Sex, Mom, and God

by Frank Schaeffer

  To plumb the depths of the tortured “reasoning” behind the Roman Catholic version of the Quiverfull Movement, consider the writing of Roman Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. She’s a heroine to today’s leading conservative Roman Catholics. She wrote passionately in defense of the papal prohibition of contraception:In considering an action, we need always to judge several things about ourselves. First: is the sort of act we contemplate doing something that it’s all right to do? Second: are our further or surrounding intentions all right? Third: is the spirit in which we do it all right? Contraceptive intercourse fails on the first count; and to intend such an act is not to intend a marriage act at all, whether or no we’re married. An act of ordinary intercourse in marriage at an infertile time, though, is a perfectly ordinary act of married intercourse, and it will be bad, if it is bad, only on the second or third counts.... If contraceptive intercourse is permissible, then what objection could there be after all to mutual masturbation, or copulation in vase indebito , sodomy, buggery (I should perhaps remark that I am using a legal term here—not indulging in bad language), when normal copulation is impossible or inadvisable (or in any case, according to taste)? It can’t be the mere pattern of bodily behavior in which the stimulation is procured that makes all the difference! But if such things are all right, it becomes perfectly impossible to see anything wrong with homosexual intercourse, for example.... If you are defending contraception, you will have rejected Christian tradition. ... It’s this that makes the division between straightforward fornication or adultery and the wickedness of the sins against nature and of contraceptive intercourse. Hence contraceptive intercourse within marriage is a graver offence against chastity than is straightforward fornication or adultery.”57

  Here is how Robert George lauded this insane “argument” in his gushing Anscombe obituary:In 1968, when much of the rest of the Catholic intellectual world reacted with shock and anger to Pope Paul VI’s reaffirmation of Catholic teaching regarding the immorality of contraception, the Geach-Anscombe family toasted the announcement with champagne. Her defense of the teaching in the essay “Contraception and Chastity” is an all-too-rare example of rigorous philosophical argumentation on matters of sexual ethics. Catholics who demand the liberalization of their Church’s teachings have yet to come to terms with Anscombe’s arguments.58

  Another Far Right Roman Catholic ideologue (and also an academic) even wrote a book calling on Christians, Jews, and Muslims to join together in a jihad against the secular West. In Ecumenical Jihad: Ecumenism and the Culture War a former friend of mine, Peter Kreeft (a professor of philosophy at Boston College), called for “ecumenical jihad.”59 I met with Kreeft several times in my home in the 1980s and early 1990s while he was developing his “jihadist” ideas. I even published some of his articles in my Christian Activist newspaper.

  Kreeft’s was not a plea for blowing people up, and his book was published pre-9/11. His book was based on the fact that many believers in Roman Catholicism, Evangelical Protestantism, and Islam (at least in their fundamentalist forms) rejected the sexual revolution of the 1960s. Homosexuality is out, sex education is evil, and so on. Kreeft called on all believers to unite to overthrow “secularism” in the same antisecular spirit that Robert George channeled a few years later when trying to undermine the Obama administration through his brainchild, the “Manhattan Declaration.” Kreeft called for an “alliance” of fundamentalist Protestants, Catholics, Jews, and Muslims to prosecute a culture war against what he viewed as the Western cultural elite.

  Ecumenical Jihad was dedicated to Richard John Neuhaus, the late Roman Catholic convert priest, and to Charles Colson (who later teamed up with George to author the “Manhattan Declaration”). Neuhaus and I often talked on the phone when he was about to launch his Far Right First Things journal. Neuhaus asked me to contribute articles, which I did. According to what Neuhaus told me, First Things was supposed to be the pro-life version of Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary. “To fill a gap,” as Neuhaus put it to me.

