Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics--And How I Learned to Love Women Read Online Free PDF

certain sigh, and I could hear “poor Fran” even if her mouth wasn’t moving.

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    F undamentalists never can just disagree. The person they fall out with is not only on the wrong side of an issue; they are on the wrong side of God. In the 1940s, my parents had a big fight with a fundamentalist leader I never met, Carl McIntyre. Years later, the mention of his name was enough to put Dad in a Mood. They fell out in a way that got personal, and McIntyre lied about my father, or so Mom said. What the lies were, I never knew. My sister Susan says that McIntyre accused Dad of being a communist and that this was “All part of the McCarthy-era witch hunts.” Anyway, the upshot was that Dad left the mission that sent him to Europe in 1947. Then my parents founded the ministry of L’Abri in 1955.
    A church split builds self-righteousness into the fabric of every new splinter group, whose only reason for existence is that they decide they are more moral and pure than their brethren. This explains my childhood, and perhaps a lot about America, too.
    The United States is a country with the national character of a newly formed church splinter group. This is not surprising. Our country started as a church splinter group. The Puritans left England because they believed they were more enlightened than members of the Church of England, and they were eager to form
a perfect earthly community following a pure theology. They also had every intention of some day returning to England, once they had proved that something close to heaven on earth could work, and reforming their “heretical” fellow citizens.
    America still sees itself as essential and as destiny’s instrument. And each splinter group within our culture—left, right, conservative, liberal, religious, secular—sees itself as morally, even “theologically,” superior to its rivals. It is not just about politics. It is about being better than one’s evil opponent. We don’t just disagree, we demonize the “other.” And we don’t compromise.
    We Schaeffers never compromised. At times it seemed that only God knew how important we were, how right, how pure. But isolation and rejection by “The World” only confirmed our self-importance. The sense of being like the tribes of Israel wandering the desert, with enemies on all sides, was the underlying reality of my childhood. I think it was shared by my three sisters—Priscilla, Susan, and Debby—too, though because I was so much younger I really didn’t get to know them until we all grew up. Before that, it was like having three extra mothers.
    My oldest sister Priscilla was kind, but my early memories of her are vague. She married when I was five and moved to St. Louis with her husband John Sandri. Later she and John came back and joined L’Abri. Susan, my next oldest sister, was dramatic, loud, and desperately trying to get me educated, something my parents had somehow absentmindedly forgotten to do. Susan went to study in Oxford and married Ranald Macaulay when I was nine. They moved in next door and also joined L’Abri. Debby, my youngest sister, was intensely sweet. She married when I was twelve, moved away for a few years,
then moved back with her husband Udo Middelmann and joined L’Abri.
    We children fell somewhere between my pietistic, gorgeous mother and my dour, ordinary-looking father. We veered from extreme dramatic piety (Susan) to doubt (me), from energetic proselytism (Debby) to spiritual wrestling (Priscilla), from solid and self-assured (Susan) to gorgeous and nervous (Priscilla), from short and passionate (me) to even shorter and virtually quivering with a sincere desire to save humankind (Debby). However, we all shared a sense of being separated from the world.
    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