×

Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible’s Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics—and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway is a kaleidoscope of early-life memoir and analysis of the American Right from someone who converted from one side of the political divide in the United States to the other but retains all the invective and ridicule of that bitter polarity. Frank (Francis Schaeffer V) is the son of the late Francis Schaeffer, one of the main shapers of evangelicalism in the later 20th century, and Edith Schaeffer, the remarkable writer and formative influence in the creation of the L’Abri communities, the Schaeffers’ greatest acheivement. Edith is one of the main subjects of the book.

Here I must confess that, as well as knowing Frank Schaeffer briefly and having written a recent biography of his father, I am writing outside of the political world in which America is currently defined. This is because I belong to a democratic system far older than that of the United States, which has its own demons.

Frank Schaeffer’s book reflects his nation’s political turmoil in being oddly incoherent. Its unity lies in anger and sharp emotional swings, with a storytelling style that much of the time succeeds in providing a gripping narrative framework. Other times there are large blocks of diatribe that I simply would not have persisted in reading if I were not reviewing the book. Also I’m rather tired of reading in fiction and non-fiction about Frank’s childhood and youth. (It is fair to say that, not being an American reader, I’m not part of the intended readership for whom Frank’s cultural criticism is directly relevant, even if unwelcome and up for challenge.) In the book’s confusion and failure to let fact hamper its style, however, there are important moments of clarity and tenderness. Particularly, Frank’s mother emerges at times in her complex and attractive personality, although Frank makes the terrible mistake of seeing her goodness and unique impact as being in spite of, rather than as enabled by, her evangelical Christian beliefs.

He sees evangelicalism as systemically flawed, creating many evils such as the devaluing of women. Francis and Edith, however, stand in a long evangelical tradition of principled activism that is person-centered rather than ideological. Before them William Wilberforce gained strength to persist in his battle to win the abolition of slavery, John Newton repented of the slave trade, and Christabel Pankhurst gained encouragement to persist in campaigning for female emancipation. More recently the late Rev. George Hoffman founded Tear Fund, now a major NGO providing aid to a hungry world, and Peter and Miranda Harris were inspired to start A Rocha, involved in research and practical projects in conservation, seeing care for the environment as important to what makes us human.

Frank has a wide but linked array of targets for his satire and blistering condemnation: the American Right, including its emerging grassroots that comes over in Sex, Mom, and God rather like a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party; Christian fundamentalism (with which he confuses evangelicalism); his father; the Bible; and the God of the Bible (ascribed as an angry male, like his father). His mother, whom he adores, is saved from attack by supposing (in the face of her clearly thought out beliefs, eloquently expressed in her writings) that she is tacitly on his side in denouncing evangelicals.

Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible’s Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics—and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway

Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible’s Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics—and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway

Da Capo Press (2011). 320 pp.

With hilarious scenes from his childhood alternating with acidic ruminations on the present state of an America he and his famous fundamentalist parents helped create, Frank Schaeffer asks what the Glenn Becks and the Sarah Palins are really all about.

Here’s a hint: sex.

The central character in this “startlingly honest” (Booklist) memoir is the author’s far-from-prudish evangelical mother, who sweetly but bizarrely provides startling juxtapositions of the religious and the sensual throughout young Frank’s childhood.

Da Capo Press (2011). 320 pp.

Frank’s whole sharp-tongued approach to the victims of his powerful prose is captured, rather unkindly, in the style used by a reviewer on Amazon, who quipped: “Frank Schaeffer is on a textbook Oedipal/Freudian quest to annihilate his father and have mommy all to himself.” This is no more accurate, however, than Frank’s portrayal of the evangelical, or, for that matter, his basic picture of fundamentalism, though maybe some targets warrant his ire. Fundamentalism is in fact very much part of the modern world, appearing in a bewildering variety. Its American religious manifestation, lampooned by Frank, is very different from the biblical fundamentalism of the early last century, which shaped and, in its separatist form, was rejected by his father and mother. I’d love to see Frank using his skills as a cultural commentator to understand why fundamentalism in various forms today is so important a part of the modern world. But to do this he needs to stand outside of his own provincialism, locked as he is into his memoir-world, often centered in his early experience (the focus of his Calvin Becker trilogy, as well as much of Crazy for God and this new book).

Memoir-writing is by nature selective, subjective, and often exaggerated. Unlike a biographer, the memoir-writer is not constantly checking the facts and interpretation. In C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy, for instance (which has some features of a memoir) he portrays the private school (“Belsen”) to which he was dispatched within weeks of his mother’s death in such a negative way that his brother Warren protested. A. N. Wilson points out that Lewis also skillfully built up his father as a comic character. In naturalist Gerald Durrell’s My Family and Other Animals, his memories of being a child on the Greek island of Corfu, he acknowledges his family helped him considerably when he was writing it “by arguing ferociously and rarely agreeing about any incident on which [he] consulted them.”

In his many memoir-shaped writings, such as Sex, Mom, and God, Frank applies a searching honesty to his life (such as his failures as a film-maker) but nevertheless overestimates his role in the politicization of American fundamentalists and, particularly, of evangelicals. It is true that, with his father, he played an important role in the anti-abortion movement and in alerting people to a fundamental shift in core values (Francis Schaeffer actually anticipated postmodernism back in the 60s). The driving force in the new Christian political activism in America, however, came from the demand to acknowledge the lordship of Christ in all of life, which of course includes politics, business life, wealth, the environment, being one’s neighbor’s keeper, scholarship, and the arts and media. Such an all-encompassing demand actually rules out in advance a one- or two-issue approach (though may lead to a tactical decision temporarily to have a narrow aim).

