Thursday, December 25, 2014 8:15:33 PM
Confessions of a One-Time Religious Right Icon
Thu Dec 25, 2014 at 10:25 AM PST
by teacherkenFollow
24 Comments / 3 New
The leaders of the new religious right were gleefully betting on American failure. If secular, democratic, diverse and pluralistic America survived, then wouldn’t that prove that we were wrong about God only wanting to bless “Christian America?” If, for instance, crime went down dramatically in New York City, for any other reason than a reformation and revival, wouldn’t that make the prophets of doom look silly? And if the economy was booming without anyone repenting, what did that mean?
What began to bother me was that so many of our new “friends” on the religious right seemed to be rooting for one form of apocalypse or another. In the crudest form this was part of the evangelical fascination with the so-called end times. The worse things got, the sooner Jesus would come back. But there was another component. The worse everything got, the more it proved that America needed saving, by us! Plus, it was good for fundraising.
Some 30 years later, what we helped start continues (I'm sorry!). With the Republicans in control of the House and Senate the question arises, again: where does the American far right find the energy to oppose everything and everyone again and again?
Those three paragraphs are from a piece that appeared at Alternet with the full title of My Horrible Right-Wing Past: Confessions of a One-Time Religious Right Icon .. http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/my-horrible-right-wing-past-confessions-one-time-religious-right-icon?akid=12614.34521.dHsT-n&rd=1&src=newsletter1029259&t=11 .. and with the subtitle of I was a religious fanatic appealing to political leaders. Today, the fanatics are the political leaders.. The author is Frank Schaeffer, whose father Francis Schaeffer became one one of the major figures in the rise of the religious right. Frank was right there at his side, helping make it happen.
Frank Schaeffer has long ago disavowed his previous past. He has written extensively both about himself and about the religious right.
This is a relatively brief piece that will make clear the agenda that we will be confronting in the new Congress - although to be fair, the Republican leaders of the House and Senate also have to confront it.
Schaeffer is considered a traitor by many on the religious right, because, as he notes, he was considered as royalty because of his father. He does not care. As he writes now
---
These days I describe myself as an atheist who believes in God.
---
Please keep reading.
Perhaps some may say this is not the day to put up a piece like this.
I disagree, and so must Schaeffer, since I got the Alternet email featuring this piece yesterday, Christmas Eve day.
Schaeffer is very blunt about his father's influence, quoting several paragraphs of his writing including this, which Schaeffer features after noting his father's reference to Jefferson's words in the Declaration about the people's right to abolish a government they cannot change:
---
There does come a time when force, even physical force, is appropriate. A true Christian in Hitler’s Germany and in the occupied countries should have defied the false and counterfeit state. This brings us to a current issue that is crucial for the future of the church in the United States, the issue of abortion. It is time we consciously realize that when any office commands what is contrary to God’s law it abrogates its authority. And our loyalty to the God who gave this law then requires that we make the appropriate response in that situation.
---
Schaeffer then lays out the implications of what his father wrote:
---
In other words, Dad’s followers were told that (1) force is a legitimate weapon to use against an evil government; (2) America was like Hitler’s Germany — because of legal abortion and of the forcing of “humanism” on the population — and thus intrinsically evil; and (3) whatever would have been the “appropriate response” to stop Hitler was now appropriate to do here in America to stop our government, which Dad had just branded a “counterfeit state.”
Is it any wonder that the (mostly) evangelicals running the far-right Republican Party these days see themselves as the children of a revolution? This is ISIS minus the beheadings, but the vibe is the same. Shutting down the government was nothing to these people. They see our government as the enemy, and they are running it.
As I said, in the 1970s we were outsiders asking for change. The change came and now people as demented as I was are running the show.
---
Pretty powerful stuff.
So is this, about the zealotry that underlies the religious right:
---
This zealous negativity has a long history. The 1970s Evangelical anti-abortion movement that Dad (Evangelical leader Francis Schaeffer), C. Everett Koop (who would be Ronald Reagan’s surgeon general) and I helped create seduced the Republican Party. We turned it into an extremist far-right party that is fundamentally anti-American. There would have been no Tea Party without the foundation we built.
The difference between now and then is that back then we were religious fanatics knocking on the doors of normal political leaders. Today the fanatics are the political leaders.
