Sex, Mom, and God

by Frank Schaeffer

  When I was fifteen, I decided to have it out with both my parents. I confronted Dad about hitting Mom. On another day soon after telling Dad just what I thought of him, I confronted Mom over my memories about Noel.

  “You’re a hypocrite,” I said. “You talk to everyone about family and almost ran off with Noel!”

  Mom answered calmly. “I never lied to you,” she said. “And I didn’t run off. I was in love, though.”

  The way my mother said the words “in love” was so forlorn that all the teen hubris was knocked out of me at a stroke. I looked her in the face—I’d been staring at the floor when I made my accusation—and I saw the tears in her eyes. I started to cry, too.

  I’d wanted to cast her “sins” in her teeth in my snotty, fifteenyear-old incarnation. Instead, I rediscovered my mother and had my first grown-up conversation with her.

  “I didn’t go with him because it would have hurt you,” Mom said. “Continuity is important.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because if our memories are cut off from time and place, then they wash away. I wanted you to have a family. And it wasn’t the right thing to do.”

  “But Dad was hitting you.”

  “There’s two sides to everything.”

  “Were you sleeping with Noel?”

  “No.”

  “Did Dad think you were?”

  “No, he believed me because I was telling the truth. What hurt Fran so deeply was that he knew that I loved Noel in a way I’d never love him. Remember how Noel always would go for walks and hunt for things to bring me for my arrangements?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, Dear, your father wouldn’t have even known what to look for. Noel understood. I could have had a life with him.” Mom wiped away her tears. Then with a smile she added, “He even prayed better than poor Fran! Fran just has all those little lists of people’s names. Noel used to pray like I do, really talk to God, for hours. And he danced with me, too, in the woods once.”

  We sat in silence together for a long time.

  “You should have gone with him,” I said at last.

  “No, Dear, I should not have gone with him,” said Mom. “To destroy a family, you have to have a real reason. Fran is a good husband as far as he’s able to be, and I love him. You know that I do, in spite of everything. Also, you were too young to go through that. I love you.”

  “I know,” I said. “I love you, too.”

  Noel was the embodiment of Creativity.

  My mother’s family was the embodiment of Continuity.

  Mom chose Continuity. There was one small happy ending, besides Mom defending her children by not leaving Dad: Years later Mom told Genie that after I’d confronted Dad, he never hit her again.

  CHAPTER 10

  Godly Sexual Dysfunction, Hope, and Love

  PHOTO: Mom at age 96 during my Christmas visit in 2010

  Had I been the person I am now when I first met Genie—as well as grandfather to my beloved ones, Genie’s lover, a man who long since left his fundamentalist religion behind—I would have warned her. I love Genie, and I would have begged her to avoid that damaged young man.

  By the time I met Genie, L’Abri had evolved into a community where absurd fundamentalist theology was masked by a hippie “with-it” exterior. Rules had become lax. By 1969 we were (as I’ve mentioned) trolling for the Unsaved by using modern culture and “what’s happening now” as bait. Under that benign exterior the heart of unreconstructed fundamentalism still beat steadily, just as even after my father grew a goatee, let his hair grow, quoted Woody Allen and Bob Dylan, gave lectures on art and sermons on love, was acclaimed by an eclectic group of groupies and visited by the likes of Timothy Leary (not to mention most Evangelical leaders), my father still hit Mom—until Dad’s and my talk, that is.

  Worse, if you had pressed him, Dad (like Mom) would have said he still believed the Bible was all literally true. Thus, anyone “saved” at L’Abri who then bought into the Schaeffer package was saddled with trying to live by a book that—if taken at face value—demands a descent into madness.

