. I’m still writing about those experiences.
33
Mom was not alone in struggling to make sure people knew that just because she believed in Jesus and was a fundamentalist (in the sense that she held to a literal six-day creation, a universal flood, and so forth) didn’t make her crazy. Believing in invisible things breeds an inferiority complex among people competing with science for hearts and minds. Many religious fundamentalists feel under siege by the secular world and harbor a deeply paranoid sense of victimhood. I think of those who turn their sense of victimhood into material and political success and their claims of persecution into strategies of achieving power as Jesus Victims. I don’t mean they are victims of Jesus, accruing power through the rhetoric of sacrifice and persecution and grasping at conspiracy theories about how the nefarious “World” and all “Those Liberals” are out to do them in. It is this Jesus Victim note of self-pity that ties together “These People,” as some smug secularists might label all conservative religious believers.
51
In reaction to the fear and loathing of Sex, women, and intimacy that resulted from the biblical teachings against premarital Sex, let along against women’s vile uncleanness, a rebellion took place. This rebellion against fear and antisexual prejudice was ushered in by the “free love” prophets-for-profit like Hugh Heffner. But what started in the 1950s and 1960s as an attempt to balance sexual fear with sanity tumbled into yet another example of dysfunctional American extremism. This happened because the practitioners of three American belief systems (that are so intense they might as well be religions) unwittingly colluded: Progressives (absolutist believers in unregulated Free Speech), conservatives (absolutist believers in unregulated Free Enterprise), and conservative Christians (absolutist believers in the uncleanness of Sex between anyone not married in a heterosexual “traditional” marriage) created a sordid monster – Porn-Gone-Nuts.
73
There is another choice: To admit that the best of any religious tradition depends on the choices its adherents make on how to live despite what their holy books “say,” not because of them. “But where would that leave me?” my former self would have asked. “I’d be adrift in an ocean of uncertainty.” Yes, and perhaps that’s the only honest place to be. Another name for uncertainty is humility. No one ever blew up a mosque, church, or abortion clinic after yelling. “I could be wrong.”
83-84
The books written by “New Atheists” like Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris attack God by attacking religion. But that’s not an argument that even begins to address the question of God (or some other outside power’s meddling in the formation of the Universe, let along first causes in cosmology). The New Atheists’ arguments make sense only as attacks on religion. There’s plenty to attack. But who says religion as practiced today, let along as “revealed” in holy books, has anything to do with an actual Creator? As Vincent Bugliosi writes in his remarkable book Divinity of Doubt, “Harris (like Hitchens) seems to believe something that is so wrong it is startling that someone of his intellect wouldn’t see it immediately, that gutting religion (as Harris tries to do my his technique of decimating faith that fosters religion), does not, ipso facto, topple God.”
85
. . . by the time the writers of the New Testament were remembering forty, fifty, sixty years later what Jesus had said, they were also building a self-interested organization based on His life. They were settling disputes and splits among themselves. What better way to strengthen their arguments than to draft The Master, in 20/20 hindsight, into supporting them in various Early Church turf wars and their fights with each other. How better to win theological battles than to “quote” Jesus about the “correct” view of celibacy or how to “deal with” the Jews or how to scare the faithful into remaining faithful or how to encourage them to stay faithful in the face of Roman persecution?
86-87
Thom Stark begins his book The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong (and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide it) like this: “In the beginning was the Argument, and the Argument was with God, and the Argument was: God. God was the subject of the Argument, and the Argument was a good one. Who is God? What does God require of us?”
Stark explains, “The doctrine of biblical inerrancy dictates that the Bible, being inspired by God, is without error in everything that if affirms, historically, scientifically, and theologically.” Stark develops a strong argument against this Evangelical/fundamentalist doctrine of inerrancy. Here’s Stark’s conclusion:
The scriptures are not infallible. Jesus was not infallible, or, if he was, we have no access to his infallibility. So where is our foundation? Upon what do we build our worldview, our ethics, our politics and our morality? The answer is that there is no foundation. There is no sure ground upon which to build our institutions. And that is a good thing. That is what I call grace.
