“The day after Mr. Grenell was hired, Bryan Fischer, a Romney critic with the American Family Association, told nearly 1,400 followers on Twitter: “If personnel is policy, his message to the pro-family community: drop dead.” The next day, the conservative Daily Caller published an online column that summed up the anger of the Christian right, linking Mr. Grenell’s hiring to the appointment of gay judges to the New Jersey Supreme Court.”

… which brings up the context of the Romney punch-the-token-gay fiasco…

If you came to earth from another planet right now as the proverbial “visitor from Mars” and tried to figure out what most religions all seem agree on and care about most you’d conclude that it was about keeping women down and bashing gays. Call this the “ecumenism of oppression.”

From the pope slapping down American nuns for being too tolerant to the rise of the incidence of woman abuse by Islamist fundamentalists in Turkey, to Orthodox Jews in Israel spitting on young female children who are wearing dresses that are “too short” to the American Roman Catholic bishops working with far right evangelicals (like the late Chuck Colson) to redefine depriving women of access to contraception and depriving gays of rights to marry as “religious liberty” issues… one message is loud and clear: Fundamentalist religion of all kinds fears women and gays.

(By the way ever wonder how anything can be called a civil rights issue when it is about depriving someone else of their civil rights?)

The worldwide practice mostly in Islamic “conservative” countries of mutilating women by slicing off their clitoris’ so they may be “protected” from sexual pleasure, the hubris of the Roman Catholic Church that has wrapped up a fifty year period of presiding over a network of pedophiles only to make the pope that protected the institution rather than the children – John Paul II – a “saint,” the bashing of gays in the anti-gay marriage surge of activity…. none of this would be believed unless it actually happened.

It did happen. It is happening. It is politics raw and naked power politics at that masquerading as religion.

It just seems so ludicrous that religion of all things should be the leading voice to deprive people of human rights. And that the people leading the charge are the same people that have also been fighting of legal suits over decades of child abuse and other multitudes of hypocrisy only makes the situation all the more tragic.

Frederick Douglass writes in “An American Slave” (Chapter 9) a good example of everything that is wrong with relying on religion instead of on your heart. When it comes to justifying bad behavior Captain Auld reminds me of today’s Roman Catholic bishops, the evangelical anti-gay activists and the women haters in Islamic countries:
“In August, 1832, my master [Captain Auld] attended a Methodist camp-meeting held in the Bay-side, Talbot county, and there experienced religion. I indulged a faint hope that his conversion would lead him to emancipate his slaves, and that, if he did not do this, it would, at any rate, make him more kind and humane. I was disappointed in both these respects. It neither made him to be humane to his slaves, nor to emancipate them. If it had any effect on his character, it made him more cruel and hateful in all his ways; for I believe him to have been a much worse man after his conversion than before.”

If you asked the visitor from Mars who this Jesus was that these misogynists from Captain Auld to today’s bishops were “following” based on the evidence of their actions he’d conclude that Jesus must have founded an anti-woman child abuse cult to replace (or augment) the cult of racism and slavery that similar white men propagated before them. The Martian visitor might also note that these child-abusers and women haters and gay-bashers have an odd habit of telling everyone else what to do while they seem to have no ethical rules at all.

How odd it is that if you read about what the actual Jesus said and who his friends were (powerless women and outcasts) you’d conclude that he was a revolutionary in his patriarchal times and a pro-woman and pro-child leader in every instance.

Can you really picture Jesus defining religious liberty as the right to deprive women and gay men and women of their basic rights to employment, marriage equality and family planning?

Jesus healed on the Sabbath just to piss off the “bishops” of his time. He took the side of the woman adulteress against the “popes” of his day. He hung out with whores when “good men” didn’t do that and in a time when treating women as equals was as unlikely then as it would be now for conservatives to accept the fact that to be born gay or female is as normal as to be heterosexual or male and as God-blessed too. I don’t see Jesus telling Richard Grenell to shut up in order to keep the religious leaders and other bigots happy!

Between the Roman Catholic anti-contraception, anti gay marriage bishops, the Islamic fundamentalists mutilating their daughters and the American evangelicals trying to force women to have children they don’t want (and trying to force Romney to join the religious right) our visitor from Mars will fly home with the news that religion of the bishops’, pope, Islamists, and evangelicals is really a misogyny/homophobic cult. He might also report that this cult of hate and fear is also a practitioner of politics masquerading as religion.

We are Catholics who are using politics masquerading as religion to forward our agenda. We are also Americans when it suits our political purposes as laid out for us by a number of influential (mostly unknown) far right Republican Party activists we the American Bishops look to for guidance on how to remain relevant even after we presided over a worldwide pedophilia ring.

These activists who guide and manipulate us were inspired by the late Richard John Neuhaus (a convert to far right papist Catholicism who equated America with Hitler’s Germany because of legal abortion), and today we are led by Professor Robert George of Princeton University (and former John McCain advisor and anti-Obama Republican activist who accused President Obama of being in favor of infanticide) who has picked up where Neuhaus left off.

Robert George came up with something called the Manhattan Declaration that was co-authored with the late far right evangelical activist Charles Colson that called for civil disobedience against the government but more specifically against President Obama, someone Professor Gorge has been working to defeat and discredit from the time he worked for McCain.

To be far right Tea Party Catholic and American should mean not having to choose between celibacy and child molestation on the one hand and making sweeping political “moral” pronouncements written for us by Professor Robert George and other Republican Party far right evangelical-style activists on the other hand. Our allegiances to both making political statements as a means to destroy the first black American president and also to cover up a decades-long war on innocent children are distinct, but they need not be contradictory, and should instead be complementary. That is the teaching of our Catholic faith, which obliges us to work together with fellow Republican Party and Tea Party citizens for the common good of all who wish to defeat President Obama in the next election by whatever means, including making the unfounded charge of his being “against religion.”

Pope Benedict XVI recently spoke about his worry that the power of the Church in the United States to oppress women, children and gays is being sadly weakened. He worries that we’ll get kicked out of here just as the people of Ireland finally got sick of us there. He called the bishops’ right to do one thing yet say another the “most cherished of American freedoms”—and indeed it is.

Of particular concern are certain attempts being made to limit that most cherished of American freedoms: the freedom for women to be baby-making vessels following the glorious tradition of the Church that sat back and denounced condoms and thus condemned millions to death from AIDS.

Religious Liberty Under Attack—Concrete Examples, Consider the following:

HHS mandate for contraception has been met with our vigorous and united opposition. We demand that women must have plenty of children to turn over to our tender care and nurturing. In an unprecedented way, the federal government will force religious institutions to abide by the laws of the land as regards women’s rights. This is unacceptable.

Discrimination against Catholic humanitarian services

Notwithstanding years of excellent performance by the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ Migration and Refugee Services in administering contract services for human trafficking, the federal government changed its contract specifications to require us to provide or refer for contraceptive services in violation of Catholic teaching. Religious institutions should not be disqualified from a government contract based on religious belief no matter how crazy that belief is.

Religious Liberty Is More Than Freedom of Worship

Religious liberty is not only about our ability to go to Mass on Sunday or pray the Rosary at home with our dozens of children. It is also about whether we can make our contribution to the common good of the Republican Party, the Tea Party and the Koch brothers’ takeover of America via the Supreme Court without having to compromise our faith in Ayn Rand, who was crucified, raised and ascended that American corporations might be saved by us.

Without religious liberty properly understood, all Republicans will suffer, deprived of the essential contribution in education, health care, civil rights, and social services that Fox News-watching Americans make every day to keep America ignorant of science and progress.

What is at stake is whether America will continue to have a free, creative, and robust civil society where rich and connected white men rule women and minorities — or whether the state alone will determine who has rights. All far right and religious right Republicans make their contribution to our common life, and they do not need the permission of the President Obama and his death panels to have access to children to molest, women to bully and gay people to discriminate against.

So this is not just a Catholic issue. This is not a Jewish issue. This is not an Orthodox, Mormon, or Muslim issue. It is an issue that binds together every American reactionary misogynist homophobic right winger that hates our not-born-here Muslim, communist, socialist, infanticide-loving “president.”

It is a sobering thing to contemplate our government enacting an unjust law to protect women that makes us bishops subject to the law rather than to our Bronze Age mythology. In the face of an unjust law that deprives WE THE BISHPOPS of the RIGHT to deprive women, children and gay Americans of their civil liberties an accommodation is not to be sought.

