When I was in college back in the 70's, a series of personal and family tragedies that occurred back to back during my junior year left me emotionally shipwrecked and set apart from the vast majority of my classmates, whose biggest problem in life was what to wear to the spring formal or whether they'd pass an exam. 

Cut adrift from familiar shores, lost and alone, I floated into the current of the campus Christian evangelical community, and consequently accepted Christ as my personal savior and was baptised in a Southern Baptist church back home.

Because I never do anything halfway, I embraced my new life right down to my soul, so to speak, joining Campus Crusades for Christ, taking Bible courses as electives, going door to door saving souls, working as a "counselor" at Billy Graham movies, serving as a summer camp counselor at a Christian camp, dating seminary students, and after graduation, teaching at a private Christian academy in another state.

Because the Bible stated that "believers should not be yoked to non-believers," that meant freezing out many of my old friends, listening only to Christian music and reading Christian books, and so on.  Back then, Christianity had not yet become a multi-billion dollar industry, and so that dictate was harder than you might think.  I had to mix up my own cassette tapes of Christian music, although many of my friends frowned upon my collection of Mormon Tabernacle Choir music because everybody knew they were a cult and therefore, Satanic.

I'd hear stuff like that and just toss it off and not dwell on it too much.  I didn't think anyone who could make such astonishing music could be anything BUT close to God.  The lack of tolerance for even listening to their music baffled me, but I didn't argue about it.  I just privately played their soaring, blessed "Halleluyah Chorus" and didn't talk about it much.

And the popular self-help books I read, all about stuff like, how to submit myself to my lord and master--meaning, my future husband--well, that kinda bugged me too, but after all, I did want to find myself a good Christian husband, because every Singles Bible class I attended concentrated on husband-finding as if being a single woman were some sort of tragic disability.  You literally did think there was something wrong with you if you had no husband or marriage prospects on the near horizon, and so you took more Singles classes so you could figure out what you were doing wrong and fix it before all the Good Christian Men were taken.

But, basically, I was more of the intellectual Christian than the emotional one.  I didn't buy into the whole speaking-in-tongues and laying on of hands and other excesses of the faith.  In fact, I grew tired of the Baptists pretty quick because every single solitary sermon said the exact same thing, and so I found a nondenominational congregation near my campus and went three times a week.

Usually, I attended lectures where the speakers translated Bible verses from the original Hebrew or Aramaic, and I read bestselling Christian authors like C.S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer, who were known as the philosophical vanguards of the faith, and who dealt in the Deeper Questions of life.  Some of their reading was dense, but that was the challenge and the joy and, I confess, gave me a bit of a feeling of superiority over those who didn't read much at all but who did things like, stop taking their epilepsy medicine because "Jesus is going to heal me."

(That guy was later found by police, wandering down the street in his underwear.)

I had a boyfriend who was a seminary student at a non-denominational institution that was--and is to this day--highly respected, and he and his friends and I would have many all-nighters debating such heavy theological issues as dispensationalism, predestination, literal-versus-symbolic interpretation of scripture, and so on.  I took a comprehensive Bible class in the New Testament from the Moody Bible Institute, another respected institution, by correspondence, and after a couple of years, I could hold my own with the best born-and-bred Bible thumpers, even if my family and old friends worried that I'd lost my mind.

In a way, I had.  I just didn't know it at the time.

The comedown, when it came, came hard and fast and violently.  Teaching at the Christian academy, it wasn't just the undercurrent of prejudice (only white students and faculty), or the haphazard educational standards or poor availability of textbooks and supplies--it was coming face to face with the thunderous judgementalism, hypocrisy, and mean-spiritedness that I encountered from colleagues with otherwise impeccable gospel standards. 

What that enviornment was doing to the students drove me to a near nervous breakdown and I quit at Christmas break, for my own sanity.  When, a few months later, I reconnected with an old and dear friend with whom I'd been romantically involved, off and on, for many years--before the whole evangelical thing--and decided to marry him, the reaction from my evangelical friends at my old Baptist church back home shocked me to my core.

