Frank Schaeffer--Country First?

Frank Schaeffer had an op-ed this week that caught the attention of left-wing activist Amy Goodman. Here is here interview with him. His critique of the religious right is fascinating. He says that their deep anti-Americanism of awaiting Armageddon and hoping for things to get worse and worse has been twisted into a hypocritical Country First boosterism. Yet ultimately, he believes it remains a secessionist, full-scale attack on the U. S., one whose vicious, hateful head has appeared in recent rallies for McCain and Palin. He believes their attempt to pin the label "terrorist" on Obama will lead to an unleashing of violence. Let's pray it does not.

Bruce Gourley pointed me toward comments made recently by Frank (formerly Franky) Schaeffer about the current presidential race. I had a vague awareness that Schaeffer had turned away from his earlier rabid fundamentalism, but did not really know the extent of his conversion. At times like this, I am reminded that my move away from the SBC, which eventually included being institutionally disconnected from the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship, the Alliance of Baptists, and the American Baptist Churches as well, is more complete than it seems in my consciousness. I don’t get a whole lot of the grapevine news about the SBC and its kinfolk among fundamentalist movements. My students bring me awareness of some sorts of popular Christian trends, but not much about those folks.

A couple of Schaeffer’s statements seem especially notable. One emphasizes his revised evaluation of fundamentalism in a way that supports much of what Bruce Prescott finds himself battling in Oklahoma and beyond—a pseudo-Christian theocratic movement to reconstitute the U. S. A.

I finally got out of the evangelical movement in 1985 when I belatedly outgrew my fundamentalist background. I wanted to be a writer, not of religious propaganda but of actual books. I also quit because I had slowly woken up to the fact that the religious right I was in bed with -- because my late father Francis Schaeffer was one of their leaders, and in the nepotistic evangelical tradition I followed in his footsteps -- were not conservatives. They were anti-American agitators for a thinly disguised theocracy.

The other remark shows the pathos and crisis of the McCain candidacy in the current atmosphere of Republican Party chaos.

The irony is that the people McCain is appeasing these days in order to "unite" his party, are the same people who in 2000, spread (and believed) the racist nonsense about his black adopted child being illegitimate etc. The people he must suck up to now undid his candidacy then.



The sad truth is that the 2000 election was McCain's moment. The right wing evangelicals (and the Republican establishment) handed the presidency to Bush and the rest is history. Now McCain's moment has past, swept away by a river of needlessly shed blood and by the politics of fear.

Thanks to Bruce Gourley for his attention to these discussions.