Frank Schaeffer - Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bibles Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics--and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway

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Table of Contents

BOOKS BY FRANK SCHAEFFER

Fiction
The Calvin Becker Trilogy
Portofino
Zermatt
Saving Grandma

Baby Jack

Nonfiction

Keeping Faith: A Father-Son Story About Love
and The United States Marine Corps
(Coauthored with John Schaeffer)

Faith of Our Sons: A Fathers Wartime Diary

Voices from the Front: Letters Home from Americas Military Family

AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of Americas Upper Classes from
Military Serviceand How It Hurts Our Country
(Coauthored with Kathy Roth-Douquet)

The God Trilogy

Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the
Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

Patience with God: Faith for People Who Dont Like Religion (or Atheism)

Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bibles Strange Take on Sex Led to
Crazy Politicsand How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway

Please visit www.frankschaeffer.com

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My wife, Genie Schaeffer; my editor, John Radziewicz; my copy editor, Jan Kristiansson; Ashley Makar; and Thom Stark gave me excellent notes on various drafts of this book and made it better. My agent, Jennifer Lyons, always provides good advice. Im grateful for the book-cover design by Jonathan Sainsbury and for the promotion of my writing by Lissa Warren (head of publicity at Da Capo Press). Collin Tracy (production editor for the Perseus Books Group) helped me get through the final edit process, showing patience and generosity throughout. My friends at Da Capo Press and the Perseus Books Group are good people to work with. Thank you all.

Mom and me (age 7) gardening in 1959

PROLOGUE

One of the things I love most about being with my grandchildren is that they only know me now. So before I explain why I had sex with an ice sculpture and how my family helped push the Republican Party into the embrace of the Religious Right and chronicle my familys complicity in several murders, let me say that my granddaughter Lucy has just turned two. She, along with my three other grandchildren, is my second chance now that Ive carved out a spiritual identity as dramatically eclipsing of my former self as if Id disappeared into a witness protection program.

My four grandchildren, Amanda, Benjamin, Lucy, and Jack, notwithstanding, Im still prone to label people and ideas as my mother labeled them. Mom divided everything into Very Important Things, say, Jesus, Virginity, Japanese Flower Arrangements, Lust, See-through Black Lingerie (to be enjoyed only after marriage), and everything else, say, those things that barely registered on my mothers To-Do List, like home-schooling me. So Ill be capitalizing some words oddly in this book, such as Sin, God, Love, and Girls, and also words like Him when referring to God. Im not doing this as a theological statement but as a nervous tic, a leftover from my Edith Schaeffershaped childhood and also to signal what Loomed Large to my mother and what still Looms Large to me.

Blessedly, Lucy and Jack live only a few hundred feet up the street. I walk to their house every day and collect them for playtime. When its Lucys turn, she perches in my arms and talks to me. (Jack is six months old and pulls my nose and laughs a lot but isnt saying much yet.) Lucy likes to be carried when we stroll back to Ba and Nannas house. (Im Ba and my wife, Genie, is Nanna.) Lucys big brown eyes scan the eighteenth-century clapboard houses of our New England neighborhood to see which of the ubiquitous American flags are wrapped around their abovethe-front-door flagpoles by the wind, Ba, and which are waving free in the ocean breeze.

When we get to my house, Lucy commands me to read The Tale of Two Bad Mice by Beatrix Potter. Its a story about two deluded mice, Hunka Munka and Tom Thumb, who mistake a dollhouse dinner laid out in the dollhouses miniature dining room for real food. When they discover that the lovely looking ham, fish, and pudding cant be eaten, they smash up the plaster food in revenge and then spitefully ransack the dollhouse.

When she wrote the book in 1904, Potter couldnt have known that her classic story would someday be an allegory aptly illustrating the delusion suffered by members of the American Religious Right. Some people who helped lead that movementincluding mewere very much like Hunka Munka and Tom Thumb. We lived lives informed by beliefs that were not based on fact and that led to deep-seated resentments that couldnt be cured because what we resented never actually happened. We took it as a personal insult that the real world didnt conform to the imagined religious facts that wed been indoctrinated to believe in, and so we did our share of smashing.

My late father, Francis Schaeffer, was a key founder and leader of the Religious Right. My mother, Edith, was herself a spiritual leader, not the mere power behind her man, which she also was. Mom was a formidable and adored religious figure whose books and public speaking, not to mention biblical conditioning of me, directly and indirectly shaped millions of lives. For a time I joined my Dad in pioneering the Evangelical antiabortion Religious Right movement. In the 1970s and early 1980s when I was in my twenties, I evolved into an ambitious, successful religious leader/instigator in my own right. And I wasnt just Dads sidekick; I was also Moms collaborator in her mission to reach the world for Jesus.

I changed my mind. I no longer ride around saving America for God, nor am I a regular on religious TV and radio these days. Neverthelesslike those two bad mice who later felt remorse and so put a crooked sixpence in the dolls Christmas stocking to pay for the damage theyd causedIm determined to acknowledge the destruction I contributed to before Lucy grows old enough to inherit the vandalized dollhouse that shell soon discover lurking beyond her childhood horizon.

Authors Note: Much of the material that is to follow chronicles an intimate journey. Some peoples names and other details have been changed. Genie reads my manuscripts, gives me wonderful notes, not to mention her generous permission to tell all and put her up on my literary auction block time and again. And Id like to say this about my mother: At age ninety-six and suffering from short-term memory loss (and sight loss owing to macular degeneration), sadly, Mom wont read this book. But just before Christmas of 2010, we sat down together during a weeklong visit and I told her about my project in detailincluding that I was going to tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may, Mom. With a flash of her old self and a familiar defiant head toss, Mom said, Go ahead; I dont care what people think and never did! Given her memory problem, I should add that before it developed and before her eyesight failed, she read my other equally scandalous writing, including my novels and nonfiction works, which also drew heavily from memories that to some people might have seemed too private to share. Mom isnt some people. I once got a letter from one of my mothers followers telling me that, having just read my novel

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