Crazy for God

by Frank Schaeffer

  Dad was our “holy tradition.” He was bigger than any church. We set trends; we didn’t follow them. As Mom said, “He meant so much to all Christians, it just wouldn’t be fair to have the funeral in any one particular denomination or with any one particular pastor.” So we rented a high-school gym in Rochester, Minnesota, where Dad died. What other building could hold the throng? And we didn’t ask a pastor to officiate. Who would be good enough? We would make this up as we went along, and showcase our family.

  “Mom, how about a private funeral?” I asked.

  “Of course we can’t do that! We can’t waste this opportunity! Besides, these are our people!”

  There was a parade of family, friends, and associates, high-powered leaders, and many hundreds and hundreds of groupies and assorted hangers-on—“our people.” The atmosphere was a cross between a farewell Beatles concert and a more solemn than usual NASCAR event. An episode of How Should We Then Live? was shown—“How nice he got to preach his own funeral sermon!” (Ruth Graham)—and my brothers-in-law all spoke. I declined Mom’s urging me to “use this great opportunity.” (Though I did say a few shaky words at the grave when the crowd had shrunk to a mere fifty groupies and a dozen or so L’Abri workers.)

  In the gym, the coffin was placed between looped-back ropes on a basketball parquet floor and lined up with the three-point line. A local baroque music ensemble of semiprofessional Mayo Clinic doctors’ wives played, and played, for so long it seemed as if we were in a concert. The music was not helped any by the high-school gym “acoustics,” or the socks, sweat, and sperm locker-room smell.

  Movies, music, and rambling freelance tributes from Dad’s sons-in-law were punctuated by tributes read out loud, seemingly forever, that had poured in from the White House, Congress, and every semifamous evangelical in the world, interspersed with yet more music from the ubiquitous quartet. And Mom was greeting all the you-have-no-idea-what-your-books-mean-to-me throng.

  It was a nightmare.

  Ten years later, the first Greek Orthodox funeral I went to filled me with envy. I decided that whatever else happened, I didn’t want to die as a member of a religion that has no clue about what to do with the most sacred moments of life, and death.

  The Greek Orthodox do what they have always done. The open casket faces the altar feet first. The priest performs the short and solemn liturgy. The ancient prayers of the Church are prayed, and everyone knows what will happen next. The family is not on display but folded into the seamless tradition of mourning, one their great-great-grandmothers would know as well as they do, one that has long since been worn smooth as the path between a playground and a road made by thousands of feet.

  I had said my good-bye to Dad a week before he died. We were alone in St. Mary’s Hospital. I would have stayed to be with him, but it conflicted with an “important” speaking engagement (I forget where) that Dad had told me to take in his place. I helped Dad shave, then clambered up beside him. We sat side by side and talked about skiing.

  “Remember, Dad?”

  He had seemed so strong, so absolutely trustworthy, so permanent when I followed him down the slope. About the second or third day of the Zermatt vacation, we would skip breakfast and leave at first light, heavily muffled against the cold. Because we stayed in Riffelberg, a few miles above Zermatt, we could ski right out the door before the lifts opened and be on our way to the valley where the big cable cars were that would take us up the mountains.

  We had to be extra careful. The bluish predawn light flattened out all the contours of the piste. What looked smooth might be a series of bumps that would unexpectedly send me spinning out of control, legs thumping up and down like pistons as I flew over ridges. But Dad went ahead. He would call back a warning if he hit ice or deep ridges.

  We skied in silence. The only sound was made by the metal edges of our skis slicing into the icy slope. By the time we arrived in the Zermatt Valley, the wool mufflers in front of our mouths were crusted white with moisture from our frozen breaths. Soon, my father and I were waiting at the cable car station, munching on the chocolate bar Dad always brought.

  Dad told me not to turn back at his hospital room door. He wanted no maudlin parting. We hugged and then shook hands.

  “I love you, Dad.”

  “I love you, boy.”

  “Good-bye.”

  57

  I still regard abortion as an unmitigated tragedy. But I no longer think that it should always be illegal. On the other hand, I don’t think abortion should always be legal either.

  Evangelicals weren’t politicized (at least in the current meaning of the word) until after Roe v. Wade and after Dad, Koop, and I stirred them up over the issue of abortion. More than thirty years after helping to launch the evangelical pro-life movement, I am filled with bitter regret for the unintended consequences.

  In 2000, after a close and disputed contest, settled by the Supreme Court, we elected a president who claimed he believed God created the earth and who, as president, put car manufacturers’ and oil companies’ interests ahead of caring for that creation. We elected a “born-again” president who said he lived by biblical ethics but who played the dirtiest political games possible, for instance in the filthy lies his people spread to derail Senator John McCain’s presidential primary bid. We elected a pro-life Republican Party that did nothing to actually care for the pregnant women and babies they said they were concerned for, but rather were corrupted by power, and took their sincere evangelical followers for granted, and played them for suckers.

  The so-called evangelical leadership—Dobson, Robertson, Falwell, and all the rest—also played the pro-life community for suckers. While thousands of men and women in the crisis pregnancy movement gave of themselves with tremendous and sincere sacrifice (to help women and babies), their evangelical “leaders” did little more than cash in on fund-raising opportunities and stir the pot so they could keep their followers motivated. That way, the evangelical leaders could represent themselves as power brokers to the politicians willing to kowtow to them.

