Interview with Frank Schaeffer - Claremont Journal of Religion

CJR: Volume 1, Issue 2 6 Interview with Frank Schaeffer Kile Jones, Founder of Claremont Journal of Religion May 9, 2012 KJ: Could you briefly describe your childhood upbringing and how religion played a role in it? FS: My late father, Francis Schaeffer, was a key founder and leader of the Religious Right. My mother Edith was also a spiritual leader, not just the mere power behind her man, which she was. Mom was a formidable and adored religious figure whose books and public speaking, not to mention biblical conditioning of me, directly and CJR: Volume 1, Issue 2 7 indirectly shaped millions of lives. For a time I joined my Dad in pioneering the Evangelical anti-­‐abortion Religious Right movement. In the 1970s and early 80s, when I was in my twenties, I evolved into an ambitious, “successful” religious leader/instigator in my own right. And I wasn’t just Dad’s sidekick; I was also Mom’s collaborator in her well meant, if unintentionally hilarious plot, to “reach the world for Jesus.” One morning in the early 1980s, I looked out over several acres of pale blue polyester and some twelve thousand Southern Baptist ministers. My evangelist father was being treated for lymphoma at the Mayo Clinic, and in his place I’d been asked to deliver several keynote addresses on the evangelical/fundamentalist circuit. I was following in the proudly nepotistic American Protestant tradition, wherein the Holy Spirit always seems to lead the offspring and spouses of evangelical superstars (or dictators) to “follow the call.” A few weeks before, after being introduced by Pat Robertson, I had delivered a rousing take-­‐back-­‐America speech to thousands of cheering religious broadcasters. And not long after, I would appear at a huge pro-­‐life rally in Denver. Cal Thomas—once the vice president of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, who later became a Fox News Commentator—would introduce me as “the best speaker in America.” The “anointing,” he said, was “clearly on this young man!” They were saying that I was a better speaker than my famous father. At that moment the Schaeffers were evangelical royalty. When I was growing up in L’Abri, my parents’ religious community in Switzerland, it was not unusual to find myself seated across the dining room table from Billy Graham’s daughter or CJR: Volume 1, Issue 2 8 President Ford’s son, even Timothy Leary. The English actress Glynis Johns used to come for Sunday high tea. I figured it was normal. They were just a few of the thousands who made it through our doors. Only later did I realize that L’Abri attracted a weirdly eclectic group of people who otherwise would not be caught dead in the same room. My childhood was, to say the least, unusual. When Gerald Ford died in January of 2007, I recalled that the day he had assumed the presidency, his daughter-­‐in-­‐law Gayle was babysitting my daughter Jessica as her job in the work-­‐study program at L’Abri, where Mike Ford, the President’s son, was a student. Mom and Dad met with presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush Sr. and stayed in the White House several times. In the 1990s when my mother Edith—then in her eighties—heard that George W. Bush might run for the presidency, she exclaimed, “What? But Barbara asked me to pray especially for young George. She didn’t think he had what it took to do anything.” KJ: How have your religious views changed throughout your life? FS: I was raised to be a fundamentalist Calvinist. Today I view “salvation” as a journey. Here’s where I’m “at” today. To find the spiritual truth within any religion’s scripture, the holy books must be mentally edited. People of goodwill, informed by the love-­‐your-­‐neighbor spiritual truth they carry within their evolving ethical selves, have to find “good bits” of various scriptures and reject the rest. In terms of my own religion, the loyalty of those who wish to live as Christians, as opposed to those who wish to force others to be like us by using Christianity as a weapon, must shift from fidelity to the Bible to seeking the life-­‐affirming message of transcendence buried CJR: Volume 1, Issue 2 9 within the madness, ignorance, and fear that we discover, not just in the darker portions of our “sacred” texts, but in every human heart. To see ourselves as fellow travelers sharing a humble uncertainty is an antidote to both religious fundamentalism and secular fundamentalism. No one ever killed anyone after shouting, “Maybe God is great!” I used to think that the Bible was okay and that our (and other Christians’ and Jews’) problems—say, our ugly behavior to gay people or lying and stealing as a “normal” way of conducting our ministries, let alone the nepotism, personality cults and power struggles—stemmed from us not “living consistently as real Christians according to the Bible’s teaching.” Now I think that living consistently according to the Bible is one of the worst mistakes possible. To choose a rotten, exclusionary, hate filled, backwards Bronze Age-­‐to-­‐Roman-­‐era ethical foundation for one’s life—
