Sex, Mom, and God

by Frank Schaeffer

  The 1970s Evangelical antiabortion movement that Dad, Koop, and I helped create seduced the Republican Party. By the early 1980s the Republicans were laboring under the weight of a single-issue religious test for heresy: abortion. I was there—and/or Dad was—participating in various meetings with Congressman Jack Kemp, Presidents Ford, Reagan, and Bush, Sr., when the unholy marriage between the Republican Party and the Evangelical Reconstructionist-infected “pro-life” community was gradually consummated. Dad and I—as did many other Evangelical leaders like Jerry Falwell—met one on one or in groups with key members of the Republican leadership quite regularly to develop a “pro-life strategy” for rolling back Roe v. Wade. (Senator Jesse Helms named Dad as his favorite author when asked by the American Spectator magazine to name his favorite books.)

  And that strategy was simple: Republican leaders would affirm their antiabortion commitment to Evangelicals, and in turn we’d vote for them—by the tens of millions. Once Republicans controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency, “we” would reverse Roe, through a constitutional amendment and/or through the appointment of antiabortion judges to the Supreme Court or, if need be, through civil disobedience and even violence, though this was only hinted at—at first.

  When Evangelical and Republican leaders sat together, we discussed “the issue,” but we would soon move on to the practical particulars, such as “Will blue-collar Catholic voters join us now?” (They did.) Soon Evangelical leaders were helping political leaders to send their message to the “pro-life community” that they—the Republican leaders—were on board.

  For instance, I organized the 1984 publication of President Ronald Reagan’s antiabortion book with Evangelical Bible publisher Thomas Nelson. Reagan’s book had first appeared as an essay in the Human Life Review (Spring 1983). I was friends with Human Life Review founder and editor: the brilliant Roman Catholic antiabortion crusader Jim McFadden. He and I cooked up the presidential project over the phone.

  The president’s book expressed his antiabortion “views” as ghostwritten by McFadden in order to cement the Reagan “deal” with the antiabortion movement. We called the book Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation. I suggested to Reagan’s people that two Schaeffer family friends—C. Everett Koop and Malcolm Muggeridge (a famous British writer/social critic and convert from Far Left politics to rabid Far Right Roman Catholicism with whom my father once led a huge pro-life demonstration in Hyde Park, London)—provide us with afterwords to “bulk out” an otherwise too brief book, which they did within a week or two after I called them.

  Once they were “on board,” Republican leaders like Senator Jesse Helms and Congressmen Jack Kemp and Henry Hyde (to name but three whom I met with often, in Jack’s case in his home, where I stayed as a guest) worked closely with my father and me, and we (along with a lot of other religious leaders) began to deliver large blocs of voters. We even managed “our” voters for the Republican Party by incessantly reminding our followers of “the issue” through newsletters, TV, and radio broadcasts. For instance, I worked closely with James Dobson in the early days of his “Focus on the Family” radio program, and I was on his show several times. He offered my “pro-life” book A Time for Anger as a fund-raising fulfillment and distributed over 150,000 copies. The book eventually sold over half a million copies.

  No one seemed to notice (or mind) that the Republicans weren’t really doing anything about abortion other than talking about it to voters. And by the mid- to late 1980s the cause shifted: We Evangelicals paid lip-service to “stopping abortion,” but the real issue was keeping Republicans in power and keeping Evangelical leaders in the ego-stroking loop of having access to power.

  Fast-forward thirty years to the early twenty-first century: The messengers, leaders, and day-to-day “issues” changed, but the volume and tone of the antigovernment “debate” and the anger in reaction to the Obama presidency originated with the antiabortion movement. To understand where that anger came from and who first gave voice to it, consider a few prescient passages from my father’s immensely influential book (influential within the Evangelical ghetto, that is) A Christian Manifesto, which was published in 1981.

