Not Wright: Black Man Damns US and Gets Vilified, White Man Calls for Nuking Cities and Gets Applauded

Posted by Bruce Wilson, AlterNet at 2:13 PM on March 26, 2008.

Democratic Presidential candidate Barack Obama has received copious criticism for the sermons of Obama's long-time (now former) pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Frank Schaeffer, son of seminal Christian right leader and author Francis Schaeffer, suggests there's a double standard at play which is both hypocritical and racist. But beyond Schaeffer's point is the sheer extremity of hate speech from the American right and religious right; at an October 2006 conference held by the Family Research Council in Washington DC, to thunderous applause, I heard Former US Secretary of Education William Bennett call for the incineration of entire Iraqi cities, for the crimes of a few. There were major religious and political figures present and no one, to my knowledge, objected in the slightest. If pastor Jeremiah Wright had called for the collective punishment of US municipalities in which racially-motivated murders had occurred, by incinerating their populations with tactical nuclear weapons or napalm, it is highly likely Barack Obama would have withdrawn his current presidential bid and might even have stepped down from his Senate seat. That is the state of American discourse, circa 2008. Hate speech is OK for whites, not blacks, and not Wright.

Frank Schaeffer is uniquely placed to level the following critique concerning the American's right's, and the mainstream media's, excoriation of Barack Obama because of condemnation of America from Obama's ex-pastor Wright. As Schaeffer wrote in an March 16, 2008 op-ed, "When Senator Obama's preacher thundered about racism and injustice Obama suffered smear-by-association. But when my late father -- Religious Right leader Francis Schaeffer -- denounced America and even called for the violent overthrow of the US government, he was invited to lunch with presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush, Sr." Frank Schaeffer walks right up to the accusation - that it is hypocritical and it is racist.

Frank's father Francis Schaeffer thought "humanism always leads to chaos" and, as a  seminal Christian thinker who studied under the Presuppositionalist theologian Cornelius Van Til along with R. J. Rushdoony, Schaeffer went on to write works in the 1970's such as The Christian Manifesto that helped inspire a radical politicization on the American Christian right which has transformed American politics. But Schaeffer's son Frank, groomed to follow in his father's footsteps, eventually took a different path, as suggested by the title of his latest book Crazy For God: How I Helped Found the Religious Right and Ruin America. As Frank Schaeffer writes,

Every Sunday thousands of right wing white preachers (following in my father's footsteps) rail against America's sins from tens of thousands of pulpits. They tell us that America is complicit in the "murder of the unborn," has become "Sodom" by coddling gays, and that our public schools are sinful places full of evolutionists and sex educators hell-bent on corrupting children. They say, as my dad often did, that we are, "under the judgment of God." They call America evil and warn of immanent destruction. By comparison Obama's minister's shouted "controversial" comments were mild. All he said was that God should damn America for our racism and violence and that no one had ever used the N-word about Hillary Clinton.

Dad and I were amongst the founders of the Religious right. In the 1970s and 1980s, while Dad and I crisscrossed America denouncing our nation's sins instead of getting in trouble we became darlings of the Republican Party. (This was while I was my father's sidekick before I dropped out of the evangelical movement altogether.) We were rewarded for our "stand" by people such as Congressman Jack Kemp, the Fords, Reagan and the Bush family. The top Republican leadership depended on preachers and agitators like us to energize their rank and file. No one called us un-American.

Frank Schaeffer walks right up to it -  the attack on Reverend Wright is racist and the double standard Shaeffer himself has lived adds considerable weight to the accusation ; many of those on the religious and political right denouncing Wright, and Obama by extension, display an underlying racism because they themselves have engaged in hate speech which, it would seem, is acceptable when uttered by a white man by not when it is uttered by a black man.