  To the extent that the Republican Party benefited from the pro-life movement, my efforts and those of my father contributed to making the Republican congressional majorities of the 1980s and 1990s possible. We also indirectly helped make the elections of Reagan, Bush Sr., and Bush Jr. possible.

  Bush Jr. was the “Christians’ ” president. So it was bitterly ironic that Bush Jr. was personally responsible for, amongst other self-inflicted horrors, the persecution, displacement, and destruction of the one million, three hundred thousand-person beleaguered Christian minority in Iraq. They had fared much better under the secular regime of Saddam Hussein than they did once Bush Jr. unleashed the Islamic militants.

  It bears repeating: Bush Jr., the Bible-believing, born-again president, delivered up his Iraqi fellow Christians to be destroyed. They fled, died, or went into hiding because a “faith-based” evangelical American president stupidly unleashed a civil war. And of course Bush Jr. was also responsible for the killing of countless other innocent civilians caught in the sectarian strife.

  The puny “president” I indirectly helped elect sent my son John to an ill-conceived, ineptly carried-out war, a war where my son’s friend Alex Del Rio got his legs blown off, where Mark, the only son of my friend Mindy Evnin, was killed. And Bush Jr. was elected with the help of millions of evangelicals that Dad, Koop, and I—directly or indirectly—helped galvanize.

  How could such a little man—a towering mediocrity—so clearly overmatched by the job ever have become president? One reason is that single-issue politics deforms the process and derails common sense. It facilitates the election of leaders just because they are “correct” on “my issue.”

  Roe v. Wade has given us more than thirty years of culture war. The results have been tragic. For one thing, Roe has given us some terrible leadership. This works both ways. The Democratic Party has, until recently, also limited itself to candidates who are rigidly correct “the
ologically” on abortion and other social issues.

  It seems to me that by demanding ideological purity on abortion (and other single issues as well), both parties have worked to eliminate the sorts of serious smart pragmatic people who make competent leaders. What we are left with are those willing to toe the party theological line, who are talented at kissing the asses of their party’s ideologues, raising money, and looking good on TV, but not much else.

  But what if absolute consistency on any issue from the left or the right, religious or secular, is an indication of mediocre intelligence and a lack of intellectual honesty? What if the world is a complex place? What if leadership requires flexibility? What if ideology is a bad substitute for common sense? What if ideological consistency, let alone “purity,” is a sign of small-mindedness, maybe even stupidity?

  Logically there was no forgone conclusion that the left would take the pro-choice side. Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood, had called abortion murder and, following her lead, so had Planned Parenthood in their literature, right up to 1968. But since the left (and hence the Democratic Party, at least the public’s perception of that party) embraced the sexual revolution, the way it fell out was that the right, especially the so-called Christian Right, became the “defenders of unborn life.” And we did this while often supporting capital punishment. And the Democrats supported abortion on-demand, while often being against the execution of convicted criminals, and while the Democratic Party included a strong traditionally pacifist wing.

  America was entering an ethical twilight zone of contradictory theological absolutism that bled into all walks of life and into many unrelated political issues. Both sides were relying on their respective “faiths,” feminist purity of heart on the one hand and so-called biblical ethics on the other. America was involved in yet another “church split” masquerading as politics.

  Meanwhile, the left (and hence the Democratic Party) seemed to be encouraging abortion, even the abortion of the same “imperfect” babies who, on other days, liberal Democrats, were legislating on behalf of, to have ramps built giving the handicapped access to libraries, hotels, and restaurants.

  One would have thought that some on the left might have noted these inconsistencies, or at least been a little nervous about abortion being made legal for any reason at any time in pregnancy, in view of the exploding potential of genetic screening for “undesirable” humans that might someday include screening for the “gay gene” or the “criminal gene” or even the “hyperactive child gene.” In fact, some civil libertarians, like Village Voice editor Nat Hentoff, spoke out vehemently on the pro-life side on just such grounds, and he quit the board of the ACLU over its lopsided support of abortion advocates.

  If it had been the other way around and the left had championed the unborn, perhaps against corporate medical industry interests, or in the name of equality—or because of the lessons taught by the rise of the eugenics movement of the 1920s and 1930s, or because of being queasy over a recently slave-owning society once again deciding who was more equal, even more human “legally” than others—my father would have been embraced as a religious leader on the left. And if Dad had been allied with the left, it would have ultimately been a much better fit for him—and for me.

  The battle lines were drawn when Roe not only became the law of the land, precluding further debate and democratic process, but also became the most permissive abortion law in the world, outside of what was then the Soviet Union. What Dr. Koop, Dad, and I helped start was a slow-motion civil war of reaction that has morphed into “red”- and “blue”-state America.