  As you read these excerpts, bear in mind what would take place in the health care “debates” over what came to be disparaged as “Obamacare” thirty years or so after my father’s book was read by hundreds of thousands of Evangelicals. Anti-health-care-reform rhetoric—“Death Panels!” “Government Takeover!” “Obama is Hitler!”—that the Far Right spewed in the policy debates of 2009 and beyond seemed to be ripped from the pages of Dad’s and my writings. Note the ominous rhetorical shadow Dad’s book cast over a benighted and divided American future, a future that produced the climate of hate that eventually spawned the murder of abortion providers such as Dr. George Tiller in Wichita in 2009.

  The “background noise” of harsh words also foreshadowed the 2011 shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson. I don’t for a moment believe that this tragedy was related to the abortion issue, let alone to Dad or to me. But irrespective of whose “fault” the killings and attempted killings were on that day, one thing is certain: The furious political climate at that time meant that no one was surprised when a deranged young man opened fire on a political leader.

  In a country awash in weapons and wallowing in the rhetoric of rebellion against an “evil” government, sporadic outbursts of murder tinged with political overtones seem as inevitable as they seem horribly “normal.” It doesn’t seem like much of a stretch to foresee a day when a “secessionist” group and/or members of some “militia”—let alone one lone individual—will use their U.S. passports, white skins, and solid-citizen standing as a cover for importing a weapon of mass destruction to “liberate” the rest of us from our federal government’s “tyranny” and/or to “punish” some city like New York, known as the U.S. “abortion capital” or San Francisco as the place that “those gays have taken over.” And the possibility of an assassination in the same vein is a never-ending threat. What we fear most from Islamist terrorists could also be unleashed on us by our very own Christian and/or Libertarian activists.

  Here’s a bit from Manifesto on how the government was “taking away” our country and turning it over to Liberals, codenamed by Dad as “this total humanistic way of thinking”:The law, and especially the courts, is the vehicle to force this total humanistic way of thinking upon the entire population.46

  And this:Simply put, the Declaration of Independence states that the people, if they find that their basic rights are being systematically attacked by the state, have a duty to try and change that government, and if they cannot do so, to abolish it.47

  Then this:There does come a time when force, even physical force, is appropriate. . . . A true Christian in Hitler’s Germany and in the occupied countries should have defied the false and counterfeit state. This brings us to a current issue that is crucial for the future of the church in the United States, the issue of abortion.... It is time we consciously realize that when any office commands what is contrary to God’s law it abrogates its authority. And our loyalty to the God who gave this law then requires that we make the appropriate response in that situation.48

  In other words, Dad’s followers were told that (1) force is a legitimate weapon to use against an evil government; (2) America was like Hitler’s Germany—because of legal abortion and of the forcing of “Humanism” on the population—and thus intrinsically evil; and (3) whatever would have been the “appropriate response” to stop Hitler was now appropriate to do here in America to stop our government, which Dad had just branded a “counterfeit state.”

  Dad’s books sailed under the radar of the major media, which weren’t paying much attention to religious books despite the powerful influence they were having on the direction of American politics. Manifesto sold more than 1 million copies in Evangelical bookstores. It also set the stage for countless acts of civil disobedience and antiabortion vandalism.
The book became the “Bible” for such activist antiabortion groups as Operation Rescue and for Far Right leaders like Dr. James Dobson (of the Focus on the Family ministry), who would (from then on) often quote from Dad’s (and my) books on air. And Manifesto was far from unique. It was just the first drop of what would become a river of Religious Right (and secular right-wing) books, radio shows, and TV programs viciously blaming “Liberals” and the U.S. government for all that was wrong in America.

  Thirty years or so after Dad was comparing America to Hitler’s Germany, Reverend Jeremiah Wright (then Senator Obama’s pastor) thundered about sin, racism, and injustice. During the 2008 election, Wright was accused of treason by the conservative media for his “anti-American” views because in a fiery sermon he’d said “God damn America.” Senator and (then) presidential candidate Obama suffered smear by association. But when my father and I had denounced America and even called for the overthrow of the U.S. government because it was “pro-abortion,” and thus “humanistic” and “counterfeit,” not to mention like Hitler’s Germany, we were invited to lunch at the White House.