We the Bishops know that by raising a possibility of civil disobedience we can grab a headline or two make religious liberty a campaign issue and thereby do our bit to get a Republican Mormon elected while holding our noses because of course not long ago we would have had him burned at the stake.

The Lord Jesus came to liberate us from the dominion of sin and so he put Us Bishops in charge of women and gay people and children. We ask nothing less than that the Constitution and laws of the United States, which recognize our right to operate an anti-democratic institution within a democracy, be respected.

Finally to our brother bishops, let us exhort each other with fraternal charity to be bold, clear, and insistent in denying that we have been part of a cover-up of crimes against children, women, minorities and gay people by warning against threats to the rights of WE BISHOPS to boss the Americans around (including those “Catholics” who no longer obey us) who work in the multiform-billion dollar institutions we control. Let us attempt to be the “conscience of the state,” to use Rev. King’s words against the first black American president.

In the aftermath of the decision on contraceptive mandates, many others who hate President Obama spoke out forcefully sensing that “religious liberty” is a good and useful smokescreen to defeat that man with.

A Fortnight for Freedom

We suggest that the fourteen days from June 21—the vigil of the Feasts of St. John Fisher and St. Thomas More and the Vigil of the Upcoming Republican National Convention—to July 4, Independence Day, be dedicated to this “fortnight for freedom to get rid of Obama by any means”—a great hymn of prayer for our country.

We invite you to join us in an urgent prayer for religious liberty by which we mean the defeat of President Obama, no matter what.

To the Christian Zionists “defending Israel” is just a handy pretext for indulging their obsession: egging on, even “helping” the fulfillment of “biblical prophecies” about the “return of Christ.” But their worst sin isn’t just embracing dumb “theology” but that they have enabled a nefarious group of losers to irreparably harm America and contribute to the needless killing of our men and women in uniform worldwide: the neoconservatives.

To the neoconservatives “defending Israel” is just a handy pretext for upholding the myth of “American exceptionalism” for profit and nationalistic “glory,” of the kind that was supposed to have gone out of fashion when hubris and stupidity got half the young male population of Europe killed in World War One.

America needlessly went to war in Iraq because neoconservative war mongers — who laugh at the “those rubes” as they think of earnest Evangelical Christian Zionists, and whose own sons and daughters seem notably absent from our armed services — used the religious passion and dedication of conservative Evangelicals to provide political means and cover for the neoconservatives’ commitment to America’s military dominance of the world. In other words the Evangelicals provided the votes to put foolish war mongers like George W Bush in power.

With “friends” like the Christian Zionists and the neoconservatives Israel, America, our men and women in uniform, the Palestinians and the rest of humanity need no enemies. This is made poignantly clear by a new film, With God On Our Side.

With God On Our Side is the most powerful, humane and compassionate documentary exposé of the Christian Zionist movement, and the impact of their ideology on the lives they have touched (and ruined), ever made. It is well crafted, subtle and fair. And — notable in the “when hell freezes over” department — it was directed and produced by… an American Evangelical.

Porter Speakman Jr.(director and producer) was raised by an Evangelical minister. Speakman grew up in a Charlotte, North Carolina in an evangelical (Pentecostal) home. These days he attends a small conservative Anglican church where he lives in Colorado Springs, “the Evangelical capitol of the world,” as some wags call the blighted town where James Dobson runs his Evangelical “Focus On The Family” empire.

The film traces Speakman’s change of heart from Christian Zionist to moderate peace maker. Speakman’s fictional alter ego — the young actor who narrates the movie — recreates Speakman’s ethical, spiritual and political journey. His dramatized journey links the interviews and historical material that provide the facts which correct the absurd lies told by the Christian Zionists not to mention their apocalyptic fantasies.

I understand where Speakman is coming from. I too look at these issues from an inside perspective. My late father, Francis Schaeffer, was a key Evangelical founder and leader of the American Religious Right. I grew up in a home where the “return of the Jews to Israel” was seen as “proof” of “God fulfilling prophecy” in order to expedite the return of Christ. I changed my mind and I changed my politics. I explain why I quit the evangelical movement in my book CRAZY FOR GOD–How I Grew Up As One Of The Elect, Helped Found The Religious Right, And Lived To Take All (Or Almost All) Of It Back. I no longer believe that any “prophecy” is being fulfilled in Israel or anywhere else. I don’t believe anyone is “chosen.” If there is a God then God either loves all people or none.

With God On Our Side is a pointed contradiction of most American Evangelicals who still believe that to “be a Christian” means that you must give your full support to the extremist elements in the State of Israel. They believe that God loves some people lots more than others. In fact the logic of their actions points to their hatred of the Palestinians, even hatred of Christian Palestinians, let alone of “those Muslims.”

For instance John Hagee, mega church pastor and founder of Christians United for Israel has said: “For twenty five almost twenty six years now, I have been pounding the Evangelical community over television. The Bible is a very pro-Israel book. If a Christian admits ‘I believe the Bible’, I can make him a pro-Israel supporter or they will have to denounce their faith. So I have Christians over a barrel you might say.”

Few within the Christian Evangelical community have dared to publicly question Haggee’s type of approach. Speakman’s film presents an authentically Christian and Evangelical alternative perspective to the warmonger Far Right’s views. As such this film is literally the most important document of its kind — because it was made by an insider. It is the key to understanding why Evangelicals have become the permanent party of war in the name of “helping Israel.”

Note: If we go to war with Iran you’ll know why after watching this film. Hint: it won’t be to protect American interests.

With God On Our Side does more than just present another Evangelical perspective — it presents an opportunity for Christians of all denominations as well as Jews, Muslims, atheists and agnostics — whomever — to engage for peace as vigorously as the Christian Zionists root for war.

Speakman allows everyone he interviews to express themselves, share what they believe and then he responds with story, facts and context. With God On Our Side contains interviews with the leading Christian Zionists including John Hagee and Malcolm Hedding (of the so-called International Christian Embassy Jerusalem).

The film shows that one of the problems with the Christian Zionist rhetoric is it is never put into context. Hagee and his warmongering ilk say whatever they want and get an “Amen” — and a check — from those who believe the same. But when you show the implications of their beliefs and actions, it becomes clear that this is not the way of Jesus.

Those like Hagee and Hedding are deeply disconnected from the pain and suffering amongst the Palestinian people and they abuse the Bible to justify such an approach with blatant disregard for the Bible’s core teaching for both Jews and Christians — love of neighbor.

The Christian Zionists are also deeply disconnected from the American military family that, for generations now, has been the spear point not of American foreign policy but of Evangelical fantasies about making the world “safe” for the return of Christ by “helping” along “biblical prophecy” by “standing up for Israel.” This so-called standing up has mired America in perpetual war. And as if that’s not enough their very raison d’être is an insult to any actual God (if there is such a thing). I mean how could God be stupider than his frail human creatures? And what could be stupider than tying land acquisition to spirituality, as if the God Of The Universe is addicted to enforcing borders established by British colonialists and/or some rather nasty genocidal warring Bronze Age tribes?!

With God On Our Side soberly and quietly challenges the thought that God is only “with” one ethnic or religious group. When I interviewed Speakman for this article he said, “When you think God is on your side everything is justified. Radical Muslims justify suicide bombings, Radical Jews justify ethnic cleansing and radical Christians justify modern-day crusades.”

Speakman has toured the US (mostly in churches) twice with the movie — quite incredibly mostly ignored by the mainstream media so far — and is now in the UK and Ireland to answer his (often insanely hostile Evangelical) critics. “What we are seeing is that there are many people who are disturbed that they have not heard this side of the story before,” says Speakman. “What is encouraging is that many people who watch our movie then want to learn more and get involved to make a positive change, for both Palestinians and Jews.”

After watching With God On Our Side I have a renewed hope that peace in Palestine and Israel is possible. This film can help that happen by signaling the beginning of the end of the largely unchallenged influence of Christian Zionism.

Order the DVD at a big discount HERE

Frank Schaeffer is a writer and author of Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

In 1947 my mother and father moved to Europe. They were American Protestant, Reformed, Calvinist missionaries. I was thus part of an experiment in radical Christian living “by faith alone” in the commune of L’abri in Switzerland where I grew up.

I’ve been exploring this childhood in my semi-biographical novels of the Calvin Becker Trilogy—Portofino, Zermatt and Saving Grandma. I guess that they are what the Times of London called them, “Cross-cultural comedies” and “coming of age stories.” But perhaps what they are really about is what children face in households where their families are dedicated to some cause, be it fundamentalist Christianity, or left wing messianic politics. Even as children we find ways to challenge the orthodoxy that surrounds us…

Other boys might have been worrying about baseball; I was worrying about “discerning God’s will for my life.” Ours was a life of self-examining spiritual intensity.