You can’t understand why the GOP was so successful in winning back both houses of congress in 2014, and wrecking most of what Obama has tried to do, unless you understand what we did back then.
---
I noted about that this is pretty powerful stuff. It is stuff that has flown under the radar for years - one of his Dad's books sold over a million copies, but was never featured on best-seller lists.
Perhaps today we pay closer attention, at least here, and yet the real craziness (to my mind) of some of these people is not at all featured in mainstream media.
Remember, it is not just abortion. Now it is any element of gay rights.
We are seeing some of this in state legislatures.
We are seeing the likes of the Koch Brothers use this strand to also weaken regulation of business and the environment.
Schaeffer acknowledges that some of his Dad's followers moved to violence - here think of the killings of Bernard Slepian and George Tiller and also the Nuremberg Files website.
He notes that the Republicans depended upon people like him and his dad to rile up the base in order to achieve other goals - think about the ALEC agenda, for example.
Schaeffer's conclusion is stark. The Republicans are still depending upon that riling up.
---
Mark my words, the subtext to the GOP assault on us in 2016 will be religious extremism — again. And now it has a racist twist. Look at the right’s reaction to the events in Ferguson. Look at the continuing anti-Obama ugliness far past mere political difference. For the Republicans the next election won’t be about politics. it will be a holy war — again.
---
I suspect that were you to go digging through Twitter accounts one might find, even today, sings of this "holy war" that wants what is basically a theocracy of their own definition.
We have seen it in Sarah Palin's anointing.
We have seen it in the New Apostolic Reformation and the event they did several years ago to "anoint" Rick Perry - and remember, Perry is running again, and Mike Huckabee might also run.
We have seen it in the continuing perversion in how curriculum that pushes a particular view is being mandated, through books, through movies, through requiring curriculum that is a biased representation of our history, through the promotion of the work of a man truly not a historian in any meaningful sense of that word - yes I mean David Barton. We see it in false representations of our founding documents, attributing non-existent quotes to various founders, and the demonization of those whose religion differs, not merely on questions of abortion and gay rights, but on the nature of the person whose birth is celebrated today (except by the tens of millions of Orthodox Christians still on a Julian calendar for whom their December 25 comes in 13 days).
For those of you who are celebrating the Nativity of the one often called the Prince of Peace, be mindful that there are those who will seek to claim Jesus for their own political purposes, and those purpose would be alien to any honest reading of the Gospel material, which is perhaps why some of those who follow in the footsteps of Schaeffer's father read that material selectively if at all.
Enjoy this day for whatever meaning it may have for you.
For me, given my last name and family background, while my wife is off at a family dinner celebrating the birth of the one they view as the incarnate god, in a few hours I will head to my local Chinese restaurant.
Perhaps you can read the Schaeffer tomorrow.
Regardless of how you celebrate this day, or not, you should read the Schaeffer and be fully aware of what he has to tell us.
After all, Schaeffer helped to create this monster, and he reminds us
---
the American right is not about politics as most people understand it but about religious absolutes.
---
Their religion. Their absolutes.
And we ignore it at the peril of all we hold dear.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/12/25/1354077/-Confessions-of-a-One-Time-Religious-Right-Icon?detail=hide
As well as in evangelistic teachings and insanities of the worst kinds it's interesting to be reminded of one
other place in which THE LIGHT also dwells. A black hole. The inside grab .. one place of truly no escape.
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=71088839
That journey into a black hole and the journey of a healthy mind into any sort of extreme psychosis .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychosis .. do have some parallels.
See also:
Rick Perry, conduit to radical Christian overthrow of US government?
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=66112765
Right-Wing Is Filled with Biblical Illiterates: They'd Be Shocked by Jesus' Teachings if They Ever Picked Up a Bible
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=95270193
Right Wing Christians Build Ties To Vladimir Putin's Inner Circle
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=107571079
all that those ISIS folks have to do to get good with Phil and become fellow children of God, all forgiven, is to convert from the ludicrous
pretense/pretension of their absolutist fundamentalism to the ludicrous pretense/pretension of Phil's absolutist fundamentalism
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=106148792
30 Tenn. courthouses get threats about bombs .. about two-thirds down ..
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=81883797
Company will stop putting biblical references on guns after Petraeus expresses ‘serious concern.’