  The word “artist” and the words “Jesus Victim” and “Bronze-Age Thug” seem to be contradictions. But I managed to combine them in my young self. Inside my bosom the heart of a Leviticussaturated male asshole beat out its angry, domineering rhythm. I harbored a woman-controlling mean streak that would have done Moses and/or any Saudi prince proud. But when it came to girlattracting bait, along with that new Beatles album, I had a studio full of my paintings. They were just the sort of paintings—of the naked human body—that my soon-to-be “friends” on the Religious Right would have burned.93

  A very few years later I was about to dump my painting vocation in favor of a fast-buck, fast-paced life and access to power by becoming my father’s sidekick. In that sense the contradiction within L’Abri of a “with it” art-loving commune and a bastion of fundamentalism was lived out in me. When push came to shove, I pulled my own “Franklin Graham” by veering back onto the “straight and narrow” and dumping art for Far Right activism, not to mention money.

  By then Genie was stuck. I was no longer the artist she thought she’d married. I was wearing a creepy three-piece (dreadful 1970s) suit and sometimes flying around in Jerry Falwell’s borrowed jet, raising millions of dollars from Nancy DeMoss, Rich DeVos, Howard Ahmanson, Mary Crowley, the Hunt brothers, and the other many financiers of the emerging Far Right/Religious Right. I was regularly appearing on the 700 Club with Pat Robertson, was a guest (several times) on Dobson’s Focus on the Family radio show, and was selling hundreds of thousands of copies of my Far Right screeds while also being an agent-instigator by discovering the likes of Mary Pride and unleashing their updated Bronze-Age tribal mythology on a new generation. I was a favorite of conservative “pro-life” Roman Catholics like Archbishop Fulton Sheen (of New York) and also (then) Archbishop Bernard Law of Boston. I was appearing on platforms with Law at antiabortion fund-raising events. Neither Genie nor I saw this bizarre future on the horizon in 1969.

  Genie slept with an artist and woke up married to a Religious Right nut. I’m not sure why Genie stuck it out. She says it’s because she loved me and took her wedding vows seriously.

  We’ve been married for forty years and are happy. Nevertheless, if I were an unselfish person (I’m not) and could warn Genie before she walked through that chalet door, I just might send her this letter.

  Dearest Genie,

  This is a message from the future from someone who loves you. You are about to meet your husband. Don’t!

  He—rather I, because I’m afraid this is me we’re talking about—grew up helping to hide my father’s violence against my mother. Violence seems “normal” to the young angry thug you are about to meet.

  There were two ANGRY MALES in our house, Dad and our Jewish/Christian “God.” I grew up trying to do the best I could to hide The-God-Of-The-Bible’s and Dad’s true character from myself and from their followers and help my parents convert people to believing in this “God” by pretending that our “Deity” was nicer than He is.

  You and I are “foreordained” (stick around my parents, and you’ll learn what that word means) to have three lovely babies—Jessica, Francis, and John—if you walk through the chalet Les Mélèzes door. So there’s that. But ... in a few years after we meet (by the way, I’m going to get you pregnant before we marry, so don’t you believe me when I say, “I’ll pull out”), I’ll do my best to hide the fact that I slap our daughter and pull her hair when I lose my temper just as I did my best to hide the fact that Dad hit Mom.

  No one in our Evangelical circle will think that “spanking” our children is wicked (let alone criminal) because they, too, will be following our dreadful, vengeful little God, Who “inspired” protorture child-smashing garbage such as Proverbs 13:24: “He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes (diligently).” And Proverbs 19:18: “Chasten thy son while there is h
ope, and let not thy soul spare for his crying.” Or take Proverbs 23:13: “Withhold not correction from the child: for if thou beatest him with the rod, he shall not die.”

  The “God” Who “said” these things—because we believe God “inspired” (i.e., virtually dictated) the Bible—wants us to beat our children so severely that a reasonable parent might worry that the child would die. I never even came close to doing that because, like most people, I am much nicer than the so-called God-Of-The-Bible, but that’s not saying much.

  In case you’re wondering, here’s what I was taught by example about how to treat women: I lay in my bed at night listening to Dad’s voice screaming at Mom and hoping he would keep yelling because when his voice fell silent, sometimes the next sound I heard was the thud of his fist.

