Frank Schaeffer: A Plea from Evangelical Royalty

Ken Harbaugh:

It is Ken Harbaugh on the MidasTouch Network.

In our companion series Against All Enemies, we've been diving deep into the overt religiosity that has become a feature of mainstream Republican politics, culminating in the election of Mike Johnson on a party line vote to become Speaker of the House.

Speaker Johnson is a fundamentalist Christian who openly claims to have been chosen by God for his current role. He has described America not as a democracy, but as a biblical republic. And he was one of the prime architects of the big lie that led to the January 6th insurrection.

If you think I am exaggerating the degree to which Speaker Johnson declares a divine right to rule, check out the Against All Enemies video in which he says he was selected not by the votes of his peers, but by the Almighty to be America's Moses. I'll put the link to that video in the notes below.

Today we've got Frank Schaeffer on the show to discuss how the religious right went so badly off the rails and took the Republican Party with it.

Frank was born and raised in a hugely influential conservative Christian family. He has been described as evangelical royalty.

I asked my friend Dara Starr Tucker to guest host this interview because she is especially familiar with both the Evangelical movement and Frank's work. I think you're going to love this one. Thanks.

Frank Schaeffer:

The first thing you've got to understand with Mike Johnson is that when the media is shocked by him talking about rescinding gay marriage rights, what they don't understand is that's his tone down public persona that he will allow you to see.

What Mike believes and what Tony Perkins and these other people believe that in the best of all worlds, we would no longer be a democracy, but a theocracy, period.

Ken Harbaugh:

I'm Ken Harbaugh, and this is Burn the Boats, a podcast about big decisions.

Dara Starr Tucker:

Well, welcome to Burn the Boats, Frank Schaeffer. I'm so glad to have you here today.

Frank Schaeffer:

Likewise, Dara.

Dara Starr Tucker:

Thank you for being with me. I can't tell you how excited I am to talk to you specifically. You don't know me, but sort of I guess by association, I know of you quite well. I can't say that I've done the deep dive on your work, which is great because I like for conversations like this to feel fresh.

And I think there are a lot of places that we're going to have an interesting time going today because a lot of my history intersects with your history, even in the evangelical world.

So, I will say that Frank Schaeffer is an author. How else would you describe yourself, Frank? I don't want to limit you. Can you tell the folks just in general how you think of yourself, how you describe what you do?

Frank Schaeffer:

Sure. Well, let me start by saying that at 71 with three grown children and a grandfather of five kids for whom I do childcare these days, and I'm not trying to be cute. I don't really think of myself as either an author or a speaker or commentator, all those things I've done for a living.

After doing this interview with you, the other important date I have today is 3:00 PM pickup for my 9-year-old granddaughter that I do every day. What I will be cooking for her this afternoon and this evening, the childcare I'll do for her. Taking my 15-year-old granddaughter to lunch this weekend.

And the fact that my wife, Jeannie, survived a heart attack two years ago and is doing so well and asked me to open a bottle of red wine this morning so she could get a cup of red wine for the French onion soup she's making because she likes to cook too. That's actually who I am.

Now, if you're asking me about bio type stuff, I guess I would say that I grew up in a famous evangelical household that the New York Times once described as evangelical royalty.

And I left that after having become, believe it or not, a nepotistic sidekick evangelical leader myself to my father Francis Schaeffer in the 1970s and ‘80s.

We made a series of movies that became very famous on the evangelical and conservative Roman Catholic Circuit because one series called Whatever Happened to the Human Race? was really the foundation of the evangelical anti-abortion movement in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

And so, when I fled that movement, I became persona non grata to those folks. I have been a writer, oh, I don't know, for 35, 40 years now. I've written five novels and a whole bunch of nonfiction, including a memoir called Crazy for God.

Which I guess gets used in a lot of university history courses these days because they feel that perhaps it's a good description of the formation of the religious right and how and why it took over the Republican Party as part of my own family history.

So, I'm sort of an odd person. I'm a writer, self-employed type of guy. I'm a commentator. I have a podcast called In Conversation with Frank Schaeffer, and I interview a lot of people just like you're interviewing me.

Actually so much so now that these days, I used to do a lot of interviews when people like you were interviewing me and I still do media, I show up on Joy Reid's show from time to time on MSNBC and all that kind of thing.

But I'm very comfortable interviewing people. I love conversations just like you do. And I probably interview one or two people, one or two authors a week on In Conversation with Frank Schaeffer, and they range from everybody from former rock stars like Moby to well-known authors or to just some young person who's doing something interesting and all points in between.

And I guess I'll just wrap by saying that of late by necessity and not by choice, I've spent a lot of time commenting on what's happened to the Republican Party and becoming part of the Trump cult, for which my family bears some responsibility, not for Trump, but for the direction of the party and its extremism.

And I guess besides the childcare I'm doing, the other overriding concern I have is to try to undo some of the damage my family did in making the Republican Party more of a far right radical fringe movement that finally turned into the Trump cult.

And as I worry about the future for my family and my grandchildren, it provides a motivation to really deal with subjects that are really distasteful to me. I'd much rather just be in the kitchen cooking something with my wife or taking care of the children.

At 71, you don't have so much to prove, but we're in a fix right now. And I guess if you love anybody in this life, you try to protect them. And I do my best to undo some of the damage we did.

I don't know if that rambling crazy intro helps you or not, but that's the best shot I can do this morning.

Dara Starr Tucker:

Well, yeah, it provides, I think, a good basis for kind of the launching point for this conversation. I will tell you a little bit about myself as it relates to you and to your father.

I went to a school called Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. And I'm trying to remember the department head's name for the humanities courses that we were all forced to take at ORU.

But they heavily emphasized the humanities because of a specific couple that was there that headed up that program that they were huge admirers of your father.

