Sex, Mom, and God

by Frank Schaeffer

  Science marched forth, demolishing fundamentalist “facts” with dispassionate argument. So science also became an enemy. Rather than rethink their beliefs, conservative religionists decided to renounce secular higher education and denounce it as “elitist.” Thus, to be uninformed, even willfully and proudly stupid, came to be considered a Godly virtue. And since misery loves company, the Evangelicals’ quest, for instance when Evangelicals dominated the Texas textbook committees, was to strive to “balance” the teaching of evolution with creationism and damn the facts.

  In the minds of Evangelicals, they were recreating the Puritan’s self-exile from England by looking for a purer and better place, this time not a geographical “place” but a sanctuary within their minds (and in inward-looking schools and churches) undisturbed by facts. Like the Puritans, the post-Roe Evangelicals (and many other conservative Christians) withdrew from the mainstream not because they were forced to but because the society around them was, in their view, fatally sinful and, worse, addicted to facts rather than to faith. And yet having “dropped out” (to use a 1960s phrase), the Evangelicals nevertheless kept on demanding that regarding “moral” and “family” matters the society they’d renounced nonetheless had to conform to their beliefs.

  In the first decade of the twenty-first century the Evangelical and conservative Roman Catholic (and Mormon) outsider victim “approach” to public policy was perfected on a heretofore-undreamedof scale by Sarah Palin. She was the ultimate holier-than-thou Evangelical queen bee. What my mother had represented (in her unreconstructed fundamentalist heyday) to a chalet full of young gullible women and later to tens of thousands of readers, Palin became for tens of millions of alienated angry white lower-middle-class men and women convinced that an educated “elite” was out to get them.

  Palin was first inflicted on the American public by Senator John McCain, who chose her as his running mate in the 2008 presidential election for only one reason: He needed to shore up flagging support from the Evangelical Republican antiabortion base. McCain wanted to prove that he was fully in line with the “social issues” agenda that Dad, Koop, and I had helped foist on our country over thirty years before. Palin lost the election for McCain but “won” her war for fame and fortune and self-appointed “prophetess” status.

  She presented herself as called by God and thus cast in the Old Testament mold of Queen Esther, one chosen by God to save her people. Palin perfected the Jesus Victim “art” of Evangelical selfbanishment and then took victimhood to new levels of success by cashing in on white lower-middle-class resentment of America’s elites. She might as well have run under the slogan “I’m as dumb as you are!”

  Brad Greenberg documented a serious movement inside the Evangelical world to hail Palin as the “next Esther”:[Biblical Queen] Esther was selected queen in a beauty contest; Palin was runner-up in the Miss Alaska pageant. So Queen Esther apparently provided the role model for the former beauty queen who went to our own king and asked for earmarks for her people. The Palin/Queen Esther report has sparked a flood of commentary from fundamentalist Christian web sites. One reports that “Sarah Palin, like Esther, was an unlikely choice. Sarah Palin, like Esther, is bold and courageous in the face of fear. Sarah Palin, like Esther, proves you can be loyal and devoted to your family while having a high position. But perhaps, more than anything, ... we are seeing someone right before our eyes who is capturing the hearts of the American people in a way that defies description—just like the Bible says.” And “Esther won the favor of everyone who saw her.” Another says, “Every once in a while a woman comes along who is made for the times. Sarah Palin is such a woman.... Another woman, Esther, was brought on the scene by God at just the right time. God’s timing was perfect for he used Esther to save the Jews.”69

  Palin made a fortune by simultaneously proclaiming her Evangelical faith, denouncing Liberals, and claiming that she would help the good God fearing folks out there “take back” their country. This “Esther” lacked seriousness. But born-again insiders knew that the “wisdom of men” wasn’t the point. Why should the new Queen Esther bother to actually finish her work governing Alaska? God had chosen her to confound the wise!