In 1954 I got polio. I was two-years-old and fortunate that the doctor Mom took me to didn’t kill me. This “polio specialist” talked Mom into allowing him to replace some of my spinal fluid with a “special serum” he made from tapping the spinal fluid of chimpanzees.

Years later Mom admitted she knew that this sounded crazy but she prayed for guidance anyway. Apparently God told her to proceed. They administered one “treatment.”

When I told this story to Dr. Koop, a friend who was about to be appointed by President Reagan as Surgeon General, he said that you couldn’t design a better method to murder a child.

Teasing Mom was one of my favorite childhood pastimes. On any given night, say when I was ten, Mom would be about to close my bedroom door, having tucked me in and turned out the light. I didn’t want to go to sleep. It was time to challenge the received wisdom and stay up a bit longer.

“Mom?” I’d ask.

“Yes dear?” Mom answered opening the door just wide enough to pop her head back into the room.

“Mom, if monkey serum cured me then maybe it proves we really are evolved from monkeys.”

“Don’t be ridiculous dear.”

“But would lizard blood have worked?”

“It wasn’t blood dear and you’re just trying to tease me.”

“I’m not, Mom. I’ve been thinking that maybe this proves the atheists are right.”

“I hope you’re joking,” said Mom opening the door a little wider.

“No, I really do think that maybe we should change what we believe because it looks like my treatment proves evolution.”

Mom stepped resolutely back into the room and turned on the light. I struggled to keep a straight face. Mom gave me a look and sighed.

“You might be joking and you might think this is funny but you are coming awfully close to joking about things we never joke about.”

“Monkeys?”

“You know perfectly well what I mean!” Mom snapped. “We don’t joke about the things of the Lord! Now goodnight dear!”

Mom flicked off the light, turned and closed the door.

“I think Dad should change what he teaches about creation!”

The door opened. Mom was standing there with her hands on her hips.

“Now you really are being absurd dear!”

“No I’m not. Dad says that Christianity is so true that if someone, anyone, can really show it isn’t true or show the Bible is wrong about anything that he’ll give up his faith! He says we must have absolute confidence in the Scriptures!”

“Well, the Bible is true and you know that!”

“But I have monkey blood in me so I’ve become sort of a missing link!”

Mom shut the door. I heard a muffled laugh.

“I evolved!” I shouted triumphantly.

“You DID NOT!” Mom called back from halfway down the stairs. “Now that is quite enough! Go to sleep! You have crossed the line and are perniciously close to taking the Lord’s name in vain!”

“I didn’t say Jesus has monkey blood!”

I heard the rush of her steps on the stairs and the door flew open. Mom’s face was flushed.

“That’s IT! One more word and I’m getting your father! And you know that will put him in a MOOD! So don’t you dare make me!”

**********

What is strange is that Portofino, Zermatt and Saving Grandma—about growing up in a Christian fundamentalist mission—have found so many readers who don’t share my evangelical background. Yet they seem to powerfully relate.

The novels are in nine languages. I receive passionate letters from Israelis raised on kibbutzim, from the daughters of feminist leaders, from children of Japanese political figures and others. Of course many evangelicals, Roman Catholics and others raised in a myriad of intensely religious households also write.

The letter-writers share something. It isn’t what the family “theology” was about but the sense of being of raised as the “anointed” then discovering that we’re all just frail humans after all.

Kids raised by, say, zealous pacifist mothers or Roman Catholic or Zionist true-believers understand the longing to allow the ordinary good things of life to overrule “theology” and “ideology.” It seems we don’t want to be overly “chosen.” And questions aren’t bad. In fact uncertainties are comforting.

I express this longing for a shared non-exclusive human community in Portofino through the words of my eleven-year-old protagonist. Calvin Becker explains why he lies about his father’s missionary work and tells the people he meets in Portofino Italy, while on vacation, that his dad is a teacher:

“Some kids I met told lies to be special. I told lies to be normal.”

Don’t we all.

When I first learned of the news I went to the Hutaree Militia homepage and was struck by the fact that their site included links to a number of evangelical “End Times” sites like that of the Jack Van Impe ministries.

Such products as Left Behind wall paper, screen savers, children’s books, and video games have become part of the ubiquitous American background noise. Less innocuous symptoms include people stocking up on assault rifles and ammunition, adopting “Christ-centered” home school curricula, fearing higher education, embracing rumor as fact, and learning to love hatred for the “other,” as exemplified by a revived anti-immigrant racism, the murder of doctors who do abortions, and even a killing in the Holocaust Museum. And now we have a cult/militia dedicated to the same idea.

Here is what’s on the Hutaree Militia homepage:

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. Luke 22:35-37…This clearly states the reason for the training and preparation of the Hutaree.

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. We will reach out to those who are yet blind in the last days of the kingdoms of men and bring them to life in Christ. Daniel 11:32-35, “Those who do wickedly against the covenant he shall corrupt with flattery; but the people who know their God shall be strong, and carry out great exploits. 33, “And those of the people who understand shall instruct many; yet for many days they shall fall by sword and flame, by captivity and plundering. 34, “Now when they fall, they shall be aided with a little help; but many shall join them by intrigue. 35 “And some of those of understanding shall fall, to refine them, purify them, and make them white, until the time of the end; because it is still for the appointed time.”

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…

No, I am not blaming Jenkins and LaHaye’s product line for the plot to murder cops or any other evil intent or result. What I am saying is that feeding the paranoid delusions of people on the fringe of the fringe contributes to a dangerous climate that may provoke violence in a few individuals.

A time-out for disclosure is in order.

I knew Jerry Jenkins quite well many years ago, and we worked on a baseball book project together, with me trying — and failing — to get his book made into a movie. I also have known Tim LaHaye for years, and some thirty years ago we shared the platform at several fundamentalist far right events. I’m betting that they mean well. It seems to me that they also have no idea what they have helped unleash. You can be very decent and very blind.

That said, the evangelical/fundamentalists — and hence, from the early 1980s until the election of President Obama in 2008, the Religious Right as it informed U.S. policy through the then dominant Republican Party — are in the grip of an apocalyptic Rapture cult centered on revenge and vindication. This End Times death wish is built on a literalist interpretation of the Book of Revelation.

Given that Revelation is now being hyped as the literal — even desired — roadmap to Armageddon, it’s worth pausing to note that it’s nothing more than a bizarre pastoral letter that was addressed to seven specific churches in Asia at the end of the first century by someone (maybe John or maybe not) who appears to have been far from well when he wrote it. In any case, the letter was not intended for use outside of its liturgical context, not to mention that it reads like Jesus on acid.

The Left Behind series is really just recycled evangelical/fundamentalist profit taking from scraps of “prophecy” left over from an earlier commercial effort to mine the vein of fearsome End Times gold. A book called The Late Great Planet Earth was the 1970s incarnation of this nonsense. It was written by Hal Lindsey, a “writer” who dropped by my parents’ ministry several times.

Lindsey’s The Late Great Planet Earth interpreted Revelation for a generation of paranoid evangelicals who were terrified of the Soviet Union and communism and were convinced that the existence of the modern State of Israel was the sign that Jesus was on the way in our lifetimes, as Lindsey claimed.

After everything predicted in the book came to nothing, Lindsey rewrote and “updated” his “interpretations” in many sequels.

According to Jenkins and LaHaye, who have taken over the Hal Lindsey franchise of apocalypse-for-fun-and-profit and expanded it into a vast industry, the “chosen” will soon be airlifted to safety. The focus on the “signs” leading up to this hoped-for aeronautical excursion is understandably no longer the defunct U.S.S.R. but the ripped-from-the-headlines gift that keeps on giving: the Middle East. Check out the accused cop killer’s website and you’ll find a preoccupation with the Middle East.

The key to understanding the popularity of this series (and the whole host of other End Times “ministries” from the ever weirder Jack-the-Rapture-is-coming!-Van-Impe to the smoother but no less bizarre pages of Christianity Today magazine) isn’t some new or sudden interest in prophecy, but the deepening inferiority complex suffered by the evangelical/fundamentalist community.