The evangelical focus of such an all-encompassing demand for obedience to Christ was not ideological but Bible-centered. Francis Schaeffer understood this, but Frank’s repentant reassessment of his own role in right-wing activism is one of a narrow focus, which he sees as the attempt to overthrow proper government if it fails to uphold his group’s aims, such as the repeal of laws allowing easy abortion. Other evangelical groups, both within and outside America, drew on a more wide-focus view of Christ’s lordship. For instance, in postwar Britain, many evangelicals took up the challenge of scholarship under his lordship and achieved chairs in what are called by American Christians the “secular universities.” Some leading scientists in the UK are evangelicals, such as Sir John Houghton, an Oxford atmospheric physicist who became director of the Meterological Office, and chaired a highly influencial Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), sharing a Nobel Peace Prize for his work. In the United States, Francis Collins led The Human Genome Project. In the 1960s, Francis Schaeffer’s lectures and later books (the earliest of which, Escape From Reason [1968)] was first published in the UK) were recognized by British academic evangelicals as reinforcing and vitalizing their vision and calling. Oliver Barclay, former head of the Inter-Varsity Fellowship (UCCF), writes that Francis Schaeffer “came at just the right time and his constructive response helped enormously to inject a new theological confidence into the evangelical community and to warn them of the dangers of escaping to subjectivism.”

Even a cursory worldwide and historical glance makes Frank Schaeffer’s portrayal of the evangelical movement in Sex, Mom, and God look silly. My reaction to it, I’m almost ashamed to confess, as I like Frank (but dislike his verbal rampages and ad hominem dismissals), is rather similar to that of Dan Brown’s exposition of Leonardo’s “The Last Supper” in his The Da Vinci Code, in which the disciple at Jesus’ right turns out to be his bride, Mary Magdalene. Both interpretations seem to lack any concern for fact in favor of a good story. Frank’s father spent decades formulating his understanding of Western art and culture, even if this is questioned in places, and encouraged a generation of evangelicals to get stuck into firsthand, demanding scholarship, often in top secular universities. At the same time, many were envisioned to work in the arts and media, including publishing and broadcasting, in aid agencies in the developing world, in medicine and social work, in care for the environment, as journalists in dangerous war zones, and so on—nothing that fits into Frank’s current, provincial perception.

Sadly, Frank also seems unaware of the painstaking work of biblical scholars and some high-caliber expositors of the Old Testament, as he reduces evangelical interpretation to ridicule. Here are some of Frank’s slash-and-burn comments about evangelicals on Scripture:

Mom was a much nicer person than her God. There are many biblical regulations, about everything from beard-trimming to menstruating, of what The-God-of-the-Bible want us to do or not do, along with rigid laws and Severe Punishment (mostly death) for the least transgression. Mom worked diligently to recast her personal-hygene-obsessed God in the best light (62).

Mom lived as if God were much bigger than the nasty little eccentric portyrayed in the Bible (63).

The “whole Bible is true,” Mom claimed, though everything in her life that was kind and decent and compassionate contradicted this platitude (63).

To her, the fault always had to be with our human “interpretation” of the Word, not with the Word itself, even if The Word painted God as barbaric and stupid (63).

I had a problem with the fact that The-God-of-the-Bible sanctions rape. . . . Moses commanded his soldiers to take their enemy’s virgins for their pleasure and to “have”—that is, rape—them. (p. 81).

I’ll trust the actual evidence of just how lovely women are as proof of God’s goodness and creative ability rather than what is written about women [in the Bible] by women-haters trying to rope God into their nasty arguments (83).

Maybe (if [Thom] Stark is right) God feels slandered by the Bronze-Age-to-Roman-era “biography” of Him that, it turns out (judging by the insanity that makes up so much of the Bible), wasn’t an authorized biography, let alone an inspired one (87).

Frank’s bitter diatribe against evangelicals (= right-wing fundamentalist Christians) should not be dismissed simply as a betrayal either of biblical faith or of his parents, who deserve honor for their years of imaginative service for Christ’s kingdom, including many years of self-chosen obscurity rather than well-marketed celebrity. It would be wrong, as some have done, to make Frank the subject of hate emails (in commendable transparency, he freely publicizes his email address). Nor should his book be seen as yet another American leftie attack on the Right. Frank’s book has been positively received by a wide variety of readers. His comments and judgments, however misjudged or inaccurate, should be taken seriously as representative of how many people today see biblical faith and the evangelical church. As such, this perception is a major barrier to coming to Christ.

It’s tough, but we need to work as hard at humbly countering such sharp-tongued and inaccurate critique as we would at answering an Oxford unbeliever like professor Richard Dawkins in a polite debating chamber where the f-word is avoided. Frank should not be persona non grata for the evangelical. He is our neighbor, whom we must love. For myself, I find it hard to forgive something Frank did as “Franky” when he was popular with many in the evangelical world. I often think of his relentless campaign against professor Gareth Jones of the University of Auckland and his book Brave New People, which defended the unborn child in a way too nuanced for Franky to recognize. His lack of judgment was a direct cause of the book being withdrawn from publication. Such a lack of judgment still persists in Frank. As a writer, perhaps the words of John Milton will haunt him: “As good almost kill a man as kill a good book; who kills a man kills a reasonable creature, God’s image; he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself, kills the image of God.”

Podcasts

LOAD MORE
Loading