Monday, August 22, 2011

Frank Schaeffer and the New York Times Part II

I commented on this NYT article at I Personally Find Frank Schaeffer To Be A Complete Loon

Get Religion takes a look at it and is quite critical at Evangelical royalty’s game of thrones. The comments are good and interesting because the NYT writer of the piece shows up to defend himself and the ever entertaining Jeff Sharlet also makes an appearance.

However I saw this in the comment section:

Any discussion of Frank Schaeffer’s account of reality should deal with the man’s own use and abuse of words. There’s plenty of examples from both his evangelical and his anti-evangelical days, but I’ll take this recent transcript from The Rachel Maddow Show, addressing people who speculate that Obama is the Antichrist:

But I think the larger point this brings up is that the mainstream—not just media, but culture—doesn‘t sufficiently take stock of the fact that within our culture, we have a subculture which is literally a fifth column of insanity, that is bred from birth through home school, Christian school, evangelical college, whatever, to reject facts as a matter of faith. And so, this substitute for authentic historic Christianity, and I may add as a little caveat here, I‘m a church-going Christian, really brings up the question: Can Christianity be rescued from Christians? And that‘s an open question.

And when you see a bunch of people going around thinking that our president is the anti-Christ, you have to draw one of two conclusions. Either these are racists looking for any excuse to level the next accusation or they‘re beyond crazy? And I think beyond crazy is a better explanation.
And that evangelical subculture has rotted the brain of the United States of America
and we have a big slice of our population waiting for Jesus to come back. They look forward to Armageddon. Good news is bad news to them.


When we talk about the “Left Behind” series of books that I talk about in my book “Crazy for God.” what we‘re talking about is a group of people that are resentful because they‘ve been left behind by modernity, by science, by education, by art, by literature. The rest of us are getting on with our lives. These people are standing on the hilltop waiting for the end.

And this is a dangerous group of people to have as neighbors, and they‘re our national neighbors. And this is the source of all of these insanities that we see leveled at the president. One way or another they go back to this little evangelical subculture. It‘s a disaster.

And this is him being MILD!! Why do people pay attention to this? Why is such a mean spirited person allowed a face of Progressive Christianity and not be called out more. Most progressive Christians ( serious ones) are not like this.

No comments: