Sex, Mom, and God

by Frank Schaeffer

  My mother deserved better. A lifetime of reaching out to The Lost and sacrificing on their behalf imbued her with a kindly spirit that even in addled old age shone through. Her example was not lost on me. I simply chose to follow the “other” Edith Schaeffer, the one whose heart was elsewhere than in the lifeless theories she paid lip-service to.

  Mom’s only mistake was that she left unchallenged the theological mind-set she had received from her missionary parents. But when it comes to life wisdom, it turns out Mom was right about so much that’s important to me now—Art, Love, Family Life—even if she sometimes justified her conclusions with the wackiest theological myths.

  Mom introduced me to a powerful conduit of Love. So I tell God I love Him and am comforted, though I have no idea Who God Is. I know only that Love and Beauty come from beyond the stardust we’re all made of. Love outshines the fact of pain in the same way that Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas for solo violin, which Mom loved so passionately, outshine all the bad music in the world, though on any given day Bach is outnumbered.

  When I was eleven, Mom held my hand tightly as Yehudi Menuhin played the Bach Sonatas and Partitas at a concert in Montreux where my mother had bought her family front-row seats. When the applause died away, Mom turned to me with tears on her cheeks and said, “That music is bigger than death, my Dear.”

  When I was writing this book and sat with my mother during our lovely weeklong (pre-Christmas 2010) visit (when I also told her about what was in the book), we listened to those same pieces of music again. I reminded Mom of what she’d said all those years ago.

  “Mother?”

  “Yes, Dear?”

  “Do you still believe that music is bigger than death?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  CHAPTER 5

  It’s Good to Be the Queen (and Rushdoony)

  PHOTO: Mom, Susan, Priscilla, Debby, and me shipboard in 1954

  Alice and her sister ran our village post office. They lived above it with their mother, who wore hairnets and was a generous supplier of excellent gingersnap cookies. Alice was one of the only villagers who both spoke English and liked my outsider family. And we liked her a lot, too, even though, as Mom said, “Alice isn’t saved and is a bit odd.”

  Alice was in her early thirties when I first met her. She had been a governess in England during the Second World War. Alice would deliver the mail with serious dignity, as if handling state secrets. Should an errant snowball land in her mailbag, a shrill rant about tampering with the mail being a “Swiss federal crime!” would follow. Otherwise, Alice was cheerful and unfailingly kind.

  When I was three or four, Alice (when not delivering the mail) started to work part-time for my mother as my nanny. This arrangement lasted only until I was seven or so but was a long enough association to give me a lifelong fondness for mail carriers—and for transvestites. Alice and I remained friends for over forty years thereafter until her death. Don’t get me wrong. Alice was not a transvestite, nor am I. But through Alice I do have a been-there-done-that admiring affinity with cross-dressers.

  Alice had short, thick, hiker’s legs, and she wore light gray tweed midlength skirts. Her stockings had seams. She had wide hips, a fertility-doll-type generous bottom, and a broad, friendly face dominated by a large fleshy nose and a wide smile. Alice had very large breasts, something like the prow of a mighty ship. When she was marching up the road delivering mail, the strap of her heavy leather mailbag divided and accentuated her formidable cleavage.

  When she was bathing me, “Alice’s Bosoms” (as Mom called them) would be mere inches away, and Alice’s tangy “unfortunate Swiss odor” (as my mother described such scents, back in the days when deodorant was still mostly an American commodity) enveloped me while Alice bent over the tub to wash my hair. When her blouse got wet, I could see the imprint of a huge white lacy bra. When doing my bit as Mom’s secret agent for the Lord, I asked Alice if she ever prayed, and she just changed the subject to a discussion of young Prince Charles’s virtues.

  The big adventure of Alice’s life was her stay in England, and the high point of that adventure had been witnessing the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. Alice gave me several souvenirs of the royal event, including a miniature die-cast metal and beautifully gilded replica of the coronation carriage and eight horses. There were pictures of the Royal Family all over Alice’s home. When I’d misbehave, Alice would say, “Prince Charles would not do that,” or “Would you do this in front of the Queen?”

  As noted, Alice was not “saved.” Had she been saved when I’d asked about prayer, she would have used that “opportunity” to launch into what we used to call a “testimony,” a blow-by-blow account of the time, day, and place where she had “met the Lord.” Besides not being saved, Alice seemed to be some sort of idolater of British royalty. And yet Mom was pleased to have Alice help raise her son. Both of them agreed that table manners were very important, even if my mother was less fixated than Alice was on preparing me for the day when I might be invited to tea at Windsor Castle.

  Mom didn’t know it, but her willingness to trust someone so very not like us, someone Lost, someone different from us, provided me with a powerful vaccination against the rejection of The Other. Alice was one reason that, some twenty-five years later, I’d turn my back on people who would have stoned Alice to death—literally—if they only could have convinced more Americans to accept their version of Jesus.

  The people that I’d be working with a few years after splashing in the bath under Alice’s watchful eye were Reconstructionist Evangelicals (a term I’ll explain in a moment), who would have gladly executed Alice for her “perversions.” For you see, Alice would dress me up as the Queen of England.

