Frank Schaeffer - A Political Plea for Awareness, Homeschooling Abuse, and Other Issues

By way of a disclaimer, though I do pay attention to Frank and his writings, I do not necessarily subscribe to demonizing organizations, political parties, church associations and denominations, nor people by label and name. That is not my nature. However I do accept Frank's vim-and-victim that he carries within his own breast as he writes of subjects near-and-dear to his heart.

Moreover I wish to subscribe to a more peaceful means of political cooperation between the citizen and state upon which American government has always been bourne. Hence, my view is one of working honestly and upfront within-and-without established structures without scheme, plot, or twist of fatalism or conspiracy theory.

Nor do I wish to start fashioning panic-laden attacks like so many critical social obliques that I read of everything-and-everyone around me just because someone disagrees with some unspecified fear or anxiety that they think they see or understand more than most.

Generally I subscribe to a kind of social behavior that requires a basic trust in people, the innate ability to speak to concerns with one another in a meaningful way, and to the process of listening patiently with one another. The goal would be one of seeking how a citizen might work with his or her government and private corporations in a manner that gives the greatest voice, liberty, and civil rights to all men and women everywhere.

Along this effort comes Frank's past religious experiences in all the black-and-whiteness that burdens his heart as one in love with Jesus and for any form of government or organization that uplifts liberty in all its many aspects. Frank is very much concerned with religious movements and groups that would make any form of government unjust in the name of its religious preferences - even that of the Christian faith when misunderstanding its center in Jesus and what that focus means for society at large in both a public and communal setting.

Yet, it is true that all forms of government hang in the balances between oppression and true freedom as fed in equal amounts by religious or political ideologies in conjunction with the people that support those organizations. Having as a nation historically witnessed Europe's past 1000 years of theocratic governmental oppression upon dissenting religious minorities it has not been the wish of the American Constitution - nor of this present American government - to return to the bad old days of Protestant or Catholic theocracy where religion rules with an injudicious iron fist. Thus the Magna Carta that preceded the United States Constitution of life, liberty, and equality for all.

As such, these new days demand a more democratic organ that is more pluralistic in legislature, more tolerant of all forms of belief, and more supportive of judicious civil rights set within communal cooperation. To that end let us listen to Mr. Schaeffer's historical review of America's more recent politico-religious past and try to discern how we might better contribute to a more gracious form of governance that respects all people while seeking as it can to right any oversights present in our corruptible systems.

Peace,

R.E. Slater

January 28, 2015

Credit: ehrlif via Shutterstock

I helped start the religious right. This is how we sought to

undermine  secular America -- and build a theocracy

- Frank Schaeffer

Source link

Frank Schaeffer

January 20, 2015

As someone who participated in the rise of the religious right in the 1970s and 1980s, I can tell you that you can’t understand the modern Republican Party and its hatred of government unless you understand the evangelical home-school movement. Nor can the Democrats hope to defeat the GOP in 2016 unless they grasp what I’ll be explaining here: religious war carried on by other means.

The Christian home-school movement drove the Evangelical school movement to the ever-harsher world-rejecting far right. The movement saw itself as separating from evil “secular” America. Therein lies the heart of the Tea Party, GOP and religious right’s paranoid view of the rest of us. And since my late father and evangelist Francis Schaeffer and I were instrumental in starting the religious right — I have since left the movement and recently wrote a book titled “Why I Am an Atheist who Believes in God: How to Give Love, Create Beauty and Find Peace“ – believe me when I tell you that the evangelical schools and home school movement were, by design, founded to undermine a secular and free vision of America and replace it by stealth with a form of theocracy.

This happened because Evangelical home-schoolers were demanding ever-greater levels of “separation” from what they regarded as the Evil Secular World. It wasn’t enough just to reject the public schools. How could the Christian parent be sure that even the Evangelical schools were sufficiently pure? And so the Christian schools radicalized in order to not appear to be “compromising” with the world in the eyes of increasingly frightened and angry parents.

My account here of the rise of the home school movement

is not aimed at home-schooling, per se, but at parents who

want to indoctrinate, rather than educate.

The Evangelical home school movement was really founded by two people: Rousas Rushdoony, the extremist theologian, and Mary Pride, the “mother” of fundamentalist home-schoolers. I knew them both well.

Until Rushdoony, founder and late president of the Chalcedon Foundation, began writing in the 1960s, most American fundamentalists (including my parents) didn’t try to apply biblical laws about capital punishment for homosexuality to the United States. Even the most conservative Evangelicals said they were “New Testament Christians.” In other words, they believed that after the coming of Jesus, the harsher bits of the Bible had been (at least to some extent) transformed by the “New Covenant” of Jesus’ “Law of Love.”

By contrast, the leaders of Reconstructionism believed that Old Testament teachings—on everything from capital punishment for gays to the virtues of child beating—were still valid because they were the inerrant Word and Will of God and therefore should be enforced. [Not only that, they said that biblical law should be imposed even on nonbelievers. This theology was the American version of the attempt in some Muslim countries to impose Shariah (Islamic law) on all citizens, Muslims and non-Muslims alike.]