The arc of the religious, cultural and political movement the Schaeffers stoked has led in directions that seem remote from the chalets of the Swiss Alpine village a L'Abri where Francis Schaeffer established himself as a conservative Calvinist theologian, as described  in a September 25, 2007 Nation article by Jane Smiley who stopped by, with her Marxist husband, to stay with a friend there and "Everyone--teachers, students, helpers--was good-looking and well dressed, and the food was delicious." L'Abri, as described by Smiley, might have been a hippy commune,

Francis sympathized with the American youth movement and countercultural search for meaning. Timothy Leary stopped by, and so did one of Joan Baez's best friends. Mick and Keith planned to come but never made it. Francis was in favor of the environmental movement, and L'Abri welcomed gays and unwed mothers without prejudice. While often cruel to one another, the Schaeffers seem to have been kind to outsiders. At the point when I visited my friend, L'Abri was more or less harmless--the L'Abri of that time was keen on cultural critique and addressing the issues raised by French existentialism. Frank and Francis together made a film titled How Should We Then Live?, which came out in 1976 and was originally meant to reinterpret Western culture from the Renaissance as a human-based philosophical failure that had given rise to twentieth-century feelings of meaninglessness and anomie.

But more expansive and tolerant, as well as exploratory, aspects of Francis Schaeffer's thought seem to have been lost when Schaeffer crossed the Atlantic and connected with evangelical leaders such as Jerry Falwell and James Dobson and, as the American religious right has gradually fused with the American political right, the movement has taken on a menacing, hateful caste that seems very far from even a strict Calvinist interpretation of Christianity. At the Family Research Council's 'Voter Values Summit', held October 2006 in Washington DC, I heard, before a crowd up perhaps several thousand, Former US Secretary Of Education William Bennett declare, to considerable applause, that Iraqi cities such as Fallujah which showed rebellious spirit should be leveled with tactical nuclear weapons, "like Hiroshima".

That incident has stuck in my minds because there is no bleaker expression of the eliminationalist impulse- so frequently voiced by some of the leaders, pundits, and politicians of the American right and religious right, and the GOP- than the suggestion that entire cities, entire civilian populations should be incinerated for alleged crimes of a few, such as those who killed the four Blackwater contractors whose deaths precipitated a massive US military assault on Fallujah that claimed hundreds or even thousands of noncombatant lives. Such as punishment, even though the assault was carried out with the use banned munitions such as white Phosphorous rounds, was apparently too mild for Bennett's taste and there was a savagery in the air, in Bennett's voice, implying that with sufficient force the Iraqis would get the message and submit. International Law has long condemned such collective punishment of civilian noncombatants as advocated by William Bennett, a man who ironically has established a name as a  moralist, but as is typical when such expressions of naked hatred get voiced from the American right mainstream media was elsewhere, so I covered the incident on an Internet blog, a small one at that.

What is especially bizarre though is that recently, as a minor scandal (and especially among Catholics) broke out when the anti-Catholic pastor John Hagee ( who also blames Jews for the Holocaust and predicts all but a remnant will soon be killed in the encroaching end-time Hagee's CUFI lobbies for, declares that a war between Christianity and Islam already underway and holds that liberal and liberal Jews, non-fundamentalist Christians, non-Christians of any sort and anyone who doesn't fit into Hagee's particular ideological and theological straightjacket is therefore in league with Islamic terrorists and Satan. ) endorsed Republican Presidential hopeful John McCain, the Senator appeared on Bennett's radio show, waffling and wriggling, as if the Former Education Secretary, a Catholic, could confer absolution. The utter absurdity of McCain's penance, for anti-Catholic trespass, before a man who had called for the incineration of thousands of innocent civilians was not noted at the time, as far as I am aware, nor do I believe it has been noted since and that is the surrealistically skewed nature of the pubic discourse in America today.

It is hard to even imagine the public outcry were Barack Obama's ex-pastor to have publicly advocated the use of nuclear weapons or napalm to incinerate US municipalities where racially motivated crimes had occurred. One cannot find hate speech on the American left, from its politicians, pundits, media figures and religious leaders, that comes anywhere close, in frequency and stomach-churning intensity, to sentiments evinced by prominent figures on the US right with pretension to Christian moral rectitude, and that reality seems to underly Frank Schaeffer's disillusionment with the movement he helped build.

Tagged as: bennett, schaeffer, obama, wright

Bruce Wilson writes for Talk To Action, a blog specializing in faith and politics.