i.e. most of the Bible—is not just a mistake, but a tragedy. KJ: What do you find compelling about the Orthodox Church? FS: I like the liturgy. I like the fact that it is not a personality cult based on clever preaching. I like doing the dishes after the food festival. I was reading, “Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said” by Phillip K. Dick. My favorite quote is: “Grief causes you to leave yourself. You step outside your narrow little pelt. And you can’t feel grief unless you’ve had love before it—grief is the final outcome of love, because it’s lost love.” In fact, the whole anti-­‐theology of one thread in Orthodoxy (not the “Orthodox” fundamentalist!) came to be called Apophatic Theology, or the theology of not knowing, or negative theology. It speaks only about what may NOT be said CJR: Volume 1, Issue 2 10 about God. And this way of perceiving God is found not just in Christianity but in other religions too. This theology takes a mystical approach related to individual experiences of the divine beyond ordinary perception of the very kind that Phillip K. Dick loved and/or drove him mad in the end, depending on your view of “madness.” The good kind of madness—yes there is a good madness—teaches that the divine is ineffable, something that can be recognized only when it is felt, then remembered. And therefore all descriptions of this sense will be false, because by definition the experience of God eludes description. I agree of course because reality is bigger than anything one may think or say about it. So at any rate, apophatic descriptions of God acknowledge that neither the existence of God nor nonexistence, as we understand these words in the material world, applies to God, that God is divinely simple and that one should never claim God is ‘one’ or ‘three’ or any ‘type’ of being, that we can’t say that God is ‘wise,’ because that implies knowledge of what wisdom is on a divine scale, and that to say that God is ‘good’ also limits God to what that word means in the context of human behavior. Clement of Alexandria, Gregory of Nyssa, John Chrysostom, and Basil the Great spoke of God in apophatic terms. This may be called the humble thread that runs through many religions parallel to the deadly we-­‐know-­‐it-­‐all thread of theological hubris we Americans have lived in. And yes, this is very different from the idea of the ‘revelation of God’s character’ through an ‘inspired’ scripture, where God, as if writing a memoir dictated to scribes, ‘reveals’ himself. The apophatic thread has existed in Christian and Jewish thinking side-­‐by-­‐
side with the literal and fundamentalist thread that destroyed us and, for instance, renders Hasidic Jews insane as they try to live by over 600 rules! The point isn’t to CJR: Volume 1, Issue 2 11 say which is correct (though I have my druthers!) but to note that even people who want to stick by ‘original’ or ‘ancient’ ways of Jewish or Christian beliefs have choices. One reason why the evangelicals are so defensive about the Bible is that they know all too well that the Bible can be used to say anything once you begin using it to try to define the deity as revealed therein. They know this because of the thousands of splits in their denominations that shatter again and again into ever-­‐
smaller fragments. They know this because they have grown up hearing the Bible used to justify as ‘God’s will’ things that are wrong, crazy or even evil. Recognizing that paradox is the way things are is about more than theological conflicts. Science (grudgingly) embraces paradox too. Take, for example, what seems to be the contradiction between Einstein’s proven Theory of General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics. The first theory holds that if you know the initial conditions of a physical system with absolute certainty, then you can know the future outcome of the system you are modeling. Theoretically, then, everything in the universe is as predictable as the speed of light—if you have enough information. The second theory (Quantum Mechanics) says that you can never know the initial conditions exactly and also that you can’t know what will happen in the future of any physical system. You can only know, to a greater or lesser extent, the probability of something happening because, for instance, some particles can be in two places at once. Quantum Mechanics might be described as the apophatic science of uncertainty. CJR: Volume 1, Issue 2 12 KJ: If you could say anything to the Religious Right, what would it be? FS: “You are not religious or right-­‐wing. You are part of a worldwide collision between modernity and fundamentalism of all kinds—Hindu, Muslim, Jewish, Christian. Stop being afraid. And stop playing the victim.” KJ: In what ways do you think religious persons and non-­religious persons can work together for the greater good? FS: Talk about our children and grandchildren together. I’m sure I’ve had no-­‐to-­‐
