113 SEX, MOM, AMD
GOD, Frank Schaeffer, Da Capo Press, Cambridge, MA, 2011
ix-x
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
mother’s To-Do List, like home-schooling me.
So I’ll be capitalizing some words oddly in this book, such as Sin, God,
Love, and Girls, and also words like Him when referring to God. I’m not doing this as a theological statement
but as a nervous tic, a leftover from my Edith Schaeffer-shaped childhood and
also to signal what Loomed Large to my mother and what still Looms Large to me.
4
. . . the words of the Bible, or even a few notes of an
old hymn, cast a shadow of bittersweet nostalgia that defies reason as
thoroughly as a whiff of perfume reminds a man of his first lover and evokes a
longing that cuts to the heart.
29
The Evangelical ghetto is a network of personality cults
operating, as far as nepotistic leadership and succession goes . . .
30
I wasted ten years or so of my life chasing “success” in
Evangelical and other right-wing circles.
Other than collecting material for future novels (and memoirs), I regret
every moment I spent selling myths to the deluded, or I should say that I
regret selling myths to myself and then passing them on to people as deluded as
I was. Then I escaped, or maybe
not. I’m still writing about those
experiences.
33
Mom was not alone in struggling to make sure people knew
that just because she believed in Jesus and was a fundamentalist (in the sense
that she held to a literal six-day creation, a universal flood, and so forth)
didn’t make her crazy. Believing in
invisible things breeds an inferiority complex among people competing with
science for hearts and minds. Many
religious fundamentalists feel under siege by the secular world and harbor a
deeply paranoid sense of victimhood. I
think of those who turn their sense of victimhood into material and political
success and their claims of persecution into strategies of achieving power as
Jesus Victims. I don’t mean they are
victims of Jesus, accruing power
through the rhetoric of sacrifice and persecution and grasping at conspiracy
theories about how the nefarious “World” and all “Those Liberals” are out to do
them in. It is this Jesus Victim note of
self-pity that ties together “These People,” as some smug secularists might
label all conservative religious believers.
51
In reaction to the fear and loathing of Sex, women, and
intimacy that resulted from the biblical teachings against premarital Sex, let
along against women’s vile uncleanness, a rebellion took place. This rebellion against fear and antisexual
prejudice was ushered in by the “free love” prophets-for-profit like Hugh
Heffner. But what started in the 1950s
and 1960s as an attempt to balance sexual fear with sanity tumbled into yet
another example of dysfunctional American extremism. This happened because the practitioners of three
American belief systems (that are so intense they might as well be religions)
unwittingly colluded: Progressives
(absolutist believers in unregulated Free Speech), conservatives (absolutist
believers in unregulated Free Enterprise), and conservative Christians
(absolutist believers in the uncleanness of Sex between anyone not married in a
heterosexual “traditional” marriage) created a sordid monster – Porn-Gone-Nuts.
73
There is another choice: To admit that the best of any
religious tradition depends on the choices its adherents make on how to live despite what their holy books “say,” not
because of them. “But where would that
leave me?” my former self would have asked.
“I’d be adrift in an ocean of uncertainty.” Yes, and perhaps that’s the only honest place
to be. Another name for uncertainty is
humility. No one ever blew up a mosque,
church, or abortion clinic after yelling. “I could be wrong.”
83-84
The books written by “New Atheists” like Richard Dawkins,
Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris attack God by attacking religion. But that’s not an argument that even begins
to address the question of God (or some other outside power’s meddling in the
formation of the Universe, let along first causes in cosmology). The New Atheists’ arguments make sense only
as attacks on religion. There’s plenty
to attack. But who says religion as
practiced today, let along as “revealed” in holy books, has anything to do with an actual
Creator? As Vincent Bugliosi writes in
his remarkable book Divinity of Doubt,
“Harris (like Hitchens) seems to believe something that is so wrong it is
startling that someone of his intellect wouldn’t see it immediately, that
gutting religion (as Harris tries to do my his technique of decimating faith
that fosters religion), does not, ipso facto, topple God.”
85
. . . by the time the writers of the New Testament were
remembering forty, fifty, sixty years later what Jesus had said, they were also building a self-interested
organization based on His life. They
were settling disputes and splits among themselves. What better way to strengthen their arguments
than to draft The Master, in 20/20 hindsight, into supporting them in various
Early Church turf wars and their fights with each other. How better to win theological battles than to
“quote” Jesus about the “correct” view of celibacy or how to “deal with” the
Jews or how to scare the faithful into remaining
faithful or how to encourage them to stay faithful in the face of Roman
persecution?