I was [Mary] Pride’s agent and sold her first huge seller “The Way Home.” What, Pride asked, was the point of having all those children and then turning them over to secular public schools to be made into secular humanists and Jesus-hating pagans? The irony was that Pride preached a dogmatic, stay-at-home, follow-your man philosophy for other women while turning her lucrative home-schooling empire into a one-woman industry. And Pride’s successor in the Patriarchy Movement, the wealthy author/guru Nancy Leigh DeMoss, was also one of those do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do best-selling career women doing high-paid speaking gigs while encouraging other women to stay home and submit to their men.

Nancy Leigh DeMoss happened to be the daughter of a former friend of my mother’s, Nancy DeMoss, who was instrumental in my parents’ rise to Evangelical superstardom. Nancy DeMoss was also pivotal in the role of facilitator and financier when it came to seamlessly merging Reconstructionist ideology with the “respectable” mainstream Evangelical community. I worked closely with Nancy on several projects. She generously supported my various Schaeffer-related anti-abortion movies, books and seminar tours. She also took “our” message much further on her own by underwriting a massive multimillion-dollar well-produced anti-abortion TV and print media ad campaign inspired by our work.

Soon after the death of her wealthy husband, Arthur DeMoss, Nancy DeMoss had become my mother’s friend and an ardent Schaeffer follower. She also took over her late husband’s foundation as CEO. Besides underwriting several Schaeffer projects, Nancy contributed millions to Republican and other far right causes (including $70,000 to start Newt Gingrich’s political action committee, GOPAC). She also helped the Plymouth Rock Foundation, a Reconstructionist-aligned group.

When Nancy’s daughter (the aforementioned Nancy Leigh DeMoss) took Pride’s ideas to a bigger audience than Pride could have imagined, she was just taking the next logical step begun by her mother. Like my sisters and I, the DeMoss siblings found themselves in their parents’ orbit. The DeMoss children became co-workers in the “cause,” much as I filled that role in my family. Nancy’s other daughter, Deborah, worked for Sen. Jesse Helms. Nancy’s son Mark worked for Jerry Falwell before founding the DeMoss Group, a P.R. firm used by the likes of Billy Graham’s son Franklin. But unlike the Schaeffers, the DeMoss clan had tens of millions of dollars with which to back its pet far-right schemes, one of which would be the Quiverfull Movement– a group dedicated to early marriage and huge families.

To plumb the depths of the tortured “reasoning” behind the Roman Catholic version of the anti-contraceptive Quiverfull Movement (they preach young marriage and huge families and wives’ obedience to husbands), consider the writing of Roman Catholic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe. She’s a hero to today’s leading conservative Roman Catholics. She wrote passionately in defense of the papal prohibition of contraception:

In considering an action, we need always to judge several things about ourselves. First: is the sort of act we contemplate doing something that it’s all right to do? Second: are our further or surrounding intentions all right? Third: is the spirit in which we do it all right? Contraceptive intercourse fails on the first count; and to intend such an act is not to intend a marriage act at all, whether or no we’re married. An act of ordinary intercourse in marriage at an infertile time, though, is a perfectly ordinary act of married intercourse, and it will be bad, if it is bad, only on the second or third counts. If contraceptive intercourse is permissible, then what objection could there be after all to mutual masturbation, or copulation in vase indebito, sodomy, buggery (I should perhaps remark that I am using a legal term here—not indulging in bad language), when normal copulation is impossible or inadvisable (or in any case, according to taste)? It can’t be the mere pattern of bodily behavior in which the stimulation is procured that makes all the difference!

But if such things are all right, it becomes perfectly impossible to see anything wrong with homosexual intercourse, for example. If you are defending contraception, you will have rejected Christian tradition. It’s this that makes the division between straightforward fornication or adultery and the wickedness of the sins against nature and of contraceptive intercourse. Hence contraceptive intercourse within marriage is a graver offence against chastity than is straightforward fornication or adultery.

Here is how far right instigator and personal best friend of Antonin Scalia Robert George of Princeton (described by the New York Times as one of the most powerful ultra-conservative instigators in America) lauded this insane “argument” in his gushing Anscombe obituary:

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

Another far-right Roman Catholic ideologue (and also an academic) even wrote a book calling on Christians, Jews and Muslims to join together in a jihad against the secular West. In “Ecumenical Jihad: Ecumenism and the Culture War” a former friend of mine, Peter Kreeft (a professor of philosophy at Boston College), called for “ecumenical jihad.” ”Ecumenical Jihad” was dedicated to Richard John Neuhaus, the late Roman Catholic convert priest, and to the late Charles Colson (who later teamed up with George to author the “Manhattan Declaration”). Neuhaus and I often talked on the phone when he was about to launch his far-fight First Things journal. Neuhaus asked me to contribute articles, which I did. According to what Neuhaus told me, First Things was supposed to be the pro-life version of Norman Podhoretz’s Commentary. “To fill a gap,” as Neuhaus put it to me.