  And here’s a passage (there are sickeningly more like it) from the Bible about how to “treat” women. I was raised on shit like this story from Deuteronomy (22:16–21): “The girl’s father will say to the elders, ‘I gave my daughter in marriage to this man, but he dislikes her. Now he has slandered her and said, “I did not find your daughter to be a virgin.” But here is the proof of my daughter’s virginity.’ Then her parents shall display the cloth [that the girl bled into when she lost her virginity] before the elders of the town, and the elders shall take the man and punish him. They shall fine him a hundred shekels of silver and give them to the girl’s father, because this man has given an Israelite virgin a bad name. She shall continue to be his wife; he must not divorce her as long as he lives. If, however, the charge is true and no proof of the girl’s virginity can be found, she shall be brought to the door of her father’s house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death. She has done a disgraceful thing in Israel by being promiscuous while still in her father’s house. You must purge the evil from among you.”

  After learning what sane humanity looks like from you, I’ll eventually leave the Evangelical/Jewish/Jesus Victim netherworld and slowly change for the better. I’ll even grow kinder as I decide that no matter what the Bible says about itself, it is an unreliable book and that if there is an actual God—say, one Who made loving, lovely, strong, intelligent, and forgiving (and sexy) females like you and endowed them with levels of common sense, altruism, and mercy beyond description—He, She, or It must want us to use our brains to discern barbaric lies from truth.

  If you do stick with me, it will be your sanity, your kindness, and your love that will save me. But you can do better than to undertake a remedial marriage with someone who will spend the first third or so of our marriage trying to escape the Bronze Age.

  Run, Darling!

  With All My Love,

  Frank

  Genie, too, was no stranger to The-God-Of-The-Bible’s crippling ideas. She was raised Roman Catholic in the 1950s and 1960s. And until she was sixteen, Genie was “trained” (read temporarily frozen) in parochial schools. The nuns warned Genie about her Temptress Body. They told her to use a facecloth to wash with so that “your hand never touches yourself down there.” They warned her not to use tampons, lest she defile her virginity. And boys were The Enemy.

  Though by age sixteen Genie had rejected her religion intellectually, fled Catholic school, and become a supposedly liberated San Francisco hippie princess (who took drugs, hung out at the old Fillmore West, had Sex, saw the Beatles and Rolling Stones in concert—twice), the nuns had successfully manipulated her into viewing her body as The Enemy. According to Genie, to be a good Catholic girl in those days was to “pretend you were a doll with nothing but smooth plastic between your legs.”

  So we two traveled our bumpy learning path—from angry and horny fornicating Jesus Victim and Enemy Body to happy husband and wife. While we completed growing up in each other’s arms, I gradually learned that Genie’s gratification was the most powerful aphrodisiac I could imbibe and that the ultimate means of attaining pleasure is selflessness—at least in bed. I also discovered that Mom was right: If you stick out the bad patches of life, fight to make them better, and hang on to what counts, one day you may wake up to discover that the best gift is a grandchild.

  The sexual dysfunction of the Evangelical and Roman Catholic communities that Genie and I grew up in is evident in the larger world as surely as that dysfunction was built into both Genie’s and my childhoods. The moralistic denial of healthy heterosexual and homosexual sexuality has also unhinged the Evangelical leadership as much as it long ago unhinged the Roman Catholic “celibate” popes and bishops and those body-fearing nuns who “instructed” Genie.

  The sexual dysfunction that unleashed the culture wars sprung from the heart of the Bible. Put another way: Either Jesus was oddly preoccupied with self-castration or the person who made up this deranged pro-celibacy and antimarriage story was.

  According to the author of Matthew, Jesus said, “‘And I say unto you, Whosoever shall put away his wife, except it be for fornication, and shall marry another, committeth adultery: and whoso marrieth her which is put away doth commit adultery.’ His disciples said unto him, ‘If the case of the man be so with his wife, it is not good to marry.’ But he said unto them, ‘All men cannot receive this saying, save they to whom it is given. For there are some eunuchs, which were so born from their mother’s womb: and there are some eunuchs, which were made eunuchs of men: and there be eunuchs, which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He that is able to receive it, let him receive it’” (Matthew 19:9–12).