Because he was a privately spiritual person but averse to organized religion, they deemed him a "nonbeliever."  When my pastor's entreaties that I not marry "this man" did not work, he said he'd go ahead and perform the ceremony, "because there are some things I want to say."

I trusted him.  He was my pastor.

That was my first mistake.

At my wedding ceremony, in front of everyone invited, he scorched my now-husband and me with a patronizing lecture, scolding me about how I should understand "what it means to obey" my husband, and launching such a towering sermon that a future sister-in-law on the front pew whispered, "Everybody stay seated.  There's going to be a baptismal after the service."

When we kissed, the pastor scowled and dug his toe into the carpet, fleeing the church almost immediately.  He did not come to the reception.

He never spoke to me again.  None of my old Christian evangelical "friends" ever spoke to me again, although one did visit once, "because I wanted to reassure myself that what they were all saying about you wasn't true."  Apparently, it was, because I never heard from her again, either.

I've been "yoked to that nonbeliever" for 35 years now, and a stronger, kinder, more patient and spiritual man you won't find anywhere.  We raised our kids out in the country around animals and nature, with deep spiritual beliefs, having family devotionals every Sunday they were growing up, often outdoors in our Chinaberry Grove, because neither of us could really feel comfortable in churches for very long.

I have not, in fact, "submitted" myself to my husband, who is a 6'4" combat vet.  I'm a feminist--not afraid of the word--and he's secure enough in his manhood not to be threatened by that.  We've worked in partnership to raise two strong, independent kids.  My daughter supports herself and doesn't put up with crap from guys looking for wilting daisies, and my ex-Marine combat-vet son has no problem cleaning house or cooking dinner for his beautiful girlfriend.  (You got a problem with that???)

When I look back on who I was during that terribly vulnerable time in my life, a time when I was lost in grief and searching for comfort, I am amazed that I did not make so many mistakes I could have made, had I truly, truly listened to what they were trying to make me into.  I shudder to think what a disastrous marriage I might have made had I married any of the churchy guys my pastor kept fixing me up with.  (One of them was a college drop-out, unemployed, and didn't have a car, so the pastor loaned him a car and probably gave him some cash for the date.  As for his uncertain future, well, the Lord will provide, dontcha know.)

When I was a young mother, and Ronald Reagan embraced Jerry Falwell in his presidential campaign, I knew right away what was happening and what was about to happen, and I knew that it was ultimately going to be very bad for our country.  The hypocrisy of the religious right for hero-worshiping a man who did not himself ever go to church and whose wife consulted astrologers did not surprise me.

You'd be surprised what they can shut out of their minds when they don't want to face a truth.  (Although, what with the Creationist Museum and so on, maybe you wouldn't.)

From Reagan's massive success garnering votes from the religious right, Republican politicians began licking their chops.  Not only were they a reliable block vote--easily manipulated with emotional "wedge" issues--but they were a bottomless well of easy cash.

After having been willingly whipped into a frenzy over those very social issues, the religious right saw politics as the way to manipulate policy and gain power, and they embraced their new-found influence with a messianic zeal.

It was a holy marriage made in hell.

By the time Karl Rove got his plump little hands on it, "voting guides" were being passed out to congregations on Sundays and voter registration drives conducted in church buildings.  And that does not even count what was going on in evangelical television, radio, and publishing.

You were basically told who to vote for, and if you did not, well, you weren't Christian enough.  In fact, some Catholic churches threatened to kick you out of the church altogether for supporting Democrats.  At Jerry Falwell's own "Liberty University," you can get kicked off-campus these days for supporting Barack Obama.

The beauty of the whole system is the ease of manipulating and disseminating information, because of the way evangelicals isolate themselves from the entire "nonbelieving" world.  Christian evangelicals befriend, marry, worship, and educate their children with other Christian evangelicals; often they work in the evangelical community.  They watch Christian TV, listen to Christian radio, read Christian books, visit Christian websites.  (They even sin with other Christians; it's not unusual for online affairs--sexual and otherwise--to occur in Christian chat rooms.) 