  I’d wear a large white bath towel for a cape, fastened by Mom’s biggest glass-bead brooch, and a crown made of pipe cleaners, woven together and covered with tinfoil. And the Bible says Alice and I were worthy of death for this ritual. “A woman must not wear men’s clothing, nor a man wear women’s clothing, for the LORD your God detests anyone who does this” (Deuteronomy 22:5). Aside from that God-detested towel, I was naked because this dress-up game happened right after my bath and was part of our cross-dressing ritual of my processing from the bathroom to my bedroom, where I’d put on my pajamas. Alice would call me “Your Majesty” and walk backward in front of me while I marched regally along our chalet’s narrow upstairs hall as she sang “God Save the Queen” in her heavily accented Swiss-French English.

  We did this more or less every night for four years or so. (Alice’s care of me was limited to late afternoons and bedtimes. The rest of the day I ran free.) During that period of my life my room gradually filled with postcard-photograph “graven images” of the Queen, Prince Charles, and even (for reasons I have now forgotten) Princess Beatrix Wilhelmina Armgard of the Netherlands in direct contravention of this command: “Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth: Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the Lord thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me; And showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me, and keep my commandments” (Exodus 20:4–6).

  My bath-time transvestite wardrobe became rather elaborate. By the time I was six, Alice had added to our nightly ritual what she said was “an ermine cape,” which seemed very much like smelly rabbit fur but otherwise was quite glamorous. She also would let me wear one of her bras stuffed with facecloths to give me a queenly bosom. Then she began to add lipstick.

  Maybe Alice’s influence is why I watch The Birdcage once a year or so to savor the delicious talents of Nathan Lane, not to mention Hank Azaria as the ever-memorable Agador. And Eddie “I grew up in Europe, where the history comes from” Izzard, a self-described “action transvestite” (the kind who, as he explains, isn’t gay and has girlfriends),
is the greatest standup comic for many reasons, not to mention he looks good in a skirt. He has the best-informed and most intelligent (and hilarious) routines related to religion of any comic or, for that matter, theologian; all of which The-God-Of-The-Bible hates, too, given that Izzard sometimes wears lipstick. But what decent God worth worshipping (who, come to think of it, created Izzard’s sense of humor and desire to wear women’s clothes) would not laugh at his routines?

  Izzard (playing both roles):“Father, bless me, for I have sinned. I did an Original Sin; I poked a badger with a spoon.”

  “I’ve never heard of that one before. Five Hail Marys and two Hello Dollys.”

  “All right. Bless me, for I slept with my neighbor’s wife.”

  “Heard it! I want an original sin!”

  “Oh, I’m terribly sorry.”24

  Perhaps my finding myself in the Izzard Camp, rather than the Evangelical Camp, when it comes to how I see most things has something to do with dressing up as the Queen. The odd assortment of formative influences in my life was liberating: God, the Alps, the Old Testament “people of God” who were killing everyone in sight and/or “taking” them and “knowing them” and “going in unto them,” Alice and the Queen, my queen bee of a mother, boys boarding school group wanking, a good working knowledge of diaphragms, and a household full of young women not related to me who also mothered me, bled in unison, and hung their very interesting lingerie on the clothesline to flutter alluringly in the breeze.... By age eight I knew that Women Have Plumbing Problems and Ovaries that must be tended as assiduously as one had to attend The Moods that went with these Female Mysteries. I also had a mother who regaled me with regular dispatches from Female Land of a kind usually reserved for students of gynecology.

  I’m lucky that Mom and Dad and the actual life lived in L’Abri were so wonderfully out of step with their official doctrine. There was room for Alice and many other eccentrics busily breaking biblical laws. And I think that my introduction to human diversity, as well as my strange, oversexualized childhood (not to mention my mother reading good books to me by authors who were very different from Us Real Christians), is what eventually opened the door to my being a writer.

  Other Evangelical children weren’t so fortunate. Many of them were raised in homes without enough humanizing hypocrisy when it came to saying one thing—“We believe the Bible to be entirely true”—but doing another, as in “Let’s not stone Alice to death today but go skiing instead.”

  Since the 1960s there has been a growing tendency among American fundamentalists to denounce all but the most conservative, absolutist readings of Scripture, all the while keeping their children in enclaves (homeschools and Christian schools) to “protect” them from the world. Even the slightly open-minded Bible interpretation that people like my mother and father practiced would be too compromising for today’s Evangelicals, who want public life to reflect their “values” and who band together to try and legislatively remake the world in their image.

  I believe that the strange contradictory activities of circling the wagons and looking inward while lashing outward at Sinners and trying to legislate against their “immorality” happened because Evangelicals, along with other religious conservatives, lost the culture wars. Conservative Roman Catholics, Mormons, and Evangelicals couldn’t turn back the gay rights movement and the progressive attitudes of most Americans about sex and legalized abortion, so they indulged in vehement anti-gay-marriage or anti-stem-cell-research referendums meant to rebuke, if not hurt and punish, more than to change hearts and minds. When these efforts mostly failed (some “succeeded”), the Jesus Victims doing the loudest talking about “traditional family values based on the Bible” were sure they were being persecuted “for the sake of Christ.” Actually, all that was happening was that their absolute certainties were not so convincing to most Americans.

