Sex, Mom, and God

by Frank Schaeffer

  Mary Pride, the modern-day Patriarchy/Quiverfull Movement’s female founder, was often quoted at the True Woman Conference. Pride paved the way for the modern-era “submission movement” decades ago. She did so with my help.

  Pride was one of my mother’s followers and began to write me fan letters in the 1970s after I’d emerged as a successful rabblerousing antiabortion leader. By then I was doing the rounds, speaking at the biggest and most politicized churches of the day, including Jerry Falwell’s Liberty Baptist. I was even pursuing my own Evangelical media side project: the business of publishing and promoting Far Right books.

  As a moonlighting literary agent, I represented my parents, as well as Koop, Whitehead, and several other Religious Right and (emerging) neoconservative authors. I’d begun my book agent line of work by negotiating contracts for my parents and getting them some record-setting advances (at least by the standards of those more modest times in the world of religious publishing). Then I was asked by Koop to represent his part of the coauthorship of Dad’s and his Whatever Happened to the Human Race? Other people asked me to pitch books for them, too, and eventually I signed on about twenty authors.

  In the early1980s, Pride sent me a manuscript for her first book, The Way Home, which was to become the “Bible” for the big-family/homeschool movement. Pride told her life story—how she moved away from her feminist and “anti-natal” beliefs and embraced Christianity. She explained how she found “true happiness” in the “biblically mandated role of wives and mothers as bearers of children.” Pride wrote that “the church’s sin which has caused us to become unsavory salt incapable of uplifting the society around us is [the] selfishness [of] refusing to consider children an unmitigated blessing.”52 In The Way Home Pride pitched huge families as the only way for women to be truly happy and the only way to change America and bring it back to its so-called Christian foundation.

  Pride was interested in more than women just having babies; she wanted those babies indoctrinated. So Pride called for unleashing a new generation of godly homeschooled children onto the slumbering American mainstream in order to reform it.

  I met resistance when selling Pride’s first manuscript because her antifeminism struck even some Evangelical editors as extreme. I eventually got The Way Home published by convincing Crossway Books publisher and editor, Lane Dennis, to take on the book even though he doubted it would sell. Dennis had said, “No women want to read a ‘women’s book’ that tells women to give up their rights.”

  After arguing for a while, I snapped back that unless he took on my new author, I’d pull the whole Schaeffer oeuvre from his company—a heretofore minor tract publishing mom-and-pop outfit (also a printing company for hire) that had recently turned into an Evangelical publishing powerhouse based on the sales of the Schaeffer books. I also told Dennis that Pride’s book would “become a movement.” The Schaeffer books, as well as those by Pride and other of “my” authors, put Crossway on the map. My own books sold well, too, such as A Time for Anger: The Myth of Neutrality.53

  Pride’s overnight success occurred for several reasons. She was a capable writer and was speaking to Jesus Victims who could be swayed by “the Bible says” arguments. Pride’s success was also yet more evidence of the backlash against Roe v. Wade and the genuine heartfelt fury it generated in many women. Pride cashed in on the Reconstructionists’ semiunderground network of homeschool groups founded by Rushdoony and took the homeschool message to a wider audience. The public schools in many areas of the country had degenerated into educational failures, so Pride also scored points about homeschooling with many parents who wanted the best for their children, irrespective of their religious or political views.

  By the time I signed up Pride as an author-client, I was connecting my expanding “stable” of Far Right authors to Crossway Books, Thomas Nelson Publishers, Word Books, Zondervan, and Tyndale House and also to the neoconservative (Roman Catholic) Regnery Gateway Publishers. Henry Regnery and I used to talk on the phone and strategize about breaking the “stranglehold of the liberal media.” Regnery copublished books with me and printed special Christian Activist and/or “Franky Schaeffer” editions of several Regnery books. Regnery even created a new imprint called “Discipleship Books.” Across the top of each book, in large bold type, the words appeared: “A Franky Schaeffer/Christian Activist Book.” Our projects included Target America: The Influence of Communist Propaganda on U.S Media by James L. Tyson, (1985); Panic Among the Philistines by Bryan F. Griffin (1985); and The Coercive Utopians by Rael Jean Isaac and Erich Isaac (1985). The books published under our joint imprint received glowing reviews in Commentary, the American Spectator, Chronicles of Culture, the Wall Street Journal, and other to-the-right publications.