86-87
Thom Stark begins his book The Human Faces of God: What Scripture Reveals When It Gets God Wrong
(and Why Inerrancy Tries to Hide it) like this: “In the beginning was the
Argument, and the Argument was with God, and the Argument was: God. God was the subject of the Argument, and the
Argument was a good one. Who is God?
What does God require of us?”
Stark explains, “The doctrine of biblical inerrancy
dictates that the Bible, being inspired by God, is without error in everything
that if affirms, historically, scientifically, and theologically.” Stark develops a strong argument against this
Evangelical/fundamentalist doctrine of inerrancy. Here’s Stark’s conclusion:
The
scriptures are not infallible. Jesus was
not infallible, or, if he was, we have no access to his infallibility. So where is our foundation? Upon what do we build our worldview, our
ethics, our politics and our morality?
The answer is that there is no foundation. There is no sure ground upon which to build
our institutions. And that is a good
thing. That is what I call grace.
An
infallible Jesus, just like a set of infallible scriptures, is ultimately just
a shortcut through our moral and spiritual development. To have a book or a messenger dropped down
from heaven, the likes of which is beyond the reach of all human criticism, is
a dangerous shortcut. It is no wonder
humans have always attempted to create these kinds of foundations. And it is a revelation of God’s character,
from my perspective, that cracks have been found in each and every one of those
foundations.
Maybe (if Stark is right) God feels slandered by the
Bronze-Age-to-Roman-era “biography” of Him that, it turns out (judging by the
insanity that makes up so much of the Bible), wasn’t an authorized biography,
let alone an inspired one. It seems to
me that as far as the best parts of Christianity go, traditions of beauty in
art, music, and literature and the humanism expressed in the abolition of
slavery movement and so forth, what might be called the good results are proof
that enlightened believers have been picking and choosing all along when it
comes to what they take seriously in the Bible.
For instance, many Christians were abolitionists in the fight against
slavery. Since the Bible, at best,
cancels itself out on this subject, the clearly proslavery bits in
juxtaposition to the enlightened do-unto-others bits, the Bible wasn’t the only
source of the push for freedom. That
enlightenment came from within the hearts of men and women who then cast around
for any supporting argument they could find, including some verses taken out of
the general context of the proslavery sentiment expressed in the Bible.
To reject portions of the Bible is not necessarily to
reject God or even the essence of Christianity.
A great deal of the Bible is contradicted by the Love that predates it
and, more importantly, survives in you and me.
And that Love edits the Bible for us.
Call that editing the Holy Spirit, or call it a more evolved sense of
ethics and human rights, but most people know what to follow and what to reject
when it comes to how they live.
Sacrifice for others, not
sacrifice of others, is the message
of the “better angels” of spiritual faith.
88
The fact that religion has time and again been awful is
no more here nr there when it comes to God than the fact that humans have
damaged everything we’ve touched is an argument for the liquidation of every
human being. Indeed, how could religion
be anything but a mess? We invented it! That doesn’t mean that the longing for
meaning that drove us to invent religion isn’t a reflection of something real:
a Creator Who many of us sense is there but Who is also beyond description.
I think that the best argument for God’s existence is
that humans long for meaning. A
corollary is that the word “beauty,” however indefinable, means something real
to most people. And then there’s that
question about the origin of everything, to which, I think, the only sensible
answer is a resoundingly agnostic “We’ll never know.” Meanwhile science truthfully explains our
evolution from single-celled organisms.
But it doesn’t tell me why I know Bach’s
Partita 1 en Si Mineur Double: Presto is more important than a jingle for
MacDonald’s Corporation. And even if brain chemistry unravels this secret, it
will reveal the how, not the why. But
you and I know that when the MacDonald’s Corporation is long forgotten, chances
are Bach’s music will have survived. Our
longing for God (by whatever name) will also be there as one constant in a
future that otherwise may not be recognizable.
100-101
The Reconstructionist worldview is ultra-Calvinist but,
like all Calvinism, 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.”)
153
Serendipitous,
messy, and joy-filled bodily-fluid-lubricated natural life, babies, and
grandbabies (in other words, Love) matter most to me. I hope, Ma
Chreie, that you found your own version of what Genie and I (and you and me
almost) stumbled into by dumb luck and horny abandon, a life full of children,
grandchildren, and friendship.