  Believing that those who disagree with you are your persecutors leads to fear, and fear leads to hate. What feeds the hate? What feeds the paranoia? What nurtures the “we’ve lost our culture” victimhood, on the one hand, and hubris about “taking America back for God,” on the other hand?

  America has a problem: It’s filled with people who take the Bible seriously. America has a blessing: It’s filled with people who take the Bible seriously. How does this blessing coexist with the curse derived from the same source: the Bible? The answer is that the Bible is a curse or a blessing depending on who is doing the interpreting. Sometimes belief in the Bible leads to building a hospital. Sometimes it leads to justifying perpetual war and empire building. Same book—different interpretation.

  If the history of Christianity proves one thing, it’s that you can make the Bible “say” anything. When you hear words like “We want to take back America for God!” the twenty-first-century expression of such theocratic ideas can be traced back to some of my old friends: the Reconstructionists. Most Americans have never heard of the Reconstructionists. But they have felt their impact through the Reconstructionists’ profound (if indirect) influence over the wider (and vast) Evangelical community. In turn, the Evangelicals shaped the politics of a secular culture that barely understood the Religious Right, let alone the forces within that movement that gave it its edge. The Americans inhabiting the wider (and more secular) culture just saw the results of Reconstructionism without understanding where those results had come from—for instance, how the hell George W. Bush got elected and then reelected!

  If you felt victimized by modernity, then the Reconstructionists had the answer in their version of biblical interpretation. Reconstructionists wanted to replace the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights with their interpretation of the Bible.

  In the Reconstructionists’ best of all worlds, Eddie Izzard would have been long since executed for the “crimes” of inappropriate wardrobe, not to mention “blasphemy.” If given the chance, they would burn people like my mother at the stake for her “heresy” of explaining away the nastier bits of the Bible or at least not living by its meaner rules.

  Most Evangelicals are positively moderate by comparison to the Reconstructionists. But the Reconstructionist movement is a distilled essence of the more mainstream Evangelical version of an exclusionary theology that divides America into the “Real America” (as the Far Right claims only it is) and the rest of us “Sinners.” And it was those “Real Americans” who were Bush’s base.

  The Reconstructionist worldview is ultra-Calvinist but, like all Calvinism,25 has its origins in ancient Israel/Palestine, when vengeful and ignorant tribal lore was written down by frightened men (the nastier authors of the Bible) trying to defend their prerogatives to bully women, murder rival tribes, and steal land. (These justifications may have reflected later thinking: origin myths used as propaganda to justify political and military actions after the fact, such as the brutality the Hebrews said God made them inflict on others and/or their position as the “Chosen People.”)

  In its modern American incarnation, which hardened into a twentieth-century movement in the 1960s and became widespread in the 1970s, Reconstructionism was propagated by people I knew and worked with closely when I, too, was both a Jesus Victim and a Jesus Predator claiming God’s special favor. The leaders of the Reconstructionist movement included the late Rousas Rushdoony (Calvinist theologian, father of modern-era Christian Reconstructionism, patron saint to gold-hoarding haters of the Federal Reserve, and creator of the modern Evangelical homeschool movement), his son-in-law Gary North (an economist and publisher), and David Chilton (Calvinist pastor and author).

  No, the Reconstructionists are not about to take over America, the world, or even most American Evangelical institutions. Buttheir influence has been like a drop of radicalizing flavoring added to a bottle of water. Though most Evangelicals, let alone the general public, don’t know the names of the leading Reconstructionist thinkers, they helped create the world we live in—where a radicalized, angry Religious Right has changed the face of American politics. Writer Chr
is Hedges has called this the rise of “Christian Fascism,” where “those that speak in the language of fact . . . are hated and feared.”26 Anyone who wants to understand American politics had better get acquainted with the Reconstructionists.

  Reconstructionism, also called Theonomism,27 seeks to reconstruct “our fallen society.” Its worldview is best represented by the publications of the Chalcedon Foundation, (which has been classified as an antigay hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center). According to the Chalcedon Foundation Web site, the mission of the movement is to apply “the whole Word of God” to all aspects of human life: “It is not only our duty as individuals, families and churches to be Christian, but it is also the duty of the state, the school, the arts and sciences, law, economics, and every other sphere to be under Christ the King. Nothing is exempt from His dominion. We must live by His Word, not our own.”28

  Until Rushdoony, founder and late president of the Chalcedon Foundation, began writing in the 1960s, most American fundamentalists (including my parents) didn’t try to apply biblical laws about capital punishment for homosexuality to the United States. Even the most conservative Evangelicals said they were “New Testament Christians.” In other words, they believed that after the coming of Jesus, the harsher bits of the Bible had been (at least to some extent) transformed by the “New Covenant” of Jesus’ “Law of Love.”