  The Christian Activist was my widely circulated antiabortion, antiliberal freebee newspaper. I was editor and founder. (The Christian Activist was published by Schaeffer V Productions.) The Evangelical version of the Christian Activist hit a circulation of about 250,000 in the early 1980s. After I left the Evangelical world, I re-created it as a short-lived Eastern Orthodox paper that reached a circulation of about 50,000. I stopped publishing that, too. I’d come to see that my “Christian” activism was antithetical to the spirit of the kind of religion I was inspired by: the Eastern Orthodox embrace of sacrament and community. (The Orthodox Church has a right wing, too, but the Orthodoxy I embraced, not to mention my local parish, was not of that ilk.) My politics was changing. By then I saw the neoconservatives as a threat to America and beyond. War without end—often in “defense of Israel”—seemed to be all the neoconservatives were really about as they fixated on a worship of military brute force put in service of some fuzzy imperial idea of so-called American exceptionalism . . . Back in the day, Regnery told me that the editions of his books reprinted with my name on them as copublisher and then promoted in my newspaper sold more than the original editions. As he once said, “With the Schaeffer name on it, I can sell anything to the Evangelicals, and there are lots of them!” My Regnery copublishing ventures also included books by such neoconservatives as writer Richard Grenier. I got his procolonial The Gandhi Nobody Knows published as a counterstatement to the film Gandhi. Conservatives had reacted to the movie negatively because it was “soft” on Gandhi, it was “hard” on white men and colonialism, and, worst of all, it made Hinduism look okay in comparison to our “Judeo-Christian heritage.”

  As I mentioned, Erich Isaac and Rael Jean Isaac were also my clients, or rather I should say briefly my authors. The Isaacs were academics and ardent Zionists, and they were leaders in such groups as Americans for a Safe Israel. Through the Isaacs I was put in touch with other radically pro-Israel neoconservatives. This “bridge-building,” in turn, introduced me to Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary magazine, who was using the Republican Party and/or being used by it to advance his single issue—support for the state of Israel—just as I was doing the same for my single issue: abortion.

  Commentary had emerged in the 1970s as the neoconservatives’ flagship publication. I regularly reprinted some of its articles as books or as essays in my newspaper. And when my mother raised $50,000 from her pal Dallas multimillionaire Mary Crowley (founder of Home Interiors and Gifts) to launch Mom’s new book, Forever Music (1986), Podhoretz lent his support.

  Mom used Crowley’s money to rent Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center and hire the Guarneri Quartet. Mom’s “best friends”—about five hundred of them—showed up for the gala concert, as did Podhoretz and his wife, Midge Decter, and their entourage. (I had invited them. Mom had no contact with the Commentary crowd.)

  By then (the concert was held April 27, 1986) I was on my way out of the Evangelical world and was involved only because of my support for my mother’s concert. It was close to her heart: a way to promote her book on her love of music. She’d spent months researching the Steinway piano company, inclusive of visits to its factories. Mom used the story of the Steinway Company as the hook to get people in
terested in her views on art and music.

  I remember laughing at the bemused expressions on the faces of the members of the quartet while they sipped drinks at the postconcert reception as they tried to figure out how the hell the same space could be occupied by these two groups: the cream of the New York neoconservative Zionist intellectuals and a passel of mink-draped, diamond-crusted Southern Baptist Texans asking everyone if they had a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ.”

