Father of the religious right regrets starting it all

[bobalot]

I found this in another forum. Thought you guys might be interested. The full text is here.

It's an interview with a guy called Frank Schaeffer. I don't know enough about the American religious right to know if he is the "father" of the modern religious right. I lifted the title of the thread from the other forum.

Here is a interesting bit of it.

JW: As you’ve written in your book Crazy for God and in your blogs, you and your father created the Religious Right. I was there, as well. In fact, people were carrying my book, The Second American Revolution, around at political rallies. Almost 30 years later, do you regret the part you played?

FS: I look back on it all like somebody who finally sobered up after drinking all their life. They realize that when they were a drunk, they used their relationships, smashed their businesses and impoverished their families. But they finally got sober, went to Alcoholics Anonymous and mended their ways. So I look back with horror because the small part I played, and certainly the larger part my father played, and the part you played with me has brought us to this place. We lifted up a number of single-issue political things like abortion, and we opened up a floodgate of a moralistic style of grandstanding from the sidelines, which has made this country essentially ungovernable. It also unleashed a culture war. The Left bears responsibility as well for that because Roe v. Wade was very ill-conceived—a kind of “one-stop solution” to a contentious issue that essentially set everybody on their ear. So it works both ways. But for the part I played, I have nothing but regret.

JW: You’ve written that the Christian Right was anti-American. What do you mean by that?

FS: We set this negative tone, in that, for us, bad news about America was good news. This was true whether it was fund-raising or whether it was the call to be a Christian society. Our basic premise was that the only way America could function was as a biblically based Christian society. We live in a multicultural, pluralistic, multi-religion society ranging all the way from atheist Jews to Hindus to Muslims to Christians to Episcopalians who are liberal, to Unitarians to Fundamentalists. Essentially, that vision of America was one of our enemies. We didn’t want a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic society. What we wanted was a homogenous Christian country built somewhat along the lines of Calvin’s Geneva or the Puritan-based state colonies. That essentially put us at cross purposes with and made us hate America as it is. So the America we envisioned actually didn’t exist, and probably never did. Thus, we were the enemies of America as it is today. America is not a religious state. It is a pluralistic, secular culture built around certain religious principles, along with certain other philosophical principles. But it doesn’t belong to us or the evangelicals any more than it belongs to any other group.

Your thoughts?

[bobalot]

Another interesting part.

FS: That’s true, but the criticism of the Left is really foolish because they’re shooting themselves in the foot. The criticism from the Right borders on being unpatriotic because it is saying that our guy lost. So now we would rather fail, to quote Rush Limbaugh, and take everybody with us and be proved right. If you’re talking in practical terms, we ought to cut our new president some slack for at least a year. I would say probably two years or halfway through his term. If halfway through his term things are measurably better economically, if we are starting to see reform in our schools, if fewer of our soldiers are getting shot at abroad, if things are generally turning around when it comes to certain other measurable things such as the amount of carbon we are putting into the atmosphere and so on. If you see progress on these fronts, even if it is minimal, then Obama’s presidency is on the way to becoming a success. But right now, the level of criticism from the Republicans, who don’t seem to offer any positive solutions themselves, is literally immoral. It was the Republicans who got us in this fix in the first place. Rather than taking the blame, they’re trying to place blame for what is happening on the new president. The Left is living in La La Land because they should realize that we don’t have the luxury of second guessing the only bet we have, which is the guy sitting in the White House right now. We have to give him time.

[The Romulan Republic]

I know nothing about this man or his career, but I'd like to think that the people who started the current madness might some day learn from their mistakes and step back from a path that leads to the destruction of America. It certainly takes guts to admit you were wrong, to the point of being an "enemy of America" and making the country "ungovernable."

Or to put it more cynically, what is the saying about rats and sinking ships?

[Nieztchean Uber-Amoeba]

More good stuff:

JW: Is the Christian Right dead? James Dobson is stepping down. I don’t see anybody else out there who can spearhead the Christian Right. The movement is rather depleted right now. But does that mean they’re dead?

FS: I think the Christian Right is dead in the sense that it is no longer the single great force to be reckoned with. Although the Christian Right has died, the rotting body has now infected the Republican Party to the point where they can’t function without the hatred and the fear. The Christian Right might be dead, but they have taken the Republican Party with them. All you have are figures like Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. And all they have left is a kind of reactionary bitterness.