little effect on most people, besides making this or that bus or plane ride interesting and/or intolerable, helping one or two people and probably ruining a few lives. I enjoy the conversations nonetheless and get a strange adrenaline rush from offering unsolicited advice. When, at age seventeen, you get your girlfriend pregnant, and your kids start families young, you wind up with grandchildren the same ages as most of your friends’ children. So when my wife of forty-­‐two years, Genie, and I walk around with Amanda (age eighteen) and Ben (age fourteen), people assume they’re our kids. “You’re too young to be grandparents of teens!” they say, with a smile, as if they’re offering Genie and me compliments, as in you look “so young” for grandparents. What’s really happening is that we’ve upset their idea of what it means to be good, upstanding, twenty-­‐first century, hardworking, kids-­‐can-­‐wait, upper-­‐middle-­‐class whites. Most upper-­‐middle-­‐class white Americans think that it’s normal for black, brown and Hispanic people to have grandchildren early in life. But upper-­‐middle-­‐class whites aren’t supposed to have kids early, let alone teenage grandchildren before they’re in their sixties. So that on top of already appearing odd CJR: Volume 1, Issue 2 13 to our friends because I’m a writer, former movie director, former right-­‐wing sidekick to a minister religious-­‐right leader father, (and now an outspoken left-­‐wing blogger and MSNBC talking head/commentator fighting to dismantle fundamentalist mythology while also trying to make a mark as a writer and artist), the fact that Genie and I have nearly-­‐grown grandchildren pushes us perilously close to becoming outcasts. We’ve committed an act of intolerably premature procreational weirdness, bordering on white trash behavior. My point is tell a HUMAN story that connects and forget being right about everything. KJ: What do you think are some of the most important political issues of our time? FS: I don’t know but here’s one. Besides the countless sex scandals involving Evangelical leaders, not to mention local and national financial scandals, there are racist and homophobic indiscretions that amount to human-­‐rights violations in the United States and abroad. In 2010 the top Evangelical leadership openly participated in a prayer breakfast organized by the “The Family,” the notorious gay-­‐
bashing Christian conservative group, also known as The Fellowship, who, at that very time, was hock deep in the international scandal of Ugandan legislation to kill gays. In a shameful exception to his usual decency, President Obama participated. (David Bahati, the man behind the kill the gays legislation, was deeply involved in The Family’s work in Uganda, and the ethics minister of Uganda was also helping to organize The Family’s National Prayer Breakfast.) CJR: Volume 1, Issue 2 14 KJ: What positive changes have you seen amongst the younger generation of Christians? FS: After the election of 2008, a student poll conducted at Gordon College (the conservative Evangelical school in Massachusetts near my home) found that about twenty percent of the students had voted for Obama. For the first time ever during that election, a group of the Evangelical students on campus even opened a student Democratic Party office. And even though the powers that be at Gordon knew I was a vocal Obama supporter, I was invited to speak in chapel shortly after the election and (amongst other things) talked about why I’d supported President Obama. After my talk, many students told me that they had wanted to vote for Obama but could not “because of abortion.” When I asked them to elaborate, all the students spoke about their horror over late-­‐term abortions, the very problem Doe v. Bolton opened the door to by “clarifying” Roe’s fuzzy inexact permissiveness. It seems that what these young Evangelicals were telling me is that their “because-­‐of-­‐abortion” reluctance to vote for Obama was less about abortion per se than about the perception (and fact) that Bolton and Roe allow abortion at any stage of fetal development. Those conscience-­‐stricken students were not alone, nor were they reactionaries, bigots or misogynists. Typically, students from more moderate Evangelical schools (like Gordon) have gravitated to organizations that are working on justice and poverty issues. Without the pool of Evangelical leaders, students and workers who come from Evangelical backgrounds, there would be many fewer people on the front line of NGOs around the world, helping the poor, caring for the sick and fighting for the restoration of the environment. From the thousand or so of CJR: Volume 1, Issue 2 15 emails I have received from young Evangelicals (and many young Roman Catholics too) I’ve learned that they are disgusted and disillusioned with the rightward tilt of the Evangelical Movement—on every issue except abortion. It’s not just that Roe and Bolton have driven away otherwise sympathetic supporters from the progressive movement; it’s that the fiery opposition to Roe keeps other (seemingly unrelated) pots boiling. Had abortion been legalized in a more moderate way and/or state-­‐by-­‐