The words left behind are ironically what the books are about, but not in the way their authors intended. The evangelical/fundamentalists, from their crudest egocentric celebrities to their “intellectuals” touring college campuses trying to make evangelicalism respectable, have been left behind by modernity. They won’t change their literalistic, anti-science, anti-education, anti-everything superstitions, so now they nurse a deep grievance against “the world.” This has led to a profound fear of the “other.”

Jenkins and LaHaye provide the ultimate revenge fantasy for the culturally left behind against the “elite.” They do theologically what Sarah Palin does politically: divide the world and America into “Them” and Us.”

The Left Behind franchise holds out hope for the self-disenfranchised that at last everyone will know “we” were right and “they” were wrong. They’ll know because Spaceship Jesus will come back and whisk us away, leaving everyone else to ponder just how very lost they are because they refused to say the words, “I accept Jesus as my personal savior” and join our side while there was still time! Even better: Jesus will kill all those smart-ass, Democrat-voting, overeducated people who have been mocking us!

All the folks in Michigan did was decide to start the killing a little early.

Knowingly or unknowingly, Jenkins and LaHaye cashed in on years of evangelical/fundamentalists’ imagined victim-hood — something that is now key to understanding the Tea Party movement.

I say imagined, because the born-agains had one of their very own, George W. Bush, in the White House for eight long, ruinous years and also dominated American politics for the better part of thirty years before that. Nevertheless, their sense of being a victimized minority is still very real — and very marketable. Whether they were winning politically or not, they nurtured a mythology of persecution by the “other.” Evangelical/fundamentalists believed that even though they were winning, somehow they had actually lost.

Most of that sense of lost battles is related to the so-called culture wars issues in which evangelical/fundamentalists did not fare so well, from the legalization of abortion to gay rights. But rather than admitting that they were often losing the arguments, or had come across as so mean (or plain dumb) that few outsiders wanted to be like them, they blamed everyone else, from the courts to organizations such as Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, the New York Times, and the “left-wing media.” Just about any scapegoat would do to deny or disguise the simple fact that fewer Americans wanted to follow the evangelical/fundamentalist Church Ladies into their gloomy cave (and/or the never-never land of the Rapture) and park their brains there.

I used to be part of the self-pitying, whining, evangelical/fundamentalist chorus.

I remember going on the Today Show with host Jane Pauley back in the late 1970s (or early 1980s). I debated with the head of the American Library Association about my claim that our evangelical/fundamentalist books weren’t getting a fair shake from the “cultural elites.” We Schaeffers were selling millions of books, but the New York Times never reviewed them. I made the point that we were being ignored by the “media elite,” which was somewhat ironic, given that I had been invited to appear on Today to make that claim.

I dropped out of the evangelical/fundamentalist subculture soon after that Today appearance (years later I was back on Today in my secular writer incarnation, being interviewed about a book of mine on the military/civilian divide, but I decided not to mention that I’d been on the show about thirty years before in what seemed like either another lifetime or an out-of-body experience.

Others carried on where I left off, pushing the victimhood mythology to the next generation of evangelical/fundamentalists, and they have cultivated a following among the terminally aggrieved based on ceaselessly warning them about “the world.”

A host of evangelical/fundamentalist Cassandras tour college campuses reinforcing their followers’ perennial chip-on-the-shoulder attitude by telling fearful evangelical/fundamentalist students to hold fast against the secular onslaught.

Sometimes right-wing paranoia takes an ugly twist. A website maintained by James Von Brunn, an avowed racist and anti-Semite well known to the netherworld of white supremacy — and the assassin who killed a security guard at the Holocaust Museum in June of 2009 — said that Brunn tried to carry out a “citizen’s arrest” in 1981 on the Federal Reserve Board of Governors, whom he accused of “treason.” When he was arrested outside the room where the board was meeting, he was carrying a sawed-off shotgun, a revolver, and a knife. Police said he planned to take members of the Fed hostage.

“Mainstream” (in other words, slightly less nutty and less violent) religious-right Republicans have been saying the same thing as Brunn about the Fed for years, particularly the so-called “dominionists” who believe it’s their job to reestablish God’s dominion on earth. They preach Old Testament-style vengeance and loony gold-standard “economics” from many “respectable” pulpits. They also hate America (as it is), want a revolution in the name of God, and espouse “pro-life” beliefs, anti-gay hate, racism, and far-right Republican politics. They take the Republican anti-government propaganda to the next step and say that even paying taxes is “unconstitutional.” I know them well.

I knew the founders of the dominionist movement — people like the late Reverend Rousas John Rushdoony, the father of “Christian Reconstructionism” and the modern evangelical/fundamentalist home school movement. Rushdoony (whom I met and talked with several times) believed that interracial marriage, which he referred to as “unequal yoking,” should be made illegal. He also opposed “enforced integration,” referred to Southern slavery as “benevolent,” and said that “some people are by nature slaves.”

Many evangelical leaders deny holding Reconstructionist beliefs, but Beverly and Tim LaHaye (of Concerned Women for America and the co-author of the novels we’re talking about in this chapter), Donald Wildmon (of the American Family Association), and the late D. James Kennedy (of Coral Ridge Ministries and a friend of mine before I left the movement) served alongside Rushdoony on the secretive Coalition for Revival, a group formed in 1981 to “reclaim America for Christ.” I went to some of the early meetings.

Many evangelical/fundamentalists can’t get enough of this garbage.

They’ve been sucking it up since the early 1970s, and now, in the Left Behind books, the message has gone viral.

The expanding Left Behind entertainment empire also feeds the dangerous delusions of Christian Zionists, who are convinced that the world is heading to a final Battle of Armageddon and who see this as a good thing! Christian Zionists, led by many “respectable” mega-pastors — including Reverend John Hagee — believe that war in the Middle East is God’s will. In his book Jerusalem Countdown: A Warning to the World, Hagee maintains that Russia and the Arabs will invade Israel and then will be destroyed by God. This will cause the Antichrist — the head of the European Union — to stir up a confrontation over Israel between China and the West.

Perhaps, in the era of Obama, Hagee will do a fast rewrite and say that President Obama is the Antichrist, because the same folks who are into Christian Zionism are also into the far, far loony right of the Republican Party represented by oddities like Sarah Palin. These are the same people who insist that President Obama is a “secret Muslim,” “not an American,” and/or “a communist,” “more European than American,” or whichever one of those contradictory things is worse — not like us anyway, that’s for sure.

Conclusion:

The truth is that the “crazies” in Michigan are just acting on what millions of evangelicals say they believe and I don’t only mean about the so called End Times. I also mean that these days the Tea Party movement is spouting a rhetoric of doom and extremism that holds that the American government and even the nation is no longer legitimate. Add in the theology and you have a self-fulfilling “prophecy” of Armageddon. Sadly we have not seen the last of such actions.

I get lots of email and answer almost all of it (crank letters aside). Once in a while I get a letter I’d like to share. In this case here’s a letter that I think might help all of us remember that stereotypes about religion — Evangelical or otherwise — don’t apply to a lot of people. I found this humbling and instructive as well as interesting. And no, I’m not including this here just because this writer had a few nice things to say about my books.

Best, Frank

Enjoy.

Sent: Sun, Jan 3, 2010 2:33 am
Subject: Thank you!

Dear Frank,

May I introduce myself and say how much I appreciate what you’ve been saying in recent appearances, in your Huffington post pieces and various TV interviews (D.L. Hughley, Rachel Maddow, GritTV, Democracy Now, etc.) and recent lecture and Q&A at the Hammer Museum at UCLA.

If you’ll permit me to give some background…

I was born in Japan to what I would call “moderate” Southern Baptist missionaries (youngest of five children) in 1957, grew up in Osaka, and went to a private English-speaking school in the city of Kobe. My father, A.L.”Pete” Gillespie, was from Memphis, TN, and my mother, Viola “Bee” Gillespie, was from southern Indiana. They met in Louisville when she was in nursing school and dad was attending Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

My father was a pacifist (quite unusual for southern baptists), though he would have prefered to simply be called an ambassador for Christ. When WWII broke out, and especially after Pearl Harbor was attacked, dad would preach to his congregation (he pastored a couple of churches in Owenton, KY, and Charleston, IL) that the Bible teaches us to love our enemies, so he said we should pray for the Japanese. Well, some of his congregation didn’t like to hear that since some of their own sons were fighting “them Japs”. Dad had initially wanted to go to the Soviet Union as a missionary before the war started, but after he married in 1940, both parents decided to go to Japan.