  Anyway, I was in a good position to “launch” not only Pride’s book but also any project I wanted to get behind. It was in this capacity as a brash young wheeler-dealer, literary agent/author/filmmaker to the Religious Right, and Evangelical/pro-life link to the emerging neoconservative movement that I launched Mary Pride. And she, in turn, started a large movement that—like so much else that has come from the Reconstructionist-inspired Religious Right since the 1970s—flew under the radar of the mainstream media.

  Major newspapers let down their readers rather badly. Maybe they just couldn’t bring themselves to take what they regarded as rube religion seriously. The New York Times didn’t even bother to review Reagan’s antiabortion book, failing to mark the moment when a U.S. president officially signaled that the Republican Party had become the antiabortion party and would from then on be defined by one social issue above all others. I think that the editors of many major North American newspapers had decided that Roe and Bolton had settled the abortion issue. These were rulings that many editors lent the prestige of their editorial page to time and again. (Perhaps that was why the media also ignored Mary Pride.)

  Pride went much further than anyone else had in pushing an antifeminist, wombs-for-revolution, post-Roe counterattack on modernity. She even broke ranks with her former idol, Edith Schaeffer!

  Pride denounced Mom’s embrace of family planning and good Sex. Mom just wasn’t hard-line enough for take-no-prisoners Pride. So in her first book she reprimanded Mom for extolling foreplay, sexy underwear, and other such sex-friendly instructions to Christian wives. In fact, Pride didn’t seem to like anything that might dilute the only real reason for copulating: making Godly children.

  “Where on earth did you dig up This Unfortunate Woman?!” Mom asked me after reading Pride’s critique of her recommendations about black nightgowns and foreplay. “Really, Darling, how could you?”

  Many Reconstructionist-influenced pastors began using Pride’s materials almost as soon as they were published because (at last) here was a woman telling other women to submit to men. And as luck would have it, Pride and her husband were computer experts back when few people were. So Quiverfull adherents were some of the first Internet users to exploit the potential of home computers. Homeschool groups began to network, and Pride became the leader of the Evangelical homeschool movement, which she, second only to Rushdoony, created in its anti-American incarnation.

  When I say “anti-American,” I mean anti-American as America actually is: multicultural, pluralistic, gay embracing, multiethnic, and based on a secular Constitution and the secular rule of law. Pride and company would have claimed to be patriotic, but their loyalty was to a “Christian America.” They seemed to have nothing but contempt for America as it actually was. They also ignored America’s complex roots, as described wonderfully by the historian and cultural critic Jacques Barzun, who writes:Our [American] spirit is watered by three streams of thought, originally distinct, but here mingled: The eighteenth century enlightenment view of progress toward social reason, or what we Americans know as the Jeffersonian ideal; The Romanticist view of man’s diversity, inventiveness and love of risk by which society is forever kept in flux, forever changing; The native tradition of Deafness to Doctrine which permits our Federal system to subsist at the same time as it provides free room for carrying out the behests of our other two beliefs.54

  The Christian homeschool movement drove the Evangelical school movement to the ever-harsher world-rejecting Far Right. This happened because Evangelical homeschoolers were demanding evergreater levels of “separation” from the Evil Secular World. It wasn’t enough just to reject the public schools. How could the Christian parent be sure that even the Evangelical schools were sufficiently pure? And so the Christian schools radicalized in order to not appear to be compromising with The World in the eyes of increasingly frightened and angry Jesus Victim parents.

  My account here of the rise of the homeschool movement is not aimed at homeschooling per se but at parents who want to indoctrinate rather than educate. There are many secular and also religiously moderate homeschool parents doing the best they can for their children, many of whom go on to successful and happy lives and do tremendously well in college. In a climate where the public schools have been allowed to rot, with plenty of help from neglectful parents and teachers, good parents have the right to do whatever is necessary to help their children get an education, including schooling children at home and/or sending them to private secular or religious schools.

  That said . . . what, Pride asked, was the point of having all those children and then turning them over to public schools to be made into secular humanists and Jesus-hating pagans?