  So she became a media star and quit as governor of Alaska. Then she battled “Them”—the “lamestream media” (as she labeled any media outlets outside of the Far Right subculture)—in the name of standing up for “Real Americans.” Palin used the alternative communication network that had its roots deeply embedded in those pioneering 1970s and 1980s Evangelical TV shows and radio shows that I used to be on just about every other day. She did this to avoid being questioned by people who didn’t agree with her. By not actually governing or doing the job she’d been elected by Alaskans to do, and by using the alternative media networks as an “outsider”—all the while reacting to and demanding attention from the actual (theoretically hated) media—Palin also made buckets of money.

  And the greatest irony was that many women in the Evangelical/ Roman Catholic/Quiverfull movements were cheering for Palin as a defender of “traditional family values.” Yet Palin was the least“submissive” female imaginable. She misused her children as stage props and reduced her husband to the role of “helpmeet”; indeed, he became the perfect example of a good biblical wife.

  Speaking of “good biblical wives,” in the Palin era the Evangelical Right still liked to pay lip-service to the Puritan community as an ideal to “get back to.” Yet the post-Roe Evangelicals ignored the Puritans’ actual ideas about government’s biblically mandated role.

  The Puritans’ theology of government was formed in the context of an embrace of all Christians’ duty to enhance the public good. This was exemplified by such unquestioned well-established concepts as the “king’s highway,” a common road system protected by the crown (government) and a common law that applied to all. One’s common duty to others was accepted as the essential message of Christian civilization. Public spaces were defended by government in the early New England settlements, just as they had been in England.

  What’s so curious is that in this religion-inflicted country of ours, the same Evangelicals, conservative Roman Catholics, and others who had been running around post-Roe insisting that America had a “Christian foundation” and demanding a “return to our heritage” (and/or more recently trashing health care reform as “communist”) ignored the fact that one historic contribution of Christianity was a commitment to strong central government. For instance, this included church support for state-funded, or state-church-funded, charities, including hospitals, as early as the fourth century.

  Government was seen as part of God’s Plan for creating social justice and defending the common good. Christians were once culture-forming and culture-embracing people. Even the humanism preached by the supposedly “anti-Christian” Enlightenment thinkers of the eighteenth century was, in fact, a Deist/Christian “heresy,” with a value system espousing human dignity borrowed wholesale from the Sermon on the Mount.

  In the scorched-earth post-Roe era of the “health care reform debates” of 2009 and beyond, Evangelicals seemed to believe that Jesus commanded that all hospitals (and everything else) should be run by corporations for profit, just because corporations weren’t the evil government. The Right even decided that it was “normal” for the state to hand over its age-old public and patriotic duties to private companies—even for military operations (“contractors”), prisons, health care, public transport, and all the rest.

  The Religious Right/Far Right et al. favored private “facts,” too. They claimed that global warming wasn’t real. They asserted this because scientists (those same agents of Satan who insisted that evolution was real) were the ones who said human actions were changing the climate. Worse, the government said so, too!

  “Global warming is a left-wing plot to take away our freedom!”

  “Amtrak must make a profit!”

  Even the word “infrastructure” lost its respectability when government
had a hand in maintaining roads, bridges, and trains.

  In denial of the West’s civic-minded, government-supporting heritage, Evangelicals (and the rest of the Right) wound up defending private oil companies but not God’s creation, private cars instead of public transport, private insurance conglomerates rather than government care of individuals. The price for the Religious Right’s wholesale idolatry of private everything was that Christ’s reputation was tied to a cynical union-busting political party owned by billionaires. It only remained for a Far Right Republican-appointed majority on the Supreme Court to rule in 2010 that unlimited corporate money could pour into political campaigns—anonymously—in a way that clearly favored corporate America and the superwealthy, who were now the only entities served by the Republican Party.70

  The Evangelical foot soldiers never realized that the logic of their “stand” against government had played into the hands of people who never cared about human lives beyond the fact that people could be sold products. By the twenty-first century, Ma and Pa No-name were still out in the rain holding an “Abortion is Murder!” sign in Peoria and/or standing in line all night in some godforsaken mall in Kansas City to buy a book by Sarah Palin and have it signed. But it was the denizens of the corner offices at Goldman Sachs, the News Corporation, Koch Industries, Exxon, and Halliburton who were laughing.