When my parents arrived in Japan in 1948, my dad expressed his opposition to the war to fellow missionaries, including one who said, “Pete, I fought for your freedom.” My dad responded, “I didn’t ask you to go.” “But Pete, what if everyone felt the way you did?” Of course, my dad didn’t need to answer that question.

I remember my folks showing home movies of a Japanese pastors’ conference c.1949. Dad used to say, “There is pastor so-and-so of Hiroshima Baptist Church. He lost 99.9% of his congregation in an instant. Without the love of God in his heart, this man would not be able to smile today.”

Years later, my dad helped Billy Graham during one or two of his crusades in Japan (late 50s, early 60s?). I’m sure that my dad knew a number of folks that you grew up meeting, at least those close to Graham. (As a footnote, I cringe every time I see Franklin Graham today–he seems to have fallen prey to the right-wing agenda more than his father had. Of course, his father stayed close with the Clinton’s, and never seemed to subscribe to the notion that one party was more “christian” than the other, at least publicly.)

My parents, however, taught us kids a kind of practical spirituality and became very suspicious when things started turning so political in the late 70s and early 80s and fundamentalists started taking over the southern baptist seminaries. As I reflect back, I’m glad they both died shortly after they reitred in 1979 (mom of lymphoma in 1982, dad of parkinson’s disease in 1983, just a year before your father died) before things got so nasty. Dad was of the opinion that the government should not be in the business of teaching Sunday School. He supported the old Baptist tradition of “separation of church and state” (in fact, the first Baptists in the USA were called and came from “Separatists” in England for this very reason, something many do not realize today). So, he was in favor of the effort by the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs to lobby AGAINST school prayer. “Whose prayer are you going to pray?” he would say.

My folks were not liberal, but not fundamentalistic. Dad always used to preach that faith was a matter of the heart, not a particular creed. One of my favorite verses is 1 Samuel 16:7b, “the Lord sees not as mans sees; man looks on the outward appearance, but the Lord looks on the heart.” If only we could all do the same.

In any case, I did grow up reading what I could in the area of Christian theology, philosophy, art, culture, etc. I read most of your father’s books. I read your Addicted to Mediocrity. I didn’t always agree with everything I read, but I welcomed someone writing about the arts and asking christians to become more artistic and more involved in the arts (I am a professional pianist now and a professor of music at Indiana University Jacobs School of Music in Bloomington, IN, where I teach jazz and classical piano and history, and also have an interest in comparative arts). Dad used to preach a sermon on how God calls us to “higher ground” in every aspect of our lives, and not to be average or mediocre.

My own spiritual journey has brought me to a point that finds resonance in many of your current thoughts. As Cornell West said in an outstanding lecture here a few years ago, “I am a christian, not a Constantinian christian, but simply a christian.” I echo his sentiments and would love to see the two of you on the same panel discussing current socio-cultural, religious and political trends. You would both have such excellent insights to share.

My faith is at the core of my being. Yet, I find nothing in common with right-wing christian theocracy or christian “Taliban” thinking or behavior. The whole right-wing fundamentalist movement has barked up all the wrong trees. When Obama won Indiana Nov 2008, I couldn’t believe it. Many of us democratic and independent folks here were thrilled.

I realize that folks like Rush Limbaugh, the mormon guy Glenn Beck, Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reilly and the like are simply entertainers, but at the risk of becoming too “dogmatic” myself, I hope and “pray” that their sphere of influence doesn’t actually lead to an assassination attempt and all the other crazy and stupid things their ditto-head followers espouse. Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow may be entertainers, too, but they (and Chris Matthews) seem to speak so much more common sense. Of course, I also enjoy listening to Bill Moyers.

Though I tend to be left of center, I’ve never felt comfortable with either the far right or the far left. I remember chatting with a unitarian seminary student in Boston years ago. “What is your dogma?” I asked him. He said, proudly, “We have no dogma?” Of course, I added, “Well, that is precisely your dogma.” It reminds me of the “Myth of Neutrality” as you wrote years ago, yet we are all blessed and cursed with language and meaning that is at once concrete and fleeting at the same time. The old “line of despair” that your father wrote about with Kierkegaard was always interesting to me. I don’t always agree with everything Kierkegaard had to say, but I was still drawn to some of his writings, and this alleged “line of despair” could, I felt, become a perpetual moment of spiritual awakening, a moment where we realize that we simply don’t have all the answers but are willing to have faith; and his notion that “Subjectivity is truth” has continued to resonate with me: it’s “relational” truth that I’m interested in, not an abstract “absolute” truth.

And your voice is like Kierkegaard in his Attack Upon Christendom as you rightly point out the hypocrisy of the religious right.

After all these years, Pascal’s Pensées also continues to resonate with me in many ways. One of my favorite quotes, “Skeptics are rarely skeptical about their own skepticism,” could be applied to Christopher Hitchens and the like (though I agree with much of what he says, I don’t always like his tone, and I disagreed with his view of the Iraq war).

I have shared several of your interviews to all of my Facebook friends and tried to get as many folks to hear what you have to say as possible. And I just now clicked your “become a fan” on your Facebook page.

A good friend recently gave me your book, Crazy for God, and I look forward to reading it. As soon as I finish it, I will read Patience with God and I look forward to reading anything else you write and any interview or lecture you give in the future. Your website has been bookmarked!

I wish there was a way to get you on one of our lecture series here at Indiana University. It would be great to have you here and to meet you in person.

One more point if I may… In the UCLA Hammer lecture, you mention a great point about President Obama bowing in Asia, but, if you’ll permit me to say, as I understand the story, it was not China, but rather Japan that the main bowing incident took place. It is part of Japanese culture to bow out of respect; the Chinese don’t have the same tradition. As a Chinese friend said to me recently when I was performing a music tour in China, you can recognize the Japanese at Chinese airports because they’re the only ones bowing. So, if you mention this in future lectures, I hope you say Japan.

Please forgive me for rambling on and for my self-indulgence. Again, I appreciate so much what you’re saying. We need more voices like yours in today’s aesthetic, artistic, spiritual, cultural, social, and political dialog.

Sincerely,

Luke

———————–
Luke Gillespie, D.M.
Associate Professor of Music
Jazz Studies/Piano (MA118)
Indiana University Jacobs School of Music

Published here by permission (Copyright Luke Gillespie, Dec, 2010)

Do you understand the parable of the Good Samaritan?

Let me refresh your memory…

One day an expert in religious law stood up to test Jesus by asking him this question: “Teacher, what should I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus replied, “What does the law of Moses say? How do you read it?” The man answered, “‘You must love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, all your strength, and all your mind.’ And, ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’” “Right!” Jesus told him. “Do this and you will live!” The man wanted to justify his actions, so he asked Jesus, “And who is my neighbor?”

Jesus then replied with a story:

“A Jewish man was traveling on a trip from Jerusalem to Jericho, and he was attacked by bandits. They stripped him of his clothes, beat him up, and left him half dead beside the road. By chance a priest came along. But when he saw the man lying there, he crossed to the other side of the road and passed him by. A Temple assistant walked over and looked at him lying there, but he also passed by on the other side. Then a despised Samaritan came along, and when he saw the man, he felt compassion for him. Going over to him, the Samaritan soothed his wounds with olive oil and wine and bandaged them. Then he put the man on his own donkey and took him to an inn, where he took care of him. The next day he handed the innkeeper two silver coins, telling him, ‘Take care of this man. If his bill runs higher than this, I’ll pay you the next time I’m here.’ “Now which of these three would you say was a neighbor to the man who was attacked by bandits?” Jesus asked. The man replied, “The one who showed him mercy.” Then Jesus said, “Yes, now go and do the same.”

In case you missed the point of that parable as I’m quoted as telling it in the book of Luke it was that the theologically correct evangelical born-again “saved” passed by on the other side of the road when confronted with a human being in need. It was the “unsaved” theologically incorrect foreigner, today’s equivalent of your atheists or Muslims or gay men and women, the unloved and the outcast, who stopped and did my Father’s will and took care of the injured man.

Put it another way: Did you miss the point when I said that those who come to me saying “Lord, Lord we followed you and believed correctly” are the very ones that I will cast out of the Kingdom of Heaven, since they did not care for the least of these, the downtrodden, the poor and the oppressed?

Did you get it when I said that the Kingdom of Heaven belongs to the humble, and the outcasts; those who mourn and to the poor in spirit? Gay couples are who are being denied their civil rights are such as these. What are you doing to defend them?