  The irony was that Pride preached a dogmatic, stay-at-home, follow-your-man philosophy for other women while turning her lucrative homeschooling empire into a one-woman industry.55 So Pride may be added to the list of powerful women who just love those “traditional roles” for other women. And Pride’s successor in the Patriarchy Movement, the wealthy author/guru Nancy Leigh DeMoss, was also one of those do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do best-selling career women doing high-paid speaking gigs while encouraging other women to stay home and submit to their men.

  Nancy Leigh DeMoss happened to be the daughter of a former friend of my mother’s, Nancy DeMoss, who was instrumental in my parents’ rise to Evangelical superstardom. Nancy DeMoss was also pivotal in the role of facilitator and financier when it came to seamlessly merging Reconstructionist ideology with the “respectable” mainstream Evangelical community. I worked closely with Nancy on several projects. She generously supported my various Schaeffer-related antiabortion movies, books, and seminar tours. She also took our message much further on her own by underwriting a massive well-produced antiabortion TV and print media ad campaign inspired by our work.

  Soon after the death of her wealthy husband, Arthur DeMoss, Nancy DeMoss had become my mother’s friend and an ardent Schaeffer follower. She also took over her late husband’s foundation as CEO. Besides underwriting several Schaeffer projects, Nancy contributed millions to Republican and other Far Right causes (including $70,000 to start Newt Gingrich’s political action committee, GOPAC). She also helped the Plymouth Rock Foundation, a Reconstructionist-aligned group.

  When Nancy’s daughter (the aforementioned Nancy Leigh DeMoss) took Pride’s ideas to a bigger audience than Pride could have imagined, she was just taking the next logical step begun by her mother. Like my sisters and I, the DeMoss siblings found themselves in their parents’ orbit. The DeMoss children became coworkers in the “cause,” much as I filled that role in my family. Nancy’s other daughter, Deborah, worked for Senator Jesse Helms. Nancy’s son Mark worked for Jerry Falwell before founding the DeMoss Group, a PR firm used by the likes of Billy Graham’s son Franklin. But unlike the Schaeffers, the DeMoss clan had tens of millions of dollars with which to back its pet Far Right schemes, one of which would be the Quiverfull Movement.

  The Quiverfull and Reconstructionist Movements have made for some weird bedfellows. I mean that in both senses of the word: It’s weird that these folks connected, given their differing agendas and theologies, and these are weird people. What unites many extremist groups is only their shared sense of grievance and victimhood. For instance, there are fundamentalist Christians making connections with some ultra-Orthodox Jewish patriarchy enthusiasts, among whom some women take the contraceptive pill to avoid menstruation on their wedding night (keeping those Levitical laws up to date) so that they can have sex and remain “clean”
and are then given fertility drugs by their rabbis to reverse the process and get the baby-making going. As one Jewish women’s “health” site says of such interventions:Physical contact between husband and wife is prohibited while the wife is niddah (impure). Therefore, a Halacha observant bride (one who follows the Talmudic “way” or “path”) will want to schedule her wedding for a date when she will not be niddah. She may turn to her health care provider for assistance in assuring that the timing is correct. This is not merely a request to avoid menstruation on her wedding night. All bleeding needs to have ceased at least one week before the wedding, allowing her enough time to count seven clean days and then immerse in the mikveh (ritual purification) before she gets married.56

  The big-family agenda of the Patriarchy Movement reaches far and wide, across bizarre lines. For instance, some formerly notoriously anti-Semitic Roman Catholic groups in Poland want to return to a strict “many-children” world and now write appreciatively about the Orthodox Jews’ many-children families. These Orthodox Jews are the people who are populating the West Bank of Israel with damn-international-law-peace-defeating “facts on the ground” (i.e., many children), as fundamentalist religious Zionists do their bit to drive the world back to their favorite period of history: the Bronze Age. And there are a number of leading Roman Catholics who are also part of this strange, informal, anticontraceptive alliance.