The Evangelical movement was neither Christian nor accidental. Frank Schaeffer points out. It was a scheme manufactured to control a sect to be used.
Frank Schaeffer explains the Evangelical fraud.
Frank Schaeffer is atoning for his past involvement in capturing the Evangelical movement. He, his dad, and their cohort did not do it for any good intentions. It was aimed at controlling the controllable to execute the will of a few.
Schaeffer explains to Joy-Ann Reid the part he and his father played in corrupting the Evangelical movement. He enumerated the reasons why the movement is now no different than the Taliban, the American Taliban.
Schaffer, over the years, has been calling out this fraud.
Frank Schaeffer continues his ‘crusade’ to atone for his past in the Right Wing religious hate machine. His article “My Horrible Right-Wing Past: Confessions of a One-Time Religious Right Icon” on AlterNet is a must-read.
One prescient passage in Frank Schaeffer piece describes the essence of the Right Wing movement.
The leaders of the new religious right were gleefully betting on American failure. If secular, democratic, diverse and pluralistic America survived, then wouldn’t that prove that we were wrong about God only wanting to bless “Christian America?” If, for instance, crime went down dramatically in New York City, for any other reason than a reformation and revival, wouldn’t that make the prophets of doom look silly? And if the economy was booming without anyone repenting, what did that mean?
What began to bother me was that so many of our new “friends” on the religious right seemed to be rooting for one form of apocalypse or another. In the crudest form this was part of the evangelical fascination with the so-called end times. The worse things got, the sooner Jesus would come back. But there was another component. The worse everything got, the more it proved that America needed saving, by us! Plus, it was good for fundraising.
Some 30 years later, what we helped start continues (I’m sorry!). With the Republicans in control of the House and Senate the question arises, again: where does the American far right find the energy to oppose everything and everyone again and again?
The short answer is that the American right is not about politics as most people understand it but about religious absolutes. As the New York Times noted on the single-minded desire to subvert President Obama’s overhaul of the broken immigration system, “And in their most audacious plans, Tea Party groups are preparing to recruit challengers to run against high-profile Republicans they accuse of betraying them — as they did when they toppled Eric Cantor, the former House majority leader.”
We need more born-again Schaeffers to remind some in the movement of their new genesis. We must continue to promote his message over and over.