And they watched all of his films. I think they were Catholic probably, which was a little bit unusual to choose a Catholic couple to head up a humanities department at an evangelical university like Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, Oklahoma. But they were hugely influential on that program.

And so, we watched your dad's films for four years. We all had to do four years of the humanities, and it was a notoriously hated program, partly because of these films (I hate to say, Frank) of your dad's called, How Should We Then Live?

And they appealed to me on an intellectual level. I appreciated the intellectualism of these films. But at the point that I went to school in the ‘90s, they were old and they were crackly. And he dressed sort of funny and quirky, and he spoke in very erudite language.

And a lot of people just hated them, frankly. But they were hugely influential on, I think, the thought formation for a lot of people like me, that really did plug in and that did care. And that sought to sort of expand their knowledge.

And it was all presented very intellectually for some of us who had grown up … I grew up as the child of a music minister. My father was a music minister and a preacher.

And he came out of the Holiness Pentecostal Church, and he ended up kind of shifting to more of a word of faith, charismatic, Pentecostal, evangelical kind of world. So, I grew up with one foot in both of those worlds, holiness Pentecostal, and then the Evangelical movement.

And so, we were very much a part of the byproduct or the result of the work that both you and your father had done. I was a kid in the ‘80s, when that whole push towards political activism within the church was really blossoming. Reagan was in office.

And we were all being encouraged … I remember a lot of chatter around we have to get out there and mobilize and get out of the pew and get into the voting booth. And it was becoming a whole thing in large part due to the work of your father.

So, I kind of want to talk first about the foundational stuff. I really actually want to start our conversation with your comments on the appointing or the election of Mike Johnson to the House of Representatives.

And then I kind of want to backtrack and talk about your history and helping to kind of establish this movement in the US that has basically led to the point where we are now, which is the appointing of Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House.

Can you talk to me about why we should be particularly concerned about his election specifically?

Frank Schaeffer:

Well, you've got a lot of stuff there.

Dara Starr Tucker:

I also have a German degree and lived in Switzerland, by the way, which I think is at least partly where you grew up.

Frank Schaeffer:

Yeah, I did grow up there. Where were you in Switzerland?

Dara Starr Tucker:

I was in Interlaken.

Frank Schaeffer:

And what were you doing there?

Dara Starr Tucker:

I was trying to learn German a little bit better, not realizing that the Schwarzwald that they spoke in Switzerland, it didn't really have anything to do with high German.

But I majored in international business and German studies at Oral Roberts University, so I wanted to learn the German language better. So, I au paired there for a year, early 2000s, like ‘03, I think I was there.

Frank Schaeffer:

Yeah. Well, okay, so, let me backtrack a little and I will jump into the Mike Johnson point here. If I wander, pull me back to it.

Dara Starr Tucker:

Okay.

Frank Schaeffer:

My history with ORU goes back into the day when we were there speaking, and I remember being on campus, I knew Richard Roberts, I knew Oral Roberts. I was there in the ‘70s and the ‘80s. They brought my dad, I think twice.

The Roberts family were very flaky, and they've had all sorts of criminal indictments since the son and the father who died. But even back in the day, we kind of regarded them as that. And most evangelicals did.

And then the university sort of became a little more respectable and had people teaching there who were serious about the academic pursuit. I guess by the time you got there, the Roberts family itself was less of a thing.

But back in the day, ORU is a real outlier with its prayer tower and Oral raising money saying that he would die three days later unless he got the money that God had shown him he needed. There were things that were odd. Okay, so, that's just water under the bridge.

But when it gets to Mike Johnson, there's a connection there personally as well. Unfortunately, when it comes to him, I actually know what I'm talking about and I'm not BS-ing.

I mean that because I know the people that formed and shaped him. I know who he follows. I know Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council, and Ralph Reed, and Franklin Graham. These are three people who discipled and mentored him.

They all, three of them, are not very closeted. Pretty out in the open reconstructionists theonomists, following a movement that was started by Rousas Rushdoony in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Who I also knew well, stayed with for a week one time in California.

And the reconstructionists believe that the Constitution of the United States was a big bad mistake.

They actually agree with a lot of more secular commentators when it comes to politics, because they admit that as a document, it was not the founding of a Christian country, but rather the document owes its influence in terms of the rights of individuals, et cetera, et cetera, to the French Enlightenment. And before that, the Italian Renaissance.

Exactly what they hate most, because that's where to use their terminology, secular humanism was born.

So, when it came to Rousas Rushdoony, and when I tell people this, they don't believe me, but I sat with them and he told me these things personally. And then wrote down 23 volumes of a huge magisterial work he did that's unreadable and goes on forever.

But in which he argues for the reintroduction of the slave trade. You heard that right. He argues for the public execution of gay people, homosexuality being forbidden in the Old Testament.

He regards the US Constitution as a bastardized slippage away from the vision of the Bay State Colony and Winthrop and the others who knew what to do with people like the Piqua Indians when they burned them alive.

And Rushdoony's vision would be literally actually aligned with, for instance, right now, as I speak to you today, the West Bank settlers in Israel, who feel they have a godly mandate to return to the Old Testament borders of Israel and prosecute land stealing and if necessary, genocidal war against Palestinians.

I'm not talking about Gaza and the war there. I'm talking about the West Bank, Orthodox Jewish settlers who uncoincidentally are supported by Mike Hagee of Houston, who's an enormous Pentecostal preacher there, believing in the end times. Has a church of thousands, a megachurch.

His whole shtick is taking tour groups to Israel, waiting for the return of Jesus. He's the one that pushed Trump to move the embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. There's an entire thing there.

Dara Starr Tucker:

Is this John Hagee, or you're speaking of his son?

Frank Schaeffer:

No, this is Hagee, the preacher. Half of my head is trying to get back to your question, Mike. We're taking a little circuitous path here.