  CHAPTER 8

  “Make Sure You Tell Your Readers I Changed My Mind!”

  PHOTO: Mom speaking in the L’Abri chapel in 1980 or so

  In 1983 I was the leader of a group of protesters who screamed abuse at Justice Harry Blackmun and made him beat a hasty retreat back into a college building at the University of Nebraska after he’d just been awarded an honorary degree. In the early 1980s my daughter Jessica and I—she was twelve—drove into Boston several times to picket abortion clinics, including one where a few years later (in 1994) two people were shot dead and five were seriously wounded by “pro-life” activist John Salvi.

  Dad agreed to lead several antiabortion demonstrations, too. He said, “We’re telling everyone else to get out there and picket, and some of our people are getting arrested, so we can’t say no to doing what we’re telling others to do.”

  When my parents and I were participating in antiabortion demonstrations, bystanders would do a double take if they saw my mother. At an Atlanta event (in 1983), Mom was dressed as if attending a concert rather than picketing an abortion clinic. She marched wearing a Chanel original and a chic pair of shoes. The other two or three hundred marchers wore their clothes the way we slovenly Americans travel these days: in sweats, jeans, running shoes. Mom seemed cool and comfortable and as out of place as if she’d been picked up by a tornado and lifted from her favorite seat at Carnegie Hall and then dumped on a chewinggum-blotched pavement in a sketchy part of town. It would have been a brave cop who handcuffed Mom when she was wearing her favorite cocktail dress, cut simply and quite short—as Audrey Hepburn wore in Breakfast at Tiffany’s—but in Mom’s case accessorized with stunning modern Danish silver jewelry rather than pearls.

  A few years later domestic terrorist Eric Rudolph confessed to the bombings of an abortion clinic in the Atlanta suburb of Sandy Springs. But the afternoon of Mom’s protest march no one was killed. Mom made everyone near her look as if they were not just homely, but also moving in slow motion. Even when she was in her sixties (as she was during various demonstrations, including one in Rochester at one of the hospitals used by the Mayo Clinic because abortions were performed there), Mom looked as if she were forty. She exuded the energy of a rambunctious nineteen-year-old. The teens milling around my mother seemed tired by comparison.

  Mom’s energy was something like the sun, wonderful—unless you got too close or were her typewriter (I’ll explain the typewriter’s misfortune). Back when Mom and Dad were still missionaries touring Europe and conducting Bible studies, my sisters (none of whom would have ever led a demonstration in downtown Atlanta if they could help it) loved our mother, but they were just plain exhausted trying to keep up with her, as were all her fellow workers, from the L’Abri staff to her editors, who in later years would stagger out of eighteen-hour meetings about some manuscript looking as if they’d been simultaneously drugged and thrown under a bus.

  The word “strong” doesn’t come close to describing Edith Schaeffer as she was until her mideighties. When I was a child, my mother occupied a category in my mind right up there with the Alps, God, the sun, and the ocean as representing everything that is permanent, beyond frailty or weakness or even time. Mom was never sick. Mom was up before anyone else every day. I never once saw my mother asleep. She went to bed last and rose before dawn and made Dad look terribly mortal—he slept! Her very presence was an assurance of eternal life: Here was one person death would surely never dare tangle with!

  It was the week before Christmas 2010, more than thirty years after I had watched Mom chatting cheerily as she marched in front of a downtown abortion clinic in Atlanta. I sat holding the ninety-six-year-old version of my mother’s hand. We were perched on a bench outside on her chalet balcony. It was a perfect winter day; hot sun, flawless blue sky, and crisp white newly fallen snow framed the staggeringly lovely view of the Alps above us. The Swiss “bath lady,” as Mom called her, had come and gone. Mom smelled like pine, because of the traces of the bath oil she liked best. The bath lady was provided by the local authorities three times a week to bathe Mom, as happens everywhere in Switzerland. The Swiss provide a full range of what Republicans would call “socialist” services. Those godless Europeans do the oddest things, like care for their elderly, provide trains that can get people to work in minutes instead of hours....

