Cashing in on crazy.

I've heard of Frank Schaeffer, even heard him interviewed and read some short pieces by him. But this afternoon a friend sent me a link to an excerpt from his latest book, and now I'd like to pass it on to you.

Schaeffer talks about how the whole "Left Behind" industry is really nothing more than the latest version of the crazy right-wing religious crap his father helped to start in this country. Here's a bit:

Others carried on where I left off, pushing the victimhood mythology to the next generation of evangelical/fundamentalists, and they have cultivated a following among the terminally aggrieved based on ceaselessly warning them about “the world.” For instance “An Evangelical Manifesto,” a document put together by yet another self-appointed evangelical/fundamentalist “leadership group” (in 2008), was widely circulated in evangelical/fundamentalists circles. It put forward the idea of the evangelical/fundamentalist battle with the dangerous forces of secularism, claiming that “Nothing is more illiberal than to invite people into the public square but insist that they be stripped of the faith that makes them who they are. … If this hardens into something like the European animosity toward religion in public life the result would be disastrous for the American republic. … [The] striking intolerance shown by the new atheists is a warning sign.”

The evangelical/fundamentalist authors of this document were claiming that fundamentalists were being stripped of their political power. Worse, we’d soon find that America would be just like— heavens!—France! They made this case during the Bush presidency!

A host of evangelical/fundamentalist Cassandras tour college campuses reinforcing their followers’ perennial chip-on-the-shoulder attitude by telling fearful evangelical/fundamentalist students to hold fast against the secular onslaught. They tell their student listeners (and those students’ even more worried parents) to not let “those people”—professors, members of the Democratic Party, moderates, progressives, and such ordinary American men and women as Jews, gays, and members of the educated “elite”—strip them of their faith. Hundreds of books by many evangelical/fundamentalist authors could be consolidated into one called How to Get Through College with Your Fundamentalist Faith Intact So You Won’t Wind Up Becoming One of Them.

The whole thing is worth reading. I don't agree with all of it - Schaeffer is still a believer, but one who has done a lot to not only distance himself from the crazies but to show them for what they are. If nothing else, it is worth it to know a little more about how this particular virulent strain of religion got so well entrenched in the American Right.

Jim Downey