  Podhoretz, who at first was friendly with Neuhaus, told me he broke with him over Neuhaus’s “anti-American views,” as Podhoretz put it. This was just after Neuhaus had started describing the U.S. government as an illegitimate “regime.” As the Washington Post noted:In an essay he wrote for First Things, [Neuhaus] likened the legal right to abortion to state-sponsored murder under the Nazi regime. “Law, as it is presently made by the judiciary, has declared its independence from morality,” he wrote. “America is not and, please God, will never become Nazi Germany, but it is only blind hubris that denies it can happen here and, in peculiarly American ways, may be happening here.” The polemical rhetoric offended many Jewish conservatives in particular and threatened to shatter the bonds that had united them.... Father Neuhaus played a central role in forging an alliance between evangelical Protestants and Catholics and in bringing conservative Christians into the Republican conservative coalition in the 1980s and 1990s.60

  The groups Kreeft, Colson, and Neuhaus had in mind to “bring together” in an ecumenical jihad were alienated Evangelicals, Orthodox Jews, and conservative Roman Catholics, to which Kreeft added Muslims (not that any actually signed on to his program as far as I know). These groups did not share each other’s theology, but they had a deeper link: anger at the “victimhood” imposed on them by modernity.

  Kreeft and Neuhaus were calling abortion murder. Thus, the logic of their argument was that of my father’s, too: The U.S. government was enabling murder and was thus disparaged as a “regime,” even a “counterfeit state,” that needed to be overthrown. George and Colson and the others who wrote and then signed the “Manhattan Declaration” (like Kreeft before them) also called for fundamentalists to unite if need be for civil disobedience to stop the U.S. government from passing laws that did not comply with their religious “values” and/or to undermine those laws if they were enacted.

  So if the U.S. government legalized gay marriage and thus “compelled” all Americans (including church groups) to recognize gay men and women’s civil rights, the government need no longer be obeyed when those laws affected religious people who disagreed with them. The “Manhattan Declaration” called believers to “not comply.” And just as Neuhaus dismissed the U.S. government as a “regime”—and my father did the same when saying the government was a “counterfeit state”—George and his cosigners also used dismissive and demeaning language about the U.S. government.

  The “Manhattan Declaration” called laws with which its signers disagreed “edicts,” thereby conjuring up images of dictators handing down oppressive rules, rather than legitimately elected democratic bodies passing legislation. In other words, when the Right lost in the democratic process, “other means” to undermine the law were encouraged.

  Neoconservative intellectuals like Neuhaus helped set the stage for the Quiverfull and Patriarchy Movements. They gave a gloss of intellectual respectability to what was nothing more than a theocratic, Far Right wish list. “Thinkers” like Neuhaus contributed to what I’ll call the ideological background noise accompanying the rise of post-Roe demagogy.61

  Here’s how this “contribution” worked: Since the 1960s a vast religious population was seething because of the changes taking place in society. It was led by a group of self-appointed “prophetic voices.” This leadership group of pastors, authors, and commentators was made up of a mix of sincere (if deluded) believers and outright charlatans. In turn the most sincere among these leaders looked for some sort of intellectual validation of their belief system. A select group of intellectuals stepped forward to give the “old-time” religion of others some sort of fig leaf of modern respectability. My father was one “fig leaf provider” for the Evangelicals. C. S. Lewis played his part, too.

  People like Robert George have (more recently) provided the fig leaf for embattled ultraconservative Roman Catholics. In turn these fig-leaf providers revered an even smaller intellectual class: The high priests of conservative relig
ious/philosophical thought. For instance, George (as we’ve seen) honored Anscombe. She was of one of the Roman Catholic Church’s leading twentieth-century intellectuals, albeit a bizarre woman whose work seemed to plumb the depths of (literal) insanity when she hit on topics such as birth control and other Roman Catholic obsessions.

  The point is this: A few smart people allowed a lot of less smart people to feel smarter because the few smart people could be claimed as “one of ours.” Or as I’ve heard thousands of people say (something like this) over the years, “I met this guy who had all these tough questions about our faith. It was a good thing I had your dad’s books handy to give him!”