But the thing is, what people need to understand about Mike Johnson and why I am talking at length about Rushdoony and the Christian Zionist movement, et cetera, et cetera, is that's the wing of evangelicalism he comes from and was shaped by.

So, the first thing you've got to understand with Mike Johnson is that when the media is shocked by him talking about rescinding gay marriage rights, what they don't understand is that's his tone down public persona that he will allow you to see.

What Mike really believes, because I know Tony Perkins, who mentored Mike as his most influential person. Mike also read my dad's books and was influenced by them.

But what Mike believes and what Tony Perkins and these other people believe that in the best of all worlds, we would no longer be a democracy, but a theocracy, period.

And the media finds this so farfetched in the same way they found it farfetched that Trump could beat Hillary Clinton until the minute he did.

Remember what that was like? Nobody thought he could win. Nobody takes seriously the idea of the American white nationalist theocracy movement because to them it's so farfetched. They don't know anybody like that.

I grew up with these people and I knew them personally. The leaders that guys like Johnson now follow.

So, he's really bad news because he's the third in line to the presidency. He's two heartbeats away from sitting in the Oval Office. If he was in the Oval Office, we would not only have an enemy of democracy, but we would have an actual proponent of theocracy.

Those proponents are already in our government. For instance, Amy Coney Barrett, who was groomed and raised and spent her whole life and is still a member of a cult that even is farfetched for conservative Roman Catholics. She also is a theocrat.

And these folks think tactically. They will take two steps forward, then one step back, so they conduct the extremism label.

But in the best of all worlds, our country, the United States of America, would fall somewhere between Iran and the Roman Catholicism of the 12th century in Europe.

And that's where we would be on abortion, women's rights, child rearing, corporal punishment, all the way down, by the way, with Rushdoony believed in beating children and preached it and all the rest of it.

So, the wing of the Republican Party shaped by evangelicals, the Trump cult, has various parts to it. And I'm almost done here.

One part of it is super extreme. Back in my day when we were advocating for things, we were never that extreme. My dad did not like Rushdoony. He said he was non-Christian in his views. Dad believed in democracy, by the way, agree or disagree with his views on abortion.

He liked our democratic system, and he thought it was part of the fruit of both Christianity and the Enlightenment. He actually admitted and knew his history.

Rushdoony did too, but said, we need to push for Old Testament law to be resubscribed to. And that is where the extreme wing of the Republican Party is today, not all Republicans.

And it just so happens that in my day, we were outsiders looking in even with our watered down version of this.

So, people like Ronald Reagan, who we knew, and both Bush presidents, who we knew and all those folks, and people like Jack Kemp, who was a congressman, and then a vice presidential candidate with Bob Dole and so forth, whose home I used to stay in.

None of them bought into any of this, but they regarded us as necessary idiots to pander to with abortion and all the rest of it to get our vote.

Fast forward to today, and this really is the end of my little speech here, Johnson is not just as extreme as we were. He's far more extreme and was groomed by people far more extreme than my father.

But, and here's the big kicker, he's not an outside agitator looking in. He's an absolute sincere believer.

Unlike Trump who believes nothing except in his own power, Johnson's an absolute sincere believer now totally on the inside with views that are far more extreme than the agitators of the religious right that we were part of.

So, we've come completely full circle. And now what we've got is really something.

And I don't think so far I've read nothing from people in the popular media who seem to get what this theology is about and have done any legwork at all to find out who has influenced him. I happen to know.

So, it's not pleasant knowledge, but it's real and I'm not making it up.

Dara Starr Tucker:

Well, I do a series of videos that I call The Breakdown on my social media. I'm a singer by trade, but I've sort of shifted into a bit of online activism. And so, this has kind of been a whole other world that has opened up to me.

And I feel like I speak from a very specific and unique point of view as being first of all, a black woman and someone who is raised in the evangelical world, and someone who has sort of deconstructed, which is the new terminology that we're using.

And back in, as you say, my day, it was called just being rebellious. My grandmother was a Pentecostal pastor. And so, for me to shift and move away from a lot of this traditional thinking, fundamentalist thinking in my sect, is seen as a very controversial thing.

But I feel like it gives me a very specific point of view to be able to step back and get a bird's eye view and evaluate and analyze some of this stuff as a former insider.

And so, it just has exposed me to a lot that I feel allows me to avoid the maybe dismissive way that a lot of people discuss Christian nationalism.

I wasn't necessarily at the heart of the white Christian nationalism part of it. I feel like with Oral Roberts University specifically, there was a difference in the way that that university developed versus Liberty University, which was Jerry Falwell's University.

And I do want to talk to you about Paul Weyrich, and Jerry Falwell, and C. Everett Koop and some of the other kind of founding fathers of this modern-day Christian nationalist movement.

But the way that Oral Roberts University developed versus Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, which I think is that Virginia, where Liberty is?

Frank Schaeffer:

Yes.

Dara Starr Tucker:

That started out as a segregationist university, Liberty University did, versus Oral Roberts University, which I feel my understanding of how that school developed, was with much more of a focus on integration.

And just the mindset was, I don't want to say completely different, but there were a lot of differences in the mindset.

Jerry Falwell, when I really started to study some of the history of what began as Lynchburg Baptist College and what is now, Liberty University.

I've done videos on this, like I said, in these breakdowns that I do, little mini documentaries on TikTok and on Instagram and have tried to help people to understand more of the foundation of where all of this comes from.

But Liberty University began as a segregationist college, and not a lot of people understand that.

And kind of, I recoil, I was talking to a friend of mine that I went to ORU with just yesterday or a couple days ago, and she was talking about sending her child to Liberty University.

And just inside, I started to clinch up because I'm like, “Man, we don't know. We don't understand. We don't know what the real history is there.”

