Sex, Mom, and God

by Frank Schaeffer

  I began successfully enough, trousers down, snow parka pulled up, mittens off (the better to fondle with), and the rest of me assuming the so-called (and Schaeffer-family-appropriate) missionary position. But all-too-brief foreplay and a frantic (and unnerving) attempt at copulation, following Actual Penetration, ended in a debacle.

  Dad always said, “Quit while you’re ahead” in reference to all manner of overlong persistence. Unfortunately, I didn’t apply this advice, as the first shock of my encounter redefined the term “she’s frigid.” I just kept going and going like some demented sexualized Energizer Bunny. And this was after what my mother euphemistically referred to as my “Little Thing” lost its joyful at-last-I’m-going-to-have- Real-Sex!-but-it’s-okay-because-this-isn’t-a-real-Girl-so-it-isn’t-fornication erection. My Little Thing also lost its ability to feel anything at all and was—to my consternation—reduced to a pitifully chafed, apparently lifeless Even Littler Thing.

  Eventually, I gave up and rocked back on my knees. Seth squatted to examine my nub close up, then stood, placed his hands on his hips, and declared, “It sort of looks like a blue acorn.”

  “It’s frozen,” I groaned.

  “And your nuts have disappeared, too,” Seth added.

  “I’ve killed it,” I moaned.

  In the upstairs bathroom of my parents’ chalet, I tremblingly dipped the remnant into Dad’s father’s (heirloom Spanish-American War memento) navy shaving mug filled with hot water. Seth watched with great interest to see “if it’ll come off when you unfreeze it.” Meanwhile, on Evangelical autopilot, I silently began to pray that God would heal me. But I was scarcely into my ponderous “Dear Heavenly Father” opening (of the formal kind reserved for the most serious prayers), when I stopped: Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea to attract more Divine attention to my situation.

  I was feeling “cut off from God’s love.” That’s what happens, Mom always said, when you are “far from the Lord’s Will.” Cut off or not, I knew that God sees, knows, and records everything we do, so it wasn’t as if I could hide. I knew that God knew—even before the Creation of the Universe—that at that precise moment in January of 1962 I’d be standing in the upstairs bathroom of Chalet Les Mélèzes in the village of Huémoz, Vaud, Switzerland with a frozen penis. Everything that happened in the universe, including who was created to be damned to Hell and who was foreordained to be of The Elect, or who would make unto himself a graven image of snow and go unto her as if “unto an harlot,” was already set in cosmic granite.

  Every crystallized cell of my blue acorn was known to God. But still, there was no point in making my defiled self even betterknown among legions of Heavenly Hosts. I didn’t think my problem was worth storming into the Throne Room and risk drawing the attentive eyes of those cherubim and seraphim to my Sin. I figured it was best to just let the four and twenty elders get on with falling at the feet of the Lord, proclaiming what He already knows, again and again and again and again: “Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honor and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created” (Revelation 4:11). No need to disrupt the praise with a plea for help that would go something like this: “Dear Heavenly Father, I just thank Thee for sending Your Son to die for me. Be that as it may, since I’ve been about nine years old I’ve wanted to try intercourse. I saw a village boy try it on a sheep, but she bit him. And anyway in the Bible it says, ‘Anyone who has sexual relations with an animal must be put to death.’ So it wasn’t sheep, Lord, just snow. So I was just wondering Lord, if You’d reach out and touchest me, O Lord, and do for my Little Thing what Thou didst for Lazarus before I have to try and figure out how to explain this Blue Acorn Situation to Mom. In Jesus’ Name I pray, Amen.”

  I knew full well that God knew what I would have prayed because He always knows what’s “on your heart,” especially if it’s Lustful. As Jesus told his followers, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Do not commit adultery,’ but I tell you that anyone who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart” (Matthew 5:28).