An infallible Jesus, just like a set of infallible scriptures, is ultimately just a shortcut through our moral and spiritual development. To have a book or a messenger dropped down from heaven, the likes of which is beyond the reach of all human criticism, is a dangerous shortcut. It is no wonder humans have always attempted to create these kinds of foundations. And it is a revelation of God’s character, from my perspective, that cracks have been found in each and every one of those foundations.
Maybe (if Stark is right) God feels slandered by the Bronze-Age-to-Roman-era “biography” of Him that, it turns out (judging by the insanity that makes up so much of the Bible), wasn’t an authorized biography, let alone an inspired one. It seems to me that as far as the best parts of Christianity go, traditions of beauty in art, music, and literature and the humanism expressed in the abolition of slavery movement and so forth, what might be called the good results are proof that enlightened believers have been picking and choosing all along when it comes to what they take seriously in the Bible. For instance, many Christians were abolitionists in the fight against slavery. Since the Bible, at best, cancels itself out on this subject, the clearly proslavery bits in juxtaposition to the enlightened do-unto-others bits, the Bible wasn’t the only source of the push for freedom. That enlightenment came from within the hearts of men and women who then cast around for any supporting argument they could find, including some verses taken out of the general context of the proslavery sentiment expressed in the Bible.
To reject portions of the Bible is not necessarily to reject God or even the essence of Christianity. A great deal of the Bible is contradicted by the Love that predates it and, more importantly, survives in you and me. And that Love edits the Bible for us. Call that editing the Holy Spirit, or call it a more evolved sense of ethics and human rights, but most people know what to follow and what to reject when it comes to how they live. Sacrifice for others, not sacrifice of others, is the message of the “better angels” of spiritual faith.
88
The fact that religion has time and again been awful is no more here nor there when it comes to God than the fact that humans have damaged everything we’ve touched is an argument for the liquidation of every human being. Indeed, how could religion be anything but a mess? We invented it! That doesn’t mean that the longing for meaning that drove us to invent religion isn’t a reflection of something real: a Creator Who many of us sense is there but Who is also beyond description.
I think that the best argument for God’s existence is that humans long for meaning. A corollary is that the word “beauty,” however indefinable, means something real to most people. And then there’s that question about the origin of everything, to which, I think, the only sensible answer is a resoundingly agnostic “We’ll never know.” Meanwhile science truthfully explains our evolution from single-celled organisms. But it doesn’t tell me why I know Bach’s Partita 1 en Si Mineur Double: Presto is more important than a jingle for MacDonald’s Corporation. And even if brain chemistry unravels this secret, it will reveal the how, not the why. But you and I know that when the MacDonald’s Corporation is long forgotten, chances are Bach’s music will have survived. Our longing for God (by whatever name) will also be there as one constant in a future that otherwise may not be recognizable.
100-101
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 to bully women, murder rival tribes, and steal land. (These justifications may have reflected later thinking: origin myths used as propaganda to justify political and military actions after the fact, such as the brutality the Hebrews said God made them inflict on others and/or their position as the “Chosen People.”)
June 2, 2024
SCHAEFFER CONTINUES HIS RUMINATIONS AFTER “CRAZY FOR GOD”
Frank Schaeffer (born 1952) is an author, film director, and screenwriter, who is also the son of evangelical theologian/apologist Francis Schaeffer; Frank directed Schaeffer's films 'How Should We Then Live?' and 'Whatever Happened To The Human Race??'.
He wrote in the Prologue to this 2011 book, “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… For a time I joined my Dad in pioneering the Evangelical antiabortion Religious Right movement… And I wasn’t just Dad’s sidekick; I was also Mom’s collaborator in her mission to ‘reach the world for Jesus.’ I changed my mind. I no longer ride around ‘saving’ American for God… Nevertheless… I’m determined to acknowledge the destruction I contributed to… Attempting to unravel the mystery of how my mother managed to have attracted such ‘fans’ and who she really was (and is)---a life-embracing free spirit---nagged me into writing this book… No, I don’t remember every childhood conversation word for word as written here. I have, however, faithfully re-created the content and style of the SORTS of conversations I DID actually have.”