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=66112765
Thu Dec 25, 2014 at 10:25 AM PST
by teacherkenFollow
24 Comments / 3 New
The leaders of the new religious right were gleefully betting on American failure. If secular, democratic, diverse and pluralistic America survived, then wouldn’t that prove that we were wrong about God only wanting to bless “Christian America?” If, for instance, crime went down dramatically in New York City, for any other reason than a reformation and revival, wouldn’t that make the prophets of doom look silly? And if the economy was booming without anyone repenting, what did that mean?
What began to bother me was that so many of our new “friends” on the religious right seemed to be rooting for one form of apocalypse or another. In the crudest form this was part of the evangelical fascination with the so-called end times. The worse things got, the sooner Jesus would come back. But there was another component. The worse everything got, the more it proved that America needed saving, by us! Plus, it was good for fundraising.
Some 30 years later, what we helped start continues (I'm sorry!). With the Republicans in control of the House and Senate the question arises, again: where does the American far right find the energy to oppose everything and everyone again and again?
Those three paragraphs are from a piece that appeared at Alternet with the full title of My Horrible Right-Wing Past: Confessions of a One-Time Religious Right Icon .. http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/my-horrible-right-wing-past-confessions-one-time-religious-right-icon?akid=12614.34521.dHsT-n&rd=1&src=newsletter1029259&t=11 .. and with the subtitle of I was a religious fanatic appealing to political leaders. Today, the fanatics are the political leaders.. The author is Frank Schaeffer, whose father Francis Schaeffer became one one of the major figures in the rise of the religious right. Frank was right there at his side, helping make it happen.
Frank Schaeffer has long ago disavowed his previous past. He has written extensively both about himself and about the religious right.
This is a relatively brief piece that will make clear the agenda that we will be confronting in the new Congress - although to be fair, the Republican leaders of the House and Senate also have to confront it.
Schaeffer is considered a traitor by many on the religious right, because, as he notes, he was considered as royalty because of his father. He does not care. As he writes now
---
These days I describe myself as an atheist who believes in God.
---
Please keep reading.
Perhaps some may say this is not the day to put up a piece like this.
I disagree, and so must Schaeffer, since I got the Alternet email featuring this piece yesterday, Christmas Eve day.
Schaeffer is very blunt about his father's influence, quoting several paragraphs of his writing including this, which Schaeffer features after noting his father's reference to Jefferson's words in the Declaration about the people's right to abolish a government they cannot change:
---
There does come a time when force, even physical force, is appropriate. A true Christian in Hitler’s Germany and in the occupied countries should have defied the false and counterfeit state. This brings us to a current issue that is crucial for the future of the church in the United States, the issue of abortion. It is time we consciously realize that when any office commands what is contrary to God’s law it abrogates its authority. And our loyalty to the God who gave this law then requires that we make the appropriate response in that situation.
---
Schaeffer then lays out the implications of what his father wrote:
---
In other words, Dad’s followers were told that (1) force is a legitimate weapon to use against an evil government; (2) America was like Hitler’s Germany — because of legal abortion and of the forcing of “humanism” on the population — and thus intrinsically evil; and (3) whatever would have been the “appropriate response” to stop Hitler was now appropriate to do here in America to stop our government, which Dad had just branded a “counterfeit state.”
Is it any wonder that the (mostly) evangelicals running the far-right Republican Party these days see themselves as the children of a revolution? This is ISIS minus the beheadings, but the vibe is the same. Shutting down the government was nothing to these people. They see our government as the enemy, and they are running it.
As I said, in the 1970s we were outsiders asking for change. The change came and now people as demented as I was are running the show.
---
Pretty powerful stuff.
So is this, about the zealotry that underlies the religious right:
---
This zealous negativity has a long history. The 1970s Evangelical anti-abortion movement that Dad (Evangelical leader Francis Schaeffer), C. Everett Koop (who would be Ronald Reagan’s surgeon general) and I helped create seduced the Republican Party. We turned it into an extremist far-right party that is fundamentally anti-American. There would have been no Tea Party without the foundation we built.
The difference between now and then is that back then we were religious fanatics knocking on the doors of normal political leaders. Today the fanatics are the political leaders.
You can’t understand why the GOP was so successful in winning back both houses of congress in 2014, and wrecking most of what Obama has tried to do, unless you understand what we did back then.
