Quotes from Frank Schaeffer

The more doubts I had, the farther to the Right I moved ideologically, as if shouting loudly enough and demonizing any who disagreed with me could solve my real problem: the growing realization that the Bible is horribly flawed.

of other women. Oppression is most powerful when internalized and self-imposed. Self-oppression (knowing your "place") becomes a passport to acceptance by the dominant group. Sometime fundamentalist women perpetrate crimes against their daughters by training them to act subservient to

Dad would often say "The next generation will follow anyone who will promise personal peace and affluence. If they are asked to make a choice between freedom and security they'll choose security. It will be the new fascism.

Our image of God-the-judgmental-deranged-monster badly needed fixing. Jesus came to edit our ideas.

that held no tradition too sacred to question. Jesus was the first of the Enlightenment philosophers. In John 8: 4-7 speaking like some sort of first century Voltaire, Jesus questioned the laws and traditions of his day. "And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery; and

God as preached and lived by Jesus, the Enlightenment writers put human non-exclusionary justice ahead of the law. This rational philosophy did not condemn according to a set of rules but demanded moral consistency and compassion from those who would judge. Enlightenment thinkers jettisoned the ugly, exclusionary and magical parts of the religion that grew up bearing Christ's name. Their goal was what Ellul called on the Church to do in Jesus and Marx:

We are part of nature yet we have decided to be nicer than nature.

Jesus' co-suffering love is the best lens through which to consider God, or at least to reconsider ourselves.

Mom could not ignore the sorts of people who were most certainly not fundamentalist: the artists, composers, and choreographers she so admired, or the sorts of secular people she might bump into at concerts and in museums. So I think my mother spent a lifetime trying to change the image of Bible-believing Christians.

VII of Denmark, he became regent of Denmark when the king's life-long mental illness grew extreme enough to create a power vacuum. Struensee's dramatic social reforms included universal health care, limits on the totalitarian power of the Church, abolishing torture, removing censorship of the press, revoking privileges for nobles

I also happened to sincerely believe in my father's message, though "believe" is perhaps the wrong word. Rather, I had not yet begun to question my indoctrination.

I realize that life is not a step to a better place: life IS the better place, right here and now. It's too good to be true—and it's real.

You will always be more than one person. You will always embody contradiction.

Muslim, Jew, Hindu or Christian, you are that because of where and when you were born. If you are an atheist, you are that because of a book or two you read, or who your parents were and the century in which you were born. Don't delude yourself: there are no good reasons for anything, just circumstances.

But what if absolute consistency on any issue from the left or the right, religious or secular, is an indication of mediocre intelligence and a lack of intellectual honesty? What if the world is a complex place? What if leadership requires flexibility? What if ideology is a bad substitute for common sense? What if ideological consistency, let alone "purity," is a sign of small-mindedness, maybe even stupidity? Logically

I'd remember that if it came down to it, I'd rather be arrested for shoplifting than ever be an evangelical leader again. There was a certain basic and decent honesty about stealing pork chops that selling God had lacked.

Labels don't mean anything. Who cares about labels when someone is slapping you in the face? Who cares about labels when someone is saving you from drowning? Who someone is and what they do is all that matters.

We will never find a "good" solution to the question of abortion. What we need to do is to back away from the idea that there is an ideological "fix" to every problem. Then again, that's just one opinion. And I could be wrong. I often am.

We were busy judging everyone's spiritual state. We had a lot to do. Only God might be able to see their hearts and innermost thoughts, but we had a pretty good idea of how it was going to go for plenty of folks on the Judgment Day. Not so well.

Artists are like creatures who swallow themselves. We process our lives into what we make.

Embracing paradox helped me discover that religion is a neurological disorder for which faith is the only cure.

And when it came to how Dad sometimes treated my mother, other L'Abri workers looked the other way. They must have heard the screaming, and some must have known there was abuse. They did nothing. And to the faithful, Dad was, in the words of Christianity Today magazine, "a great oak" of Christian leadership, something they called him when he died. That the great oak abused his wife was beside the point. Even

Most of the time, I was biting my tongue. If I wanted to be invited back, I couldn't go on the 700 Club and tell people that the host was a lunatic. I couldn't go on Dobson's Focus on the Family and tell the truth: The host was a power-crazed political manipulator cynically abusing his followers. And I couldn't tell my Hollywood producers that they were full of shit when they cast their girlfriends to star in their movie. I wanted the next job!

But our prayers needed to be long so that we might not hide our lamp under a bushel, so that we wouldn't get to heaven and find that we had been ashamed of the Lord and that because of this He would say we had denied Him before men so He would deny us before the Father.