So, I would like for you to kind of explain briefly, if you could, the relationship between your father Francis Schaeffer and people like C. Everett Koop, Jerry Falwell, Paul Weyrich, who really were at the heart.

They were at the foundation of the modern, of the contemporary evangelical nationalist movement or in the push towards involving Christians more in the political process because that wasn't happening.

I've done a video about how a lot of the foundation of this started even with these segregationist schools like Lynchburg College, Liberty University, and the requirement with Brown versus Board of Education that these schools integrate. And that was a huge mobilizing factor.

But kind of talk to me if you can … I know this is just a broad subject, but if you can give me kind of just a nutshell version of the relationship between these men in the ‘60s and ‘70s.

Frank Schaeffer:

Well, it's going to seem weird to keep saying I knew these guys personally, but I did. And you keep going back to a past era that I was part of as the young nepotistic sidekick of a famous evangelical leader and intellectual.

And I was tagging along, I wrote and directed the movies that you were talking about, both How Should We Then Live? which I produced and directed many of the episodes of. And then I wrote and directed the entirety of Whatever Happened to the Human Race? with C. Everett Koop based on their book.

And as such, I was part of that traveling circus that went out on seminar tours around the country and filled stadiums with the first series.

And the second series on abortion actually was a financial disaster at the beginning because, and this is something you may or may not know about, but our fight was not with the National Organization of Women and NARAL and other pro-choice groups.

It was with the evangelicals who were pro-choice, starting with Reverend Billy Graham, the famous evangelist, and with Dr. Criswell, who is president of the Southern Baptist Convention. It doesn't get any more right wing white and Southern Baptist than that. And also, president of Dallas Baptist Theological Seminary.

These guys were pro-choice, pro-choice. Not ambivalent on abortion. They thought it should be legal.

Today's discussion, you don't hear that. You would think that abortion was like contraceptives have always been to the Roman Catholics forever, that it was sort of part of the fabric of evangelical teaching. It was not.

So, in 1976 or ‘77, when we brought the second series out on abortion, Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, we were playing to empty stadiums.

Where four years before, with How Should We Then Live?, we sold out the Grand Ole Opry, we sold out Madison Square Garden, we sold out Dallas Convention Center. Sold out literally every seat taken.

And dad hadn't fallen away in popularity. We showed up with a movie on abortion. It's like, “What's that got to do with us?”

And we had to fight an entire battle, for instance, with the editors of Christianity Today magazine, who refused to endorse it with Billy Graham, whom dad and I sat down with three times at the Mayo Clinic, where he was getting some treatment at the time, begging him to jump on board.

These were all people who had lined up behind the first series. The one you didn't like in college.

Dara Starr Tucker:

No, I liked it.

Frank Schaeffer:

You're not putting your money back. Okay.

Dara Starr Tucker:

I loved it actually.

Frank Schaeffer:

Yeah. Alright. But anyway, what I'm saying is that the first little footnote I want to share with you as a fly on the wall, who was actually there.

So, this isn't theory, because I actually sat in Billy's hospital room at the Methodist Hospital in the Mayo Clinic, saying, “Billy, why don't you …”

And the best we could get is his wife Ruth helped found a crisis pregnancy center three years later, sort of joined our team, so to speak. But these are family friends that went back years.

Like Franklin. I met Franklin first when we were both nine years old. We knew the Grahams, Gigi Grahams still takes me to breakfast anytime I'm in town near the Billy Graham Center where she works. She's an old friend of mine. We're both in our — well, she's pushing 80 now. These are all real connections. So, I was there.

Alright. In that context, Paul Weyrich came along, met with me in Washington DC and with dad, and he was into direct mail raising money for right-wing activists. He knew Jerry Falwell. He was a radical Roman Catholic.

And actually part, sort of like Amy Coney Barrett of a side of a cult that was rebelling against Vatican. The Vatican where they went from Latin mass to in English. All those changes that happened coming out of the Vatican. And he wanted it all back in Latin.

And this guy for him, the best part of history was in the 12th century. And it was downhill ever after.

He was very political, very anti-abortion. And he saw Jerry Falwell floundering around, having had his school integrated, as you rightly pointed out, forced to integrate. Jerry was looking for a new issue because how do you keep stoking the rage machine when you've lost a big battle on race?

And he knew that wouldn't fly anymore. So, he set sights on two things. What he called the homosexual conspiracy, which was the rising, not power so much, but the visibility of the gay rights movement.

And women feminism. Women should stay in the home, women shouldn't work. And as a part of that traditionalism, of course, the abortion issue came along.

And at first, Jerry, like everybody else that I had been talking to, it's like, well, this is a Catholic thing, isn't it?

And you got to understand, when I grew up, Catholics weren't saved. They weren't real Christians. Only we were real Christians. Blood bought Bible believing evangelicals, we were the true church. Catholics weren't even saved.

So, it wasn't just a Catholic issue, it was an issue with people that we didn't even regard as fellow travelers. They might as well have been Hindus as far as we were concerned when I'd say was a child. My parents shifted later out of, I guess some growth, but also political expediency.

Well, anyway, Weyrich went to Jerry Falwell. So, I knew Jerry when we were flying around the country for the seminar tour. He lent to us his jet. And so, we would fly around the country in his jet.

And then I spoke at Liberty University twice to the whole student body and then once from the pulpit of the church. And came away from that experience, even in my right wing phase, despising Falwell, because he was one of the meanest people I've ever met.

And his sons and he were just straight-out con artists, thieves. They were designing vast, clever fundraising programs.

I'll just give you one example. Getting obituary notices about all their donors’ widows, collecting them and writing a quote, “Personal letter just happening to mention that your husband or your wife (fill in the blank) had promised a major donation before their death. And I know that Harry would love to be remembered that way.”