JW: Do you feel any remorse for being partly responsible for the Christian Right and all that has followed?

FS: Remorse isn’t the word I would use. Maybe I would use the word regret. If I do have regret, it is for two things. I have regret for the politics, but I also have regret on the spiritual side for the simplistic vision of Christianity that we painted where everything is black and white, saved and lost, and which forgets that one is on a spiritual journey. To claim at any point on that journey that you have enough knowledge to want to force other people to do what you believe is right is arrogant and self-defeating. You always have to admit at any point in the journey that (a) you could be wrong and (b) that you are going to continue down that path and that you cannot claim at any point the mantle of absolute truth and then start applying that to public policy. It is a wrong theology and an intolerant theology that regards everyone who is not cast in a certain mold of theological correctness as an outsider—as the “other” and therefore the enemy. When you divide the world into me and the people who agree with me and everyone else, I think you really have a problem, especially when you are trying to work within a pluralistic or democratic culture. So for me personally, what I regret is what I believe was a truly misguided theology that was absolutist and intolerant that led to an even worse politics that was utterly misguided and has been measurably a failure.

JW: It was failed philosophy from the beginning.

FS: From the beginning. What we did was set our hand against the reality in the United States and essentially set up this alternative reality of Christian books, Christian TV, Christian radio, Christian magazines, Christian schools and the home school movement. All of these various things were basically telling the rest of the country, “We hate you. We don’t like the way you are. We think you are sinful. We think you are awful. We wash our hands of you. We are going to do our own thing. And if we have our way, we will elect people like us and put them in office, change the laws and run you guys out of town.” We were essentially anti-American revolutionaries. So, in a way, the title of your book, The Second American Revolution, had an unintended, or at least a subtle, context because there really was a second American revolution. We were trying to overthrow the status quo. And I don’t think that was sufficiently understood. It was a much more radical movement than people realized.

[Darth Wong]

I know nothing about this man or his career, but I'd like to think that the people who started the current madness might some day learn from their mistakes and step back from a path that leads to the destruction of America. It certainly takes guts to admit you were wrong, to the point of being an "enemy of America" and making the country "ungovernable."

Or to put it more cynically, what is the saying about rats and sinking ships?

Indeed. His profound revelation is a bit like a guy crawling out of a car wreck, looking at the corpses of his victims, and saying "I'll never drink and drive again!"

Fuck him and the horse he rode in on.

[Surlethe]

Frank Schaeffer would be the son of the "philosopher" Francis Schaeffer, who played a large part in starting up the religious right. The older Schaeffer was also instrumental in the creation of presuppositionalist thought, the sort of "We have to take the Bible literally as a deductive starting point" mentality that organizations like AiG (the creationists, not the insurers) now have.

Recently, the younger Schaeffer has broken with the religious right - IIRC, it went public about a year ago.

[Surlethe]

(Ghetto) edit: some other memories drifted up. Schaeffer also helped merge the religious right and libertarianism by writing books justifying why capitalism is Biblically sound.

This is also a very relevant quote to anyone who wants to understand the evangelical counterculture:

JW: It was failed philosophy from the beginning.

FS: From the beginning. What we did was set our hand against the reality in the United States and essentially set up this alternative reality of Christian books, Christian TV, Christian radio, Christian magazines, Christian schools and the home school movement. All of these various things were basically telling the rest of the country, “We hate you. We don’t like the way you are. We think you are sinful. We think you are awful. We wash our hands of you. We are going to do our own thing. And if we have our way, we will elect people like us and put them in office, change the laws and run you guys out of town.” We were essentially anti-American revolutionaries. So, in a way, the title of your book, The Second American Revolution, had an unintended, or at least a subtle, context because there really was a second American revolution. We were trying to overthrow the status quo. And I don’t think that was sufficiently understood. It was a much more radical movement than people realized.

[Patrick Degan]

This is like the guy who comes back and apologises for setting that little bonfire in the woods which subsequently burned down whole forests, a town or two, and a few dozen people.

Waaaay too late for apologies now.

[tchizek]

And none of the people who followed in his (and his fathers) footsteps will listen or have any reaction except "heretic!" to his realization.

This is where a time machine would be handy - send the older SOB back to convince the younger SOB that what he was doing is stupid. (Or maybe just shoot the younger SOB?)