He says, “I’ve received thousands of notes in response to my writing about the impact of religion… from people who were also raised by parents with a zealous sense of mission and who, like me, once honestly believed that every single word of the Bible was true. People who say that they believe every word of the Bible … are not necessarily 100 percent biblical literalists. They believe that everything the Bible AFFIRMS is true because it is the ‘inerrant Word of God.’ But that’s the grown-ups. From a child’s perspective … 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 every will be … 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.” (Pg. 3-4)
He observes, “An Edith Schaeffer cult (made up of mostly born-again middle-class white American women) grew up around Mom’s books after she began to be published in the late 1960s… Mom went to far as to write several best-sellers with titles like ‘What Is a Family?’ though our actual family was a model of dysfunction. However Mom was no hypocrite. She was just forgiving. The image of Schaeffer family happiness she painted in her books and talks was motivated by her genuine missionary desire to present us as ‘an example to the lost.’ And most of our family’s dysfunction was the result of my father’s Moods, or as mom put it, ‘Fran’s Temper’ and/or ‘Fran’s Many Weaknesses.’” (Pg. 15)
He recalls, “Dad did assert himself occasionally. He yelled at Mom, and once in a while he socked her on the arm or slapped her. Oddly, this abuse---I’d place it (morally speaking) somewhere between inexcusable wife-beating and a type of involuntary outburst---left Mom even more in control. Dad would grovel in abject repentance for several weeks after the delivery of a sock to her upper arm or a swift slap to her face. The rest of the time he pretty much did as instructed by my mother: preached, gave weekly lectures, and led discussions with students. Mom directed everything else, from interpreting the ‘Lord’s Will’ for our family… to raising me (endless Talks on Sex and how to be a ‘Christlike’ young man…), to running L’Abri day to day…” (Pg. 29)
He suggests, “Many religious fundamentalists feel under siege by the secular world and harbor a deeply paranoid sense of victimhood. I think of those who turn their sense of victimhood into material and political success and their claims of persecution into strategies of achieving power as Jesus Victims… they claim to be victims ‘for the sake of’ Jesus, accruing power through the rhetoric of sacrifice and persecution and grasping at conspiracy theories about how the nefarious ‘World’ and all ‘Those Liberals’ are out to do them in. It is this Jesus Victim note of self-pity that ties together ‘These People’…” (Pg. 33)
He states, “The history of theology … is the history of people desperately trying to fit the way things ACTUALLY ARE into the way their holy books SAY THEY SHOULD BE… Some people do what Mom did: spend a lot of time making excuses for The-God-Of-The-Bible. Others contrive their theology to make it seem more enlightened than it is.” (Pg. 72)
He notes, “Edith Schaeffer HERSELF was the greatest illustration of the Divine beauty of Paradox I’ve encountered. She was a fundamentalist living a double life as a lover of beauty who broke all her own judgmental rules in favor of creativity… Mom was just so un-Edith-Schaeffer-like in person! And Mom’s embrace of the contradiction … was quite an accomplishment for One Lone Brave Woman. It was as if my mother were struggling to humanize the 5,000-year-old tradition that had consumed whole races in endless war… My mother deserved better. A lifetime of reaching out to The Lost and sacrificing on their behalf imbued her with a kindly spirit that even in addled old age shone through. Her example was not lost on me. I simply chose to follow the ‘other’ Edith Schaeffer, the one whose heart was elsewhere than in the lifeless theories she paid lip-service to.” (Pg. 91)
