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I’ve been reading Frank Schaeffer’s Patience with God over the past month. There are several things about his book that I appreciate: his belief that art and literature should be honest rather than one-dimensional Christian propaganda; his point that medieval churches were built to outlast their builder, indicating that Christianity back then didn’t have the sort of personality cults that afflict modern evangelicalism, at least not to the same degree; his statement that he dreads his elderly mom’s passing, even though he found her annoying throughout his life; etc.
I flinch, however, at some of these statements that he makes:
Page 86: But back to [Christopher] Hitchens: What no one knows, including (I suspect) Hitchens, is whether Hitchens is serious, or just a Brit former-lefty version of Ann Coulter, cashing in on the American market and dedicated to entertaining (and making a great living off) those of the godless marshmellow of the American left who will tolerate him, instead of entertaining (and making a good living off) the God-fearing even-lower-Neanderthal-brow Americans of the right who mistake Coulter for a serious (or even decent) person.
(BTW, I do enjoy Schaeffer’s discussion of Hitchens. I once criticized a Christian who said that he doesn’t find anything in atheists that he would like to emulate. While I consider that to be too broad of a statement, as there are good and bad people in all sorts of camps, I wonder why anyone would consider Hitchens a hero!)
Page 94: These authors (all of whom are studied at Wheaton and some of whose papers are enshrined there) would have shot themselves rather than be condemned to attend, let alone teach at, Wheaton College or any other evangelical/fundamentalist backwater institution like it.
The context here is that C.S. Lewis smoked and drank, so he probably wouldn’t be allowed to teach at Wheaton were he alive today, even though Wheaton idolizes him as a great Christian thinker.
Pages 100-101: And woe betide [Rick] Warren if he expresses any truths about his doubts or failings or, worse yet, casually mentions that he’d rather be, say, a secular Jew free to say or do what he wants without a gaggle of low-IQ evangelicals parsing his every move.
I can somewhat understand where Schaeffer’s coming from, for he’s probably encountered a lot of Christian fanatics in his lifetime. I have too, but not to the extent that he has.
But I’m not big on calling people stupid. I don’t like to dehumanize people (even though, as a sinner, I have done so in the past).
Intelligence is relative. I may be smart in a particular area, but there are people who are smarter than me in that area. And those people can be on the right, the center, or the left of the political or religious spectrum. Then there are people who aren’t as knowledgeable as I am in that area, and yet they’re intelligent in other areas. I know this one right-wing fundamentalist lady who strikes me as a scary fanatic, yet she ran her own small business. I’d struggle to do that!
Some Christians have claimed that Anne Rice dehumanized Christians when she made her recent statement against Christianity. But I don’t think that’s what she did. She didn’t call anyone stupid. She just stated that she had problems with things she has observed in Christianity, and so she’s leaving. There’s disagreement, and there’s disagreement that overlaps with dehumanization. And yet, I’m sure there are Christians (especially in America) who will call any disagreement with them “persecution”.
