Frank Schaeffer, the son of the late Christian Right icon Francis Schaeffer, speaks out about how modern fundamentalists have abused his father’s teachings.

By Jeff Sharlet

Last October, I reviewed Frank Schaeffer’s new memoir, Crazy for God: 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 for the British New Statesman. Frank Schaeffer produced his father in a series of films,How Should We Then Live? and Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, that are still shown in church basements to this day, foundational texts of the modern Christian Right. Francis died in 1984, and Frank later left the movement he helped build to become a successful novelist and the author of two books about the American military, Keeping Faith: A Father-Son Story About Love and the United States Marine Corps, co-authored with his son, John, and AWOL:The Unexcused Absence Of America’s Upper Classes From Military Service and How It Hurts Our Country, co-authored with former Clinton presidential aide, Kathy Roth-Douquet. I recently spoke with Frank about the religious conservative movement he helped build and how his father’s intellectual heirs may have misunderstood Francis Schaeffer’s teachings.

In Crazy for God you argue that the Religious Right bets against America – to hope for its downfall. Why would they do that?

It’s one of the ironies of the Religious Right that came out of the 1960s and ’70s. Back then, the idea was that the Right was patriotic and that the Left was always suspect of being unpatriotic, critical of America, wanted to see the U.S. defeated. But by the mid-’70s, I started noticing a change: the rhetoric of the emerging religious Right was more fundamentally anti-American, always rooting for failure, than anything coming out of the Left. When you look back at it, the Left really wanted reform – whether it was about race, or foreign policy, or women’s rights. But the Right, since then, roots for real failure – to prove a philosophical and theological point. An analogy is the Religious Right’s support for Israel. On one level, right-wing fundamentalists are rooting for Israel. On another level, for their theology to be proven correct, Israel has to be destroyed, Jews killed. Which is almost literally the same idea for America when it comes to a Falwell or a Robertson. They slipped up and expressed those sentiments openly after 9/11, but that was only a dramatic example of what’s been said for years privately and sometimes not so privately.

How does American failure confirm their theology?

A. The essence of their theology and their philosophy is that America was founded as a Christian country, in the most literal sense a theocracy, under a special blessing from God. The U.S. has a special destiny in the world, which is not only political but also theological. So where they root for American failure is when America departs from that supposed destiny. If America prospers and is blessed without adherence to biblical principles and out without a return to theocracy – in practice if not in form – if homosexuality can be practiced in the open and no thunderbolts hit, given their orthodox theology, America should lose its special place and enter into an irreversible decline. If not, American well-being disproves America’s special place in the divine order of things. It’s a situation of a test-case, of proof. If crime goes down in New York, or if test scores go up without prayer in schools, it casts doubt on all the theological claims of right wing fundamentalist Christianity.

But if crime goes up…

Bad news is always good news for them, because bad news drives people toward God. If you take prayer out of schools, and test scores go down, it’s “pre-evangelism,” it gets people ready to be evangelized, makes them worried and makes them want to find Christ. To the extent that we prosper without fundamentalist Christianity, the theological theory of right wing Christianity is over. There’s a parallel to the gold standard folks. Some of them are even the same people –Gary North, Rushdoony. They predicted that if we went off the gold standard the stock markets would crash and the economy would collapse and it would all fall apart, doom on a wholesale scale, so you’d better sell everything and buy gold. But the doomsday never happened, and the economy is basically ok, and gold prices go up and down.

No thunderbolts.

Right. In the 1970s, the right-wing fundamentalist leadership predicted absolute doom for the United States if Roe v. Wade was not overturned, if prayer was not returned to school. Crime would skyrocket. But it didn’t, and one of the big cultural, historical arguments of right wing fundamentalism has been removed.

There was a turning point there, wasn’t there, right around 1981 when your dad published his Christian Manifesto and these same people stopped preaching doom from the outside and moving into power, so much so that they’re throughout government now.

They did, and now right-wing fundamentalism pervades every level. It’s there permanently, at least for my life time. But the rhetoric of the outsider has to change when it becomes insider talk. That’s what happened to right-wing Christianity. The people my father called to civil disobedience went one step further – they got elected to congress, they became judges, they now run institutions, and so their rhetoric has changed, it’s not as shrill. But the theology, the philosophy is the same, only now it comes from the inside.

They still root for American failure but from the inside?

They have to! There’s an arc there, it’s the arc of the outsider becoming insiders. And there’s this question of what they bring in with them. When you start electing people based on a single issue that you determine through your theology, when you choose people just because they’re right on an issues and no one’s really looking at their capability, their experience, you get an outsider becoming an insider who may not be qualified for the job. Other outsiders put them there not for their experience or their capability, but for their adherence to certain positions, for their theology. That wasn’t what my father was suggesting. He began by calling on Christians asoutsiders to push for the overthrow of unjust laws. But rather than overthrow the government, right-wing fundamentalists have taken it over from inside. That’s why shrill rhetoric is not anymore an option.

And yet shrill ideas survive on the inside. Fundamentalists within government try to dismantle programs, to privatize them, to demolish government from within.