He says of Christian Reconstruction, “In its modern American incarnation… Reconstruction was propagated by people I knew and worked with closely when I, too, was both a Jesus Victim AND a Jesus Predator claiming God’s special favor… No, the Reconstructionists are not about to take over America, the world, or even most American Evangelical institutions… [But] Anyone who wants to understand American politics had better get acquainted with the Reconstructionists… Until [Rousas] Rushdoony… most American fundamentalists (including my parents) didn’t try to apply biblical laws about capital punishment for homosexuality to the United States… By contrast, the leaders of Reconstructionism believed that Old Testament teachings … 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.” (Pg. 100-103)
Of homeschooling, he observes, “There are many secular and also religiously moderate homeschool parents doing the best they can for their children, many of whom go on to successful and happy lives and do tremendously well in college. In a climate where the public schools have been allowed to rot, with plenty of help from neglectful parents and teachers, good parents have the right to do whatever is necessary to help their children get an education, including schooling children at home… That said; what, [Mary] Pride asked, was the point of having all these children and then turning them over to public schools to be made into secular humanists and Jesus-hating pagans? The irony was that Pride preached a dogmatic, stay-at-home, follow-your-man philosophy for other women, while turning her lucrative homeschooling empire into a one-woman industry.” (Pg. 164-165)
He argues, “The politics of the antiabortion movement became about everything BUT saving babies… Far Right Republicans used abortion when they were in power to do everything BUT help women. If the Republicans had wanted to prevent abortions, they would have funded a thorough and mandatory sex education initiative from the earliest grades … and combined it with the distribution of free contraceptives… They would have legislated generous family leave for both mothers and fathers. They would have provided federally funded day care as a national priority. They would have expanded adoption services, including encouraging gay parents to adopt children… They would have raised taxes to pay for these programs… What the Republicans did instead was misuse abortion… as a polarizing issue to energize their base. But so did the Left.” (Pg. 209-210)
He explains, “I was wrong when I was an antiabortion activist. I changed my mind. Today, I am PRO-CHOICE. Today, I’m decidedly NOT PROABORTION. I think abortion must be legal because women have a need to determine their individual futures, because many women find themselves pregnant without the support of a loving community and in horrible circumstances…” (Pg. 212)
He also states, “If there is one thing all Christians should have learned by now, it’s that we—of all people---should never, ever cast aspersions on anyone else’s sex life… the worldwide Christian community … is in the morally compromised position of a violent habitual rapist criticizing a shoplifter for stealing a candy bar…” (Pg. 247-248)
This book will be loved by those who liked ‘Crazy for God,” as well as those relishing discussions of the problems of being raised by Evangelicals.
Frank Schaeffer (born 1952) is an author, film director, and screenwriter, who is also the son of evangelical theologian/apologist Francis Schaeffer; Frank directed Schaeffer's films 'How Should We Then Live?' and 'Whatever Happened To The Human Race??'.
He wrote in the Prologue to this 2011 book, “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… For a time I joined my Dad in pioneering the Evangelical antiabortion Religious Right movement… And I wasn’t just Dad’s sidekick; I was also Mom’s collaborator in her mission to ‘reach the world for Jesus.’ I changed my mind. I no longer ride around ‘saving’ American for God… Nevertheless… I’m determined to acknowledge the destruction I contributed to… Attempting to unravel the mystery of how my mother managed to have attracted such ‘fans’ and who she really was (and is)---a life-embracing free spirit---nagged me into writing this book… No, I don’t remember every childhood conversation word for word as written here. I have, however, faithfully re-created the content and style of the SORTS of conversations I DID actually have.”
