Sex, Mom, and God Read online

  Table of Contents

  BOOKS BY FRANK SCHAEFFER

  Title Page

  Acknowledgements

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER 1 - Family Planning

  CHAPTER 2 - Magic Menstrual Mummies

  CHAPTER 3 - Sex with the Ice Sculpture

  CHAPTER 4 - The-God-Of-The-Bible’s Unauthorized Biography

  CHAPTER 5 - It’s Good to Be the Queen (and Rushdoony)

  CHAPTER 6 - A Very Small, Tragically Immodest Speedo Bathing Suit (and Roe v. Wade)

  CHAPTER 7 - The Girl Who Let Me

  CHAPTER 8 - “Make Sure You Tell Your Readers I Changed My Mind!”

  CHAPTER 9 - “Strange Women”

  CHAPTER 10 - Godly Sexual Dysfunction, Hope, and Love

  EPILOGUE

  Dedication

  INDEX

  Copyright Page

  BOOKS BY FRANK SCHAEFFER

  Fiction

  The Calvin Becker Trilogy

  Portofino

  Zermatt

  Saving Grandma

  Baby Jack

  Nonfiction

  Keeping Faith: A Father-Son Story About Love

  and The United States Marine Corps

  (Coauthored with John Schaeffer)

  Faith of Our Sons: A Father’s Wartime Diary

  Voices from the Front: Letters Home from America’s Military Family

  AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America’s Upper Classes from

  Military Service—and How It Hurts Our Country

  (Coauthored with Kathy Roth-Douquet)

  The God Trilogy

  Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the

  Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

  Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don’t Like Religion (or Atheism)

  Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible’s Strange Take on Sex Led to

  Crazy Politics—and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway

  Please visit www.frankschaeffer.com

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My wife, Genie Schaeffer; my editor, John Radziewicz; my copy editor, Jan Kristiansson; Ashley Makar; and Thom Stark gave me excellent notes on various drafts of this book and made it better. My agent, Jennifer Lyons, always provides good advice. I’m grateful for the book-cover design by Jonathan Sainsbury and for the promotion of my writing by Lissa Warren (head of publicity at Da Capo Press). Collin Tracy (production editor for the Perseus Books Group) helped me get through the final edit process, showing patience and generosity throughout. My friends at Da Capo Press and the Perseus Books Group are good people to work with. Thank you all.

  Mom and me (age 7) gardening in 1959

  PROLOGUE

  One of the things I love most about being with my grandchildren is that they only know me now. So before I explain why I had sex with an ice sculpture and how my family helped push the Republican Party into the embrace of the Religious Right and chronicle my family’s complicity in several murders, let me say that my granddaughter Lucy has just turned two. She, along with my three other grandchildren, is my second chance now that I’ve carved out a spiritual identity as dramatically eclipsing of my former self as if I’d disappeared into a witness protection program.

  My four grandchildren, Amanda, Benjamin, Lucy, and Jack, notwithstanding, I’m still prone to label people and ideas as my mother labeled them. 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.

  Blessedly, Lucy and Jack live only a few hundred feet up the street. I walk to their house every day and collect them for playtime. When it’s Lucy’s turn, she perches in my arms and talks to me. (Jack is six months old and pulls my nose and laughs a lot but isn’t saying much yet.) Lucy likes to be carried when we stroll back to “Ba and Nanna’s house.” (I’m “Ba” and my wife, Genie, is “Nanna.”) Lucy’s big brown eyes scan the eighteenth-century clapboard houses of our New England neighborhood to see which of the ubiquitous American flags are wrapped around their abovethe-front-door flagpoles “by the wind, Ba,” and which are waving free in the ocean breeze.

  When we get to my house, Lucy commands me to read The Tale of Two Bad Mice by Beatrix Potter. It’s a story about two deluded mice, Hunka Munka and Tom Thumb, who mistake a dollhouse dinner laid out in the dollhouse’s miniature dining room for real food. When they discover that the lovely looking ham, fish, and pudding can’t be eaten, they smash up the plaster “food” in revenge and then spitefully ransack the dollhouse.

  When she wrote the book in 1904, Potter couldn’t have known that her classic story would someday be an allegory aptly illustrating the delusion suffered by members of the American Religious Right. Some people who helped lead that movement—including me—were very much like Hunka Munka and Tom Thumb. We lived lives informed by beliefs that were not based on fact and that led to deep-seated resentments that couldn’t be cured because what we resented never actually happened. We took it as a personal insult that the real world didn’t conform to the imagined religious “facts” that we’d been indoctrinated to believe in, and so we did our share of smashing.

