Republican Gomorrah Read online

  Burning at the stake, death by “the sword,” and hanging were some of Rushdoony’s preferred modes of execution. However, his son-in-law Gary North, a self-styled Reconstructionist economist (who eventually fell out with his father-in-law) and former adviser to libertarian Republican Representative Ron Paul of Texas (a one-time outspoken admirer of the John Birch Society), advocated stoning evildoers to death. Rocks, North argued, are free and plentiful, making them ideal tools for the financially savvy executioner.

  Although Rushdoony’s Institutes and his other books are hard to find and remain obscure, his anti-government ideas attracted the interest of an emerging group of southern pastors rankled by the forced integration of public schools. Among them was Jerry Falwell, a firebrand reverend from Lynchburg, Virginia, who gained his early prominence as a local leader of massive resistance to civil rights.

  When the Supreme Court handed down its Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954, Falwell inveighed against the court from the pulpit. Like Rushdoony, Falwell posited segregation as a biblical mandate. “The facilities should be separate,” the basso profondo preacher boomed from above his congregation during a 1958 sermon. “When God has drawn a line of distinction, we should not attempt to cross that line. The true Negro does not want integration.” Falwell promptly enlisted with the FBI’s director J. Edgar Hoover to distribute propaganda leaflets attacking Martin Luther King Jr. as a Communist subversive, and he publicly denounced King for daring to mix politics and religion. Finally, in 1966, with the pace of integration intensifying, Falwell founded the Lynchburg Christian Academy—“a private school for white students,” as the Lynchburg News described it the week its doors opened. Falwell’s school was one of the many “seg academies” christened across the South—the last redoubt for him and his brethren.

  Some of those around Falwell felt uneasy about Rushdoony’s underground influence. In 1986, two of Falwell’s associates at Liberty University, Ed Dobson and Ed Hindson, wrote an article warning against Rushdoony’s “scary vision.” “Rushdoony distrusts democracy,” they wrote. And they noted that he prescribed the death penalty for homosexuals and alcoholics. Rushdoony wrote in response that Dobson and Hindson had misrepresented his views. Never, he indignantly maintained, had he said he was in favor of executing drunkards.

  For Falwell and the figures who would later constitute the leadership of the Christian right, race was the issue that galvanized their political activism. But as America grew increasingly weary of overt, ugly displays of Dixieland racism, their resentment transmuted into a more palatable moral crusade. The strategy to win that crusade—the one that would propel the Christian right tantalizingly close to Rushdoony’s theocratic vision—was conceived an ocean away by an iconoclastic theologian named Francis Schaeffer.

  CHAPTER 2

  CREATING A MONSTER

  With a puffy white goatee and a mane of gray hair, and sporting burlap knickers and suspenders, Francis Schaeffer was the picture of the Reformation-era Christian patriarchs he assumed as his models. Schaffer’s aesthetic preferences were a perfect fit for the bucolic outskirts of Geneva, Switzerland, that he chose as the site for L’Abri, a Christian commune he founded in 1946. The setting evoked nostalgia for Calvin’s own presence in the area four hundred years before, when he reigned over Geneva and outlawed cursing, mandated church services for all citizens, and burned dozens of heretics at the stake. But the community Schaeffer nurtured assumed a markedly more tolerant tone than Calvin’s Geneva. “If [you] had come to L’Abri,” Schaeffer’s son Frank told me, “you would have eventually figured you were in a Jesus-oriented hippy commune, and nothing would have made you think you were in a right-wing environment.”

  L’Abri was deluged during the late 1960s by a diverse, international band of cultural refugees who had dropped out and tuned in—first to the counterculture and then to Jesus. Syvester Jacobs, an African American photographer from Oklahoma, took shelter at L’Abri in 1968 with his wife, a white woman from Britain. Condemned by his parents for his interracial marriage, Jacobs found a uniquely welcoming home in Schaeffer’s commune. Upon his arrival, Schaeffer took the jittery young man aside and assured him, “I would have been happy to have you marry one of my daughters.” Jacobs told his friends back home that Schaeffer was the first white man to treat him like a human being.

  Young gay people also found sanctuary at L’Abri. During the mid- 1950s, an open lesbian named Carla announced that she would work topless in the garden alongside the men, a defiant gesture intended to provoke Schaeffer’s ire and opposition. “That’s fine, Carla,” Schaeffer coolly demurred.