Podhoretz, who at first was friendly with Neuhaus, told me he broke with him over his “extremist anti-American views,” as Podhoretz put it. This was just after Neuhaus had started describing the U.S. government as an illegitimate “regime.” As the Washington Post noted:

In an essay he wrote for First Things, [Neuhaus] likened the legal right to abortion to state-sponsored murder under the Nazi regime. “Law, as it is presently made by the judiciary, has declared its independence from morality,” he wrote. “America is not and, please God, will never become Nazi Germany, but it is only blind hubris that denies it can happen here and, in peculiarly American ways, may be happening here.” The polemical rhetoric offended many Jewish conservatives in particular and threatened to shatter the bonds that had united them.Father Neuhaus played a central role in forging an alliance between evangelicalProtestants and Catholics and in bringing conservative Christians into the Republican conservative coalition in the 1980s and 1990s.

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

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

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

The “Manhattan Declaration” called laws with which its signers disagreed “edicts,” thereby conjuring up images of dictators handing down oppressive rules, rather than legitimately elected democratic bodies passing legislation. In other words, when the right loses in the democratic process, “other means,” like civil disobedience, are encouraged. In fact, George, who authored the “declaration,” then headed up the group that successfully won on the Hobby Lobby case and also won the Evangelical Wheaton College suit to allow them to not cover contraception for women.

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

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

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

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

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

Recently, Gordon College asked President Obama to exempt them from laws protecting gay civil rights. To understand why the old-fashioned conservative mantra “Big government doesn’t work,” the newly radicalized Evangelicals (and their Roman Catholic co-belligerents) added, “The U.S. government is evil!” And the very same community—Protestant American Evangelicals—who had once been the bedrock supporters of public education, and voted for such moderate and reasonable men as President Dwight Eisenhower, became the enemies of not only the public schools but also of anything in the (nonmilitary) public sphere “run by the government.”

In the minds of Evangelicals, they were re-creating the Puritan’s self-exile from England by looking for a purer and better place, this time not a geographical “place” but a sanctuary within their minds (and in inward-looking schools and churches) undisturbed by facts. Like the Puritans, the post-Roe Evangelicals (and many other conservative Christians) withdrew from the mainstream not because they were forced to but because the society around them was, in their view, fatally sinful and, worse, addicted to facts rather than to faith. And yet having “dropped out” (to use a 1960s phrase), the Evangelicals nevertheless kept on demanding that regarding “moral” and “family” matters the society they’d renounced nonetheless had to conform to their beliefs.

In the first decade of the 21st century the Evangelical and conservative Roman Catholic (and Mormon) outsider victim “approach” to public policy was perfected on a heretofore-undreamed-of scale by Sarah Palin. She was the ultimate holier-than-thou Evangelical. What my mother had represented (in her unreconstructed fundamentalist heyday) to a chalet full of young gullible women and later to tens of thousands of readers, Palin became for tens of millions of alienated, angry, white lower-middle-class men and women convinced that an educated “elite” was out to get them.

Palin was first inflicted on the American public by Sen. John McCain, who chose her as his running mate in the 2008 presidential election for at least one big reason: He needed to shore up flagging support from the Evangelical Republican antiabortion base. McCain wanted to prove that he was fully in line with the “social issues” agenda that Dad, Koop and I had foisted on our country more than 30 years before. Palin lost the election for McCain but “won” her war for fame and fortune.

She presented herself as called by God and thus cast in the Old Testament mold of Queen Esther, one chosen by God to save her people. Palin perfected the Jesus Victim “art” of Evangelical self-banishment and then took victimhood to new levels of “success” by cashing in on white lower-middle-class resentment of America’s elites.

Palin made a fortune by simultaneously proclaiming her Evangelical faith, denouncing liberals and claiming that she would help the good God-fearing folks out there “take back” their country. This “Esther” lacked seriousness. But born-again insiders knew that the “wisdom of men” wasn’t the point. Why should the new Queen Esther bother to actually finish her work governing Alaska? God had chosen her to confound the wise!

So she became a media star and quit as governor of Alaska. Then she battled “Them”—the “lamestream media” (as she labeled any media outlets outside of the Far Right subculture)—in the name of standing up for “Real Americans.” Palin used the alternative communication network that had its roots deeply embedded in those pioneering 1970s and 1980s Evangelical TV shows and radio shows that I used to be on just about every other day. She did this to avoid being questioned by people who didn’t agree with her. By not actually governing or doing the job she’d been elected by Alaskans to do, and by using the alternative media networks as an “outsider”—all the while reacting to and demanding attention from the actual (theoretically hated) media—Palin also made buckets of money.

In the scorched-earth post-Roe era of the “healthcare reform debates” of 2009 and beyond, Evangelicals seemed to believe that Jesus commanded that all hospitals (and everything else) should be run by corporations for profit, just because corporations weren’t the evil government. The right even decided that it was “normal” for the state to hand over its age-old public and patriotic duties to private companies—even for military operations (“contractors”), prisons, healthcare, public transport and all the rest.

The religious right/far right et al. favored private “facts,” too. They claimed that global warming wasn’t real. They asserted this because scientists (those same agents of Satan who insisted that evolution was real) were the ones who said human actions were changing the climate. Worse, the government said so, too!

“Global warming is a left-wing plot to take away our freedom!”

“Amtrak must make a profit!”

Even the word “infrastructure” lost its respectability when government had a hand in maintaining roads, bridges and trains.