Who do you think will inherit the earth: the wealthy leaders of your giant churches or the downtrodden gays scorned and mocked by society? Who’s side do you think God is on: the bullied and outcast or the powerful religious leaders with their false smiles?

Who will qualify for calling themselves my sons and daughters: The meek who mourn or the proud who say: “Lord, I thank you that I’m not like these gay men and women and these illegal immigrants, and these lazy poor people who deserve no health care and these Muslims?”

You hypocrites! Don’t you get it?

You say you take everything in the Bible seriously and yet you ignore all the many verses about divorce and somehow paper that over because a majority of America buys into divorce now and you don’t want to lose your congregations. And half your pastors and religious leaders are divorced and remarried. But you stick it to gay men and women because they are a minority and easy to pick on! Why wax moralistic about one thing you call sin (though I have no problem with divorce per se) and yet stick it to a minority?

So you quote a few dumb passages about gay love while ignoring all the many more moral teachings you find inconvenient, say about greed and not caring for the poor or fighting unjust wars.

Look, I’m not against picking and choosing Bible verses! It’s called thinking! I never stuck to everything the Bible says myself either.

For instance I broke the biblical law when I said that the people who brought me the adulterous woman should not stone her to death. In other words I said: “forget what the Bible says, only kill her if you’re perfect.” Well, no one was so they quit picking on her and left her alone. Since then I’ve given my followers that as a reason to ignore the dumb harsh parts of the Bible. That is my message: pick the good, leave out the bad. The Bible is just a book, and words are just metaphors so get a life and worship the God of love not some imperfect book!

Did you get it when I said that if you lust in your heart it’s the same as committing adultery? You twisted my words to make it seem as if I’m a moralistic “Church Lady” like you idiots, but I intended the exact opposite!

What I meant was that since everyone lusts; therefore the difference between how we think and feel and temptation and what we do is meaningless in terms of how God sees us. The whole point was that we’re not to judge other people because we ourselves think the same thoughts. So no one is better than anyone else.

You judgmental holy rollers are like banks always making a mistake in their own favor! Why do religious so-called conservative Americans always pick on the little guy, the disenfranchised, blacks, Hispanics, immigrants, pregnant women, gay people? I’ll tell you why!

Because you are bullies!

You are the Pharisees passing by on the other side of the road, those who are so sure you’re saved because of some nonsense that you believe in my name.

Wrong!

You American Christians utterly defaced the name of Christianity with your racism, your slavery and your bigotry against women. And now you’re doing it again in your war against gay men and women and in your war against the poor who have no health care. Some of you even have had it as part of your wicked program to reestablish the Biblical law demanding death to gay people that I clearly showed must be broken by the greater law of love. Well, as you judge so you will be judged. Good luck with that!

Do you think the Kingdom of God is more likely to belong to, a wealthy “Christian” leader who preaches hate and exclusion (even when saying “I love everyone and only hate the sin”) or to the least of these, the disenfranchised who want nothing more than to enjoy the same rights of other citizens? Do you think God does not see that the poor have no care and die because your greedy (lying) insurance lobby has your so called Congress in their pockets?

You hypocrites and liars! You say you’re preaching my gospel when my gospel never was about correct belief or correct behavior. My gospel was about not judging others, making room for everyone at the table, loving your neighbor as you love yourself. If gay men and women are your enemy then, as you know, I commanded you to love them! And if they are asking to be allowed to marry I commanded you to give to him who asks of you! Besides, you don’t own America. This is a democracy and yours is just one opinion.

How did it come to this?

How do those who claim that they serve and represent me misuse the Bible to the extent that they make bumper stickers and coffee mugs calling for the death of the President by misquoting Psalm 109.8? (By the way, in case you want to know, he’s doing his best to follow the law of love right now, even though it’s almost impossible to do that because the fool who ruled before him — talk about a burning Bush! — left the biggest mess since the fall of Jerusalem in the year AD 70!)

Do you think I am on the side of a those who want to make the First Lady of the United States (who happens to be a favorite daughter of mine!) a widow and the daughters of the President (very lovely children!) orphans as this Psalm is misconstrued to “call” for?

There is no Hell or Heaven other than that we create for ourselves here on this earth and in the next life. But I’m tempted to ask God to create a real hell for you damnable hate mongers!

You are like the Pharisees I used to know and who strained out the least gnat of others’ so-called misbehavior while turning a blind eye to their own wickedness, hypocrisy and lies. Remember my sayings about taking the beam out of your own eye before removing the speck from your brother’s?

Quit worrying about gay people and start to worry about your so-called churches, those ash heaps of stinking bigotry and hate. The way you hate your first black president is all I need to know about you. So stop worrying about other people’s “sins” and start worrying about all the lies you are telling your children in my name!

And all your talk about patriotism will do you no good unless you love every American as you love yourself — including gay Americans, poor people the disenfranchised and yes, women who have abortions and the illegal immigrants.

They ask mercy of you! Give to them! Or did you miss that part of my teaching too?

Do you really think I’m on the side of those who hate the “other”?

You are killing me again!

The point is to have a chance to sanctify love in every generation.

If I walked here on Earth again with you, you’d kill me again, just as you are going to kill all that is good in my name, just as some of you are praying for the death of your president who you even call “Anti-Christ.”

Let me tell you who is Anti-Christ: Christian “saved” America. Depart from me!

Please come up with a new name for whatever you are. Drop the word “Christ” out of your name. You’ve destroyed my reputation.

So let others admire and extol him who claims to be able to comprehend Christianity. . . . I regard it then as a plain duty to admit that one neither can nor shall comprehend it. The Sickness Unto Death, Søren Kierkegaard

When I place my five-month-old granddaughter Lucy on a blanket on my kitchen table, and I help her stretch by rubbing her feet, legs, and arms in what my wife Genie calls “Lucy’s Grandpa spa,” everything fades away—bills, the economy, who got elected, even the background “sound track” of my impending doom, that ticking clock of aging, never too far below the surface these days. Lucy loves stretching after her naps. She smiles and looks into my eyes with such contentment that I feel transported to a place beyond time and reckoning where nothing exists but my hunger to reward this little girl’s love.

I find myself praying, “Lord, may none but loving arms ever hold her.” That prayer has nothing to do with theology. I’d pray it whether I believed there is a God or not, for the same reason that on a lovely spring morning when I’m looking at the view of the river that flows past our home I sometimes exclaim, “That’s beautiful!” out loud, even when I’m alone.

Genie and I offered my son John and his wife Becky a place to live while they got on their feet financially. It has been a long haul since John unexpectedly volunteered to serve in the Marines right out of high school, was deployed to war several times, returned home, concluded his time of service, went to the University of Chicago, married Becky, graduated from U of C with honors, had Lucy, and started a new job. This is the son I was on my knees praying for while he was being shot at. He came home! My son’s baby daughter Lucy is in my arms! Life is sweet! When I hold Lucy, belief in God seems natural.

Why do I write about faith and/or include religion and religious people in so many of my books? What’s it to me if I disagree with the New Atheists and with religious fundamentalists? First, one writes about the life one has experienced. I’ve lived religion. Second, I don’t like to be forced to choose between lousy alternatives. Third, I think that I keep writing about faith because my faith needs affirmation.

One person running around shouting “Jesus saves!” or throwing stones at the Devil while circling a large black rock, or proposing that science is the alternative to religion sometimes appears crazy, even to himself or herself. Fill a church with a thousand people moaning, “Lord have mercy,” or pack a million pilgrims on their hajj around that rock, or fill a classroom with students applauding someone’s declaration of atheism, and each member of the group can say to himself or herself, “So many of us can’t be wrong! There must be something to this!”

Speaking of God, there are thousands of books hanging around in my house worrying me. In those books are tens of millions of words. None of those words (including these) explain why the greatest pleasure that I experience during any given day is when I lose myself in the small yet overwhelming presence of my granddaughter. Caring for Lucy feels as if I’m diving through warm, crystal clear water above some shimmering Mediterranean reef. Body temperature and water match. Everything is stunningly beautiful. I disappear. The usual selfish “me” that is the sum total of my genes and/or God/Mom/Dad/whatever–induced worries, is temporarily forgotten.

The experience evokes the fondest of childhood memories, of being once again truly carefree, as I was when my family traveled by train each year from our home in Switzerland to Portofino, Italy, where we vacationed, where sand and sea, freedom to wander, and the blood-warm water and languid pace of life left such a lasting impression of joy that the childhood memory of “my” Italy defines happiness for me fifty years later. So it is with Lucy; I stop worrying when I hold her, and simply am.

