Maximos to Schaeffer: "Just go away"
Maximos on Frankie-goes-to-Hollywood Schaeffer and his crush on Barack Obama. Here's the meat:
If I could proffer just a few words of counsel to Schaeffer, they would be the encouragement to Just. Go. Away. If you are bound and determined to make your peace with the liberal compact, the privatization of normative commitments which are properly public - and you know what these are - then do so quietly, and privately, causing no scandal by identifying my Church with the endorsement of Moloch-worship. Cease engaging in warfare with the past, as though you were still an adolescent rebelling against your father, and drop the pretense that your present views are so much more sophisticated and spiritual than those you held then - if there is any truth to the accounts of that past, the one constant is the need to stand on the corner shouting, "I thank Thee, O God, that I am not like those people", in this case the fundamentalists, God-botherers, and people who actually understand Christian ethics.
Shaeffer writes:
ReplyDeleteOn the other hand Rush Limbaugh [and] his ilk, including religious radio hosts like Dr. James Dobson, are backing the Republican Party's most divisive candidate: Romney. They hate McCain because his hatred of people who disagree with him isn't intense enough.
My first reaction is that he has it all wrong: McCain is too intense in his hatred of those with whom he disagrees.
After all, he accused of bigotry for opposing his amnesty bill.
(Never let it be said that my support for McCain is enthusiastic.)
This one excerpt shows how little Shaeffer's picture of things actually fits reality, and the whole thing is a good example of why supposedly conservative pundits who so value feeling over thought should be dismissed as untrustworthy: the heart is fickle, so they should be dismissed from the ranks before they inevitably stab us in the back.
And, this near-literal idolizing of Obama is a foreboding instance of the fascist tendencies of leader-worship that Goldberg's been writing about: Obama can't magically erase partisan lines, and it's dangerous to think (or rather, feel) that he can.
This is a domestic version of what Rush rightly described as "Gorbasms".
You know, about twenty-five years ago, Franky Schaeffer wrote a great book about Christianity and the arts called Addicted to Mediocrity. He was a pro-life, conservative evangelical then. In the book, he took Christians to task for having a dumbed down, utilitarian view of the arts. He showed how this didn't used to be the case, and how Christians needed to get involved with the arts again for arts' sake, not as merely a tool for preaching. I remember he wrote about his father with great admiration.
ReplyDeleteNow he seems to have denounced his father and turned his back on everything he used to believe in. Needless to say, I like the old Franky Schaffer better.
The Limbaugh-deranged on the left as well as the quasi-holier-than-thous on the right like Schaeffer are going to feel really silly someday for letting Rush get to them so badly that they turn their back on the most important issue.
ReplyDeleteBTW, I don't think Romney is divisive, but in the small artsy/crunchy cirlces Schaeffer hangs out in he probably symbolizes evil incarnate because of the money. These are the true enviers, IMHO.
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