Where you see their real colors is in the absolute, steady drumbeat against public education. There would be no public schools if the Religious Right got its way. They don’t care if public schools are working or not, because remember, good news is bad news for them. They don’t want them to work. The same philosophy that gives us “No Child Left Behind,” that demands higher test scores, with one hand it gives and the other it takes away. It’s the same voices calling for vouchers so that parents can pick religious education for their children, so they can control everything their child learns until the child is 18. Another place I see this, when I began thinking about the military because I was writing a book about my son becoming a Marine, is in the all-volunteer army. The irony now is that the biggest defenders of the all-volunteer army come from the Right, not the Left. It’s the philosophy and orthodox theology of deconstructing government, of privatization at any cost. I was on a radio show with a right-wing host and I was talking about this, about the ways in which the draft had this strong democratic element, and how the Left now thinks about it in terms of, “Would we be in these wars if everybody had to serve?” And I was trying to talk about sacrifice, about a draft that would require everybody to sacrifice, and the host came back and said, “The rich already do sacrifice, they pay taxes.”

When I look back at your father’s books, I don’t see any of that sensibility of entitlement. Was that there then? Was it part of the Religious Right? Or is it the result of a merger that occurred later?

It was there. I don’t think it was nearly as prominent, and I certainly don’t think my father was interested in that kind of thing, but a lot of the politics of the 1970s and ’80s brought them together. One of the things I feel terrible about is the part I played in that, the part I played in bringing my father into that. I helped derail my father’s life in a big way.

By drawing him into the nascent right-wing fundamentalism of militant anti-abortion, and all the alliances that came along with it.

Of course he was an adult, and he made his own choices, but I really pushed him. Here’s kind of a strange analogy: It’s as if my father had one stunted leg, and that stunted leg was fundamentalist Christianity. It was a part of him, but he didn’t talk about it. He was like Bob Dole, with that shriveled hand he keeps shoved in his pocket. It was part of his past. That was fundamentalist Christianity for my father. If it hadn’t been for the resurgent right-wing stuff that I helped get us into, he never would have mentioned it. And even then, he was saying, “Well, I don’t know, I’m not sure.” But it was part of a political movement now, not an intellectual one, and right-wing fundamentalism doesn’t have that many intellectuals it can claim. C.S. Lewis, maybe, and G.K. Chesterton. And my father. It was like he was Rip Van Winkle, that fundamentalist part of him had been asleep for 30, 40 years, and then he woke up and there it was again.

What was your father’s relationship to some of the other fundamentalist intellectuals? I’m thinking here of Rushdoony. Your father read his work pretty early on, didn’t he?

I remember this vividly: I’d just come back from Rushdoony’s Chalcedon commune, or whatever, out in California, where I’d heard all this really weird stuff. Stoning homosexuals, putting adulterers to death, reconstructing Old Testament law. It was some of the most bizarre stuff I’d heard. And I went home and I said to my dad, “Who is this guy? I’ve never heard anything so weird.” And my dad just said, point blank: “Oh no, he’s crazy.” And then he said, “That’s not a figure of speech. I believe he has psychiatric problems.” Later, when all the political stuff started happening, those people tried to muscle in to what dad was doing. Gary North would show up, Rushdoony was writing him letters. But my father was not at all happy about the connection.

And yet there is some connection, isn’t there, between your dad’s later work and some of Rushdoony’s earlier work – not his really crazy stuff, but the providential history work.

If you look at the work on which my father built his reputation, The God Who Wasn’t There,Escape From Reason, I don’t think you’ll find a single sentence about those kinds of things. American history wasn’t one of the things that really interested him. That all came in reaction to something else, it was always part of fishing around for an answer to something else – what he would see as the relentless forward march of secularism.

In thinking about secularism more broadly he began digging into providential history?

I don’t know what he was reading then, if it was Rushdoony or other people writing along the same lines, but there’s no question at all that with regard to American history, at least, my father and Rushdoony were very much on the same path at that point.

What about the dominionists who on the other side of the cultural spectrum, the Prayer Breakfast folks, the Fellowship, Doug Coe. They were admirers of your father, weren’t they?

My father’s view of them was, and this sounds really 1960s, but he considered guys like [that] part of the establishment. He thought they were squares. He’d get invited to those prayer breakfasty things, but he wouldn’t go. Not on principle, but because he just really wasn’t into that establishment stuff. He had a lot of disdain for that. He called it middle class Christianity. He called it bourgeois. He’d say, “What’s the use of this stuff, these prayer breakfasts all mixed up with the federal government”? He was very wary of the prayer breakfasts. He believed it couldn’t be real Christianity if was part of the government. He didn’t like it, and he was suspicious of it.

It wasn’t his scene.

Let me put it like this: Somebody like, say, [Fellowship member] Chuck Colson and my father could not have been further apart. I can’t imagine Chuck Colson at a Jefferson Airplane concert with his kids and passing a joint to the person next to him and really listening to the music. My dad wasn’t smoking the joint, but he didn’t care about it. Dad used to say that he learned more from the students than they earned from him. And it was true. Dad got his first Dylan album,Route 66, I think, from a student who was carrying it in her back pack. I don’t think Chuck Colson’s kids, if he has kids, I don’t think they have memories like that. Colson and others borrow Dad’s work, but they borrow it outside of the context of Dad’s actual life’s work: relating to people on a human level one on one. His thing was thinking and talking, and turning up his classical music louder and louder because there were a bunch of kids below him talking all night, and he liked that, he wanted that, but he needed to have his privacy, too, so he’d turn up his music and then he’d go do at four in the morning for a cup of tea, and the kids would still be talking, and so he’d sit down and talk with him. That was my father. He loved those conversations. The idea of my father putting on a suit and going to a prayer breakfast – at least before the last 6, 7 years, the political stuff, going to the White House and all that – that was just completely not what he was about.

Frank Schaeffer’s latest book is Crazy for God. Visit his website to learn more about Frank’s work. Jeff Sharlet is the editor of The Revealer and author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power, forthcoming this spring.