He says, “I’ve received thousands of notes in response to my writing about the impact of religion… from people who were also raised by parents with a zealous sense of mission and who, like me, once honestly believed that every single word of the Bible was true. People who say that they believe every word of the Bible … are not necessarily 100 percent biblical literalists. They believe that everything the Bible AFFIRMS is true because it is the ‘inerrant Word of God.’ But that’s the grown-ups. From a child’s perspective … 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 every will be … 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.” (Pg. 3-4)
He observes, “An Edith Schaeffer cult (made up of mostly born-again middle-class white American women) grew up around Mom’s books after she began to be published in the late 1960s… Mom went to far as to write several best-sellers with titles like ‘What Is a Family?’ though our actual family was a model of dysfunction. However Mom was no hypocrite. She was just forgiving. The image of Schaeffer family happiness she painted in her books and talks was motivated by her genuine missionary desire to present us as ‘an example to the lost.’ And most of our family’s dysfunction was the result of my father’s Moods, or as mom put it, ‘Fran’s Temper’ and/or ‘Fran’s Many Weaknesses.’” (Pg. 15)
He recalls, “Dad did assert himself occasionally. He yelled at Mom, and once in a while he socked her on the arm or slapped her. Oddly, this abuse---I’d place it (morally speaking) somewhere between inexcusable wife-beating and a type of involuntary outburst---left Mom even more in control. Dad would grovel in abject repentance for several weeks after the delivery of a sock to her upper arm or a swift slap to her face. The rest of the time he pretty much did as instructed by my mother: preached, gave weekly lectures, and led discussions with students. Mom directed everything else, from interpreting the ‘Lord’s Will’ for our family… to raising me (endless Talks on Sex and how to be a ‘Christlike’ young man…), to running L’Abri day to day…” (Pg. 29)
He suggests, “Many religious fundamentalists feel under siege by the secular world and harbor a deeply paranoid sense of victimhood. I think of those who turn their sense of victimhood into material and political success and their claims of persecution into strategies of achieving power as Jesus Victims… they claim to be victims ‘for the sake of’ Jesus, accruing power through the rhetoric of sacrifice and persecution and grasping at conspiracy theories about how the nefarious ‘World’ and all ‘Those Liberals’ are out to do them in. It is this Jesus Victim note of self-pity that ties together ‘These People’…” (Pg. 33)
He states, “The history of theology … is the history of people desperately trying to fit the way things ACTUALLY ARE into the way their holy books SAY THEY SHOULD BE… Some people do what Mom did: spend a lot of time making excuses for The-God-Of-The-Bible. Others contrive their theology to make it seem more enlightened than it is.” (Pg. 72)
He notes, “Edith Schaeffer HERSELF was the greatest illustration of the Divine beauty of Paradox I’ve encountered. She was a fundamentalist living a double life as a lover of beauty who broke all her own judgmental rules in favor of creativity… Mom was just so un-Edith-Schaeffer-like in person! And Mom’s embrace of the contradiction … was quite an accomplishment for One Lone Brave Woman. It was as if my mother were struggling to humanize the 5,000-year-old tradition that had consumed whole races in endless war… My mother deserved better. A lifetime of reaching out to The Lost and sacrificing on their behalf imbued her with a kindly spirit that even in addled old age shone through. Her example was not lost on me. I simply chose to follow the ‘other’ Edith Schaeffer, the one whose heart was elsewhere than in the lifeless theories she paid lip-service to.” (Pg. 91)
He says of Christian Reconstruction, “In its modern American incarnation… Reconstruction was propagated by people I knew and worked with closely when I, too, was both a Jesus Victim AND a Jesus Predator claiming God’s special favor… No, the Reconstructionists are not about to take over America, the world, or even most American Evangelical institutions… [But] Anyone who wants to understand American politics had better get acquainted with the Reconstructionists… Until [Rousas] Rushdoony… most American fundamentalists (including my parents) didn’t try to apply biblical laws about capital punishment for homosexuality to the United States… By contrast, the leaders of Reconstructionism believed that Old Testament teachings … 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.” (Pg. 100-103)