160
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. . .
162-163
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 them on be defined by one social issue above
all others.
164
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 Jacque 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.
175-175
The Far Right
intellectual enablers began by questioning abortion rights, gay rights, school
prayer rulings, and so forth. What they
ended up doing was to help foster a climate in which, in the eyes of a
dangerous and growing (mostly white lower class undereducated gun-toting)
minority, the very legitimacy of the U.S. government was called into question,
sometimes in paranoid generalities, but often with ridiculous specificity: for
instance, in the persistent lie that President Obama was not a citizen or was a
Muslim or that the Federal Reserve and/or United Nations were somehow involved
in a plot to “take away our freedoms” or that sensible gun control equaled “tyranny.”
180
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.
217
The tension
between the beauty of life-giving and the slavery of some unwanted pregnancies can’t
be resolved by a one-size-fit-all law or moral teaching. But science, aesthetics, emotions, evidence,
and the collective wisdom and compassion that exist in religious teachings
about loving they neighbor must be given their due when we’re trying to figure
out how to reconcile the
irreconcilable as best we can.
“As best we can”
is not perfect. And that is where both
sides in the abortion debate fail when they seem willing to tear our culture
apart (not to mention constantly derail the whole progressive agenda and set it
back decades) in order to stick to their fundamentalist purity on “the issue.” One side sweeps the fetus under a “rug” of
moral platitudes about female empowerment, and the other does the same to women
with platitudes about the sacredness of life.
233
“Kiss her!”
screamed My Penis, sensing an opportunity slipping away.
234
Individuals my
mother admired most were what she called “artistic types.” Creativity
was Mom’s favorite word, followed closely by Continuity. Those two words,
or should I say the meaning my mother gave them, came into conflict when my
mother fell in love.
236-237
Whenever Mom and
Dad were or weren’t doing with the men and women they very obviously had
crushes on from time to time, Dad clearly favored certain young women over
others, they did their best to set their children on a monogamous path. They extolled the virtues of family life and,
above all, of Continuity. Of commonsense
biological/psychological fact: Humans are programmed to be jealous nest-makers
who (usually) don’t like to live along or be cheated on.
I think that my
parents were right about the benefits of monogamy because I think that their
beliefs happened to tap into larger reality of evolutionary psychology. I don’t agree with Mom and Dad’s
God-Will-Hate-You-If-You-Sleep-Around theology of monogamy, but speaking in
practical terms (and with apologies to Winston Churchill), I do believe that monogamy is the worst
form of all sexual relationships, except for everything else that has been
tried. Brain, Penis, Vagina, and Heart
my bicker among themselves, but I think that kindness and common sense should
win the genitals-versus-brain debate whenever possible. Hurting your partner’s feelings is stupid.
238
We sat in silence
together for a long time.
“You should have
gone with him,” I said at last.
“No, Dear, I should
not have gone with him,” said
Mom. “To destroy a family, you have to
have a real reason. Fran is a good
husband as far as he’s able to be, and I love him. You know that I do, in spite of
everything. Also, you were too young to
go through that. I love you.”
“I know,” I said.
“I love you, too.”
Noel was the
embodiment of Creativity.
My mother’s
family was the embodiment of Continuity.
Mom chose
Continuity. There was one small happy
ending, besides Mom defending her children by not leaving Dad: Years later Mo
told Genie that after I’d confronted Dad, he never hit her again.
244
If you stick out
the bad patches of life, fight to make them better, and hang on to what counts,
one day you may wake up to discover that the best gift is a grandchild.
246-247
Mom’s best
efforts to rehabilitate The-God-Of-The-Bible’s sexual dysfunction failed. The sexual sickness that cripples
The-God-Of-The-Bible is catching.
Worshipping a “God” who sniffs around women’s menstrual cycles, hands
virgins to warriors to be raped as a reward, worries about who ejaculates
where, wants unmarried women who lose their virginity (premarriage) stoned to
death, recommends castration so that men can become eunuchs for the sake of the
kingdom of heaven, is the sort of “Good” who winds up attracting the worst
sorts of nuts to His “cause.” And those
born into that cause imbibe deeply from a well of sexual dysfunction before
they make any choices of their own.
They, we, are marked for life.