state, there would have been fights aplenty, but nothing like the society-­‐wide meltdown that’s been our culture wars’ history. KJ: Does the current role of religion in contemporary American society bother you? FS: Yes. Here’s one example. The politics of the anti-­‐abortion movement became about everything but saving babies. Just as Glenn Beck’s mentor, far right Roman Catholic political activist Professor George of Princeton, was misusing abortion as a handy stick with which to beat up on Obama during the 2008 election, so too the Republicans used abortion when they were in power to do everything but help women. If the Republicans had wanted to prevent abortions they would have funded a thorough and mandatory sex education initiative from the earliest grades in all schools (religious schools included), combined with the government-­‐funded distribution of free contraceptives in all high schools, public and private. They would have given Americans universal single-­‐payer health care and legislated generous mandatory family leave for mothers and fathers. They would have raised taxes and instituted federally funded day care. They would have expanded adoption services, including encouraging gay parents to adopt children after encouraging gay CJR: Volume 1, Issue 2 16 couples to marry. They would have provided a generous tax incentive to have children and direct financial assistance and educational opportunities for women with children. What the Republicans did instead was misuse abortion as a polarizing issue. Abortion is the perfect winner-­‐takes-­‐all means for energizing the “base” of both sides that, by this time, have a Pavlovian response to hearing the word “abortion.” I know. I raised over five million dollars to make two anti-­‐abortion documentary film series with Dad and Dr. Koop and to fund a nationwide series of seminars. Over one hundred thousand people attended the more than forty “pro-­‐
life” seminars we ran; the movies were seen by millions in tens of thousands of churches and the books that went with the movies became bestsellers. KJ: What are some of your favorite ways of engaging different religions, cultures, and people? FS: Telling stories, like the one a monk on Mt. Athos told me about twenty years ago. It derives from the 10th C. “There was a holy monk and this monk lived in a monastic community in a desert. He wished to find true holiness and in a dream asked his angel to show him who of all the holy fathers and hermits in his desert was truly enlightened. You see he wished to ask whoever was truly enlightened to be his confessor, elder, and Igumen. In the dream he flew with his angel over the mountain where he and the brothers lived in caves. They passed over all the great teachers and ascetics striving in that place. They passed over the boundary of the community and flew over the town nearby. There they flew over the rooftops to the refuse heap. The angel showed the monk a woman toiling to gather what little food she could CJR: Volume 1, Issue 2 17 from the garbage. They followed her home to a tiny hovel where there were ragged children. The angel said to the monk, ‘She is the only fully enlightened and holy person hereabouts. You may confess to her with assurance of receiving perfect wisdom.’ The monk protested and said, ‘But she is a pagan and, even worse, a woman! How could she be holy or wise?’ The angel answered, ‘You asked to be shown a holy person and indeed she is that one person here and is a perfect child of God.’ And then the monk awoke and was dismayed.” KJ: If you could say anything to current theology and religious studies students, such as those currently attending Claremont School of Theology and Claremont Lincoln University, what would it be? FS: It strikes me that our American society, from kindergarten through old age, might as well have been designed to destroy family happiness (especially when selling worried young mothers and fathers “parenting” products that they don’t need). That’s because both the religious fundamentalist and the secular consumer/choice models of existence and everything that goes with both “dogmas” flies in the face of the reality of what we human beings fundamentally are: tribal, communal, and family-­‐seeking animals craving Unconditional Love. We human animals are complicated. We’re biological machines who also happen to look at the universe through spiritual eyes. In other words, we seek out meaning that transcends the sum of our physical parts. I know only one thing: that any worldview—be it religious or secular—that doesn’t start and end with the CJR: Volume 1, Issue 2 18 recognition of Paradox will become a tyranny. So I have rejected many of my past certainties and also embraced the meaning I find in praying for my children and grandchildren. Or put it this way: I believe that if Jesus sat down next to me on a bus that I’d get some good advice about how to be a better husband, father and grandfather, and maybe even a better lover, too. I don’t think I’d hear much about religion. Frank Schaeffer’s new book, Sex, Mom and God (Boston, MA: De Capo Press, 2011) is available on Amazon at: http://www.amazon.com/Sex-­‐Mom-­‐God-­‐Strange-­‐Politics-­‐-­‐
/dp/0306820730/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1336694414&sr=8-­‐1