So much so that my friend Cal Thomas, who was then president of the Moral Majority, quit working with Jerry Falwell because of his disagreement with these sleazy tactics.

So, this family, in addition to being segregationist, follows genuinely the scum of the earth because I don't know what he actually believed in his heart, but I remember just before I went on to speak from his pulpit in Liberty Baptist Church, that we were in his study.

And he had been talking about how much money he was raising because someone had cut the guy wires on one of their transmission towers. And he was saying the homosexuals did it.

And he said, “Oh, so far we've raised three times the cost of the tower because as soon as you throw out their word, (and he used the F word to describe them) all my people donate.”

And then literally as I was stepping out of the door of his little office behind the pulpit, not his big swanky office, just a little cubby hole where you change actually on the way to his pulpit, he looked at me and he said, “And you know what I think?”

And I said, “Well, what do you think?” He says, “Well, if I had a dog that did what those F words do, I'd shoot it.”

And that was the last thing he said to me as I transitioned to the pulpit to speak. And he introduced me with this big happy, I love everybody grin, and turned on a totally different kind of charm.

So, 30 seconds before I could have been talking, literally talking to a Nazi in Germany in 1938 and 10 seconds later, he's introducing the son of Francis Shaeffer, who will be our speaker today (sorry for the English here) with his smarmy shit eating grin. And that was him.

People often ask me about some of these leaders I knew, were they flakes? Are they thieves? Did they believe anything? And all I can tell you with Jerry Jr., who's a thief as well as a philander, a hypocrite, the apple did not fall far from the tree. And that is this whole pool boy thing, whatever.

The Falwell family is a disaster. And Liberty University is a disaster because of that. All kinds of stuff from contemporary students, about the way sexual assault reports get buried, the way they are bullied into not reporting malfeasance on the school.

The amount of money that has gone into the Falwell family from so-called a non-profit 501 3© university education group. The way they have done real estate deals with properties adjoining so that they can personally profit.

This is one of the sleaziest families that I've ever run up against in any walk of life. And I worked in Hollywood as a director, and I know all kinds of people, but there is nobody worse than the Falwell Plan.

Oral Roberts not that way. Oral Roberts was just a good old Pentecostal preacher. I think he believed every single word he said. He also was very canny when it came to fundraising. Very flaky from the point of view of whatever. But there wasn't a mean bone in his body.

I'm just talking about my own impressions of people I knew.

When it comes to Paul Weyrich, he was just an operator, and he didn't particularly care for any of these people.

He was a radical old fashioned Roman Catholic who viewed these Protestants as heretics, necessary evil to work with, to bring about his sort of version of a kind of a reconstructionist version of Catholicism where he was going to move the country in the right direction and get us on abortion and all the rest so that he could get Republicans elected.

And one, he wanted to move the whole country to the far right. So, he used these guys.

So, basically, we were hanging around with people back in the day who were a very mixed bag of people. But the result was that Falwell in the end decided that there was money to be made in the energy of the pro-life movement once we got it going.

And then he saw fundraising opportunities in stirring the pot again and again of the kind of anger machine. You send me 25 bucks and I can push these secular humanists back, and the liberals and the Democrats. They just repeated it, repeated it, repeated it.

They would throw all kinds of issues up against the wall, and if something stuck, then they would latch on. And abortion would not have worked for them without our film series, which they then capitalized on.

And once it started becoming a thing, they got in on the act. Before that, you never heard a word about abortion from Falwell or any of these guys. It was all segregation and things like that. When that didn't work, they looked for other things.

And then they focused on two things, gay rights, women's rights. And as part of fighting back against women's rights, they took a quote, “stand on abortion” once they were able to figure out that they could raise money that way.

And their inheritors of the movement are still doing it today. And of course, in the end, that's why Roe got reversed and all the rest. And Jerry's final legacy, I guess you could say is the Trump presidency.

Dara Starr Tucker:

So, I guess in the work that I do, as I said, I do these kind of little mini explainers, little mini docs and storytelling online around a lot of topics, but this is one of my topics that I like to talk about.

And I've started a series called Toxic Conservatism and just kind of getting into some of the history and the why, the foundational kind of elements as to why we have ended up in the place that we've ended up.

And one of my passions, as I said, is to have these conversations with other conservatives and to not sort of leave them out of the conversation like, “Hey, we're going to camp up over here, we're going to silo ourselves and aren't those people so crazy.”

It is a passion of mine to sort of pull them into the conversation because I think that that absolutely needs to happen.

And in one of the videos I did recently, I talked about how they have played the long game. They've been playing this game for, as you said, this has been groundwork that's laid for 50 years to take down Roe versus Wade. And that's not their only goal.

And so, some of the difficulty that I have in having these conversations with my family, many of whom are still very religiously and politically conservative and friends and people I went to school with, like I said at ORU, it's a difficult thing sometimes to have conversations with other conservatives, people that were my world for most of my life.

It's difficult to have conversations with them about the dangers of this movement because ideologically and morally, they line up with a lot of what's going on right now.

So, it's difficult to help them to understand the danger of the political element or the political thrust of this movement.

So, can you kind of, from your point of view, do you attempt to have those conversations with conservatives or is it your point of view that, hey, we've got to know kind of where we stand and let them come to us if they're willing or able to do that?

Or is that reach out element an important part of the work that you do?

And there's no wrong answer here. I kind of want to understand from your point of view. Are you evangelical I guess in your discussions around this?

Frank Schaeffer:

The answer to that is yes and no. Yes in the sense that, for instance, I visit back in Switzerland when I return the ministry, I am friends with the people who are there now. I've stayed there and talked with them. Some of my family is still involved in that ministry.

Dara Starr Tucker:

What part of Switzerland did you grow up in?