So to cynics like Karl Rove and Dick Cheney--who admit that in private, they themselves are not religious--the evangelical community is putty in their hands.  How easy it was, for instance, for them to sell a war based on nothing more than waving flags, yellow-ribbon magnets, and "support the troops" church-drives and prayer lists, with a good, solid dose of fear thrown in; fear of the "other," of rabid Muslims coming into our mostly-white, gated communities and destroying our way of life.

They don't question anything, because to question is to lead to answers they may not want to hear, and they are afraid that questioning tenets of the faith as flat-out literal, would be to see the whole thing collapse.  In truth, it's just the opposite--the more I questioned my own beliefs, the deeper my faith grew--it was different, certainly, but deeper.  (I now include Eastern traditions and Native American beliefs in with a symbolic interpretation of the Bible, and I continue to question things, every day.) 

But this lack of questioning is how they fail to see a dichotomy in accepting that a black presidential candidate can be both a radical Christian like the Jeremiah Wright-guy they saw on TV hundreds of times a day, AND a closet Muslim terrorist.  You just don't question.

I watched all of this unfold through the years with a particular kind of horror, because I knew the flip-side of sanctimonious piety.

In fact, Jesus knew it too--when he faced the Sadducees and Pharisees.  It was not the Romans, really, who crucified Jesus.

It was religious extremists who demanded purity tests of him that he ignored.  The price was his execution.

By torture.

Another little fact so conveniently ignored by the religious right.

Someone who has first-hand knowledge of the danger to this country in combining religion and politics is a man who lived it first-hand.  His name is Frank Schaeffer.

Yes, THAT Schaeffer.  The Francis Schaeffer whose books we read and debated in college Christian circles was Frank Schaeffer's dad.  During the zoom-growth years of the 80's, the Schaeffers basically created the Religious Right.  They were embraced by all the big evangelical names of the day:  Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Billy Graham, James Dobson, and others.

Republican presidents had them over to the White House, and powerful conservative politicians not only courted them, but had them speak to fellow conservative senators and congresspeople.

It was Frank Schaeffer who literally wrote the book (and made the movie) on the abortion issue that was to set the movement on fire--a fire that soon raged out of control and eventually resulted in "pro-life" bombings and assassinations, a tragedy that Schaeffer accepts responsibility for--probably more than he should, really.

But at least he's got the balls to admit it.

In the end, Schaeffer's own emotional and spiritual fall from evangelical graces was, like mine, hard, fast, and violent--but in his case, it was far more agonizing because he had invested his entire life in it, and because he knew, first-hand, things I had only intuited: that something was very, very rotten in Denmark.

Schaeffer's entire journey is detailed in his fascinating book: 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.

As I read the book and reflected on the immense respect we in the Christian intellectual community had had for Francis Schaeffer, I think that was one of the things that saddened me the most: the esteemed philosopher-theologian's own blunt disillusionment:

 

"Dad seemed lost in a depressed daze," Schaeffer writes, "He had recently been saying privately that the evangelical world was more or less being led by lunatics, psychopaths, and extremists, and agreeing with me that if 'our side' ever won, America would be in deep trouble."

 

Perhaps acknowledging that this might even apply to his own family, Schaeffer comments that he and his father gradually came to realize that, "...Evangecalism is not so much a religion as a series of fast-moving personality cults."

He writes:

 

"As soon as the leader steps aside, or is shoved aside, or stumbles, the crowd looks for the next man or woman to briefly follow.  There is always a bigger show down the street, another--even better--Bible-study leader or congregation to try, another hot author/guru to read, another trend, from speaking in tongues to giving homeschooling a try.  And most evangelicals spend a good portion of their time wandering from church to church, from one leader to another, in the same way that when I was a teen I'd  switch my loyalty from one rock band to another."

 

The bestselling books I had devoured in my evangelical days (I'm talking about the pop-Christian-psychology books and not the works of scholarship by his dad)--are exposed by Frank Schaeffer as being ridiculously easy to write and publish as long as the subject matter is the Hot Christian Topic of the day, and ridiculously easy to hoist up on the bestseller list.  (Dr. James Dobson once purchased 100,000 of Frank Schaeffer's own books to give away to his listeners.  My guess is that he did not purchase 100,000 copies of Crazy for God.  Probably never even read it.)