  We Americans—secular, religious, of the left and the right—like to think of ourselves as good. This national delusion is our real religion. We think we know something special about virtue, the way the French believe they have the inside track on food and wine. When we do bad things, we like to dress them up and call them good, for the same reason no Frenchman will admit to being a bad cook. We can’t just hit an enemy, we have to call it “spreading democracy.” We can’t just abort a baby, we have to call it “reproductive rights.” We can’t tolerate human frailty, we have to fight to outlaw all abortion as “murder,” declare victory over “evil,” and leave some young woman paying the price for our self-righteousness.

  For most Americans, thoughts about the rights of the unborn were blessedly fuzzy before Roe and allowed plenty of room for hypocrisy of the kind that makes life bearable. They would have preferred that some abortion be legal and be done quietly, but that there be a line drawn that would provide us with moral cover, something to feed our delusion of goodness.

  Roe was too extreme for our American sense of the virtuous self, and it provided no moral cover, say of the kind most European governments provided when it came to legalizing abortion, by strongly discouraging abortion past the earlier stages of pregnancy. Roe was too sweeping. It was absolutist—and bad public relations, too.

  To most Americans—including me these days—it is gut-check self-evident that a fertilized egg is not a person, because personhood is a lot more than a collection of chromosomes in a Petri dish or in the womb. To most Americans—including me these days—it is also gut-check self-evident that an unborn baby is mighty like one of us, and that a lot of fast talking about reproductive rights and choice or a woman’s mental well-being doesn’t answer the horror of a three-pound child with her head deliberately caved in lying in a medical waste receptacle.

  Perception is reality in politics, maybe in ethics, too. And to many Americans, the Democrats, at least in perception, adopted an absolutist pro-choice platform, guaranteed to alienate many reasonable and compassionate people. When it came to defending Roe, the Democrats seemed to have replaced the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness with the right to fucking.

  Roe was an answer to the “by-product” of sex, and, most particularly, of the ’60s sexual revolution. The sexual revolution was just one example of the individualistic “I want” replacing the moralistic “you should.” But as the sexual revolution part of the “I want” revolution was overtaken by AIDS and by an STD and teen-pregnancy epidemic, it started to look idiotic.

  It turned out that personal preference is not always the best guide. And there were plenty of women of all political and religious persuasions who, post-Roe, woke up to the fact that male sexual “ethics” now separated sex, commitment, and responsibility into watertight compartments. A lot of people had the uneasy feeling that things had gone “too far.” That included many liberal parents who were appalled by a culture wherein it was considered “normal” that their young teenage (even preteen) daughters dispensed casual oral sex to cement “friendships” with boys they hardly knew. In the public mind, this moral slide was somehow linked to a loss of moral focus, and (fairly or unfairly) the legalizing of abortion was perceived as a big part of that slide.

  Up to the 2006 elections, the Democrats were saddled with the public’s perception of being the party that had aggressively gone to bat for Roe. Then in 2006, when the Democratic Party began to include a few outspoken pro-life candidates in their national congressional races—and some won—they seemed to be correcting an error, because it wasn’t long ago that Democratic candidates who did not pass the pro-choice theological litmus test were barred from even speaking at Democratic Party conventions.

  Where the pro-life movement seemed nutty when saying that a fertilized egg is fully human, at least pro-life nuts had genetic science on their side. But when the pro-choice proponents found themselves trying to explain why a six-month-old unborn baby deserved no protection, and was a mere “part of a woman’s body,” subject to her “choice,” they defied both common sense and science. And how could a country hooked on notions of its own goodness feel warm and fuzzy about “procedures” involving the killing of almost-viable, sometimes even viable, babies?

  Defending such horrors was awkward. It pushed otherwise moderate people to extremes. The extremes persist. After the Supreme Co
urt upheld the federal Partial Birth Abortion Ban Act (April 18, 2007), the next day the Times reacted predictably saying that to ban even extremely late-term abortions, “severely eroded the constitutional respect and protection accorded women.” The paper also stated that the decision “threatened the rule of law.” What the editors didn’t mention was that all the Court had done was to bring American law a bit closer to European and other countries’ less extreme abortion laws.

  A paper like the Times looks philosophically unimaginative and ethically challenged when it doggedly sticks to the party line at the extremes of the argument. They look as silly and theologically dogmatic as the nutcase pro-lifers who want to hold funerals for fertilized eggs and ban stem-cell research.

  How do we make our society better when it comes to protecting the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness? This is about more than one issue. For instance, it seems to me that capital punishment is a terrible idea. Our society would be a better place to live if the state could rise above acts of vengeance. Symbols matter. On the other hand, if a policeman is dealing with a criminal who has taken hostages and has started killing them, and will not surrender, I hope the cop shoots him before others are killed. This is not an act of vengeance but one of need, to protect society when other means aren’t available. And I’d rather live in a society that is willing to sometimes kill out of necessity than follow some theological “sanctity of life” ethic to an absurd extreme.

  It seems to me that there will always be a need for some abortions to terminate some troubled early pregnancies. But this is no small thing. It is a sad reality. But compassion for women facing a tough pregnancy has to be balanced by the greater good. Sometimes compassion for the innocent means saying no to a couple that wants to abort their child because their unborn daughter is going to need surgery to correct a harelip and they want a “perfect” designer baby. Sometimes it means saying yes to a thirteen-year-old who has been molested or raped.