In denial of the West’s civic-minded, government-supporting heritage, Evangelicals (and the rest of the right) wound up defending private oil companies but not God’s creation, private cars instead of public transport, private insurance conglomerates rather than government care of individuals. The price for the religious right’s wholesale idolatry of private everything was that Christ’s reputation was tied to a cynical political party “owned” by billionaires. It only remained for a far right Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court to rule in 2010 that unlimited corporate money could pour into political campaigns—anonymously—in a way that clearly favored corporate America and the super wealthy, who were now the only entities served by the Republican Party.

The Evangelical foot soldiers never realized that the logic of their “stand” against government had played into the hands of people who never cared about human lives beyond the fact that people could be sold products. By the 21st century, people were still out in the rain holding an “Abortion Is Murder!” sign in Peoria and/or standing in line all night in a mall in Kansas City to buy a book by Sarah Palin and have it signed. But it was the denizens of the corner offices at Goldman Sachs, the News Corp., Exxon and Halliburton who were laughing. As for the likes of the Quiverfull people — the Koch brothers weren’t having babies or not educating their daughters … but they found the religious right useful.

And that is what the Koch brothers know and most Americans don’t: the religious right have been useful pawns. And that is why there is a Republican majority in both houses of government: They have tapped into the energy of the religious right and their hatred of “sinful” America exemplified by the paranoia of the home-schoolers. Taken together the GOP and the religious right are still fighting a religious war against their own country.

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Related Article -

An Interview with Frank Schaeffer on Home School Abuse

The Right's Home School Conspiracy

* * * * * * * * * * * * 

CRHE Fundraising Appeal

http://hsinvisiblechildren.org/

Homeschooling’s Invisible Children (HIC) shines a light on the dark side of homeschooling, where a lack of outside protections for homeschooled children has led to some horrifying consequences. Homeschooling can be a useful educational tool in the hands of the right parents, but when it falls into the hands of the wrong parents the results can be disastrous, and it is the children who suffer.

HIC documents and archives cases where homeschooling was not in the best interest of the child and was instead used as a means to isolate, abuse, and neglect, resulting in exceedingly harmful or fatal outcomes. This is for Lydia, Hana, Nubia, the children of the Gravelles and Kluths, and those whose stories we may never hear.

HIC operates under the oversight of the Coalition for Responsible Home Education (CRHE). The two organizations support a common goal, that of safeguarding and protecting the wellbeing of homeschooled children. CRHE works to educate the public, policymakers, and other constituencies, and to promote the need for adequate safeguards for at-risk children who are homeschooled.

Click here to read the main database.

Warning: This site’s content includes mention of severe child abuse, torture,

and untimely death and contains pictures of children who died under such conditions.

Why Jesus Wouldn't Cut It as a Pastor in Today's Evangelical Megachurches

Why Jesus Wouldn't Cut It as a Pastor in Today's Evangelical Megachurches

http://www.alternet.org/belief/why-jesus-wouldnt-cut-it-pastor-todays-evangelical-megachurches

by Frank Schaeffer

October 29, 2014

Jesus promoted empathy for everyone, while the actions

of today's religious establishment undermine it.

Jesus never could have been the pastor of a contemporary evangelical church nor a conservative Roman Catholic bishop. Evangelicals and conservative Roman Catholics thrive on drawing distinctions between their "truth" and other people's failings. Jesus by contrast, set off an empathy time bomb that obliterates difference.

Jesus' empathy bomb explodes every time a former evangelical puts love ahead of what the "Bible says." It goes off every time Pope Francis puts inclusion ahead of dogma. It goes off every time a gay couple are welcomed into a church. Jesus' time bomb explodes whenever atheists follow Jesus better than most Christians.

Put it this way: Godless non-church-going Denmark mandates four weeks of maternity leave before childbirth and fourteen weeks afterward for mothers. Parents of newborn children are assisted with well-baby nurse-practitioner visits in their homes.

In the “pro-life” and allegedly “family friendly” American Bible belt, conservative political leaders slash programs designed to help women and children while creating a justifying mythology about handouts versus empowerment.

In "God-fearing America" the poor are now the “takers,” no longer the “least of these,” and many conservative evangelicals side with today’s Pharisees, attacking the poor in the name of following the Bible.

So who is following Jesus?

Confronted by the Bible cult called evangelicalism we have a choice: follow Jesus or follow a book cult. If Jesus is God as evangelicals and Roman Catholics claim he is, then the choice is clear. We have to read the book--including the New Testament--as he did, and Jesus didn't like the "Bible" of his day.

Confronted by bishops protecting dogma and tradition against Pope Francis' embrace of empathy for the "other" we have a choice: follow Jesus or protect the institution.

Every time Jesus mentioned the equivalent of a church tradition, the Torah, he qualified it with something like this: “The scriptures say thus and so, but I say…” Jesus undermined the scriptures and religious tradition in favor of empathy. Every time Jesus undermined the scriptures (Jewish "church tradition") it was to err on the side of co-suffering love. Every time a former evangelical becomes an "atheist" in favor of empathy she draws closer to Jesus. Every time Pope Francis sides with those the Church casts out he is closer to Jesus. Every time conservative Roman Catholics try to stop the Pope from bringing change to the Church they are on the side to those who killed Jesus.