  In 1963, Schaffer’s eleven-year-old son Frank discovered his father sobbing uncontrollably in his study. “Why are you crying?” Frank asked. Schaeffer said he had just received terrible news from the mother of one of his former acolytes, an openly gay French man who converted to Christianity under his wing. The young man had been found dead, beaten mercilessly by a band of homophobic thugs. Schaeffer, who was given to spontaneous fits of rage, stood before his son and slammed his fists furiously into a wall. “I wish I had been there!” he screamed. “They wouldn’t have messed with him if I was there!”

  Back in the States, Schaeffer’s writings riveted the counterculture. Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page carried Schaeffer’s book Escape from Reason in his back pocket when he met with the Christian philosopher. (Decades later, Bono pronounced himself a fan of Schaeffer’s work.) Countercultural interest in Schaeffer’s commune reached such a degree that Timothy Leary, the avatar of acid, made his own pilgrimage. For self-proclaimed “Jesus People,” L’Abri seemed a more spiritual version of Haight-Ashbury. And Schaeffer, who once declared that “one of the greatest injustices we do to young people is ask them to be conservative,” was their guru.

  True to the free-wheeling spirit of the times, the fifty-something Schaeffer cast aside the Bible and focused his lessons instead on the modernist art and existentialist literature that captivated his young guests. He was convinced he could channel the restive energy of the “Jesus People” into a movement that would rejuvenate the dour, politically impotent church. “The hippies of the 1960s did understand something,” he wrote. “They were right in fighting the plastic culture, and the church should have been fighting it too.” (Schaeffer went on to quote approvingly from the “longshoreman philosopher” Eric Hoffer.)

  But when the Supreme Court legalized abortion with its 1973 Roe v. Wade ruling, Schaeffer snapped. He transformed suddenly into a fiery herald of doom unrecognizable in the all-embracing counselor of L’Abri’s halcyon days. Schaeffer now cast the counterculture as a cancerous side effect of modernism, and the modern age as a giant sickness that imperiled the survival of civilization. In 1976, he published a best-selling polemic that inspired the Christian right’s advance guard, How Should We Then Live? The Rise and Decline of Western Civilization and Culture. The book concluded by proclaiming legalized abortion—“infanticide,” Schaeffer called it—the final leg in Western civilization’s death march. To preserve Judeo-Christian society, Schaeffer implored evangelicals to organize a crusade to stop abortion by any means.

  By this time, Schaeffer’s twenty-four-year-old son had become a force in his own right. Having studied film and painting in Europe, Frank Schaeffer applied his talents to advance his father’s mission, producing a three-part documentary film version of How Should We Then Live? In the film, the elder Schaeffer appeared beside a suburban sewage drain warning that the secular elite would soon begin infusing the public water supply with anti-aggression drugs and birth control pills. Frank Schaeffer and his father hoped that by showing their film to church audiences, they would cultivate a new generation of shock troops for the coming culture war. But impressing the value of opposing abortion on the new generation of politically assertive evangelicals would be a daunting task.

  Paul Weyrich, a right-wing Washington operative and anti-Vatican II Catholic, had already tried to sell evangelicals such as Falwell on a
nti-abortion. The issue had riveted America’s Catholic community and pushed elements of it deep into conservative politics. In his discussions with Falwell, however, Weyrich’s pleas for pivoting resentment on a wedge issue other than race fell on deaf ears.

  “I was trying to get those people interested in those issues and I utterly failed,” Weyrich recalled in an interview in the early 1990s. “What changed their mind was Jimmy Carter’s intervention against the Christian schools, trying to deny them tax-exempt status on the basis of so-called de facto segregation.”

  In this tumultuous atmosphere, Schaeffer became an evangelist in the truest sense of the word. He insinuated himself into Republican Washington and befriended then representative Jack Kemp, a former professional football player elected to the Congress from suburban Buffalo. Kemp was best known for his advocacy of supply-side economics and tax cuts, but he also became an ardently anti-abortion evangelical. Kemp arranged a series of speeches for Schaeffer before conservative lawmakers and movement luminaries. Kemp’s wife Joanne led a book club of congressional wives, including Elizabeth Dole, who diligently read Schaeffer’s works. One of Schaeffer’s acolytes at L’Abri was Michael Ford, son of Michigan congressman Gerald Ford, who became president upon Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974. At Michael’s urging, Schaeffer was invited to a private dinner with President Ford at the White House.