  My late father, Francis Schaeffer, was a key founder and leader of the Religious Right. My mother, Edith, was herself a spiritual leader, not the mere power behind her man, which she also was. Mom was a formidable and adored religious figure whose books and public speaking, not to mention biblical conditioning of me, directly and indirectly shaped millions of lives. For a time I joined my Dad in pioneering the Evangelical antiabortion Religious Right movement. In the 1970s and early 1980s when I was in my twenties, I evolved into an ambitious, “successful” religious leader/instigator in my own right. And I wasn’t just Dad’s sidekick; I was also Mom’s collaborator in her mission to “reach the world for Jesus.”

  I changed my mind. I no longer ride around “saving” America for God, nor am I a regular on religious TV and radio these days. Nevertheless—like those two bad mice who later felt remorse and so put a “crooked sixpence” in the dolls’ Christmas stocking to pay for the damage they’d caused—I’m determined to acknowledge the destruction I contributed to before Lucy grows old enough to inherit the vandalized “dollhouse” that she’ll soon discover lurking beyond her childhood horizon.

  Author’s Note: Much of the material that is to follow chronicles an intimate journey. Some people’s names and other details have been changed. Genie reads my manuscripts, gives me wonderful notes, not to mention her generous permission to “tell all” and put her up on my literary auction block time and again. And I’d like to say this about my mother: At age ninety-six and suffering from short-term memory loss (and sight loss owing to macular degeneration), sadly, Mom won’t read this book. But just before Christmas of 2010, we sat down together during a weeklong visit and I told her about my project in detail—including that I was going to “tell the truth and let the chips fall where they may, Mom.” With a flash of her old self and a familiar defiant head toss, Mom said, “Go ahead; I don’t care what people ‘think’ and never did!” Given her memory problem, I should add that before it developed and before her eyesight failed, she read my other equally “scandalous” writing, including my novels and nonfiction works, which also drew heavily from memories that to
some people might have seemed too private to share. Mom isn’t “some people.” I once got a letter from one of my mother’s followers telling me that, having just read my novel Portofino (a work of humor where the mother character, “Elsa Becker,” is like my mother in some ways), she was sure it would “kill your mother because of the hatred for Jesus that drips from your SATANIC pen!” Coincidentally, that fan letter (received in the early 1990s before I was using e-mail) arrived in the same post delivery as a note from Mom asking me for another dozen signed hardcover copies of that book so that my mother could send out more to her friends. Mom’s follower had signed her letter “Repent!” My mother signed her note “I’m so proud of you.” Attempting to unravel the mystery of how my mother managed to have attracted such “fans” and who she really was (and is)—a life-embracing free spirit—nagged me into writing this book. One other thing: No, I don’t remember every childhood conversation word for word as written here. I have, however, faithfully re-created the content and style of the sorts of conversations I did actually have. Lastly, in the first chapter readers of some of my other books will run into a few familiar facts. That’s because I need to set up this book for those readers who haven’t read my memoir Crazy for God. But I promise you that if you’ll take this journey with me (for better or worse), I’ll soon guide you into uncharted territory.

  CHAPTER 1

  Family Planning

  PHOTO: Mom (age 1) and her father in China, 1915

  My biblically inspired sex education took a quantum leap in 1960. When I was eight years old, my mother handed me her diaphragm. I was standing at the window of her hotel room overlooking the Mediterranean Sea. We were on vacation. I’ll explain about the diaphragm once I set the scene by noting that while the children of lapsed Episcopalians, secular Jews, ordinary pagans, Hindus, and Frenchmen presumably went peacefully to sleep after their mothers read them Goodnight Moon or A Tale of Two Bad Mice, some of us reared in Evangelical families were tucked into bed after absorbing rather odd bedtime stories like this one.

  “And the LORD spake unto Moses,” Mom said, in her most cheerful singsong bedtime-Bible-story-reading-out-loud voice. “And the children of Israel took all the women of Midian captives, and their little ones, and took the spoil of all their cattle, and all their flocks, and all their goods.... And Moses was wroth with the officers. And Moses said unto them, have ye saved all the women alive? Behold, these caused the children of Israel to commit trespass against the LORD. Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.”

  “But, Mom,” the eight-year-old version of me asked, “how did they know which women hadn’t known a man?”

  “Well, Dear, of course they checked,” said Mom as she reached over from where she was sitting next to me on my bed and gave my hand a friendly squeeze. Then, with her brightest, most encouraging these-things-are-hard-to-understand-but-trust-me-it’s-okaybecause-the-Lord-works-in-mysterious-ways-even-if-it-seems- crazy-to-us smile Mom added, “There’s a way to tell.”

  “How?” I asked.

  “I’ve already told you about that precious little barrier called the hymen.”

  “But why did those women have to die?” I asked.

  “Because,” Mom said, giving me another radiant smile, “in Numbers 31:9–18 it says that before the battle God told Moses to tell his soldiers to kill all the women who made the children of Israel commit the trespass of following after false gods. You see, Dear, to worship a false god is like going to a prostitute. And besides, anyway, everyone is supposed to wait for their Wedding Night, Darling, even Midianites. Goodnight, Dear.”