A leper came to Jesus and said, “Lord, if you choose, you can make me clean.” If Jesus had been a good religious Jew, he would have said, “Be healed,” and just walked away. Instead, he stretched out his hand and touched the leper, saying, “I do choose. Be made clean,” even though he was breaking the specific rules of Leviticus (two chapters teach that anyone touching a person with leprosy is contaminated!).

In evangelical and Roman Catholic fundamentalist terms, Jesus was a rule-breaking humanist who wasn't “saved.” A conservative bishop would have refused Jesus the sacraments. Christianity Today magazine would have editorialized against him, called for his firing, banning and branded him a traitor to the cause of Christianity.

The Evolution of Empathy

The message of Jesus’ life is an intervention in - and an acceleration of - the evolution of empathy. Consider this story from the book of Matthew: “A woman who had been subject to bleeding for twelve years came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak. She said to herself, ‘If I only touch his cloak, I will be healed.’ Jesus turned and saw her. ‘Take heart, daughter,’ he said, ‘your faith has healed you.’ And the woman was healed at that moment.”

Jesus recognized a bleeding woman touching him as a sign of faith. By complimenting rather than rebuking her, Jesus ignored another of his scripture’s rules:

“If a woman has a discharge of blood for many days, not at the time her [period], or if she has a discharge beyond the time, all the days of her discharge she shall continue in uncleanness... Every bed on which she lies during all the days of her discharge shall be treated as [unclean]… Everything on which she sits shall be unclean … Whoever touches these things shall be unclean” (Leviticus 15:25).

Jesus’ un-first-century antics went beyond coddling lepers and welcoming the touch of a bleeding woman. Jesus’ embrace of a woman from an enemy tribe in a culture where tribal belonging was paramount distressed both his followers and enemies. His attitude to the “other” was as incomprehensible as if he’d blurted “ E=mc2 is the equation of mass–energy equivalence.” Even the Samaritan woman at the well knew that his actions were shocking. When Jesus stopped to talk to her, she said, “You are a Jew and I am a Samaritan woman. How can you ask me for a drink? For Jews do not associate with Samaritans” (John 4:9).

Jesus responded by attacking the preeminence of religion, tradition, dogma and group identity, offering an entirely new way of looking at spirituality by emphasizing basic human dignity above nation, state, gender or religion:

“Woman,” Jesus replied, “believe me, a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, for salvation is from the Jews. Yet a time is coming and has now come when the true worshipers will worship the Father in the Spirit and in truth, for they are the kind of worshipers the Father seeks. God is spirit, and his worshipers must worship in the Spirit and in truth” (John 4:19–24).

True Worship

"Worship in the Spirit and in truth," is not about a book, let alone "salvation" through correct ideas or tradition. For people who call Jesus "the Son of God" you'd think they would also reject the veneration of the book he's trapped in and church dogma that has crucified him again each time a gay man or divorced couple are refused the sacraments.

Evangelicals struggle to conform Jesus to a book, not the other way around. And the conservative bishops have aligned themselves with the American neoconservative wing of their church against not just the Pope Francis but against the emancipating logic of Jesus' empathy time bomb. If Jesus isn't the "lens" evangelicals and Roman Catholics read the Bible and their traditions through then whatever they say to the contrary they do not really believe Jesus is the son of God.

This article is largely excerpted from WHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD: How to give love, create beauty and find peace

Frank Schaeffer tells "How God Wins" in Fundamentalist Language

The Missionary Kid Goes on “Vacation” and Winds Up “Witnessing” to a VERY LOST Italian in a VERY SMALL Bathing Suit!

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/frankschaeffer/2014/07/the-missionary-kid-goes-on-vacation-and-winds-up-witnessing-to-a-very-lost-italian-in-a-very-small-bathing-suit/

by Frank Schaeffer

July 24, 2014

Comments

In 1947 my family moved to Switzerland from the U.S. as missionaries to the Swiss, whom they rarely converted since neither of my parents could speak anything but English. Dad never learned to speak any other language notwithstanding his forty-year sojourn in Europe.

So my parents ministered to American tourists and other English-speaking visitors. Then in 1954—after yet more splits with the home mission board—Mom and Dad were “led” (another way of saying they had to figure something out when they were kicked out of their mission over a theological dispute) to start their own ministry. They called their work L’Abri Fellowship. (L’Abri means “shelter” in French.)

My parents theoretically acknowledged that there were other Real Believers, but (many church splits later) there seemed to be no one besides our family that they wholeheartedly approved of. We were different and (at least in the early fundamentalist incarnation of our family) sometimes smug in the rightness of our difference.

Since our family and my parent’s ministry—the work of L’Abri—represented the only truly theologically “sound” configuration of believers this side of Heaven, my sisters stuck around L’Abri even after marriage. Priscilla and her husband, John, returned to us from seminary when I was ten years old, and none of my sisters left home for good until many years later after L’Abri split up along the lines of various personality clashes. My three sisters encouraged their husbands—who had wandered into L’Abri as young men, got “saved,” and married a Schaeffer daughter—to join “The Work.”