In the end, Schaeffer's analysis of what went wrong with the evangelical movement, and why it has been so poisonous for politics and the politicians who sucked up to it, can be summed up in the following astute paragraph:

 

"I think my problem with remaining an evangelical centered on what the evangelical community became.  It was the merging of the entertainment business with faith, the flippant lightweight kitsch ugliness of American right-wing enterprise, the platitudes married to pop culture, all of it...that made me crazy.  It was just too stupid for words."

 

However, "stupid" though it may be, that does not mean it cannot still be a dangerous force:

 

"One thing I do not regret is that I missed the 'opportunity' to be the so-called big-time evangelical leader.  I could have been.  I was good at speaking.  We would never have run out of paranoid delusions with which to stir up the ever-fearful and willfully ignorant.  But the idea of 'passing up' a chance to becmoe a cross between Pat Buchanan, Elmer Gantry, and Ralph Reed never bothered me."

 

That sentence:  "We would never have run out of paranoid delusions with which to stir up the ever-fearful and willfully ignorant," hits at the very heart of what makes this movement such a serious threat to the very values that they pretend to hold dear.

I mean, just think about it: "Liberty" University does not give its own students the freedom to support the presidential candidate of their choice.

We saw this in full-blown force with the Sarah Palin candidacy.  The throngs of "good Christians" who flocked to her campaign events were the same ones who shouted twisted, hateful accusations at her opponent of being a closeted Muslim terrorist, of being not-quite-American-enough to pass muster, of being even...dangerous.  She goaded it along with a charming, pretty smile and lots of God-talk.

"Kill him!" screamed one Palin supporter at an event.

And when the Secret Service investigated the threat, evangelical bloggers referred to them as "The S.S.," as if they were Nazi storm-troopers and not a protective detail doing their job.

The backlash of such hate-speech never fails to "surprise" the evangelical community when violence results.  An abortion doctor is slain in church; anti-abortion activists claim it was some kind of righteous retribution for his being a "mass murderer," the assassin is made into an evangelical hero complete with prayer requests and jail-cell addresses for supportive cards and letters--and then they complain that the so-called "liberal media" makes them all out to be wild-eyed nutcases.

Frank Schaeffer says that, from the beginning, religious leaders like Jerry Falwell were not nearly as interested in saving souls as they were in gaining--and keeping--POWER.  He tells chilling stories about these famous characters and how they (meaning Fallwell, Robertson, Dobson and others) behaved backstage and in private.  Their support of party-purity litmus-test politicians was their ticket to power, and they played it for all it was worth.

But something happened on the way to the Right Hand of God and Washington, D.C.

The voters.

It's kind of hard to talk about loving Jesus in one breath, while you stand back and watch while thousands of people drown in a dying city.

It's kind of hard to talk about loving Jesus in one breath, while invading a country, starting a war, and instigating policies of torture in order to cement your power-gains.

It's kind of hard to talk about loving Jesus in one breath, while glancing the other way and pretending not to notice when extremists you harbor commit terrorist acts on American soil, whether bombing a federal building in Oklahoma City, bombing abortion clinics and Olympic venues, assassinating judges, doctors, lawyers, and others who don't agree with you, and so on.

It's hard to talk about loving Jesus in one breath, while forwarding around racist, bigoted e-mails that mock and denigrate the first black president of the United States.

And it's REAL hard not to appear just as crazy as you are when, for example, that same president comes out and presents a calm, clear, rational plan for something or other and you hit the airwaves in minutes, screaming that he's a socialist, a communist, an extremist, a terrorist, and any other "ist" you can come up with while the red light is on.

It's been an entire generation since Ronald Reagan first saw gold at the end of the church aisle, and all those mostly-white church-goers who thought he was god are now aging.