259-260
When I got Genie
pregnant, I was deemed normal within the Evangelical ghetto in which I was
raised. I could sleep with my sweetheart
fearing no more than a reprimand for doing something “too soon” and “before
marriage.” I might have been called a
sinner, but I never would have been castigated as a deviant and told to change
my inner sexual self. My “sins” left me
respectably accepted within the camp of the righteous and still categorized as
fully human.
Moses was
condemned by “moral” people as a “freak” for
being born who he is and for possessing normal
homosexual sexuality. And so he stood
there next to me facing death threats for having done no more than experience
the same God-given emotions I had experienced when I met Genie.
261-262
Anne Hutchinson
was a seventeenth-century settler in Massachusetts and an “unauthorized” Bible
teacher in a dissident church group who, in the words of the state of
Massachusetts monument honoring her, was a “courageous exponent of civil
liberty and religious toleration.”
Hutchinson was also a student of the Bible, which she interpreted by the
light of what she termed her own “divine inspiration.”
In other words,
Hutchinson came to believe that in order to remain both a Christian and a sane and decent being, she had to pick and choose what she believed in her
tradition. Hutchinson was banished from
the colony for her stand. And
Hutchinson, like all people of goodwill informed by the love-your-neighbor
ethic, carried within her evolving
ethical self the ability to “listen” for the Lord’s “prophetical office” to “open
scripture” (as she called it).
Hutchinson seems
to have concluded that religious believers should worship God, not the books about God.
Another way to state her case is that God does not reveal Himself,
Herself, or Themselves through books but through the heart and the “prophetical
office” of the heart.
Our hearts
connect to a truth larger than ourselves: Love of others in the context of
community.
That is the only
value of formal religion. It provides the place and time for the liturgies
through which we may unite with others heart-to-heart to seek out those
mysterious truths that words can’t describe but that the doing of ritual helps us tap into.
And this idea isn’t
some modern-era “Liberal” view or even original with the “heretic” Anne
Hutchinson. A thread of open
interpretation of the Scriptures and religious tradition goes back to the
beginnings of the Christian era and coexists with the narrower, harsher view of
God. That “threat” teaches that we do
not find God through dogma but through stillness of the soul. In that quiet place we may be given the gift
of encountering something bigger and more beautiful than ourselves.
First-century
Church Father Tertullian summed up this more enlightened view, exhorting the
faithful, “That which is infinite is known only to itself. This it is which gives some notion of God,
while yet beyond all our conceptions, our very incapacity of fully grasping Him
affords us the idea of what He really is.
He is presented to our minds in His transcendent greatness, as at once
know and unknown.”
A whole antifundamentalist,
antitheology thread in church history came to be called apophatic theology, or
the theology of not knowing. This merciful and open tradition takes a
mystical approach (similar to Hutchison’s) related to individual experiences of
the Divine, which are given by God as a gift, not acquired or demanded.
Apophatic
theology teaches that the Divine is ineffable, something that can be recognized
only when it is felt after it is given.
All we can “do” is shut up, listen, and wait. This ancient tradition, this humane thread,
flies in the face of today’s Evangelical myths about an “inerrant,” let alone
literal, Bible.
263
To be true to
what I hope is the heart of the best of the universal religious message, I want
to say the redemption through selflessness, hope, and Love necessitates a new
and fearless repudiation of the parts
of holy books and traditions, be they Jewish, Christian, Muslim (or other),
that bring us messages of hate, exclusion, racism, ignorance, misogyny,
homophobia, tribalism, and fear. To find
any spiritual truth within any religion’s holy books, we must mentally edit
them by the light God has placed in each of us.
As Anne Hutchinson put it at her trial, “The Lord knows that I could not
open scripture; he must by his prophetical office open it unto me.”
Those who wish to
live as Christians, Jews, Muslims, agnostics, or atheists by following the
humble apophatic thread, as opposed to those who wish to force others to be like them by
using Christianity, Judaism, Islam, or doctrinaire secularism as a weapon,
must shift from unquestioning faith in the Bible, Quran, Torah, or science to a
life-affirming message of transcendence.
278
. . . both the religious fundamentalist and the higher-education-worshiping
consumer/choice models of existence and everything that goes with both “dogmas”
fly in the face of the reality of what we fundamentally are: tribal, communal, and family-seeking animals craving
Unconditional Love and Continuity and Creativity.