  There is an indirect but deadly connection between the “intellectual” fig-leaf providers and periodic upheavals like the loony American Right’s sometimes-violent reaction to the election of people like Barack Obama. No, your average member of some moronic gun-toting Michigan militia is not reading Francis Schaeffer. But it’s a question of legitimacy and illegitimacy. What the Religious Right, including the Religious Right’s Roman Catholic and Protestant enablers, did was contribute to a climate in which the very legitimacy of our government—was questioned.

  It was in the context of delegitimizing our government that actions by domestic terrorists like Timothy McVeigh became thinkable. In 1993 McVeigh told a reporter, “The government is continually growing bigger and more powerful and the people need to prepare to defend themselves against government control.” 62 Change a word or two and his words could have been lifted from my father’s book A Christian Manifesto, or for that matter from my A Time for Anger or, a few decades later, from statements by the so-called Tea Party.

  The Far Right intellectual enablers began by questioning abortion rights, gay rights, school prayer rulings, and so forth. What they ended up doing was to help foster a climate in which—in the eyes of a dangerous and growing (mostly white lower class undereducated gun-toting) minority—the very legitimacy of the U.S. government was called into question, sometimes in paranoid generalities, but often with ridiculous specificity: for instance, in the persistent lie that President Obama was not a citizen or was a Muslim or that the Federal Reserve and/or United Nations were somehow involved in a plot to “take away our freedoms” or that sensible gun control equaled “tyranny.”

  Not everyone was content to simply believe such lies. Some people took the next step and acted upon them. The night of December 14, 2008, Bruce Turnidge was in handcuffs and sitting next to an FBI agent in Turnidge’s farmhouse in Oregon. He was ranting about the “need” for militias and cursing the election of an African American president. Hours earlier, his son, Joshua, had been arrested for allegedly causing a fatal bomb explosion.

  “Bruce started talking about the Second Amendment and citizens’ rights to carry firearms,” said George Chamberlin, the FBI agent. “Bruce talked at length that the government should fear the people and that the people should not fear the government.”63

  According to press reports, people who knew Turnidge and his son said that they loved their guns, hated President Obama, and fantasized about starting a militia and a tent city in the woods for people who shared their radical beliefs. Prosecutors said that the Turnidges acted on that anger by planting a bomb that blew up inside a small-town bank in 2008, killing two police officers and maiming a third. Turnidge Senior regularly lectured anyone who would listen about the need for citizens to be armed in order to defend their freedom, and he had cheered the Oklahoma City federal building bombing. His son shared similar views. Prosecutor Katie Suver said both men believed the Obama administration would crack down on their rights to own guns. The attack occurred about a month after Obama was elected.64

  In February 2010, a little more than a year after Obama’s inauguration, Joseph Stack, a fifty-three-year-old software engineer, piloted a plane into an IRS building in Austin, Texas, and killed one man and injured several others. Before killing himself, Stack posted an online suicide note railing against the federal government and expressing grievances similar to those Neuhaus, Dad, and I had enumerated in our books and articles about the evils of the U.S. government, except without our “pro-life” twist. A Facebook group celebrating Stack had thousands of members sign on almost instantly after he was “martyred for our freedoms,” as one contributor called it. The site featured the Gadsden flag (the flag with the logo “Don’t Tread On Me”) and these words: “Finally an American man took a stand against our tyrannical government that no longer follows the constitution and turned its back on its founding fathers and the beliefs this country was founded on.”