Our family thrived on a somewhat hysterical diet of “miracles” that provided a constant high. Mom and Dad never asked donors for money, and yet—miraculously—the Lord “moved people’s hearts” and we were sent gifts to “meet our needs.” So we knew that From Before The Creation Of The Universe God had planned that in 1954 the Schaeffer Family would found the American mission of L’Abri, located in Huémoz, Switzerland, conveniently near the ski slopes of Villars and the tearooms of Montreux and only five hours by train from Portofino Italy. That was where we vacationed each year.

The rest of the time we lived in the Alps enjoying stunning views of the towering mountains in every direction, which Mom said God had created expressly for our pleasure. Mom said that our job, and thus the reason for both L’Abri’s and our existence, was to “prove the existence of God to an unbelieving world.” We Schaeffers did this by praying for the gifts needed to run our mission. God provided the exhilarating life-affirming “proof” of His being out there somewhere by answering our prayers and sending us just enough money—no more and no less—so that His Work might go forth and so that I’d grow up eating cheese and various other ingredient-stretching casseroles to sustain my life while praying for red (or any) meat!

Sacrificing-For-The-Lord was a pride-filled way of life. No owner of a new home, car, or yacht was ever prouder of his or her venal material possessions than we Schaeffers were of not achieving our fondest dreams. Mom’s father spoke five languages and “could have taught in a secular college, even at Harvard,” Mom said. But he didn’t teach at Harvard; rather, my grandfather taught in a series of small impoverished Bible schools after he returned from China, just like Dad didn’t pastor a huge church, “even though Fran’s a far better preacher than most,” as Mom claimed.

What we didn’t do suited us Schaeffers fine (even if some of us sighed from time to time over missed opportunities). We prided ourselves on how much our family had “given up for the Lord.” So Mom didn’t dance and instead had married a short man after the Lord showed her that together they could Save The Lost, even though “many tall handsome poetic men were interested in me,” Mom said. But as Mom also always added with (yet another sigh) when telling me what she’d given up for the Lord, “Worldly success is not what counts.”

When I compared what I thought of as Normal People to my family, I envied them. They smoked, drank, laughed, never witnessed to anyone, and sometimes even danced to the music from the snack-bar jukebox on the beach when we were in Italy on vacation. Mostly they didn’t seem haunted by the idea that they were foot soldiers in a war between God and Satan.

In The Battle Of The Heavenlies, much was expected of Us Real Christians when it came to doing our bit. This ongoing contest was won or lost one person at a time. The outcome of every battle depended on whether or not the Souls of the people we converted (or didn’t convert) went to Heaven or Hell. It also decided their fate after the Resurrection: to burn forever in the “lake of fire” or to enjoy their indestructible bodies for eternity, doing who knew what.

“Mom?” the ten year-old version of me asked one night after Mom had read me the creation story (again) and Eve had (again) been tempted by Satan, sinned, and taken us all down with her (again).

“Yes, Dear?”

“Why did God create Satan?”

“God did not ‘create Satan,’ my Dear!” said Mom, and she shot me a hurt glance as if to say that the phrasing of my question had been needlessly unkind to both God and to her. “He created lovely angels, and one of them was Lucifer, the highest-ranking angel. Lucifer didn’t want to serve God. But Satan can’t change God’s Divine Purposes! Meanwhile, we have to bring people to Christ to help God win. Do you understand?”

“But, Mom, what I don’t understand is why Jesus doesn’t just bring everyone to Jesus?”

“Then they’d have no choice, and He doesn’t force anyone.”

“But Dad says we’re elected.”

“Yes, and that because God knows what will happen, Dear, but we still choose.”

“How?”

“Because as it says in the Bible, ‘All things are possible with God.’”

“It seems like a lot of bother,” I said.

“It’s God’s Plan, Dear,” said Mom in a tone that clearly indicated that, while she welcomed all questions about the Lord, I should nevertheless not question to a point that seemed to open the door to the sort of doubts that can lead us far from the Lord. Mom’s tone softened as she added, “Darling, we’re finite, so we just can’t finally explain these things.”

“But, Mom, why do we have to tell people about Jesus when God already knew who will be saved before He made them, and why did He make anyone to be Lost anyway?”

“Because, Dear, that way we get to participate in His Plan and also show that we love Him.”

“But it seems so dumb!”

“No, Darling,” said Mom, shooting me an alarmed look and beginning to speak rather quickly. “There’s a difference between asking legitimate questions and questioning God in a way that makes it seem as if we’re rebelling against Him. I’d be careful if I were you about using the word ‘dumb’ in this context, and for another thing, that’s such an American word and not terribly sophisticated, and to use that word is not the sort of use of vocabulary that I know that you know, Dear, which is the reason I only read good books to you, so please say, ‘I don’t fully understand,’ or ‘That concept seems contradictory’ but avoid the sort of words that make it sound as if you’re being raised by ordinary American Christians who derive their tragically limited vocabulary from what they hear Billy Graham say, read on cereal boxes, and see on television!”

I grew up feeling that Mom, Dad, my sisters, and I were a separate species from the Normal humans I would see going about their business as if there were no Battle Of The Heavenlies.

We were Set Apart From The World. We had no TV and no American cereal boxes either. And we’d done it to ourselves—on purpose! God wanted us to walk among Normal People as His Chosen Outcasts.

