Although Frank Schaeffer describes himself “some days as an atheist, some days as an agnostic, other days as a fundamentalist,” he delivered a “sermon” at Riverside Cathedral in New York City on October 16, 2011.
John D. Rockefeller, Jr. built Riverside Church as a temple for once ascendant liberal Protestantism, against which Schaeffer’s prominently evangelical father, Francis, inveighed for decades. If the younger Schaeffer pondered the irony of his presence in Riverside’s pulpit, previously filled by liberal icons like Harry Emerson Fosdick and William Sloane Coffin, he did not mention it.
Instead, Schaeffer, told the congregation: “Sometimes I wonder why I bother going to church.” And he insisted, “Whatever salvation is, it is not about correct ideas.” As a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church, Schaeffer appreciates its allowance for “holy mysteries” in contrast to his previous “Protestant way of thinking,” where he “had to be sure” about his beliefs. He has “lived long enough to know that I always am changing my mind,” and “there is no frozen being of belief, it goes up and down just like the weather, and that’s real life.”
Without an authoritative and constant basis for his beliefs, Schaeffer says his view of love and the nature of God is inspired by his relationship with his three year old granddaughter. He believes that “if there is a God, and he, she, it, or they are creators, how would we imagine for a moment that they would be harsher in their judgment of us than a three year old granddaughter who loves us?” Because church is “the chance to look into the face of a spirit that is loving, not judging,” Schaeffer said he still attends services even though he is “burnt out on my faith.”
Schaeffer employed a monastic mystic interpretation of the parable of the prodigal son told in the Gospel of Luke to illustrate his belief that “there is no heaven and hell, there is only the presence of God.” According to this interpretation of the parable, although both brothers are in the presence of their father, the returned prodigal chooses to rejoice in his father’s presence, while the faithful son “received it as hell.” Through this lens, Schaeffer concluded “there are no two destinations for any human being. There is only one destination which is the presence of God.” This, he said, “leaves a question for us, what sort of God are we dealing with?” Schaeffer’s idea of God, who may or may not exist, is one who would not be “condemning of any human being for any action no matter how heinous.”
Sounding his usual political warnings, Schaeffer sermonized that “the Republican party has been taken over by a fringe of the religious right … and has conspired to destroy and undermine the presidency of Barack Obama.” He lamented that he “played a part in laying the groundwork for these people,” and said anger at “these people” was why sometimes what “I deliver what might be interpreted as a rant.” He explained that his departure from the faith of his influential parents happened when he realized “that I could not remain a person of faith and be part of a camp that excluded the other [and] that the religious right that I was part of actually hates this country.” He claimed: “They despise the country that actually exists that embraces gay people, women, and human beings of all colors, instead they love a fictional America that never existed, and when it did exist it put half its population in chains.”
The religious right, according to Schaeffer, has so thoroughly corrupted America that it is even to blame for the woes of the Occupy Wall Street movement. In a recent article, Schaeffer wrote that the growing Occupy Wall Street protests must target “the enablers of the top 1 percent exploiting the 99,” to achieve their goals. The “enablers,” he said, are evangelical “value voters.” Supposedly, “Evangelical fundamentalism helped empower the top 1 percent” by replacing “economic and political justice with a bogus (and hate-driven) ‘morality’ litmus tests” on issues like abortion, same sex marriage, school prayer, and others. Schaeffer claimed that by framing these moral issues as decisive, “masses of lower middle-class and poor Americans who should be voting for Democrats and thus their own economic interests, have been persuaded to vote against their own class and self-interest.” Ultimately, Schaeffer asserted, “values voters” view the government as evil because it allows abortion and other morally reprehensible things, so less government is always preferable to more “because ‘the government’ is evil.” So “unregulated corporations, banks and Wall Street are always right and represent ‘freedom’ while government is always wrong and represents ‘tyranny.”
Schaeffer may change his mind about all matters of faith, but his view of the supposedly depraved and religious right “heading us toward a theocracy” seems fixed.
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