  In March 2010 the so-called Hutaree Militia, a right-wing, biblically inspired fundamentalist group, was alleged to have hatched a plot to kill police officers. Members of this outfit had planned attacks on police officers as a way of acting out their hatred for the government as well as a way to launch the civil chaos “predicted” in so-called End Times biblical prophecies. The day the plotters were arrested, I checked their online homepage. Here’s what I found as their mission statement (misspellings in the original post, which has since been taken down, as has the site):As Christians we all are a part of the Souls of the Body of Christ, the one true church of Christ.... This is the belief of the Hutaree soldier, as should the belief of all followers in Christ be. We believe that one day, as prophecy says, there will be an Anti-Christ. All Christians must know this and prepare, just as Christ commanded. ... Jesus wanted us to be ready to defend ourselves using the sword and stay alive using equipment. The only thing on earth to save the testimony and those who follow it, are the members of the testimony, til the return of Christ in the clouds.... The Hutaree will one day see its enemy and meet him on the battlefield if so God wills it.... You can find the news we find in some of the places we have in the information sources section. Also you can get gear from some of the choice places we have on gear links.

  I clicked on the Hutaree’s “gear links” and found the Evangelical fish symbol on a catalog for mail-order weapons that proudly indicated that the company was run by “Bible believers.” Then I checked the Hutaree’s other links and found Evangelical organizations and other conservative groups, including Worthy Christian News, WorldNetDaily, Jack Van Impe Ministries, Real Truth Magazine , Times of Noah—Current Events and Bible Prophecy, Christian Apologetic Web site.

  Following the election of our first black president, the “politics” of the Evangelical, Jewish, Roman Catholic, and Mormon Far Right was not the politics of a loyal opposition, but rather the instigation of revolution, which was first and best expressed by Rush Limbaugh when even before President Obama took office he said, “I hope Obama fails.”65

  Ironically, at the very same time as Evangelicals like Dad, Mary Pride, and I were thrusting ourselves into bare-knuckle politics, we were also retreating to what amounted to virtual walled compounds. In other words we lashed out at “godless America” and demanded political change—say, the reintroduction of prayer into public schools—and yet also urged our followers to pull their own children out of the public schools and homeschool them.

  The rejection of public schools by Evangelical Protestants was a harbinger of virtual civil war carried on by other means. Protestants had once been the public schools’ most ardent defenders.66 For instance, in the 1840s when Roman Catholics asked for tax relief for their private schools, Protestants said no and stood against anything they thought might undermine the public schools that they believed were the backbone of moral virtue, community spirit, and egalitarian good citizenship.

  The Evangelical’s abandonment of the country they called home (while simultaneously demanding change in that society) went far beyond alternative schools or homeschooling. In the 1970s and 1980s thousands of Christian bookstores opened, countless new Evangelical radio programs flourished, and new TV stations went on the air.67 Even a “Christian Yellow Pages” (a guide to Evangelical tradesmen) was published advertising “Christ-centered plumbers,” accountants, and the like who “honor J
esus.”

  New Evangelical universities and even new law schools appeared, seemingly overnight, with a clearly defined mission to “take back” each and every profession—including law and politics—“for Christ.” For instance, Liberty University’s Law School was a dream come true for my old friend Jerry Falwell, who (when I was speaking at his school in 1983 to the entire student body for the second time) gleefully told me of his vision for Liberty’s programs: “Frank, we’re going to train a new generation of judges to change America !” This was the same Jerry Falwell who wrote in America Can Be Saved, “I hope I live to see the day when, as in the early days of our country, we won’t have any public schools.”68

  To the old-fashioned conservative mantra “Big government doesn’t work,” the newly radicalized Evangelicals (and their Roman Catholic and Mormon cobelligerents) added “The U.S. government is evil!” And the very same community—Protestant American Evangelicals—who had once been the bedrock supporters of public education, and voted for such moderate and reasonable men as President Dwight Eisenhower, became the enemies of not only the public schools but also of anything in the (nonmilitary) public sphere “run by the government.”

  As they opened new institutions (proudly outside the mainstream), the Jesus Victims doing this “reclaiming” cast themselves in the role of persecuted exiles. What they never admitted was that they were self-banished from mainstream institutions, not only because the Evangelicals’ political views on social issues conflicted with most people’s views, but also because Evangelicals (and other conservative religionists) found themselves holding the short end of the intellectual stick.