Thanking someone for Lucy seems natural to me. I pray even though I’m a “faith person” who often wishes he weren’t. I’m sick of religion for the same reason that I’m tired of my body, how it’s getting old, how every morning when I wake up, the dreary realization crashes in: I’m still me. Sick of being me or not, I still brush my teeth, take a daily vitamin, stick to my low-dose aspirin regimen, drink red wine because I like it and it’s better for me than white wine, and get colonoscopies from time to time. I still go to church, too, regardless of the fact that I get dumb hate emails signed “in Christ,” blasting me for everything from my support of President Obama to my having fled my evangelical/fundamentalist roots and
the Republican Party.

This is a book for those of us who have faith in God in the same way we might have the flu, less a choice than a state of being in spite of doubt, in spite of feeling wounded by past religious contagion, in spite of our declared agnosticism or even atheism, in spite of the sorts of idiots like me who are attracted to or, more accurately, bred to, religion and run around defending and /or criticizing it. This book is part of a conversation, not a sermon. I’ve written it the way faith in God, and everything else, happens, to me. Happens is the right word. In Hollywood when I used to work as a movie director, the producers always wanted an “arc” to the story. The worse the script was, and the more formulaic, the more obvious the arc. There was a beginning, a middle and an end; good guys and bad guys; first, second, and third “acts” leading to the conclusion. But faith in God, and great movies made by the greatest directors (of whom I certainly was never one) such as Bob Altman and Federico Fellini, don’t string along like cars of a train or come in tidy packages. They are a slice of life, not a story about life.

My only promise is that I’m trying to tell the truth about my slice of life as I see it, even when the best I can do is to say that I don’t know the answers. So there are ideas here but also stories memoir and memory of what shaped the person writing down the ideas. That means we jump from ideas to stories that could be from a novel about the person writing the essay. Don’t be surprised by these twists and turns. This is how conversations go. This is what life, rather than false “arcs,” is like.

In Part I, the first chapters are a critique of the New Atheists. The next chapters are a critique of the religious fundamentalists. Then in Part II, I write about my experiences related to faith or lack of faith in God, and the evolving nature of what I describe as the catalysts that may take us to whatever the next stages of our personal and communal spiritual evolution may be.

Bob Altman said of his movie directing that “accidents are what push the ‘truth button.’” I’ve tried not to edit out those accidents, even in the parts of this book that tend to essay style. In other words, this book is for those of us who are stuck feeling that there is more to life than meets the eye, whatever we call ourselves or say we believe. Or put it this way: If an angel showed up outside my office window and explained “everything” to me, I’d simultaneously question my sanity, be scared as hell, and feel mightily relieved, because
believing in invisible things is tough.

I’m not the only person wrestling with issues of meaning, religion, and purpose. You will find a small sample here of the several thousands of emails from my readers who have been responding to my writing, radio, and TV interviews and lectures about religion, politics, and society. Their emails, including the following note, inspired me to write this book. (I’ve omitted names to protect privacy and have indicated trims by ellipses. And each email represents many similar to it.)

Hello, Mr. Schaeffer. I watched your Princeton lecture. I found it interesting, but I learned nothing of your new religious beliefs, except that you enjoy Greek Orthodox liturgy. I presume you still avow some form of Christianity.

I do still avow some form of Christianity in spite of my doubts, the attack on faith by the New Atheists, and the “certainties” of the religious fundamentalists who claim their way is the only truth, which is another way to attack faith because it drives people away from experiencing God. I believe that the ideological opposites I’ll be talking about—atheism and fundamentalist religion—often share the same fallacy: truth claims that reek of false certainties. I also believe that there is an alternative that actually matches the way life is lived rather than how we usually talk about belief. I call that alternative “hopeful uncertainty.”

My hopeful uncertainty will either resonate with you eliciting a “me too” and “been there” or not. I am not trying to make converts. If what I write resonates, it will be because we’ve shared certain experiences, for instance your own childhood stories and your own love for a friend, lover, or a husband or wife, children, and grandchildren, not because I convince you of anything. I offer no proofs. There are none. When talking about the unknowable, pretending to have the facts is about as useful as winning a medal from the Wizard of Oz. In this game—the meaning game—it’s all about intuition, hope, and the experience of life, a letting go of all concepts, words, and theologies because they can only be metaphors and hinder our experience of the truth as it is—not as we desire, believe, or hope it might or should be, but as it is.

Before continuing I have several disclosures to make. To begin with, I have a vested interest in keeping faith in God relevant. Also, I’ll be talking about religion but concentrating on Christianity. That is the tradition I know a little about, having been raised by evangelical/ fundamentalist American missionaries.

As a young man in the early 1970s I did a really stupid thing and stopped painting, drawing, and sculpting, thus truncating what was becoming a promising art career. I’d had successful shows in New York, Geneva, and London by the time I was twenty-two. I got greedy for a faster track with a steadier income, and I became my parents’ (Francis and Edith Schaeffer) sidekick. I then became a leader in my own right on the big-time evangelical/fundamentalist circuit after we Schaeffers got famous—famous within the evangelical/ fundamentalist ghetto, that is.

By the early 1980s, at the height of my involvement in the evangelical/ fundamentalist religious right, I was invited to preach from Jerry Falwell’s pulpit, appeared many times on The 700 Club with Pat Robertson, and met privately with many of the top Republican leadership of the day. In the midst of these heady experiences I began to change my mind about what I believed, and not just about religion but about politics too.

By the mid-1980s I began the process of escaping my family’s literal-minded religion and the political causes that had become indistinguishable from it. I went to Hollywood, directed four indifferent to- pretty-terrible R-rated feature films, quit the movie business, and then started to write novels in the early 1990s. I received encouragement from the critics and my readers. I’ve been a “secular” full time writer of both fiction and nonfiction ever since.

Although I’m no longer proselytizing, I’ve profitably (in every sense of that word) mined the divine mother lode of my background through my Calvin Becker trilogy of semi-autobiographical novels Portofino, Zermatt, and Saving Grandma and also in Baby Jack (where God shows up as an African American Marine drill instructor
on Parris Island), not to mention my memoir Crazy for God. As my religion-preoccupied writing demonstrates, one can run from a religion but can never entirely escape.

I not only grew up in the fevered atmosphere of an American religious commune—L’Abri Fellowship (located in Switzerland of all places)—but at age ten I was sent to an evangelical British boys boarding school called Great Walstead, where I encountered an easygoing and refreshingly new to me, Anglican-derived faith that embodied a level of religious tolerance I wasn’t familiar with. Later in life the memory of that encounter shaped my sense that there might be better alternatives to the strict fundamentalism I was raised on. It may also be one reason why, much, much later when in midlife, I discovered that sacrament-based liturgical worship was a comfortable fit for me and I joined the Greek Orthodox Church.

So please note, as I conclude this disclosure, that my only “qualification” for meditating on faith in God is no more than the better part of a lifetime spent thinking about faith and reading about religion (and a few other things) and then living among, and then fleeing, the faithful. I’m with Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard when he says of Christianity that “one neither can nor shall comprehend it.”

Kierkegaard’s view was closer to many of the early Church Fathers— in other words, to the first leaders in the early Christian Church (during the first to sixth centuries) than it is to today’s fundamentalists. Until I was on my way out of my evangelical/fundamentalist subculture and actually read a little church history and some of the writings from the earliest Christians, I assumed that older is always stricter. In the case of the Christian religion, this is not so. It’s mostly the later eras of Christianity that produced the most rules-based approach to faith, something like the transition from the sixties and early seventies to the “Reagan eighties,” as hippies got haircuts and put on suits and turned out to be more middle class and “bourgeois” than their parents.

So for people who think that Christianity was strict, literalistic and fundamentalist and filled with nothing but rules and regulations from the beginning and that a more “mystical,” “tolerant,” “progressive,” or “liberal” approach to faith is a lax modern phenomenon, the writings of some of the most important early Christian figures are a startling wake-up call. For instance, one fourth-century ascetic—Evagrius Ponticus—was a revered spiritual leader. He led by example rather than by official standing because he was not a bishop. Writing in The Gnostikos, he made this anti-fundamentalist statement: “Do not define the Deity: for it is only of things which are made or are composite that there can be definitions.”

