You can take the boy out of fundamentalism....
July 20, 2011
.... but you can't take the fundamentalism out of the boy.
That was the point I made about Frank Schaeffer in his latest book. Apparently incapable of understanding with any degree of sympathy those who do not see the world as he does, he can only demonise them as `far right' and 'whackos' who are driven by `hate and fear' and among whose 'victims' he is to be numbered. That just about sums up all those people in evangelical and confessional churches I know who volunteer in crisis pregnancy centers, adopt orphans, give to food banks, draw alongside the lonely etc. Still, we would not want the particulars of reality to alter a simplistic image of the evangelical fundamentalist Other which makes for a good story and generates the same kind of fear-mongering and bogey-man stereotypes which Mr S imputes to conservative evangelical Christians.
Many readers will know that he was at it again last month at the Huffington Post. It is a fascinating piece: uncharacteristically ghastly prose; and fundamentalist to the core, bristling with absolute certainty about the correctness of his position (ironically, the importance of doubt and the danger of certainty), while dripping with scorn for anyone who does not think exactly as he thinks. It is also a classic example of someone promoting himself under the guise of not promoting himself. It is all there: more name dropping than you would get at a party from some wannabe Access Hollywood hack trying to impress a crowd of teenage girls; anecdotes to remind everyone that, hey, the superstars are just ordinary guys; shameless promotion of his own new book; blanket dismissal of any and all who might criticise the bash he was attending; and a mandatory reference to a gorgeous wife, though not Mr Schaeffer's. Shameless celebrity style from top to bottom.
Interestingly enough, Schaeffer's continuing attachment to fundamentalist idiom even after his departure from fundamentalist Protestantism was rumbled as early as 1995 by the distinguished Orthodox theologian, Vigen Guroian. In his book, Dancing Alone, Schaeffer, as a new convert to Orthodoxy, took it on himself to lecture the Orthodox on where they had gone wrong and how they needed to get with the (i.e., his) program if they were to be at all significant. As a minor sect of only about 300 million people worldwide, it was clear that they urgently needed new boy Frank's help in order to avoid immediate extinction.
In his review of Schaeffer's tome, Guroian spotted the individualism and the combative language of classic fundamentalism and declared that "Schaeffer brings an alien polemic into the Orthodox Church andshows disrespect to all of the great figures of Orthodoxy in this century whogave the Orthodox faith back to world Christianity." To quote Schaeffer, Nice! As I said, you can take the boy out of fundamentalism, but you cannot take the fundamentalism out of the boy. Professor Guroian's review can be found here.
When it comes to Frank Schaeffer and his alternative to conservative Protestantism, this time it is the words of The Who, not Thin Lizzy, which come to mind: `Meet the new boss; same as the old boss.'
That was the point I made about Frank Schaeffer in his latest book. Apparently incapable of understanding with any degree of sympathy those who do not see the world as he does, he can only demonise them as `far right' and 'whackos' who are driven by `hate and fear' and among whose 'victims' he is to be numbered. That just about sums up all those people in evangelical and confessional churches I know who volunteer in crisis pregnancy centers, adopt orphans, give to food banks, draw alongside the lonely etc. Still, we would not want the particulars of reality to alter a simplistic image of the evangelical fundamentalist Other which makes for a good story and generates the same kind of fear-mongering and bogey-man stereotypes which Mr S imputes to conservative evangelical Christians.
Many readers will know that he was at it again last month at the Huffington Post. It is a fascinating piece: uncharacteristically ghastly prose; and fundamentalist to the core, bristling with absolute certainty about the correctness of his position (ironically, the importance of doubt and the danger of certainty), while dripping with scorn for anyone who does not think exactly as he thinks. It is also a classic example of someone promoting himself under the guise of not promoting himself. It is all there: more name dropping than you would get at a party from some wannabe Access Hollywood hack trying to impress a crowd of teenage girls; anecdotes to remind everyone that, hey, the superstars are just ordinary guys; shameless promotion of his own new book; blanket dismissal of any and all who might criticise the bash he was attending; and a mandatory reference to a gorgeous wife, though not Mr Schaeffer's. Shameless celebrity style from top to bottom.
Interestingly enough, Schaeffer's continuing attachment to fundamentalist idiom even after his departure from fundamentalist Protestantism was rumbled as early as 1995 by the distinguished Orthodox theologian, Vigen Guroian. In his book, Dancing Alone, Schaeffer, as a new convert to Orthodoxy, took it on himself to lecture the Orthodox on where they had gone wrong and how they needed to get with the (i.e., his) program if they were to be at all significant. As a minor sect of only about 300 million people worldwide, it was clear that they urgently needed new boy Frank's help in order to avoid immediate extinction.
In his review of Schaeffer's tome, Guroian spotted the individualism and the combative language of classic fundamentalism and declared that "Schaeffer brings an alien polemic into the Orthodox Church andshows disrespect to all of the great figures of Orthodoxy in this century whogave the Orthodox faith back to world Christianity." To quote Schaeffer, Nice! As I said, you can take the boy out of fundamentalism, but you cannot take the fundamentalism out of the boy. Professor Guroian's review can be found here.
When it comes to Frank Schaeffer and his alternative to conservative Protestantism, this time it is the words of The Who, not Thin Lizzy, which come to mind: `Meet the new boss; same as the old boss.'