  “Goodnight, Mom.”

  Mom completed our bedtime ritual by praying with me. I prayed, too, and she kissed me, turned out my bedside lamp, and left my room. A second later Mom opened the door just wide enough to pop her head back in. Since my room was so small that my narrow bed filled most of it, Mom’s face was almost directly over me as she looked down and said, very matter-of-factly, “It is important that when you grow up, you avoid Strange Women.”

  “I will,” I said.

  “You know what happened to Solomon because of Strange Women.”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  Mom withdrew her head, but just before she clicked the door shut, she added that evening’s final instruction. “Marry a virgin, Dear. You don’t want your wife to spend the rest of her life comparing you to other men. You should be the only man for her.”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  “Sleep well.”

  I’m not saying that this bedtime Bible story exchange was a usual conversation between a typical Evangelical mother and her eight-year-old son in 1960. Edith Schaeffer wasn’t typical. I am saying, however, that I know that I’m not the only person trying to get the ringing out of my ears from childhood overexposure to the bizarre collection of Bronze-Age short stories my family called “the Scriptures.” I know this because I’ve received thousands of notes in response to my writing about the impact of religion—even when that impact has been disguised as fiction in my novels like Portofino, Zermatt, and Saving Grandma—from people who were also raised by parents with a zealous sense of mission and who, like me, once honestly believed that every single word of the Bible was true.

  People who say that they believe every word of the Bible (i.e., “Bible-believing” Christians and the more fundamentalist Jews) are not necessarily 100 percent biblical literalists. They believe that everything the Bible affirms is true because it is the “inerrant Word of God.”1 But that’s the grown-ups. From a child’s perspective peering out at the larger world from deep in the cocoon of a “Bible-believing home,” every word of the Bible is understood to be true in ways that nothing else is or ever will be even if, years later, that child grows up and changes his or her mind. That former child’s grown-up incarnation may be willing to admit Nuance and Paradox, but the emotional “weight” of the absolutely true Word lingers. The actual words in The Word are still the very fabric of a whole private universe inhabiting those raised inside the hermetically sealed tunnel of absolutist faith, “truer” than all the other words he or she will ever hear, say, read, or think put together—truer than any later reasoned evidence. And on top of that 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.

  But back to my biblically inspired sex education: It took a quantum leap when my mother handed me that diaphragm. The view beyond the looming diaphragm was framed by the hills and bay of the picturesque fishing village and “Jet Set” hideaway of Portofino, Italy. While contemplating Mom’s diaphragm, I was trying to understand how God could have planned everything if Mom and Dad were picking and choosing when to have children. Mom had the answer: “Mommy and Daddy use this wonderful invention, but sometimes God leads me not to use it, and then He picks the marvelous egg and individual amazing sperm and the exact moment they’re conjoined so that the person He’s chosen from before the Creation to be born—for instance you, my Dear!—may fulfill His Wondrous Plan!”

  So God’s Foreknowledge included His Foreknowledge of humankind’s ability to use rubber in so many interesting ways besides the invention of the tire. Thus, my parents weren’t planning anything by using contraception but merely doing the Lord’s Will by exercising their “Free Will.” According to Mom’s logic, the Lord knew what would happen, but He wasn’t bound by any path He’d preordained. He could adjust His Plan, thereby changing His Will for your life by issuing factory recalls (killing people) or even changing His Mind (replacing people), but since He knew He’d do that, even when He changed His Mind, that, too, was part of THE PLAN. In that sense even God couldn’t outsmart God.

  There are many passages in the Bible about God changing His Mind. For exampl
e, God sent the flood of the Noah’s Ark story when He “repented of” Creation: “The LORD was grieved that he had made man on the earth, and His heart was filled with pain. So the LORD said, ‘I will wipe mankind, whom I have created, from the face of the earth—men and animals, and creatures that move along the ground, and birds of the air—for I am grieved that I have made them’” (Genesis 6:6–7). In Exodus, God reserves the right to change His Mind: “Go up to the land flowing with milk and honey,” God says to Moses. “But I will not go with you, because you are a stiffnecked people and I might destroy you on the way” (Exodus 33:3).

  God’s frequent mind-changing notwithstanding, Mom said that God knew everything about everything before He made anything to know everything about. God knew and/or planned—depending on how you interpret the interplay of Foreknowledge and Predestination and Free Will—that after The Fall women would conceive at the drop of a solitary sperm. Thus, God made fertility the Chief Punishment of women.

  After expelling Eve from the Garden, God said unto the woman, “I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee” (Genesis 3:16). That didn’t make God mean, though, Mom said, because He also planned to (1) send Jesus to save a very few of His fallen creatures, including a very few women; and (2) pick the sperm and egg that would create Charles Goodyear so that Mr. Goodyear would discover the rubber vulcanization process, which he patented in 1844.