  In his spare time, Schaeffer lobbied Falwell on the strategic importance of joining the “pro-life” cause. Finally, he brought Falwell onto the anti-abortion bandwagon and even sold the anti-papist Baptist on the concept of “co-belligerency,” or working with conservative Catholics and other non-evangelicals to assail the secular establishment. Under Schaeffer’s guidance, in 1979, Falwell founded the Christian right’s first lobbying front, the Moral Majority, and made certain to place abortion at the top of the group’s agenda. Whether or not Falwell shared Schaeffer’s passion for banning abortion, the Moral Majority’s swelling membership convinced him of the issue’s popular appeal.

  As Schaeffer’s crusade gradually expanded beyond his influence, he grew disenchanted with his retrograde Southern Baptist allies. He privately called Falwell a charlatan and mocked his followers as “the low IQs.” Schaeffer was particularly disgusted by the homophobic passions of Falwell and his allies. Abortion was the issue that made Schaeffer’s blood boil, not the presenßce of gays at the head of public school classrooms and Boy Scout troops. “My dad would have identified with the left if they had picked up on the issue of abortion,” Frank Schaeffer told me.

  Suffering from depression and sapped of strength after undergoing several grueling rounds of cancer treatment, Schaeffer channeled his final ounces of energy into pushing his movement in a truly radical direction—into the streets and toward domestic terrorism. “There does come a time when force, even physical force, is appropriate,” Schaeffer wrote in his 1981 book A Christian Manifesto. “When all avenues of flight and protest have closed, force in the defensive posture is appropriate.”

  In Manifesto, Schaeffer described Christians as victims of persecution at the hands of a tyrannical secular elite not unlike the Romans who dragged Christians before teams of lions two thousand years before. So long as the “establishment elite” held sway, Schaeffer argued, Bible-believing Christians were powerless to stop the mass slaughter of innocent fetuses. To defend their supposedly threatened rights, Schaeffer suggested that Christians at least consider righteous violence as a last recourse.

  In spite of the fact that Schaeffer repeatedly rebuffed R. J. Rushdoony’s requests to meet, Rushdoony’s son-in-law, Gary North, accused him of “the nearly verbatim lifting of certain material from Rushdoony’s The One and the Many.” Whether or not North’s claim was true (he did not produce any evidence in his essay containing the allegation), Schaeffer and Rushdoony clearly influenced one another and mutually shaped the Christian right’s philosophy as a result.

  Even though Manifesto—and its call for literally attacking the foundations of liberal democracy—went unnoticed by mainstream America, it sold a whopping 250,000 copies in its first year after publication. “What’s amazing about Christian Manifesto,” Frank Schaeffer remarked to me, “was that my father was practically calling for the overthrow of the United States government. If his words had come out of the mouth of anyone other than a white American it would have been called sedition. Instead, we were invited to the White House and I went swimming in Michael Ford’s pool.”

  As he lay dying at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, Schaeffer agonized about the rise of the Christian right. He was convinced that he had created a monster. When former orange juice industry poster child and outspoken homophobe Anita Bryant appeared to beseech Schaeffer for his deathbed blessing for her anti-gay crusade, Schaeffer angrily rebuked her. “My dad simply told Anita off and told her he would have no part of what she was doing under any circumstances,” Frank Schaeffer recalled. “He said if she had any concern for the well-being of homosexuals this was a hell of a way to demonstrate it.”

  When Schaeffer finally succumbed to cancer in 1984, his acolytes had assumed key positions within the Republican Party. The Republican National Convention plank that year not only reiterated the party’s call for a constitutional amendment asserting legal rights for fetuses, it insisted for the first time that the Fourteenth Amendment’s legal protections apply to them as well and called for the appointment of more anti-abortion judges. Four years later, the party plank invoked the civil rights anthem “We Shall Overcome” to demand that Roe v. Wade be overturned. With Schaeffer’s inspiration, the movement that once mounted massive resistance against civil rights had regenerated itself by co-opting the very tactics used to defeat it.