Speaking of “the Deity,” I have a love-hate relationship with God—well, actually not with God (as Evagrius said, who knows anything about that?) but with the people who have tried to define God in ways that the more tolerant earlier Christians didn’t. My love-hate relationship is with fundamentalists who say they believe in God and with people who are so sure there is no God that they’ve turned atheism into just another brow-beating religion. That means I have a love-hate relationship with myself, because I find both sides of the faith/no faith debate coexisting within me. Those “sides” are expressed well by juxtaposing the following emails from two men with very different viewpoints:

Frank: Any religious faith is nothing more than an adult fairytale. . . . Now I admit that I may be wrong . . . you may enjoy Orthodox liturgy for its own sake. . . . Still, I find it perplexing. . . . My question to you is: Why do you, a very smart person, continue to hold to a fairy-tale? Respectfully, T.

Just as I was about to try and come to the defense of the “fairytale,” I received an email from an Orthodox priest. Unlike a lot of the emails I get, at least this one was signed—but for current purposes, let’s just call the sender Father X.

The email questioned my Christianity because I supported a prochoice candidate like Obama. Since Fr. X believed that Obama represented everything Christianity does not stand for, where did I get off calling myself a Christian? Not to mention that I blogged on the Huffington Post, that internet portal to damnation. OK—comes with the territory. But here’s the kicker. The sender signed what was a very insulting note: In Christ, Father X.

(Rant starts here:) When I got this email I thought it might be a joke, because my long experience with Orthodox priests and bishops has been almost uniformly positive. I googled the name and found that this man was an actual priest. Father X badgered me for several weeks since I chose not to answer him.Then I began to receive emails that Fr. X had been sent a copy of, as had a growing list of others whose names showed up from then on in my email letterbox. It seemed that Father X had “introduced” me to his far right friends. Abortion was their big issue, as were Obama’s “communism.” Several people accused me of “supporting the Antichrist.” Nearly all of them told me I was due for a severe punishment from God. None of these prolific email writers seemed to bother to read my replies, to which I attached articles I’d written for the Huffington Post explaining in some detail why I was both pro-life and pro- Obama, given that I believed that his social programs might help reduce the numbers of abortions, just as he said that he hoped they would, and that, conversely, the Republicans had been cynically using the “life issue” to drum up votes while cutting funding for health care, contraceptives, sex education, and child care. Of course I could have been wrong about all my political ideas on the subject, but I certainly hadn’t become a “leading abortionist,” as three of my email correspondents said I had.

I can only imagine the steady diet of junk ideology that must have been spewing from right-wing websites, evangelical/fundamentalist leaders, talk radio, and bizarre newsletters into the heads of these email writers to have pushed them—including a priest no less, supposedly a confessor, shepherd, and comforter—to put politics ahead of faith and berate a complete stranger and question his faith on the basis of who that stranger voted for and what websites he writes for and because of a disagreement over tactics regarding how best to
reduce the number of abortions.

The Religious Right has seduced millions of Americans with titillating hatred and lies: The earth was created in six days and is not warming; Obama is a secret Muslim (perhaps even the Antichrist!) and wants women to have more abortions; gays are trying to take over America; the United Nations (and/or Obama and/or the president of the European Union) is the Antichrist; an unregulated market economy is Christian; guns keep people safe; taxing the rich is “communism”; capital punishment is good; immigrants are the enemy; national health care is “communist.” Some or all these paranoid fantasies are accepted as truth by a whole substratum of “Christians” determined to judge their country as “fallen away from God.” They believe America is “doomed” because they don’t agree with their fellow citizens’ politics or because, as their signs routinely proclaim, “God Hates Fags!” They call people like me “abortionists” because I and others say that maybe the best way to reduce abortion is to keep it legal but to also help women escape poverty, educate young people, and provide contraception rather than trying to reverse Roe v. Wade (realistically an impossibility, on which prolifers have wasted almost forty years of effort and untold tens of millions of dollars).

Appeals to facts get nowhere with these folks because they don’t trust any sources but their own and listen only to what emanates from an alternative right-wing universe. Thus arguments become circular. The more impartial the source, the more suspect it becomes. Propaganda, fulminating (and fundraising), and hatred of gays, women, our government, big-city folks, black people, the educated “elite,” everything-not-like-us-Real-Americans supplant compassion and even common sense. And one is guilty by association. Write for the “wrong” people “these people,” in the words of Fr. X or vote for the “wrong” president, or make the “wrong” call on a practical way to reduce abortions, and it’s off to the stake.

The late Neil Postman, author, New York University professor, and prophet, predicted how and why people such as today’s members of the evangelical/fundamentalist movement and other right wingers would be living in a dream world cut off from reality. Postman is best known for his 1985 book about television, Amusing Ourselves to Death, in which he wrote

Television is altering the meaning of ‘being informed’ by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. Disinformation does not mean false information. . . . What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there
would be no one who wanted to read one. . . . Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumble puppy.

Postman is not the only person to have accurately predicted where we are headed and the sort of society that our disjointed news-media-as-entertainment, texting as “writing,” blogging as “news” would produce. RoboCop (1987) was a mediocre (and nastily sadistic) little movie, but director Paul Verhoeven got one thing right: the “news” shows on TV in his futuristic dystopia. His parody of glib, cheerful trivia clips as news has come horribly true, even more so with the advent of the ideologically divided
Web, wherein people have their “information” filtered by likeminded ideologues and rarely encounter views they disagree with. As Postman predicted, Huxley’s prophetic vision came to pass: We are “a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies.”

We have become a nation of not terribly bright children who essentially have a collective learning disability manifested by an inability to concentrate or defer gratification, to hold one thought long enough to see it through to a conclusion, or to contemplate making real sacrifices for the sake of long-term benefits. The Father Xs of this world are one result.

Just in case you think that Father X’s excesses let atheists off the hook—and also to capture a little of the tone of the atheist/religion debate these days—here is another email I got from a reader objecting to an article I wrote criticizing the New Atheists. (Misspellings
n the original)

Sir, You had an insolence . . . to call the brightest people of our time “the fundamentalist Atheists.” These people: Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris are the great Heroes of our time. . . . These heroes are withstanding to the thousands and thousands of years of corrupted, filthy religious fanaticism. . . . We would avoid many,
many deceases if not for religion. Religion is the opium for the masses. It was said by a smart man. I completely agree with this comment. You are, Sir, brainwashing people and are filling your deep pockets with the dirty money using people’s stupidity. Shame on you! Sincerely
Y

No, I didn’t make that up. Though I was tempted to forward Y’s email to Fr. X, feeling that these men would understand each other quite well!

(End of rant!)

Okay, about that “fairy-tale” of religion. I discovered from the emails I’ve been inundated with since my memoir was published that there are more of us perplexed former (or currently) religiously inclined or religiously raised folks on a journey from past certainties to points unknown than I’d been aware of. We want to have faith in God in spite of our bad experiences with religion, oppressive family relationships, and/or doubts and questions. We too worry that we’ve been hoodwinked by a fairy tale. I hope that this book will
provide a meeting place for those of us who count ourselves among the scattered members of what I’ll call the Church of Hopeful Uncertainty in the same way that this man’s email helped me feel less alone.

Frank: Growing up, I attended a private Christian school which was started by a very conservative religious right church connected with Bob Jones University. . . . I have studied to be a preacher, and seem to have no desire to be one but have no experience to do anything else. . . . Truth be told, I have more questions than answers. . . . I have broken through the false, religious right, closed minded doctrine of hate that was my past. However, I have not found any answers from the religious left. The left is good at saying what the right has done wrong but not at giving me anything to hold on to. Thank you, K.

This book is a search for that “something” to hold on to. I don’t know if my up-and-down, hot-then-cold-then-hot-again faith in God persists because I was conditioned by my parents to see everything in spiritual terms or if faith is a choice. Either way, whatever I believe or feel, or think I feel or think I believe, it’s flawed at best. Like most people, I’ve changed my mind before about the so-called Big Questions and will again. Opinion is a snapshot in time.

Because I belong to the Greek Orthodox Church, there are parts of this book that reflect my personal experience with one form of liturgical worship. In those Orthodox-oriented parts my aim is to offer an example of one approach, knowing that other people take other religious paths (or none) and find spiritual comfort. And I certainly do not speak for the Orthodox Church. Nor has being in the Orthodox Church answered all my questions. Far from it. And I know that some of what I say here may be a departure from what some Orthodox (especially to the political right) think is true. But I believe that my journey is worth describing because my life experiences have led me to believe that there are better choices than being asked to decide between atheistic cosmic nothingness and fundamentalist heavenly pantomimes.