---
I noted about that this is pretty powerful stuff. It is stuff that has flown under the radar for years - one of his Dad's books sold over a million copies, but was never featured on best-seller lists.
Perhaps today we pay closer attention, at least here, and yet the real craziness (to my mind) of some of these people is not at all featured in mainstream media.
Remember, it is not just abortion. Now it is any element of gay rights.
We are seeing some of this in state legislatures.
We are seeing the likes of the Koch Brothers use this strand to also weaken regulation of business and the environment.
Schaeffer acknowledges that some of his Dad's followers moved to violence - here think of the killings of Bernard Slepian and George Tiller and also the Nuremberg Files website.
He notes that the Republicans depended upon people like him and his dad to rile up the base in order to achieve other goals - think about the ALEC agenda, for example.
Schaeffer's conclusion is stark. The Republicans are still depending upon that riling up.
---
Mark my words, the subtext to the GOP assault on us in 2016 will be religious extremism — again. And now it has a racist twist. Look at the right’s reaction to the events in Ferguson. Look at the continuing anti-Obama ugliness far past mere political difference. For the Republicans the next election won’t be about politics. it will be a holy war — again.
---
I suspect that were you to go digging through Twitter accounts one might find, even today, sings of this "holy war" that wants what is basically a theocracy of their own definition.
We have seen it in Sarah Palin's anointing.
We have seen it in the New Apostolic Reformation and the event they did several years ago to "anoint" Rick Perry - and remember, Perry is running again, and Mike Huckabee might also run.
We have seen it in the continuing perversion in how curriculum that pushes a particular view is being mandated, through books, through movies, through requiring curriculum that is a biased representation of our history, through the promotion of the work of a man truly not a historian in any meaningful sense of that word - yes I mean David Barton. We see it in false representations of our founding documents, attributing non-existent quotes to various founders, and the demonization of those whose religion differs, not merely on questions of abortion and gay rights, but on the nature of the person whose birth is celebrated today (except by the tens of millions of Orthodox Christians still on a Julian calendar for whom their December 25 comes in 13 days).
For those of you who are celebrating the Nativity of the one often called the Prince of Peace, be mindful that there are those who will seek to claim Jesus for their own political purposes, and those purpose would be alien to any honest reading of the Gospel material, which is perhaps why some of those who follow in the footsteps of Schaeffer's father read that material selectively if at all.
Enjoy this day for whatever meaning it may have for you.
For me, given my last name and family background, while my wife is off at a family dinner celebrating the birth of the one they view as the incarnate god, in a few hours I will head to my local Chinese restaurant.
Perhaps you can read the Schaeffer tomorrow.
Regardless of how you celebrate this day, or not, you should read the Schaeffer and be fully aware of what he has to tell us.
After all, Schaeffer helped to create this monster, and he reminds us
---
the American right is not about politics as most people understand it but about religious absolutes.
---
Their religion. Their absolutes.
And we ignore it at the peril of all we hold dear.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/12/25/1354077/-Confessions-of-a-One-Time-Religious-Right-Icon?detail=hide
As well as in evangelistic teachings and insanities of the worst kinds it's interesting to be reminded of one
other place in which THE LIGHT also dwells. A black hole. The inside grab .. one place of truly no escape.
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=71088839
That journey into a black hole and the journey of a healthy mind into any sort of extreme psychosis .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psychosis .. do have some parallels.
See also:
Rick Perry, conduit to radical Christian overthrow of US government?
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=66112765
Right-Wing Is Filled with Biblical Illiterates: They'd Be Shocked by Jesus' Teachings if They Ever Picked Up a Bible
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=95270193
Right Wing Christians Build Ties To Vladimir Putin's Inner Circle
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=107571079
all that those ISIS folks have to do to get good with Phil and become fellow children of God, all forgiven, is to convert from the ludicrous
pretense/pretension of their absolutist fundamentalism to the ludicrous pretense/pretension of Phil's absolutist fundamentalism
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=106148792
30 Tenn. courthouses get threats about bombs .. about two-thirds down ..
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=81883797
Company will stop putting biblical references on guns after Petraeus expresses ‘serious concern.’
http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=66112765
It was Plato who said, “He, O men, is the wisest, who like Socrates, knows that his wisdom is in truth worth nothing”
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