  Since I wasn’t married, my attempt at fornication certainly wasn’t adultery, but it was Lust. After she read that very passage (for about the hundredth time) about Lust in your heart counting as much as actually doing it, Mom said, “Some misguided wives’ give ‘permission’ when they say to their husbands, ‘Look; just don’t touch.’ But, Darling, God knows and it’s as if they did it when they lusted.” Then, shifting from her authoritative Talk For Girls tone to that overly intimate voice, Mom continued, “Which is one reason why Fran and I have sexual intercourse every single night as I’ve told you, so that he never has any reason to commit adultery—even in his heart. Though, I’m afraid, he does cast what I know are Lustful Glances when he lingers outside that awful nightclub on the Rue de Bourg in Lausanne and looks at the pictures of what they’re offering inside that worldly place.”

  Mom was a much nicer person than her God. There are many biblical regulations, about everything from beard-trimming to menstruating, of what The-God-Of-The-Bible wants us to do or not do, along with rigid laws and Severe Punishment (mostly death) for the least transgression. Mom worked diligently to recast her personal-hygiene-obsessed God in the best light. Rigid Biblebelievers would reject my mother’s way of benignly dressing up The-God-Of-The-Bible’s Word to appear more kindly and palatable, not to mention sane, than the text warrants. Mom struggled to make her “God” kindly. But it’s tough to rehabilitate the judgmental misanthropic Spirit of Divine Pettiness who commands no beard trimming, “lest the land vomit you also out when you defile it,” as The-God-Of-The-Bible says. “For whoever commits any of these abominations, the persons who commit them shall be cut off from among their people” (Leviticus 18:24).

  What’s more, The-God-Of-The-Bible doesn’t seem terribly concerned with being sensible (let alone nice) when issuing His long lists of Dos and Don’ts: Don’t clip your beard or defile yourself with menstrual blood, but Do help yourselves to slaves, and have your way with them: “You may buy male and female slaves from among the nations that are around you. You may also buy from among the strangers who sojourn with you and their clans that are with you, who have been born in your land, and they may be your property. You may bequeath them to your sons after you to inherit as a possession forever. You may make slaves of them, but over your brothers the people of Israel you shall not rule, one over another ruthlessly” (Leviticus 25:40–45).

  The only way Mom could have really let this brutish slave-trader/ inventor of genocide, “God” off the hook was to repudiate much of the Bible’s portrayal of Him. But when it came to theology, Mom was more loyal to her Bible than to any actual God who might have created galaxies and put Love in the hearts of men and women. She went with His “biographers’” version of Him rather than trusting her heart, let alone her otherwise solid common sense.

  When it came to honoring the Bible more than a God Who might have actually created the universe, Mom—like all conservative religionists hiding behind their holy books—seemed to ignore the inner witness of Beauty, Humor, Paradox, Complexity, Love, and most of all in terms of what makes us humans, memories of actual experiences. Yet the irony was that in her manner of life—rather than her official theology—Mom lived as if God were much bigger than the nasty little eccentric portrayed in the Bible.

  The “whole Bible is true,” Mom claimed, though everything in her life that was kind and decent and compassionate contradicted this platitude. Given her official fundamentalist allegiance to a book about God rather than to whatever actual God there might be, Mom couldn’t openly deny the truth of any of the Bible’s words. To her, the fault always had to be with our human “interpretation” of the Word, not with the Word itself, even if The Word painted God as barbaric and stupid.

  Though the subject of slave owning didn’t come up much in Huémoz, we at L’Abri were keenly concerned with “applying God’s Word to our lives.” Luckily, or r
ather providentially, for me, Mom wasn’t keeping all the rules. For a start she hadn’t had any of my Little Thing cut off, and as for many other rules Mom decided on a case-by-case basis which ones God had liberated her from by personally shedding His Son’s Blood instead of killing us all and/or making us keep all the pre-Jesus rules.