  I get it. As someone who has argued with his Penis in a “down boy!” manner, I’ve sometimes been reduced to threatening my (close but pesky friend) with some Matthew 18:8 logic. “If your hand or your foot causes you to sin, cut it off.... It is better for you to enter [heaven] maimed ... than to have two hands or two feet and be thrown into eternal fire.”

  When delivering her Talks, Mom read the antimarriage “he that is able to receive it, let him receive it” passages in a bored voice of the kind she usually reserved for the hurried incantation of the dreary biblical genealogies. When pressed to explain just why Jesus and Paul seemed antisex and elevated celibacy to a nutty status where Jesus actually urged those “able to receive it” to castrate themselves, Mom had a way of discounting the inconvenient passages.

  “Well,” Mom would say, “given how marriage is presented in the Bible between God and Israel, Christ and the Church, why do both Jesus and Apostle Paul seem to sanction celibacy as better than marriage in First Corinthians, Matthew, and Revelation? Well, they don’t! Jesus just seems to have told the disciples when they questioned His condemnation of easy divorce laws that ‘there are eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. He who is able to receive this, let him receive it,’ but Paul, in First Corinthians, makes it clear that yes, indeed, those who aren’t able to receive his teaching on celibacy aren’t sinning when they marry to avoid burning with passion. You see, what Paul and Jesus really mean is that because some married people are more divided in their interests between serving God and other things than compared to some single men or women, maybe those easily distracted people should just stick with being missionaries and not marry. So you see that doesn’t apply to all Christians at all times! It applied only to those easily distracted Corinthians Paul was writing to. I can do a lot more than one thing at once, Dear! Being married to Fran doesn’t stop me from witnessing! Helping him is part of my ministry, not an impediment to it. Anyway, Jesus had to exaggerate sometimes, Dear, to get people’s attention.”

  Mom’s best efforts to rehabilitate The-God-Of-The-Bible’s sexual dysfunction failed. The sexual sickness that cripples The-God-Of-The-Bible is catching. Worshipping a “God” who sniffs around women’s menstrual cycles, hands virgins to warriors to be raped as a reward, worries about who ejaculates where, wants unmarried women who lose their virginity (premarriage) stoned to death, recommends castration so that men can become eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven, is the sort of “God” who winds up attracting the worst sorts of nuts to
His “cause.” And those born into that cause imbibe deeply from a well of sexual dysfunction before they make any choices of their own. They—we—are marked for life.

  Lurking in the heart of the Jewish/Christian/Muslim communities—the people of the book—is a strange take on Sex that keeps exploding into public view. It’s easy to sit in the “enlightened” West and shake our heads over Afghan tribesmen raping little boys en masse (as reported in the San Francisco Chronicle article I cited earlier), but how are we of the enlightened West doing?

  The Roman Catholic Church, as it has tried to make “eunuchs which have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake” via a celibate priesthood, has had its sexual “ethics” discredited ever since Giovanni Boccaccio called the Church’s bluff when he wrote the Decameron in the fourteenth century. Nothing has changed since. Boccaccio’s wonderfully ribald satire at the expense of the Roman Catholic Church’s gross sexual hypocrisy is as apt today as ever. And the Evangelicals find themselves in the same mess, from the sexual-scandal-mired Evangelical leadership to the nefarious enablers like the so-called Family and its C Street enclave of congressional adulterers (of which more in a moment).94

  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. When it comes to pointing the finger over sexual “sin,” the worldwide Christian community—from the halls of the Vatican and many a Greek, Russian, or Arab Orthodox bishop’s palace, to an Evangelical “home church” established in somebody’s basement two minutes ago—is in the morally compromised position of a violent habitual rapist criticizing a shoplifter for stealing a candy bar.