More about religion's dark side

And the surprising history of the US anti-abortion movement

I had no idea that my last letter, “When religion turns to the dark side,” would generate much correspondence and lead to revelations and soul searching. I’m coming back to the subject with a few gems to share.

How did it happen?

First, a reader recommended this film and book: The Brainwashing of My Dad. It focuses on the role of the media industry. I don’t yet know if it has advice on what to do about friends and relatives who’ve been radicalized. If you’ve seen it or read the book, I’d love to know what you think.

Another reader sent a list of books by George Lakoff, a scholar who’s written a great deal about how much better the right-wing is at messaging, or “framing,” than left and liberal folk. The savviest practical book I’ve read on messaging, You Are the Message, was written by Roger Ailes, who founded Fox News. Conservative strategist Frank Luntz wrote a more recent guide, Words That Work, as well as a recent oped: “How to Make Trump Go Away”).

Then I rediscovered the Schaeffers.

Uncle Dean must have given me one of Francis Schaeffer’s books. When I returned to California as a teenage born-again Christian, I found that there was a tiny branch of the Schaeffer mission, called L’Abri (The Shelter) and based in Switzerland, perched at the top of Highway 17 in the Santa Cruz Mountains. I became friends with the couple who ran it and stayed there for a couple of months before moving to England to live with my father and stepmother. For some months, I drove to the English L’Abri in Hampshire every Sunday to go to church and have lunch.

This came back when I discovered that Frank Schaeffer, son of L’Abri’s founders, is now known for explaining the history of right-wing evangelical politics, as well as for his own part in powering the anti-abortion movement that led to last year’s repeal of Roe v. Wade. He’s written a number of books and here’s an interview he did last year with Christiane Amanpour, known for her reporting from war zones:

Schaeffer explains that when evangelical Christians found that abortion was a moneymaking theme, they were all over it. To my astonishment, until that time Billy Graham, the Southern Baptist Convention, and Christianity Today were pro-choice!

Essential history

His book Crazy for God which should be required reading for everyone who wants to get a handle on evangelistic extremism in US politics.¹ Here’s an example of how history repeats itself²:

One event stands out as foreshadowing one of the many reasons I would later flee the evangelical world: The best material we shot for How Should We Then Live?—genuinely historic and unique footage—was filmed in the Accademia that houses Michelangelo's David. Dad was on a scaffolding that we built right up next to the statue, so people would get the sense of scale. (That was when I handed him a feather duster to clean off David's head! We noticed it was dusty!)

We filmed a magnificent dolly shot past Michelangelo's Captives (or "unfinished works") that line the hall up to the David. Then the shot continued all the way around David and ended on Dad.

Gospel Films insisted that I cut the scene and replace the shot with stock footage bought from an old NBC show because our shots revealed—oh, horror!—David's genitals. The old NBC footage conveniently blacked them out.

"We can't have this for a Christian audience," said Billy Zeoli. "Churches won't rent it."

"But we have other nudes and you never said anything. What about Mary's breast in that Virgin and Child?"

"That's bad enough! One holy tit is okay, as long as you don't leave it on screen too long. But churches don't do cock!"

The role of the media gets attention: “Evangelical books were often outselling the [New York] Times’ best-sellers. But the paper did not bother to count sales in religious bookstores. The people hurt most weren’t evangelical authors (our books sold anyway); rather, the losers were Democratic Party leaders and other liberal reading of the ‘paper of record’ who were blindsided by subsequent events.” And Schaeffer wrote this in 2007, more than fifteen years before Roe v. Wade was overturned:

Abortion became the evangelical issue. Everything else in our "culture wars" pales by comparison. The anger we stirred up at the grass roots was not feigned but heartfelt. And at first it was not about partisan politics. It had everything to do with genuine horror at the procedure of abortion. The reaction was emotional, humane, and sincere. It also was deliberately co-opted by the Republican Party and, at first, ignored by the Democratic Party.

And:

If Planned Parenthood, NOW, and NARAL had sat down to figure out the best way to energize the evangelical subculture, they couldn't have done a better job. With their absolutist stand, they might as well have been working to help the Republicans take Congress and the White House. They branded all who even questioned Roe as backward women-hating rubes. Roe was the law! There was no need for further debate! There could be no compromise! Shut up! Go away! All that was at stake was "fetal tissue"! People who didn't agree could just be ignored, mocked, or sued into silence. Besides, the "progressives" had history on their side. We were entering a new secular and enlightened age!

He also comments on evangelical book banning and their attitude towards third places:

The idea of public space, the ideas that led to the building of my father's and my favorite places, for instance all those civic works in Florence and the piazzas we so happily strolled, was the very idea that the evangelical home-school movement unwittingly wanted to destroy. They wanted no public spaces (physical or intellectual) to be shared by people of all beliefs. They wanted only private spaces, where they could indoctrinate their children free from "interference."

And how about this?

[Dad] had recently been saying privately that the evangelical world was more or less being led by lunatics, psychopaths, and extremists, and agreeing with me that if "our side" ever won, America would be in deep trouble. . . . And what sort of fools would "our people" elect as president or for Congress, given that they had so easily been duped by the flakes, madmen, and charlatans they were hailing (and lavishly funding) as their spiritual leaders?

I guess we know the answer to that.

Handmaid’s Tale?

I’ve worked with eminent leadership scholars and written on leadership myself. I published a whole series about Religion & Society with Routledge, including volumes on Fundamentalism and Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity. I looked at the Christian right as an intellectual, an environmentalist, a feminist. I did not take their cause seriously. An American theocracy led by power-crazed men? How absurd.

I took this photo at Hyde Park Corner in London.

In Crazy for God, published over 15 years ago, Frank Schaeffer shows vividly that that is what the fundamentalists in the US evangelical world were aiming for. Taking control of the Republican Party was an essential step. They were inept in many ways. (Remember Jim and Tammy Baker? My Christian boyfriend’s parents worked for that illustrious pair.) But they were shrewd, too, harnessing religious piety and conservatism to build political power. This isn’t just a US phenomenon: we can see it in Russia, Hungary, and Indonesia.

I’m reminded of a Bible verse: “I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” That was advice to early Christian prostelytizers but it’s time to turn the tables. More to come on the art of persuasion, and on messaging (or framing), a topic relevant to both politics and books.

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. —Sun Tzu, The Art of War

1. Apologies for this very US-focused letter. While I (and many young people) found the Schaeffers appealing because they were international in their outlook, intellectual and cultured, they had far more lasting impact in the US than in Europe.

2. A Florida principal was recently forced to resign after a photo of the statue was shown to students in a class discussion of Italian art.