  Mom didn’t own slaves or withdraw to a tent and sit there once a month for seven days the way she would have if she were actually following the Bible. And she ignored the Bible (and some of the early Church Fathers’) prohibitions against women teaching, too. Nevertheless, Mom often used Bible verses she wasn’t literally following to condemn others for doing things she didn’t approve of.

  Mom would quote bits of Leviticus when putting down Roman Catholics: “And the Lord said to Moses . . . They shall not make bald patches on their heads, nor shave off the edges of their beards, nor make any cuts on their body.” Mom referred to this verse when railing against Roman Catholic monks who were tonsured (with “bald patches on their heads”) as further proof that Catholics followed “false teachings.” Leviticus 20:10 was useful on the home front: “If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.” That proved that Mom had to help Dad with his Nightly Need since adultery was still a serious Sin, and far be it from Mom to be a “stumbling block” and complicit in Dad’s Many Weaknesses.

  Mom’s selective application of Scripture to her life and to others’ lives was not usually judgmental and moralistic. More often than not, Mom was softening, mitigating, and/or just ignoring (to put it in the terms she used for Dad) God’s Many Weaknesses.

  As I’ve said, she and Dad showed more or less limitless compassion to the many gay men and women who, over the years, were made welcome at L’Abri. But the “You shall not lie with a male as with a woman” admonishment worried me. Although I had no desire to lie with a man, Seth and I used to take care of our Needs in a comradely way. Huddled in my “secret chamber” behind the hot water boiler under the chalet stairs, we’d “touch ourselves” side by side while ogling a bra-and-panty advertisement and/or Cranach’s Adam and Eve. The line between who was wanking with another boy merely for good company and who liked other boys “that way” was never clear, even when I was at boarding school in England. I’d join in “group wanks” with a cheery who-can-squirt-the-farthest abandon. I have no idea who was gay or straight, only that I was imagining matron (the very female school nurse).

  If you could prove you were thinking of a naked woman while wanking shoulder to shoulder with another male and staring at Eve, not Adam, in Cranach’s Reformation porn, would the Elders at the Heavenly City Gate have let you off with a stern warning instead of stoning you to death? Or was the act of dropping your trousers with other boys—even if you were sincerely wishing you were with a Girl, even with a small-breasted, strange-looking Cranach nude—an “abomination unto the Lord,” punishable by death, whatever your thoughts were about? Then again, since God “sees the heart,” and since Lust is just as bad as actually Doing It, surely the Girl you were thinking of when you wanked alongside boys proved to God you weren’t a homosexual, no matter whom you were with or who was holding the art book open to the “best page.”

  Drawing from experience, I can only offer my speculations about the damage Bible-believing views of sexuality can do. I think the many, many biblical exhortations about the body make for a selfloathing that drives people to take it out on others or to flip to the other extreme and head into a one-way Internet porn thicket of ever-more-degrading material while trying to find what they think they’ve somehow missed out on. Either way, as a sincere (or even a former) Bible-believer, you’re doomed to hate your own body because it tricks you into Lust. And since you hate your own body but don’t want to kill it just yet, you redirect your hatred to other people’s bodies and what they do with them.

  What also pisses you off is to stumble again and again on “nonbelievers” who seem happier than you are. You say you hate the Sin, not the Sinner. But since “Sinners” are rarely grateful for this sort of “love” and resent being judged, pretty soon you get into fights with the Sinners and start to rebuke them. Or you push for legislation like anti-gay-marriage initiatives to stop Sinners from entering into the union you believe is “only for a man and a woman,” perhaps because you’re bitter that the inerrant Word of God has come between you and your body or between you and the many other bodies you’d like to have had Sex with.

  You must “stand against all compromise”; you must hate every “deviation” because you are in a constant battle with temptation. Maybe your temptations lead you to question what you say you believe. Above all, your temptations make you wonder if you are “Saved.” So you don’t open a door to doubt; rather, you just yell all the louder to drown out the nagging thought that you may, after all, be no better than anyone else and may be just as “Lost” as the next guy. Maybe you build a career out of all that yelling and/or “legislative initiatives.” But at some point you have a choice: to listen to your reasonable doubts, follow your questions, and perhaps, as I did, embrace the inexplicable fact of Merciful Paradox, or deny the reasonable voice of doubt and redouble your efforts to “keep faith.”