  Anyway, my mother stared unseeing at the mountains we both love. She listened to me speak words she’d forget an hour or two after I spoke them, though at the time our exchanges were warm and comfortingly ordinary and she was “all there.”

  If I fell silent for a few minutes, I felt the gentle pressure of Mom’s head as it settled against my arm while she drifted into a sleep interrupted by wakefulness.

  Edith Schaeffer sleeps! The French might as well renounce food! Perhaps the British hate their dogs and cats now, too! As a child, I could never have imagined this day, let alone my mother leaning against me, asleep. “How are you Mom?” I asked, wanting to wake her because her sleeping was so unsettling.

  “I’m old!” she said and grinned.

  “John has had a son,” I said. “They called him Jack.”

  “John?” Mom asked with her eyes shut again.

  “Your grandson,” I reminded her. “Remember, he was in the marines before he went to the University of Chicago.”

  “Who was a marine?” she asked, opening her eyes but staying put against my shoulder.

  “Your grandson,” I said.

  She said nothing.

  “I’m going to call the book I’m working on Sex, Mom, and God,” I said.

  “The one about me?” she asked, perking right up.

  “Last time I checked I only have one mother,” I said.

  Mom laughed.

  “Sex, Mom, and God,” Mom said, and shook her head in exaggerated mock dismay. “You never change!”

  She reached up and patted my cheek.

  “I’m going to tell them how you always used to say that the only real necessity in life is a sheer black see-through nightgown.”

  “Well it is!” said Mom.

  My mother remembered Jessica and Francis better than John because they lived with her back in that part of her life that, for whatever neurological reason, is still fresh. It’s as if the older memories were cast in a better sort of concrete than the rest of Mom’s inner “building.”

  But there were no flies on Mom when she was awake, even at ninety-six. An attractive young caregiver was living with her during that visit, and anytime we were all in the room together, Mom pointedly asked, “And how is Genie?” and then added, “I just LOVE Genie!” At other times Mom blurted, “Tha
nk you so much for allowing Genie to go to China with me!”

  Mom was talking about a trip she took when Genie was her companion for five weeks. My mother was eighty years old at the time. Genie was the person Mom wanted with her.

  The reason Mom kept bringing Genie up—right out of the blue and in the middle of other conversations—was that even though she was supposed to be blind, Mom was still herself in one area: Her Sexual Attraction Radar was working as well as ever! Mom’s caregiver was attractive, young, and sleeping in Mom’s little chalet that I was staying in, too.

  “So HOW IS Genie?!” Mom would ask, shooting her kind but dangerously winsome blond helper a slightly worried look anytime I glanced at the young woman, which I did quite a bit.

  One morning we were lounging on Mom’s couch, and Mom reached up and rubbed my neck the way she used to do when we’d be together for my bedtime stories. Her hand was so frail that I could barely feel her touch. Her delicate hands were gnarled but still lovely. Debby made sure Mom got a manicure every month, and her fingernails were well kept. When I was a child, Mom’s massages were powerful and effective. Her hands were small but so strong! Mom always used to give me back and foot rubs, especially concentrating on massaging my “bad” leg—the atrophied one wrecked in early childhood by polio.

  Those hands! She gardened. And her fingernails always had dirt under them in the summer. I remember the armfuls of broccoli and cabbages glistening with dew that Mom would carry into the house at dawn after she got up to weed, plant, thin, hoe, and pick by first light. To me her hands were instruments of power that expressively “talked” right along with her as she gestured when speaking. They also pounded multiple carbon copies out of her huge old manual typewriter. Spellbound, I’d watch her type, mesmerized by her speed, accuracy, and the deadly beating she gave that typewriter.