Frank Schaeffer

I’ve been waiting for this. Robert P. George is an excellent thinker and astute cultural critic. He writes from the Roman Catholic tradition and there is much with which the Orthodox can find agreement (“Clash Of Orthodoxies: Law Religion & Morality In Crisis” is an excellent read). Frank Schaeffer, well, what can you say. I know the man and have been keeping up with his writing, not the books so much which are so-so for the most part — adequate but not memorable except perhaps for his scathing and unseemly criticism of his parents. (No parent is perfect, and no parent, except perhaps a rank abuser, deserves to have his failings pilloried in public by his children).

I knew both of his parents tangentially. A friend and I started the Students for Life group at the University of Minnesota many moons ago (the only accredited Feminist Studies program at any American university at the time) and invited Francis Schaeffer to speak at “Pro-Life Week” that we organized — the feminist studies department dutifully protested in full force. Later I got to know Edith Shaeffer. I was ordained at the time and spent a day with her on the day Frank got chrismated and explained what Orthodox Christianity was (she was relieved to find out it was not a cult). She is a very gracious and generous woman.

Later I got to know Frank a bit better (full disclosure: I was a co-editor of Dancing Alone: The Quest for Orthodox Faith in the Age of False Religion) and thus was alarmed with what appears to be a drift from the moral tradition towards libertine liberalism — moral parity for homosexuals is his new cause). I keep up with his writings on the Huffington Post but find the slide into temporal moralizing almost intolerable — lot’s of self-assured finger-wagging, no serious thinking. I only check it every few months now.

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HT: Mirror of Justice

“Natural Law” and “far right Reconstructionist extremism!”
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(HT: Orthodoxy Today)

The State of Kansas vs Frank Schaeffer in the Murder of Dr. George Tiller

By George C. Michalopulos

Recently, the notorious abortionist Dr George Tiller was gunned down in his church in Wichita, Kansas. The killer was a man who appears to be a dysfunctional loner with grave psychological problems. Nobody in the pro-life movement has stepped forward to applaud him or his actions; routine condemnation has been the order of the day.

One man however, has bravely stepped forward to take responsibility for this act. Frank Schaeffer, a self-described former member of the “Republican Party hate machine,” a group that included his father Francis Schaeffer, Jerry Falwell, and Ronald Reagan among many others, recently offered a mea-culpa in the left-wing journal The Huffington Post. Schaeffer believes that his life’s work as a young man in the Evangelical movement directly led to this incident because he helped create a “climate of fear” with his documentary (Whatever Happened to the Human Race?) and other work that made such atrocities like Tiller’s murder inevitable. As such, he puts himself in the pantheon artists like J. D. Salinger and Jodie Foster, whose ouvre inspired the murder of John Lennon and the attempted assassination of President Reagan.

On closer reading however, Schaeffer’s credibility is suspect from his first paragraph. He states that he “got out of the religious right (in the mid-1980s) and repented of [his] former hate-filled rhetoric.” Actually, he did no such thing. Sure, he may have abandoned the Evangelical Right, but as a new convert to Orthodoxy, he helped create an “Orthodox Right.” As for his abandonment of “hate-filled rhetoric,” one can read his various books and writings or view any of the numerous books and DVDs he produced since that time. There is more than enough venom against the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and secular humanism in the Schaeffer canon to choke a horse.

To be fair, it is possible that Schaeffer’s recollection of the “mid-1980s” extends to the years 2000-2002, in which he traveled the country barnstorming Orthodox Churches, telling them that America was going to hell in a hand-basket. One of his bugbears was abortion and the degradation of man. The other was the threat of Islamo-fascism. I first heard the term “Islamo-facism” in 2002 and it was from his lips. Schaeffer’s grave disappointment in President Bush actually started then, when he rightly saw Bush’s phrase that Islam was as a “religion of peace” as a sham. I got the impression sitting in the pews at Holy Trinity Greek Orthodox Church in Tulsa, Oklahoma that in Schaeffer’s mind, Bush should have taken up the Cross instead of placating the Islamic masses who were “an implacable enemy” of our civilization. Continue reading →