Frank Schaeffer:

It's in the French speaking part of Switzerland near Montreux Lausanne, if you know where the Montreux Jazz Festival is? It's 20 minutes from there.

Dara Starr Tucker:

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.

Frank Schaeffer:

Down by Lake Geneva. It's not actually on the lake, it's up in the mountains, but 20-minute drive away. So, the French speaking part of Switzerland very near the Italian border, down there by the lake. So that's where I grew up. So, I go back and I talk with them.

When it comes to evangelical type media or things like that, obviously, I was a hell like my dad back in the day when I was publishing and so forth. I was well known in those circles. I never hear from any of those people because I've just sort of died to them.

But with my podcast, my producer, Ernie Gregg and I have been reaching out to what I'll call reasonable conservative authors and others who I would have fundamental disagreements with, but they're not Trumpists and they're not particularly evangelical.

And I have been interviewing a number of them and we are actually booking a couple more.

So, when you look at my podcast, it's not left-wing liberals all the way down. There are some thoughtful writer commentator type people from the right, from what you might call the sane right.

For instance, the head of the history department from Notre Dame University, I interviewed him. We had a wonderful discussion and he's written a book looking at all sorts of areas that I agree in some, disagree with some.

But we've had a real discussion and I've asked him to offer me some other names of people I can talk to.

So, yes, I am making an effort to use whatever platform I have to talk to people and to discuss with them and not attack them. Just, “Okay, you've written a book, let's talk about it.”

I do the same on the left by the way. I have all kinds of interviews with people on the left who are … to say further left than me is not a good description. But to say take views of kind of an absolutism and certainty about certain things on social issues. I'm not talking about abortion. Heartily pro-choice.

So, I'll talk to people to the left of me, to the right of me, all points in between. I make every effort to do so when it comes to my own podcast.

Personal relationships, I've done what I can to maintain folks who are still in the ministry that my parents founded L'Abri Fellowship. To the extent it's possible.

When it comes to the evangelical community in general, I would never be invited to speak and none of them would ever appear on anything with me because that would blacklist them. There goes their next invitation to speak at Wheaton College.

“Hey, he was on Frank Schaeffer's podcast, forget it.” It would be kind of a strike against them. So, I don't know if that answers your question, but that's kind of where I'm at on it.

Dara Starr Tucker:

Well, I guess just in theory, how would you talk to someone, I'll ask it in that way. How would you speak to someone about the dangers of the Christian nationalist movement? Someone who is Christian, or someone who does consider themselves to be evangelical?

How would you have that conversation with them about the dangers of a Mike Johnson or a Marjorie Taylor Greene or the many other figures now that are populating our political landscape?

Why are these people, folks that we should be wary of, that we should look out for, that we should be concerned about?

I mean, isn't this just a wonderful thing if these people are representing our morality on the political stage? Isn't this just a great thing? Why is this something to be concerned about?

Frank Schaeffer:

I don't have a magic formula here, but I would just say, I think on a personal level, I would start talking about some of the hypocrisy of just the way the whole movement operates.

The money, the greed, the power hunger in it. How far away from anything that could be called basically Christ-like. I would really get into the weeds on that.

In other words, whether I buy into those beliefs anymore myself, which is a different discussion and I'm happy to go there if you want to in this interview, that's a different topic. But I grew up in it and I know the language and I also know what, for instance, my parents believed.

And I might tell them a little bit of my own story. They might say, “Well, you left the movement. Were you bitter against your parents?” They're always making up these reasons that would fit their idea. I'd say, “No, it's actually quite the reverse.”

Before my father got famous as an evangelical writer, he was a very humble little ministry. Dad worked on a tray on the corner of his bed in a rocking chair. He didn't have a desk, he didn't have a secretary. We didn't have a car.

The only meat we ever got was on the weekends. Mother would make roast chicken for Sunday with rice and gravy. And we shared that with the students who were staying with us.

And the thing that began my journey out of the movement you are still part of (speaking to you as if you were one of these people), what you've heard, that I'm angry or bitter, it's all lies.

I mean, actually read my books, you'll see they're not angry and bitter. My secular editors think they're very loving and nice portraits of something I left and interesting.

But if you really want to know what began my journey out of your movement, it was comparing the humility, the kindness, and the lack of greed.

The Christ-like behavior of my mom and dad, and how they treated people in our ministry and why people became Christians in that ministry. It was because they actually were trying to follow Christ.

And my own journey out of the movement is as I got well known and my father got well known, and I began to meet the leaders of what then mutated into the religious right, the flakes, the thieves, the meanness, the bitterness, the personality cults, everything that became Trumpism in the end was already there.

And the reason Trump was able to mislead so many people is he was actually so much like their own leaders. It was all about the money. It was all about the power. They were all hypocrites.

That's why I got out of the movement. It was the opposite of what you think. I left because I had grown up seeing what genuine Christ-like kindness was like.

I remember my mom down on her hands and knees in the kitchen, mopping up the vomit from a heroin addict that my parents had taken in, didn't throw her out.

She was a young British musician who was on heroin. She would go into the woods and shoot up. She vomited in our kitchen and my mother cleaned the vomit up and sat her down and made her a cup of tea.

Did they kick her out? No, because my parents believed that they were reaching out to lost people, not just in a theological sense, but that really, that's how you treat people. And the same with the gay couples that came to L'Abri. This is in the ‘50s and ‘60s.

Integration, my father opened L'Abri up in 1966 to 60 students from Sofia University in Bulgaria, all of whom were African students from Nigeria and all these places on communist scholarships.

They could come to Switzerland because it was a neutral country. It was the only country in Europe they could visit because it was not in NATO. While they were in a communist east block school.

And dad had them all come for the summer. This is in the mid to late ‘60s. And that's who was there that summer, was all these African students. My father performed a quote, “interracial marriage” with one of them and a young English woman that they had met.