By the time I was eight or nine, the only conversations I felt comfortable having with strangers were those that happened out of my parents’ and sisters’ earshot. When they weren’t around, I could temporarily pretend to join the human race. Lying was necessary because otherwise I’d attract The Look and The Uncomfortable Silence that always followed any truthful answer to the question “So what does your father do?”

If my sister Susan was there, or worst of all Mom, I’d have to mumble something truthful about being missionaries and Dad being a pastor, and then I’d pray Mom wouldn’t launch into the explanation of how God had called our family “to live by faith alone,” otherwise known as “The L’Abri Story.”

“But what do you live on?” a perplexed British vacationer on the beach near Portofino might ask the cringing eleven-year-old version of me after hearing Mom talk about “living by faith.”

“People help out,” I’d mutter, while scanning all possible escape routes.

If Mom were within earshot, in other words anywhere within a mile or so, she’d offer a glowing and animated explanation: “The Lord answers our prayers as a demonstration of His existence to an unbelieving world. We live by faith alone!”

“So strangers send you money?”

“Yes, as the Lord moves their hearts!” Mom would say.

The listener, who had been expecting something like “We’re living in Switzerland while Dad’s on business” would give me The Look and sidle off. If the listener didn’t sidle off while the going was good, Mom might pull out a witnessing aid or a tract and share the Gospel right then and there.

This sharing of Jesus with strangers would be done to some inoffensive agnostic, Anglican, Catholic, or Jew—in other words, to someone of a different (or no) religious persuasion. The target might have been on the way to the snack bar for a slice of pizza and an espresso and instead would end up pressed into a one-on-one Evangelistic rally as her reward for politely remarking on the fine weather.

Sometimes Mom brought her Gospel Walnut and/or “The Heart of Salvation” booklet along to the beach, and she’d use those on The Lost. The witnessing aid was an actual walnut hollowed out and packed with a long strand of ribbon: black for your heart filled with sin, red for Jesus’ blood, white for your heart once it was washed of sin, and gold for Heaven, where you’d be headed provided you prayed the Sinner’s Prayer right then and there and asked Jesus to come into your heart and to be your Personal Savior, while Mom acted as a midwife for your second birth before the pizza oven exploded and killed you (or you got cancer—whatever) and it was “too late.”

“Mom, can you be saved after you die?” the five-, six-, seven-, and eight-year-old versions of me repeatedly asked, rather hoping that you could so that there would be less pressure to save everyone right now, not to mention that I would get more time, too.

“No, Dear, the Bible is very clear. Hebrews 9:27 says we’re ‘destined to die once, and after that to face judgment.’ Another passage that tells us there’s no chance after death in Luke 16. The parable is about that rich man who died and went to Hell. He’s told a chasm separates Heaven and Hell. Difficult as it is to fully understand, we know there’s an Eternal Separation as the Punishment for people who won’t accept Jesus Christ while they have the chance right now.”

“What about the ones that never hear the Gospel?”

“They’re all Lost, so that’s why we have to always witness!”

Because there were no more chances after death, we Schaeffers were responsible for Every Lost Person we ever encountered—including all the Italians we met, except for Dino and Lorna in Milan because they’d come to L’Abri and already been saved. Dad said, “They’re probably the only Real Christians in Italy, but they don’t count because Lorna is English.”

Sometimes Mom would leave the Gospel Walnut in her room and bring along “The Heart of Salvation” instead, a booklet about ten inches by ten inches cut out in a heart shape and made of five pages: black, red, white, gold, and green. Mom had taught my sisters and me a cheerful little ditty to sing as she turned the pages:

The Heart of Salvation

“My heart was BLACK with sin, until the Savior came in!

His precious RED blood, I know, has washed it WHITE as snow!

In His Word I am told, I’ll walk the streets of GOLD!

A wonderful, wonderful day, He washed my sins away!”

The props for witnessing that Mom carried were in her gospel-sharing repertoire only until the early 1960s. My parents had deployed witnessing aids in their ministries back in the States, but I caught only the tail end of Mom and Dad’s fundamentalist incarnation. Once a bit of European sophistication rubbed off on my parents, their witnessing methods changed. They became more subtle.

The Gospel Walnut was retired and replaced with conversations about philosophy, art, and politics. But these “conversations” were then steered and inevitably ended with a consideration of the Meaning of Life. And THAT, of course, led to a “discussion” about that “feeling of guilt we all have” and you can guess Who the only Answer to that feeling was…

Anyway, once our “The Heart of Salvation” song ended, we’d add,

“Green is the color that shows how a child who loves Jesus will grow.”

I don’t know why the explanation of the green page had to be delivered as a brief soliloquy after the song. But the recipient of our serenade never asked about that, mostly because by then his eyes had glazed over, and he (or she) was backing away and/or rooted to the spot in a horrified Normal-Pagan-and/or-Theologically-Confused-Liberal-Vacationing-Anglican-caught-in-the-headlights-of-an-oncoming-Born-Again-Express-Train sort of way.