  No one called us un-American. (We were white.)

  Actually, we were profoundly anti-American. Dad and I contributed to a government-is-the-enemy climate in which eventually Timothy McVeigh found it thinkable to bomb the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. We had no personal connection to McVeigh, and he’d probably never heard of us, but some of our followers did kill abortion providers.

  Dad and I both visited several of our antiabortion “troops,” as Dad called them, in various jails serving sentences for blocking access to clinics. And Paul Hill, a Reconstructionist Presbyterian minister had read Dad’s antiabortion books before Hill murdered Dr. John Britton and James Barrett (an abortion provider and his security escort) in 1994. James Kopp, who shot Dr. Barnett Slepian in 1998, had once written to Dad thanking him for his leadership. And Dad and I were close to the radical elements that started Operation Rescue, and they in turn were the breeding ground for individuals who began to break the law.

  As I said, the same sort of “discourse” we’d used to denounce abortion when calling it “murder” and to predict that euthanasia and infanticide were going to be the “next step” resurfaced with a vengeance during the Obama presidency. The idea that the government was illegitimate also exploded, this time with a personal (often race-tinged) twist directed at President Obama: “He wasn’t born here!” “He’s not a real American!” “He was born in Kenya!” “He doesn’t believe America is exceptional!” and so forth.

  Some anti-Obama agitators even seemed to be trawling for assassins. For instance, one group started selling a Psalms 109:8 anti-Obama bumper sticker that read, “Let his days be few; and let another take his office.” The underlying message was clear (at least to anyone raised in a Bible-believing home). The next verse in that Psalm reads, “Let his children be fatherless, and his wife a widow.”

  Dad and I were rewarded by the Republican leadership—admittedly before some of Dad’s fans were killing doctors but after we were spreading antigovernment and anti-American venom—for our “stand.” By the end of the 1970s the Republicans depended on agitators (or “prophetic voices”) like us to energize their rank and file.

  They still do. A multi-billion-dollar industry grew from the antiabortion movement’s roots. Its sole business became the “winding up” of white middle- and lower-middle-class undereducated (often overtly anti-higher-education) religious fundamentalists and their fellow “patriotic” secular libertarian Far Right travelers. By the early twenty-first century these “just folks” were the core of the base of the Republican Party. (William F. Buckley, call your office!) As Rupert Murdoch, Fox News, Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Robert George, and others discovered, selling perpetual anger (not to mention self-pity and a sense of outraged victimhood) to the proudly misinformed leads to fortune.

  Since my father’s death in 1984 and in spite of his work having contributed to several murders of doctors, not to mention to a troubled period of American history in which threats against our leaders became more and more common, he’s suffered no loss of admirers in top Evangelical circles. For instance, during the 2008 primary campaign, when Arkansas governor and presidential candidate (and Southern Baptist minister) Mike Huckabee was asked by Katie Couric to name the one book he’d take with him to a desert island, besides the Bible, he named Dad’s book Whatever Happened to the Human Race? a book in which Dad had compared post–Roe v. Wade America to Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. And here’s how another “respectable” Evangelical leader endorsed my father’s books. “[How Should We Then Live?] is a modern-day classic, one of Schaeffer’s books that awakened me to how biblical truth affects all of life,” writes Charles Colson.49

  To the post-Roe Right, hating the American government became the new patriotism. And, yes, other issues were involved besides Roe in goading Evangelicals and other members of the Right into a defensive crouch, but those issues—racial integration, a ban on prayer in public schools, gay rights, immigration and so on—paled in comparison to the slam-dunk blanket legalization of abortion when it came to stoking the flames of alienation.