Of homeschooling, he observes, “There are many secular and also religiously moderate homeschool parents doing the best they can for their children, many of whom go on to successful and happy lives and do tremendously well in college. In a climate where the public schools have been allowed to rot, with plenty of help from neglectful parents and teachers, good parents have the right to do whatever is necessary to help their children get an education, including schooling children at home… That said; what, [Mary] Pride asked, was the point of having all these children and then turning them over to public schools to be made into secular humanists and Jesus-hating pagans? The irony was that Pride preached a dogmatic, stay-at-home, follow-your-man philosophy for other women, while turning her lucrative homeschooling empire into a one-woman industry.” (Pg. 164-165)
He argues, “The politics of the antiabortion movement became about everything BUT saving babies… Far Right Republicans used abortion when they were in power to do everything BUT help women. If the Republicans had wanted to prevent abortions, they would have funded a thorough and mandatory sex education initiative from the earliest grades … and combined it with the distribution of free contraceptives… They would have legislated generous family leave for both mothers and fathers. They would have provided federally funded day care as a national priority. They would have expanded adoption services, including encouraging gay parents to adopt children… They would have raised taxes to pay for these programs… What the Republicans did instead was misuse abortion… as a polarizing issue to energize their base. But so did the Left.” (Pg. 209-210)
He explains, “I was wrong when I was an antiabortion activist. I changed my mind. Today, I am PRO-CHOICE. Today, I’m decidedly NOT PROABORTION. I think abortion must be legal because women have a need to determine their individual futures, because many women find themselves pregnant without the support of a loving community and in horrible circumstances…” (Pg. 212)
He also states, “If there is one thing all Christians should have learned by now, it’s that we—of all people---should never, ever cast aspersions on anyone else’s sex life… the worldwide Christian community … is in the morally compromised position of a violent habitual rapist criticizing a shoplifter for stealing a candy bar…” (Pg. 247-248)
This book will be loved by those who liked ‘Crazy for God,” as well as those relishing discussions of the problems of being raised by Evangelicals.
October 2, 2023
2.5 stars.
I only made it about 1/3 of the way through this book. What I read was reasonably interesting, and met my expectations of frank, reflective insights into life behind the public image of evangelical icon Francis Schaeffer, but the writing style was deeply off-putting and ultimately became a terminal distraction, to the point that I'm not even interested in commenting on the content. Only the style.
Frank, the big man's son and this book's author, seems not to have met a typographic tonal signal that he does not adore. He liberally Proper Nouns words he finds Significant, italicizes phrases that are meant to get your attention, hyphenates strings of words-that-are-meant-to-stand-out, "puts" one thing after another in "air quotes," particularly when he wants you to "understand" that he's being "sarcastic" but also, sometimes, for no readily "identifiable" reason, and, in the chapter which finally killed my momentum, PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY'S portions of dialogue that the CONTEXT would indicate are NOT EVEN SPOKEN LOUDLY but are simply SPOKEN WITH EMPHASIS.
I do not mind judicious use of any of these things. In fact, I appreciate them (and as a side note, in the case of A Prayer for Owen Meany, I was astonished to find I admired it). But little in the style of this book seems well-considered.
Okay, here is my end-of-review comment on content, by way of style. While I slogged through the first 70 pages, I was powerfully reminded, more than once, of processing subscription cards at a newspaper years ago. From time to time, instead of an order for the Sunday paper, I would discover that someone who was eager to share their thoughts had covered every spare inch of the sub card with handwriting. I saw a few of these, and each one had a few things in common: multidirectional text, a clear sense of urgency, a less-clear line of thought, and liberal use of capitalization, underlining, quotation marks, etc.
I could follow Mr. Schaeffer's thinking, but in other respects it shared too much DNA with those sad, stressful memories. So I leave yet another book unfinished, and I wonder for the thousandth time why modern editors are not more invested in ensuring high quality in the manuscripts they publish.
I only made it about 1/3 of the way through this book. What I read was reasonably interesting, and met my expectations of frank, reflective insights into life behind the public image of evangelical icon Francis Schaeffer, but the writing style was deeply off-putting and ultimately became a terminal distraction, to the point that I'm not even interested in commenting on the content. Only the style.