Preached a sermon saying that unlike people in America, evangelicals, he knew that he had left in 1947, he believed in interracial marriage.

“And by the way, if one of my daughters falls in love with one of our African students, I would be delighted to have her marry a black man.”

This is in the mid ‘60s. That was my father. And then as I began to tour around and met people like Jerry Falwell, it's as if I had fallen into a vortex of another planet.

My leaving the evangelical movement was in disgust, not with the politics, but with the unChrist-like behavior that I witnessed on a leadership level across the nation. I didn't run into people like my parents.

I did meet some individual humble kind people, but the leadership was in the money, the power, and they were liars. And my parents were truthful and kind people.

Now, you can disagree with where they went on abortion. You can disagree on the people that we worked with and say, “Well, why would you work with people like that?” Dad regarded them as kind of necessary evil people like Jerry Falwell, because we're trying to spread our message. Okay, that's a different question.

But why did Frank Schaeffer begin asking a series of questions that eventually let him out of the movement? Because I had seen the real thing and what we were now part of was a lie. And that's how I started out.

So, what I would tell you is, have you ever stopped back to think how far the movement you're still part of (speaking to you as if you were one of these people) has traveled from what your own ideals used to be.

Can you remember what it was like to be really in love with Jesus? Can you remember what it was like to really get up every day trying to treat other people as your neighbor? And if you can, do you think your movement is there now? Think about it. That's maybe where I would start.

And it wouldn't be in a big public speech, just one-on-one. That's where I'd begin.

I understand the frustrations. I understand how annoying the secular left has become. Believe me, I've had it with the virtue signaling, all the gender correctness and language. I have no idea where all this comes from. I'm tired of it. It looks Orwellian to me too.

There's a lot I can agree with you on in terms of the extremes on the left. But let's just start with who Jesus was and where your ideals were, say as a child with your parents who were ministers or whatever it might be, do you really think this is what is represented now by the Republican Party that you're now part of? I don't.

So, I don't hold up the left and the Democrats is the kind of paradigm of virtue. I think the virtue signaling, the greenwashing, all the rest of it is all real.

I'm sick and tired of all the messing around with English language to virtue signal. I think the left is totally hypocritical in a lot of things. I'm willing to go there in the discussions.

But I think the real place to start is the degradation of the ideals that so many evangelicals grew up with. And now, what are you settling for? AR-15s, guns all the way down, armed resistance of the US government. No funding for social programs, family values.

What family values? Where's the year of parental leave for every child born? Where's the help that young mothers get?

Where's the practical love that my parents showed people in L'Abri when they opened their home to young women who came pregnant who had been thrown out of their homes by evangelical pastors? And my mom said, “You can come stay with us.”

That's what ministry looked like to me. And when I began to hit the big time in America, my eyes opened and it was like, “This is rotten to the core.”

And by the way, it's also ruining my marriage because basically I'm being groomed to be an asshole by divine right. Another power hungry jerk on the fringe of this thing, bossing his wife around, over disciplining his children, coming home angry off the road.

And my own journey as a human being was so opposite of everything that I grew up believing in with my parents, that I had to look at myself very, very hard. That's why I got out of the movement.

And then of course you start asking questions, the whole thing eventually unravels. That's a different discussion.

So, those are some of the places that I talk individually with people. And once in a while, you meet someone who listens.

A lot of the time, the evangelical right wing is so hardened now, that it's literally like trying to talk somebody in Germany out of being in the Nazi party in 1940. The bridge has been crossed and then burned. It's kind of over. But when it comes to individuals, you can still try.

Dara Starr Tucker:

Well, in the kind of closing minutes of this talk, what do you feel, I guess are the strategies that the rest of us, I don't even necessarily want to say the left, but those of us who are not willing to go along with this agenda. What are the strategies that we can engage in?

I mean, one of the things that I've discovered in the research that I've done for the explainer videos and things that I do is how well funded the right is, that whole movement is.

They are so well organized and so well funded. And so many of these political action committees and think tanks and the Heritage Foundation, we could go on and on and on. Now, Moms for Liberty and all of these groups who are just their organizing, I like to say like little worker bees below the surface.

And just when you see Roe v Wade come down, that wasn't something that was just planned for a year or two. This is something that has been in development for decades. They're playing the long game.

And I have never felt like the left or progressives have been nearly as knowledgeable about what is going on on the right as they should be or have been nearly as organized or well funded.

And maybe that's just my perception. Maybe that's my overestimating the power of this other side because I've been so connected to it or aware of it for so long.

But what can progressives, what can the left do to make sure that they're sort of preemptively kind of getting ahead of some of the stuff rather than always reacting to it?

Frank Schaeffer:

This is unlike the other topic where I was there, and I can tell you exactly what I think. This is just me, private citizen casting about for ideas.

But one thing I would say is the left does a miserable job of prioritizing. And we keep serving our head on a platter to the opposition.

You're totally right about the organizational function of the right and the long-term 50-year program. It's not a conspiracy, it's just a plan that worked. And the funding is there from people like the Koch brothers and others.

And now, new little wrinkle as some of these libertarian tech bros throw their money into the fray. Like Elon Musk, for instance, who now describes himself as a Republican and who knows how much he's going to throw into the fight coming up in the next election to put Donald Trump back in the White House.

There's a new kid in town and these billionaires don't have any limit on spending. They're going to make the old funding of the right wing, the Koch brothers look like a Sunday school picnic because these are people who can take $44 billion and drop it into a vanity project like buying Twitter for the hell of it.

And then decide that Republicans are more favorable toward libertarians who don't want to be regulated by any aspect of the US government at all and throw their money into it because corporate America actually has more power than the government now.

And these guys know that because they're part of that structure. So, that's a new thing.