And their sons and daughters are dropping out.  Regular church attendance among young people has plummeted in recent years, and one of the reasons they state, when polled, is that they resent how the church took issues such as abortion and gay marriage and hinged an entire religion--and political future--on them--when young people care far more for such things as helping the poor and caring for the environment.  They worry about AIDS and climate change.  They may tend to be pro-life, but they have no desire to kill any living human being over the issue.

And as the religion itself is struggling (mega-churches have not appreciably added to the evangelical population overall), the political movement they fostered and nurtured is beginning to founder.

Political reporter Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post writes:

 

Quick -- think of the three faces of the Republican party: Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh and Newt Gingrich immediately come to mind.

What do these men all have in common? They are over 50 years old, male, white and staunchly conservative.

That -- in a nutshell -- is the problem facing Republicans today, an imbroglio cast in sharp relief by a new analysis by Gallup of more than 26,000 interviews conducted in May.

Nearly nine in ten (89 percent) Republicans are white with the vast majority of those people describing themselves as "conservative" (63 percent). Just seven percent of Republicans are either Hispanic (five percent) or black (two percent).

Compare that to the composition of those who call themselves Democrats -- 65 percent white, 19 percent black and 11 percent Hispanic -- in the Gallup data and you quickly have a sense of the enormity of the problem for Republicans as they try to re-brand (and re-imagine) themselves.

"Republicans have a clear monopoly on the allegiance of white, conservative Americans but the GOP's challenge is to figuring out whether this is enough of a base on which to build for the future," writes Gallup poll director Frank Newport.

John Weaver, a longtime Republican strategist, said that diversifying the party demographically is an absolute necessity, arguing that the debate over whether or not to do so is "worrisome" in and of itself.

"Any student of political history knows political movements do not remain static," added Weaver. "They either grow -- and remain relevant -- or they recede -- and risk being replaced. And we're currently headed lickety-split down the replacement path."

...Demographics, in politics, is destiny. Republicans must find a way to solve their demographic dilemma quickly or risk being a minority party for years to come.

 

Even Bob Herbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times, thinks the religious/racist Republican majority may finally be on the way out, in his piece, "The Howls of a Fading Species":

 

One can only hope that the hysterical howling of right-wingers against the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court is something approaching a death rattle for this profoundly destructive force in American life.

It's hard to fathom the heights of hypocrisy currently being scaled by the foaming-in-the-mouth crazies who are leading the charge against the nomination...

 

After detailing the excessive posturing of the Newt Gingriches, Karl Roves, Rush Limbaughs, and so on, Herbert, who is African-American, writes:

 

It was always silly to pretend that the election of Barack Obama was evidence that the U.S. was moving into some sort of post-racial, post-ethnic, post-gender nirvana. But it did offer a basis for optimism. There is every reason to hope that we've improved as a society to the point where the racial and ethnic craziness of the Gingriches and Limbaughs will finally have a tough time finding any sort of foothold.

Those types can still cause a lot of trouble, but the ridiculousness of their posture is pretty widely recognized. Thus the desperate howling.

 

The racism--aided and abetted by the religious right--is becoming as anachronistic as a vote-getter as other big "wedge" issues like gay marriage, and yet, still the party grasps at these old mainstays because that is what you do when you are old and tired and have no new ideas.  You cling to the familiar and fight like hell to keep from losing it, like the old-timers who were given days and days' warning that Mount St. Helens was going to erupt and still refused to leave their homes, and so met their deaths beneath a cloud of volcanic ash.

Those of us who have long since moved on from that smothering place have not necessarily lost our faith altogether.  Frank Schaeffer has a new book coming out in October, 2009 called, PATIENCE WITH GOD: Faith for People Who Don't Like Religion (or Atheists).

Like me, he has groped his way to a profoundly spiritual and political activist life that has a healthy respect for a separation between the two, and like me, he has learned that you can be a Christian (or any other kind of religious belief system) without being an "evangelical."

The right-wing Powers That Be embraced the religious evangelical community because they were greedy to get and hold power, and the religious evangelical community returned the embrace because of the same reason, but in the end, it turned out to be a Judas Kiss for them both.