Frank, the big man's son and this book's author, seems not to have met a typographic tonal signal that he does not adore. He liberally Proper Nouns words he finds Significant, italicizes phrases that are meant to get your attention, hyphenates strings of words-that-are-meant-to-stand-out, "puts" one thing after another in "air quotes," particularly when he wants you to "understand" that he's being "sarcastic" but also, sometimes, for no readily "identifiable" reason, and, in the chapter which finally killed my momentum, PRAYER FOR OWEN MEANY'S portions of dialogue that the CONTEXT would indicate are NOT EVEN SPOKEN LOUDLY but are simply SPOKEN WITH EMPHASIS.
I do not mind judicious use of any of these things. In fact, I appreciate them (and as a side note, in the case of A Prayer for Owen Meany, I was astonished to find I admired it). But little in the style of this book seems well-considered.
Okay, here is my end-of-review comment on content, by way of style. While I slogged through the first 70 pages, I was powerfully reminded, more than once, of processing subscription cards at a newspaper years ago. From time to time, instead of an order for the Sunday paper, I would discover that someone who was eager to share their thoughts had covered every spare inch of the sub card with handwriting. I saw a few of these, and each one had a few things in common: multidirectional text, a clear sense of urgency, a less-clear line of thought, and liberal use of capitalization, underlining, quotation marks, etc.
I could follow Mr. Schaeffer's thinking, but in other respects it shared too much DNA with those sad, stressful memories. So I leave yet another book unfinished, and I wonder for the thousandth time why modern editors are not more invested in ensuring high quality in the manuscripts they publish.
August 26, 2024
I picked this up at a little free library and thought it would be interesting to see what Francis Schaeffer's son has to say on this topic.
I found this book to be profoundly sad. It is sad to see him reject everything about his Christian roots. It was sad to feel his anger towards anything that even had a hint of evangelical theology. It was sad to him pointing out many (valid) flaws in fundamentalism and then to see him paint his parent and others that he knew with such a harsh brush. Their might be a few that are deserving of the anger he had, but he lumps in many many people as "extreme right" who are most certainly not extremist. I found this book to be very unfair and not thoughtful at all. I think this subtitle was also very misleading when is said "How I learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway". There very little love of women in this book, only Frank's creepiness. There as also very little love of Jesus in this book. And there was mostly just hatred for many of those that do love Jesus (despite their flaws).
I found this book to be profoundly sad. It is sad to see him reject everything about his Christian roots. It was sad to feel his anger towards anything that even had a hint of evangelical theology. It was sad to him pointing out many (valid) flaws in fundamentalism and then to see him paint his parent and others that he knew with such a harsh brush. Their might be a few that are deserving of the anger he had, but he lumps in many many people as "extreme right" who are most certainly not extremist. I found this book to be very unfair and not thoughtful at all. I think this subtitle was also very misleading when is said "How I learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway". There very little love of women in this book, only Frank's creepiness. There as also very little love of Jesus in this book. And there was mostly just hatred for many of those that do love Jesus (despite their flaws).
June 5, 2019
I hardly know where to begin talking about this one. I think I had one eyebrow raised for the entire length of the book. It alternates between wildly funny, completely bizarre, weirdly pervy, and boomer baby stodgy. Schaeffer is really quite a character. Even after shedding his former far-right persona and becoming something like a moderate progressive, it's noticeable how comfortable he is speaking as an authority. But I want to believe that he is admirable enough to have truly written this memoir out of remorse for the ways his religious and political work, including his lies and hypocrisy, have hurt generations of women (men too), and for his desire to make amends for the sake of his granddaughters. I don't come to all the same conclusions that he does on all questions of morality and you might not either, but this is still a very worthwhile read.
August 28, 2020
Have you ever wondered what Jake Paul's book would be like if he was an exvangelical? Shock value, sex constantly on the mind because of cultural expectations for male adolescence, and storytelling that jumps around so much I thought I was on a trampoline. I'm interested in other writings by Frank Schaeffer, but I don't enjoy tell-all memoirs, even with approval of those being written about, so this wasn't for me. However, the title was very appropriate. This was very much about Frank Schaeffer's relationships with sex, his mother, and God. I'm all for keeping folks off pedestals, so I think the true story of Francis Schaeffer's life is important to know, but I could really do without hearing from their son what kind of contraception Francis and Edith Schaeffer used. It's just not worth my time.