But other than that, I think you're totally right in terms of the long-term funding. And I think the only thing that the left can do to counter this is to be a lot smarter when it comes to prioritizing what we want to be talking about.

And right now, me personally, all I want to be talking about is that there's only one issue that should bother or mean anything to anybody right now who I think is sane or patriotic. Just throw the net wide.

And that is we cannot have a Trump second term, or we will move from a democracy to an authoritarian system from which there will not be a way back.

And so, this is like want to talk about the environment, forget it. The environmental movement is dead if Trump becomes president.

Want to talk about gay rights or trans rights, forget it. Pronouns is not the issue. To even spend 10 seconds on trying to correct people in terms of pronouns right now is ridiculous. The house is burning down, we're facing cataclysm.

So, I guess right now, between now and the election day coming up in 2024, my message to anybody who's not a Trumpist right wing, MAGA loving cultist, in other words, anybody but that, whether they're Republican, or Democrat, or left wing, or black, or white, or lesbian, or gay, or trans, or heterosexual, or a grandfather, or a young parent, or a high school student is only one thing.

Forget everything except the next election. And don't do anything to distract from that fight because this is the only thing that matters right now.

Why? Because nothing else you care about will be the same the day after of Trump's back in the White House.

And you will have lost every battle you're spending your time worrying about now, say trans rights or other gender issues, or the future of gay marriage. All of which I believe in, by the way. Race relations, forget it. Defund and fund the police, not an issue. Nothing matters if we lose this fight.

So, is that alarmist? Yeah, you're damn straight it's alarmist because this is the time to sound the alarm.

I'm 71, I've been in this a long time and there's never, never ever in my lifetime been anything approach the crisis we face if Trump goes in for a second term, because he will be vengeful, he will not be running for a third term. He might be president for life for all we know at that point.

His supporters are armed, they're angry, they're misinformed, they're conspiracists. And everything from vaccine availability on another pandemic all the way down to school shootings, to race relations, to gay rights. None of this is going to matter if we blindly walk in to another Trump term.

And then if you added majorities in both houses to that, if it was a sweep, and a Supreme Court position to back every single thing he does, six person far right, Catholic slash Protestant cultist majority, we have a prescription that means nothing else you're thinking about.

Talking not to you now, Dara, but everybody, nothing you think matters matters if we lose this one.

So, basically, I'm the oncologist saying you came in for a checkup on a sore throat and you don't have a dentist right now, and you need knee surgery and all this other shit.

And yes, these are all real problems, but guess what? You have throat cancer. And if we don't start chemo today and radiation therapy and throw everything we've got at it, none of your other ailments matter because you're going to be dead in a month. And that's the situation we're in.

So, to my friends on the left, I am begging, I am pleading, fight this fight and when it's done, we can all get back to everything that bothers us that we want to correct.

But right now, this minute, right now, as we face the future with Trump as potentially the president again, stop whining about Biden being too old, you idiots. He's done a good job.

And if he is the candidate, goddamn, get behind him and fight tooth and nail and stop worrying about whether he can … if that's what's going to happen, throw your weight behind him.

If you take a different view than he does on his leadership with the Palestinian Israeli conflict, sorry folks, none of that matters if Trump's president. We're going to have somebody who is an absolute authoritarian oligarch in power forever, and the people who follow him. And look what's already happening with Mike Johnson, et cetera.

So, if you care about that, get the hell out of the street because this is a distraction. If you're turning part of the left against the Democrats based on this, and you'd rather have Trump, you're an idiot.

Because you think you have problems now, Netanyahu's best friend was Donald Trump. Open season, told that we're going to move the embassy and then after that, take the whole West Bank, screw the Palestinians.

Nothing you care about is going to get better or matters if Biden loses the next election. And I don't know how many ways but sideways to say this, but when I look at the situation, if we don't fight for this, we will lose everything.

And so, I would just say, “Hey, that's the theme till 2024, shut up about everything else and fight the big fight because in context, nothing else will matter. We don't have time for anything else right now. This is an emergency.”

Dara Starr Tucker:

Well, I guess that says it. Frank, that could not be any more frank. And I think a lot of people agree with you at this time and place.

It's just interesting that we seem to find ourselves in this place of nothing else matters more and more often. That everything is at stake, that this is the most important election of our lifetime. And it starts to sound like hyperbole after point.

But I don't think you're wrong. And so, as many of us can be sounding the clarion call as possible, I think the more folks I think will really understand what is at stake when it comes down to it.

Thank you, Frank, for your thoughtful discussion. And like I said, there are just so many connection points which I can connect with what you're doing and identify with your story and your journey, your progression out of that world that you have come from.

So, I just appreciate the work you do and I am really honored to have had this conversation.

Frank Schaeffer:

Thank you. Hey, listen, two things.

First of all, Dara, we need to swap this out and have you come to my podcast and let me interview you. I'd like to learn more about you and your music, but also just everything you're doing. I think it's such an interesting story of your own. So, please come, let me interview.

If people are interested in this interview and want hear anything more from me, you can subscribe to Substack, it's free. My It Has to Be Said commentary appears on Substack. Maybe once or twice a week I have something to say. It's up there.

And then of course, my podcast In Conversation with Frank Schaeffer. I would just ask people to look for both of those things.

Ken Harbaugh:

Thanks for listening to Burn the Boats. If you have any feedback, please email the team at [email protected]. We're always looking to improve the show.

For updates and more, follow us on Twitter @Team_Harbaugh. And if you enjoyed this episode, don't forget to rate and review.

Burn the Boats is a production of Evergreen Podcasts. Our producer is Declan Rohrs and Sean Rule-Hoffman is our audio engineer. Special thanks to Evergreen executive producers, Joan Andrews, Michael DeAloia, and David Moss.

I'm Ken Harbaugh and this is Burn the Boats, a podcast about big decisions.