  Schaeffer had influenced not only Jack Kemp and Jerry Falwell. He had also had a lasting impact on Tim LaHaye, a Christian right leader he considered a huckstering extremist. After visiting Schaeffer at L’Abri, LaHaye went on to coauthor the best-selling apocalyptic pulp fiction Left Behind series. The Reverend Pat Robertson, whom Schaeffer believed to be pathologically insane, and who once boasted to Schaeffer of burning a Modigliani painting in his fireplace, praised his books. Late in Schaeffer’s life, a popular child psychologist named James Dobson became a fixture at his lectures. Schaeffer resented Dobson’s machinations, privately deriding him as a disingenuous power-monger concerned with politics above all else. But with Schaeffer dead, Dobson cast himself as torchbearer of his legacy. “Thank God for Francis Schaeffer,” Dobson declared in a 2002 speech. “He saw everything that we’re going through today . . . He said that there was a connection between abortion and infanticide and euthanasia.”

  Born-again Watergate felon Chuck Colson assumed a similar posture, styling himself as Schaeffer’s intellectual heir. Colson marketed his 1999 polemic How Should We Now Live? as a twenty-first-century remix of Schaeffer’s seminal tome How Should We Then Live? But the admiration was not mutual. “Dad absolutely couldn’t stand Colson,” Frank Schaeffer said.

  Other less prominent but significant activists felt Schaeffer’s impact. Two young Pentecostals, Randall Terry and Rob Schenck, studied Schaeffer at the Elim Bible Academy in upstate New York during the early 1980s. Upon their graduation, the two founded Operation Rescue, a militant anti-abortion group that organized blockades of Planned Parenthood clinics and spawned closely affiliated offshoots that engaged in acts of domestic terror and the assassination of abortion doctors. Terry, a self-described Christian Reconstructionist, credited Schaeffer as his inspiration: “You have to read Schaeffer’s Christian Manifesto if you want to understand Operation Rescue,” he said.

  Schenck, who had converted from Reform Judaism to evangelical Christianity after attending a Pentecostal revival at age seventeen, became renowned for his outrageous anti-abortion stunts. He was arrested a dozen times during protests outside women’s health clinics and abortion doctors’ homes, and he made news when he dangled an aborted fetus in Bill Clinton’s face outside the 1992 Democratic National Con
vention. When Clinton vetoed a partial-birth abortion ban in 1996, Schenck approached the president at a National Cathedral Christmas service and told him, “God will hold you to account, Mr. President.” He was then removed from the chapel and interrogated by Secret Service agents.

  One night in 1998, while cooking dinner for his wife and four children, Barnett Slepian—an abortion doctor in Buffalo, New York, whose home had been the site of protests by Schenck and his followers years before—was shot to death through his kitchen window by James Kopp. Kopp, a former resident of Schaeffer’s L’Abri and a volunteer at Randall Terry’s Binghamton, New York, office, was promptly placed on the FBI’s Top Ten Most Wanted List. The National Memorial for the Prevention of Terrorism identified him as a terrorist.

  Slepian’s assassination became a public relations disaster for Operation Rescue, and even though Schenck denounced the killing, the organization’s more extremist members, who had nicknamed Kopp “Atomic Dog,” insisted that it was justified. When Schenck placed flowers at the doorstep of Slepian’s office, they were returned abruptly by his infuriated wife, along with a letter—later made public—that read, “It’s your ‘passive’ following that incited the violence that killed Bart [Barnett Slepian] and took away both my and my children’s future.”

  Once Schaeffer died, his son stood to inherit his throne. Dobson hosted Frank Schaeffer on his radio show in 1985 and then excitedly printed 150,000 copies of Schaeffer’s book A Time for Anger: The Myth of Neutrality, a strident attack on cultural liberalism. He was a smashing success with a constituency that was larger and more fervent than anything his father knew. Having been raised in Europe in a cosmopolitan environment, however, Schaeffer was alienated by the backwardness and parochialism of the southern evangelical subculture. And unlike his father, he was still young enough to entertain doubts: “I realized that these are crazy people and as soon as they win, the first person they’re going to put up against the wall and shoot is me,” Schaeffer remarked. “I was not one of them. Once I made that break and looked at their politics, I really disagreed with what they stood for. I didn’t see the world the way they did. If you started questioning anything it all came away in your hands. For me, it started out as a matter of taste and culture and it ended as a matter of ideology.”