  Abortion is still the perfect winner-take-all means for inflaming the “base” of both sides, which have a Pavlovian response to even hearing the code words “choice,” “life,” “family values,” and “abortion.” I know. I raised over $5 million to make those two antiabortion documentary film series with Dad, including the one with Dr. Koop, and to fund our nationwide series of seminars. Over 100,000 people attended the more than forty seminars we ran, and the movies were later seen by millions of people in tens of thousands of churches, not to mention the best-selling books that went with the movies.

  And here’s the part my pro-choice friends won’t like me mentioning and that I rarely see discussed in the Left’s version of the Right’s echo chambers: Pro-choice advocates were as much to blame for the start of the culture wars as the people on the antiabortion side who reacted to Roe.

  It takes two to start an all-consuming culture war. Pro-choice advocates made some mind-bogglingly dumb (and extreme) choices in the tactics they used to pursue abortion rights. Both sides missed the point: The abortion “issue” intersects with actual lives and emotions. The antiabortion side talked about abortion as if women with lives, hopes, and dreams weren’t at the heart of the question. And the pro-choice advocates seemed to forget something, too: that the “fetal tissue” they dismissed as irrelevant looked very much like the rest of us when seen in an ultrasound image, or, as my mother lamented about her lost baby, “He had all his little fingers and toes.”

  CHAPTER 7

  The Girl Who Let Me

  PHOTO: Mom pounding on her old manual typewriter in 1962

  Time travel was possible in the Swiss Alps. By mid-April the crocuses had faded, but if I wanted to revisit early spring, all I needed to do was to walk up the path above the village. Changing altitude meant I could find yellow, purple, and white crocuses. I could pick which week or month I wanted to visit and turn the clock forward or back. In the lower valleys crocus and anemones flowered early with the snowmelt. Then they disappeared, with only their leaves remaining. But as the season advanced, I could pick a large bunch of field flowers for Mom in May above our house and then pick the same kinds of flowers for her again a month later a half a mile higher up the mountain long after our village’s hay fields were cut.

  But when it came to Girls, no matter what season, they had either bloomed and were taken or they were stuck in a perpetual winter and uninterested in pollinating. And at L’Abri they were twenty and I was thirteen. I knew that Girls didn’t need what I needed—to pollinate!—and that there was no way to hurry, let alone manipulate, their seasons, no way to bridge the gap between their ages and mine, their mysterious chaste winter and my ardent spring. Unlike field flowers, Girls didn’t fit any perennial patterns that would help predict when they were supposed to bloom
. I knew nothing of their pollination prospects other than Mom’s mantra about “before” and “after” that all-important Wedding Night.

  I’d look at Girls but knew that they weren’t looking back at me—That Way. Desire seemed to be a one-way street. Women seemed maddeningly whole, whereas I was anxiously incomplete. I regarded what I wanted to do to Girls as my very own special Sinful Need. I figured that I’d have to somehow trick some Girl into letting me fulfill My Need before she figured out what was going on.

  Of course, this was if I were to pollinate before my Wedding Night. After that, according to Mom, a miracle would happen and the heretofore uninterested female whom God had picked out for me would willingly take off all her clothes any time I asked her to, and best of all, then it would be OKAY with Mom and also with God!

  “Men,” Mom said, “are notorious.” Girls who didn’t wait “fell pregnant.” Girls were victims of boys. Mom presented premarital sex as something boys did to Girls not with Girls. The import of Mom’s instructions was to beg me to curb my Desires long enough so that I wouldn’t join the ranks of “those sorts of men”—the predators—who made some poor girl “stumble.”

  So when any Girl had let me do anything to her, on some rare occasion and as if by chance, I was surprised. I assumed that she was just being absentminded. Patti (the daughter of a family of visiting missionaries) let me hold her hand when I was six and she was seven. I kissed Jennifer (the daughter of a L’Abri worker) when we were nine, but that was just a good-bye kiss on her unexpectedly proffered cheek after her birthday party. Her sister Amy was sixteen and had breasts and wore tight red-and-green plaid capri pants and form-fitting sweaters. I wanted Amy, not Jennifer!