If the recipient of the Schaeffer family’s attentions happened to be a forty-year-old Italian businessman, standing barefoot on the cracked sandy concrete floor of the snack bar terrace while clad only in a Very Small, “tragically immodest” Speedo bathing suit, chest hair black and oily against his leathery tan chest, redolent and glistening with the tangy extra-virgin olive oil he used as suntan lotion, a cigarette in one hand and a glass of Campari in the other, the bulge of his genitals outlined in startling detail as he casually adjusted them by scratching, then shifting his generous package while reaching within his Speedo while we sang, the scene would become surreal.

Here was the epitome of The World, a caricature of Fallen Humanity being confronted not just by The Gospel, but also by four (or post-Priscilla-leaving-home three) Very Virtuous Women and one little boy. The women were radiating disapproval of the man’s Speedo and his clearly visible genitals—balls to the left, penis folded to the right—while also exuding a severe love for his Soul. The little boy was thinking of bolting for the water and swimming to the horizon.

As Mom would turn the pages while we sang, she’d point to her heart and then to the man’s heart, tapping him firmly on his chest, thereby making his Pagan Saint Medallions and assorted gold charms, including his cornuto (an inch-long horn-shaped amulet carved from red coral to protect against the evil eye), to bounce. After we sang, the Lost Italian (who could not understand English) would nevertheless clap while smiling at us children, especially at my “developing” sisters. Perhaps all American families burst into songs as a way to greet strangers. “Congratulazioni!” he’d exclaim somewhat nervously, then try to turn away.

The Pagan Symbols dangling around his Lost Oily Neck were all the proof we needed—his alcoholic drink, cigarette, and penis wrapped around his thigh aside—that our target was Very, Very Lost. Had he been even moderately born again, he’d long since have tossed out his “Catholic trinkets.” When Israel committed spiritual adultery, God called His people “whorish women” and accused them of fornication (Ezekiel 16:26–32 and Jeremiah 3:1–25). And we knew that the Roman Catholic Church was even worse than Israel when it chased after False Gods and Strange Women!

If on the off, off chance the Lost Italian showed interest and—after changing into born-again modest boxer-type swimming trunks—wanted a longer answer as to why he should take off his Pagan Saint Medals, Mom would have said, “What does the Bible say about Your Catholic Idols, you ask? That little horn miniature carrot thing you wear was once sacred to worshipers of the Moon Goddess! In your Catholic heresy, these awful things relate to the Virgin Mary standing on a lunar crescent! So turn with me to Exodus 20:4–5. Here let me show you! As you grow in the Lord, you’ll get more familiar with your Bible! Here it is! ‘Thou shalt not MAKE unto thee ANY graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not BOW DOWN thyself to them nor SERVE them.’ Don’t you Catholics MAKE graven images? Don’t you then serve the moon goddess?”

“Io suppongo di sì.” (I suppose so.)

“Don’t Catholics KNEEL down to statues of Mary?”

“Io penso di sì.” (I think so, yes.)

“Don’t Catholics SERVE Mary?”

“Ovviamente.” (Obviously.)

“Don’t Catholics BOW DOWN and kiss the foot of the pagan god Jupiter, which was renamed St. Peter?”

“É vero.” (Yes, that’s true.)

“Then turn with me to Leviticus 26:1. Susan, please show this poor man where it is. See? ‘You shall make you NO IDOLS nor GRAVEN IMAGE,’ and THAT INCLUDES CORAL CARROTS, OR WHATEVER IT IS YOU CALL THAT SILLY THING! ‘Neither rear you up a STANDING IMAGE. Neither shall ye set up any IMAGE OF STONE in your land to bow down unto it.’ Don’t Catholics rear up STANDING IMAGES?”

“Io non lo so.” (I don’t know.)

What do you mean ‘I don’t know’? Don’t Catholics set up IMAGES OF STONE?! Haven’t you ever been to St. Peter’s Basilica? Turn with me to Deuteronomy 4:16. No, no, my poor Dear man, it’s in the Old Testament! Here, Debby, you show him! He’s obviously never even seen a Bible! ‘Lest ye corrupt yourselves, and MAKE you a GRAVEN IMAGE, the similitude of ANY FIGURE, the likeness of MALE or FEMALE.’ Don’t you Catholics make graven images of MALE and FEMALE?”

“Non importa.”

“Debby, what did he say?”

“I think he said it doesn’t matter.”

“Oh, Dear, haven’t you heard anything I’ve been telling you? Turn with me to Deuteronomy 16:22. Here I’ll show you. ‘Neither shalt thou SET thee up ANY IMAGE: which the Lord thy God HATES.’ Don’t Catholics SET UP ANY IMAGES? Yes! Doesn’t God HATE those IMAGES?”

“Io non lo so.”

“Don’t you know what God hates?”

To which our Italian might have answered “Si!” and torn off his wicked trinkets and been saved or kept his trinkets and muttered “Vaffanculo!” and remained as Lost as ever.

But this never happened. In all the years of witnessing, while on vacation we never saved one cornuto-wearing Italian, though several Italians, including the aforementioned Dino (and Lorna if you count English wives married to Italians), did come to L’Abri and returned to Dark, Lost Italy and started a home church in Milan. “But, sadly,” as Mom once said, “even Dino still wears a medallion of some ‘saint,’ so I’m not entirely sure about him.”

Frank Schaeffer is a writer. His new book is –WHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD: How to give love, create beauty and find peace.

Amazon Link