Frank Schaeffer part two: speaking out

         We sat down and wept ...

Frank Schaeffer knows that the message from the Psalms 109:8 bumper sticker is, "It's open season on President Obama." He knows that because he invented the code language that is used in right-wing un-Christianity.

The Taliban quotes the Quran, and the Religious Right quotes the Old Testament, for the same purposes: to justify hate and violence. The man who murdered Dr. Tiller, a doctor who provided women's health care services including abortion, justified himself and was justified by the hate groups on the fringe of the fringe of right-wing hate religion. Republican and Christian editors don't challenge them, perhaps because they don't dare. Their names could be next on the hit list.

Schaeffer warns us not to dismiss these people as harmless crazies--on the contrary, he says: "Rush Limbaugh's telling the truth when he says he wants [Obama] to fail. These people are ideological enough that they would rather take our whole country down and be proven right than be patriotic Americans and stand up and do the thing that every American ought to do right now, which is support the president, whether you voted for him or not."

Schaeffer also admits his role in the growing of the Religious Right: "What I can say is that there would not have been a Religious Right as it became known, including the make-up of the Republican Party, without the involvement of my dad, myself, Dr. C. Everett Koop ... and those of us who were in on all this at the very beginning.  My book discusses some of the unintended consequences. My father never would have pictured a day when his work would help lay a foundation for the anti-gay, anti-homosexual campaign being carried out by people like James Dobson and others ... Unintentionally, I think some of the activities we got involved with ... basically became part of an enormous political movement. It helped lay the foundation for that and eventually put people like George W. Bush in the White House. In fact, people like James Dobson and Jerry Falwell had never been involved with politics or anything else like that before. Dad died in 1984 before some of this happened. But even before his death, he would never have imagined the direction all this would go in. But that is what happens with unintended consequences."

Schaeffer sees a clear contrast between the politics he grew up with and those of today: "[Republicans] wanted a separation of church and state. They were not using politics to beat people over the head with a moral crusade. They were not looking to start wars for no reason. We moved from a period where the Republicans represented something you could agree or disagree with, to a period where it represents a kind of fundamentalist Christianity on one side and a view of the world, which sees everyone who is other, whether that is black, white, Arab, Muslim, a different country, gay, as the enemy."

The upshot of this transition was that Schaeffer left the whole movement, both politics and religion. "I personally came to believe that a lot of the issues that were being latched onto by the Christian Right, whether it was the gay issue or abortion or other things, were actually being used for negative political purposes. They were used to structure a power base for people who then threw their weight around. The other thing I began to understand is that in dismissing the whole culture as decadent, in dismissing the public school movement as godless, in talking about anybody who opposed them as evil, the Religious Right was only a mirror image of the New Left ... Thus, the kind of harshness you see in left and right-wing blogs today, for instance, such as its red state, blue state America, I just got sick of it. In other words, the Religious Right was as negative and anti-American as anybody I ever talked to on the Left.

"The same thing happened with the Religious Right—that is, their idea was that without fundamentalist Christian beliefs being absolutely imperative for everybody in the country, the country would go to hell in a handcart and that would be the end of everything. So negative things were always accentuated ...  By the time they tell you over and over about all the bad things happening ... I begin to get the feeling that they don’t want things to get better. This is their shtick. This is the way they raise their money. This is how they maintain their central power base."

This stunned me when I first read it. But Schaeffer has more to say. In his book, Crazy for God, he describes the Right Wing from his own years of private life with them: "The public image of the leaders of the religious right I met with so many times also contrasted with who they really were. In public, they maintained an image that was usually quite smooth. In private, they ranged from unreconstructed bigot reactionaries like Jerry Falwell, to Dr. [James] Dobson, the most power-hungry and ambitious person I have ever met, to Billy Graham, a very weird man indeed who lived an oddly sheltered life in a celebrity/ministry cocoon, to Pat Robertson, who would have had a hard time finding work in any job where hearing voices is not a requirement."

Then he addresses them directly in a letter that appeard on The Huffington Post: "You Republicans are the arsonists who burned down our national home. You combined the failed ideologies of the Religious Right, so-called free market deregulation and the Neoconservative love of war to light a fire that has consumed America. Now you have the nerve to criticize the "architect" America just hired -- President Obama -- to rebuild from the ashes. You do nothing constructive, just try to hinder the one person willing and able to fix the mess you created."

I can add nothing to that. Aside from the Huffington Post exerpt, the quotes from Schaeffer appeared in an interview that he conducted with John W. Whitehead.