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“As a survivor of the rightwing Christian poitical movement Frank Schaeffer and his father Francis Schaeffer help to found, I find Crazy for God [subtitled: 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] a welcome reality check.
Frank's father, Francis Schaeffer and his wife Edith were founders of L'Abri, a Christian ministry and education center in Switzerland. His father's book, How Shall We Then Live? became a a seminal document of the anti-abortion movement in the U.S., a movement which became the framework for the rightwing political/religious movement that helped elect both George H.W. Bush and his son George W. Bush to the Whitehouse.
Actually, Frank, the younger, was perhaps more important in launching the movement than his father because as a "Christian" filmmaker he created a mass audience not only for his father but for others, as well. Both he and his father came to regret their associations with movement stars Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson James Kennedy, John Whitehead, and James Dobson,
"Compared to Dad, these slick media figures were upstarts. They were 'not our sort of people,' Dad often said. What some people like Robertson and Falwell got from Dad was some respectability.
"Dad had a unique reputation for an intellectual approach to faith. And his well-deserved reputation for frugal ethical living...was the opposite of the reputations of the new breed of evangelical leadership...Empire builders like Robertson, Dobson, and Falwell like rubbing up against (or quoting) my father, for the same reason that popes liked to have photos taken with Mother Teresa.
"What I slowly realized was that the religious-right leaders we were helping to gain power were not 'conservatives' at all, in the old sense of the word. They were anti-American religious revolutionaries...
"The new religious-right was all about religiously motivated "morality," which it used for nakedly political purposes. This was a throwback to an earlier and uglier time, for instance to the 1930s pro-fascist "Catholic" xenophobic hatemongers like Father Charles Coughlin and his vicious anti-Roosevelt radio programs."
I call myself a survivor of the rightwing political movement Schaeffer and his dad helped to get started. I "survived" in that I came to my senses (very gradually, I must admit). I left my job as a ministry fundraising writer for Pat Robertson during his campaign to become the Republican party's presidential nominee. As I came out from under "the spell," I became more and more appalled by the damage rightwing "Christians" have inflicted on the political process in my country.
Today Christian demagogues have been overshadowed by media figures like Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck and here in Nashville, Phil Valentine. There is absolutely nothing Christian about the hatred and fear these men along with women like Michele Malkin and Anne Coulter are purveying. These "anti-American revolutionaries," as Schaeffer has called them, are not speaking from pulpits in churches but from behind microphones on radio and under the blazing lights of television talk shows and cable news programs.
Neither I, nor my country, has survived this onslaught. Not yet. Frank Schaeffer's book, Crazy for God, gives us valuable insight into the way things are and how they came to be.
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Annie M wrote this review Sunday, September 27, 2009.
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