  Those who fight to “defend the faith” in its fundamentalist harsh incarnation, as Evangelical “professional Christians” often do, have a special need-based interest in making sure other people live by the letter of the Bible’s “inerrant” Word. As modernity has threatened the belief system of conservative Christians, their resentment has grown into alienation. Rather than rethink their beliefs, many Christian leaders seem hell-bent on forcing the world to conform to their fears.

  If professional Christians earn their living and derive their meaning from their roles as religious leaders—not to mention enjoy their power over other people—then they have all the more motivation to deny their doubts (and their bodies and perhaps their sexual orientation) and to call for others to conform to their beliefs. But note I say “conform to their beliefs” rather than conform to their example.

  And therein is the problem: Theory and practice have diverged. Many Evangelical leaders of antigay initiatives have turned out to be closeted gay men. Many leaders in Congress harping on “family values” or state governors crusading on platforms of moral rectitude have turned out to be mired in sexual scandals. Many Roman Catholic “celibate” bishops and popes that sniff around in other people’s bedrooms also are fighting to keep the public misled about what they and/or many of their priests actually have been getting up to in their own bedrooms, including child molesting.

  There seems to have been a consistent pattern: The louder the protest against “the lack of morals,” the more likely it has been that the person doing the protesting and/or trying to make others conform to his or her beliefs was also mired in sexual struggles that, if known, would have given a lie to the protester’s moralizing. I think that is why sometimes the sons (or daughters) of some religious leaders are harsher and even more extreme in their rants against “the World” than their parents were.

  The next generation must shout down its own doubts all the more loudly since the children of religious leaders have seen firsthand that their parents had feet of clay. These children know that in fact their parents’ public image and private lives were often wildly different. For instance, having a father who hit my mother made it a little hard for me to take his book about love The Mark of the Christian—described by the publisher in the sell copy as “what a true Christian witness looks like in our needy and broken world”—terribly seriously.17

  But my flawed father was just famous in the Evangelical ghetto, not famous in the entire world. Imagine the discrepancy between evangelist Billy Graham’s semiofficial status as the American Protestant “pope” (and chaplain to presidents) and the reality of his actual human self as seen daily from the Graham children’s perspective. I happen to have become close friends with Gigi Graham when we were both in our
twenties. (We’ve since fallen out of touch.) Suffice to say that when her sister Ruth wrote to me after reading my memoir Crazy for God to say that she loved the book and that she and the other Graham children were also “sacrificial lambs,” I knew just what she meant.

  So the story of evangelist Billy Graham’s son Franklin Graham strikes scarily close to my own experiences. Long before he was worrying about where to bury his parents, I met Franklin several times while we were both coming of age as the sons of religious leaders. Our first meeting happened when we were both nine and he visited L’Abri with his whole family and stayed for church and Sunday tea. (Franklin looked as if he’d rather have been just about anywhere else.) A few years later, Franklin was poised to follow in his father’s footsteps. But just before that he (all-too-briefly) deviated from the usual nepotistic path. Rumors abounded about Franklin’s “wild living” and the rejecting of his family’s faith. When I was in my early twenties, I remember talking to Franklin’s mother and his sister Gigi about Franklin’s “period of youthful rebellion” and how sad they were that he’d “fallen so far from the Lord.” But later Franklin “repented” and then rejoined the team and took over his father’s ministry.

  Franklin’s story is typical of the preposterous nepotistic “model” of Protestant leadership, what might be called entrepreneurial ministry through the Divine Right of Succession to the Mailing List If You Can’t Find Anything Better To Do. But Franklin also represents something else: the second generation in an Evangelical empire being even harsher and more strictly fundamentalist than the first.