May 6, 2020
Interesting, but a very masculine point of view. I was horrified, as a mother myself, by his hyper-sexualization as a child by a mother who cavalierly discussed her own married sex life with him at the tender age of 8 or even earlier. No surprise he was a father at 17. Too much for me!
But his life has followed a very surprising trajectory. And I did find his evolution from child of most famous evangelical parents to artist, to anti-abortion activist, to a more open-minded “spiritual but not religious” feminist and adoring grandfather rather fascinating.
But his life has followed a very surprising trajectory. And I did find his evolution from child of most famous evangelical parents to artist, to anti-abortion activist, to a more open-minded “spiritual but not religious” feminist and adoring grandfather rather fascinating.
July 31, 2022
3.5 First of all thank you Frank Schaeffer for writing this book. Thank you for articulating and giving context to some of the thinking I grew up with. Thank you for giving one more explanation for the downward conservative slide which happened in local evangelical churches in western Canada in the 80s and 90s. Thank you for the deep laughs at some of your childhood vignettes. Thank you for admitting and taking ownership of your (and your families') part in that downward slide.
An interesting book which could have been outstanding with an editor.
An interesting book which could have been outstanding with an editor.
September 3, 2019
Frank Schaeffer is incredibly open and honest in this book about his relation with his mother, the Bible and sex. Where as most people try to keep their private thoughts, actions, and struggles hidden (especially about sex), Frank puts them all out there for his readers to consider. This book is highly critical of the “Biblical God” and religious fundamentalism and perhaps rightly so. I think it is a well written book and very interesting.
October 14, 2017
Francis Schaeffer was all the rage when I was involved in the fundamentalist church in the 80s. So learning about the "behind the scenes" of his family life was fascinating. I couldn't put this book down. The damage done by fundamentalist, revisionist Christians is far reaching. And, once again, things are never as they appear when it comes to strict ideologies. People will always be human.
June 24, 2022
Right book for the right time for 4 stars.
Awkward Christian coming of age, dealing with obviously imperfect “mature” Christian family, owning up or coming to terms to past selves. This has it all.
This book is the unpacking of the uncomfortable relationship between a boy and his bad-fundamentalist mother.
Awkward Christian coming of age, dealing with obviously imperfect “mature” Christian family, owning up or coming to terms to past selves. This has it all.
This book is the unpacking of the uncomfortable relationship between a boy and his bad-fundamentalist mother.
March 5, 2018
I'm a fan of Frank Schaeffer's because, wow. It's hard to find words to describe the damage done by Evangelical dogma and yet he does so in ways that are both sobering and side-splitting. This book is needed and I am so thankful he had the guts to write it, knowing full well the vitriol he would attract from evangelicals.
This book is for you if: 1)you were raised Evangelical and want to dig deeper into the psyche of it's darker side, 2)you know an Evangelical and want to understand why they think the way they do, 3)you wonder about how/when/why politics became so polarizing in the land of the free and the home of the brave 4)you are a agnostic, atheist, jewish, Roman Catholic
Not for you if: 1) you are steeped in Evangelical doctrine and have absolute certainty of your truth. You will hate it.
This book is for you if: 1)you were raised Evangelical and want to dig deeper into the psyche of it's darker side, 2)you know an Evangelical and want to understand why they think the way they do, 3)you wonder about how/when/why politics became so polarizing in the land of the free and the home of the brave 4)you are a agnostic, atheist, jewish, Roman Catholic
Not for you if: 1) you are steeped in Evangelical doctrine and have absolute certainty of your truth. You will hate it.
June 13, 2020
Pretty interesting history of fundamentalism and its ties to the far right. Frank Schaeffer kind of has a weird obsession with describing his sexual encounters with young women though - feels a bit weird.
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