We cover a lot of ground in this one folks. You may know Frank Schaeffer as the son of famed evangelical author Francis Schaeffer, but since helping his father found the religious right in America (we're not kidding), Frank has had a dramatic personal transformation and a fascinating career. We talk with him about his new book Fall in Love, Have Children, Stay Put, Save the Planet, Be Happy. The conversation covers Frank's role in abortion becoming the cause célèbre of the American evangelical establishment, his relationship with his parents and other famous evangelical leaders of recent decades, what a family values agenda would actually look like, how corporate tech culture is killing people's ability to be happy, and how understanding human evolution can help. Frank is raw, honest, and deliciously brash. He's also got a potty mouth, so be advised if you're listening with children.
Check out Frank's own podcast, In Conversation... with Frank Schaeffer.
The beer we taste in this episode is Terror Dome from Saint Errant Brewing.
To skip the tasting, go to 6:13.
You can find the transcript for this episode here.
=====
Want to support us?
The best way is to subscribe to our Patreon. Annual memberships are available for a 10% discount.
If you'd rather make a one-time donation, you can contribute through our PayPal.
Other important info:
Cheers!
We cover a lot of ground in this one folks. You may know Frank Schaeffer as the son of famed evangelical author Francis Schaeffer, but since helping his father found the religious right in America (we're not kidding), Frank has had a dramatic personal transformation and a fascinating career. We talk with him about his new book Fall in Love, Have Children, Stay Put, Save the Planet, Be Happy. The conversation covers Frank's role in abortion becoming the cause célèbre of the American evangelical establishment, his relationship with his parents and other famous evangelical leaders of recent decades, what a family values agenda would actually look like, how corporate tech culture is killing people's ability to be happy, and how understanding human evolution can help. Frank is raw, honest, and deliciously brash. He's also got a potty mouth, so be advised if you're listening with children.
Check out Frank's own podcast, In Conversation... with Frank Schaeffer.
The beer we taste in this episode is Terror Dome from Saint Errant Brewing.
To skip the tasting, go to 6:13.
You can find the transcript for this episode here.
=====
Want to support us?
The best way is to subscribe to our Patreon. Annual memberships are available for a 10% discount.
If you'd rather make a one-time donation, you can contribute through our PayPal.
Other important info:
Cheers!
Randy 00:15
Welcome to A Pastor and Philosopher Walk into a Bar.
Kyle 00:18
The podcast where we mix a sometimes weird but always delicious cocktail of theology, philosophy and spirituality. Well welcome to A Pastor and Philosopher Walk into a Bar. Today we're talking with Frank Schaeffer. Some of you may have heard of him. His dad was Francis Schaeffer, super influential, super famous evangelical thinker, thought leader, back in, I don't know, when was he most active...
Randy 00:30
70s.
Kyle 00:33
70s, 80s...
Randy 00:39
80s, early 80s.
Kyle 00:48
Definitely everybody I grew up with knew who Francis Schaeffer was. I didn't actually read him until grad school. I had his books for a long time on my shelf, it was one of those things, like, you just have them because you're an evangelical. And I didn't actually get around to reading one of them until I was studying philosophy full time. And that was an interesting experience which maybe we can talk about... But we're actually talking to his son, who has kind of made a career publicly distancing himself from that in various in various different ways. He's a writer. He's a speaker. He's kind of a thought leader in his own right at this point, but in a very different direction. Frank writes very honestly, very transparently about his past and his parents and his own struggles, personally. So what you're gonna get is pretty raw at times. And it's reflected in the tone of the book as well, the book that he just wrote, which is called Fall in Love, Have Children, Stay Put, Save the Planet, Be Happy.
Randy 01:41
That really is the title.
Kyle 01:42
Yep, which is, which is out November 2. And so I don't want to put a disclaimer on it, I guess. But you're in for a wild ride.
Randy 01:49
Well, I do want to say, don't listen to this episode with your kids. If you have kids younger than 15 or so, Frank, he's got a little bit of a potty mouth, somewhat delightfully so in some ways, but he does swear, so put your earbuds on and enjoy this interview.
Kyle 02:03
Yeah. But at the same time, where he's coming from is largely centered on his experience with children. And it's really lovely in that way. Yeah. So parents don't skip it. But but maybe listen without your kids.
Randy 02:15
Yeah. And keep in mind, and I say this in the interview, but I want to just say it again, because Frank comes off very hard on the evangelical superpower superstars of the 70s, 80s, 90s, on up until today. And he doesn't do that from a voice outside of the tradition, saying you guys are a bunch of hypocrites, which most of us do, who have that strong critique. He's saying it as someone who was in the circles, and not just in the circles, but in the limousines, in the private jets, in the helicopters with these huge names, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, Billy Graham, I mean, he knew them all. And that's what turned him off. So hang in there. And just remember, this is from an insider's perspective. So, you also brought today's drink. Can you tell us what we're tasting here today?
Kyle 03:07
Yeah. So I have for us today one of my favorite breweries anywhere in the world, honestly. I love these guys.
Randy 03:14
That's a big deal.
Kyle 03:14
Yeah. And they don't even have a location. They only distribute in the Chicago area. You can't get them in Wisconsin or any other state outside Illinois that I know of. And they make, in my opinion, some of the best IPAs in the country.
Randy 03:28
They don't have a location. So this could be made by Budweiser.
Kyle 03:30
No, I know who it's made by. They have a website and you know, I've interacted with them on social media. They just don't have a taproom yet. Hopefully, they will eventually do that. But they're pretty small, pretty small distribution network, just a select handful of liquor stores and whatnot in the Chicago area you can get their stuff at. But they're called Saint Errant, e r r a n t, Brewing. And they, as I said, specialize in IPAs, particularly New England IPAs, which is the style that I love, this kind of hazy thing.
Randy 03:58
What does that mean?
Kyle 04:00
It means a couple things. It means it's hazy, not clear.
Randy 04:03
So the, it's unfiltered, the yeast is still floating around, yep.
Kyle 04:06
Yeah, yeah. And they tend to be less bitter. And that has to do with when the hops are added. And they also tend to use hops that provide like fruity flavors, without giving any bitterness. So if you recall the King Sue we had from, from Toppling Goliath, this should be a similar flavor profile. So this is called Terror Dome. This is a double dry hopped IPA.
Randy 04:26
Fun. Yeah. It's got that same foggy, yellow color.
Elliot 04:30
Very hoppy on the nose.
Randy 04:32
Pineapple on the nose.
Elliot 04:34
And on the palate.
Kyle 04:35
Yeah.
Randy 04:37
Oh, wow.
Elliot 04:38
I almost wish you hadn't said pineapple because that's the whole thing now.
Kyle 04:40
A little resinous, I think.
Randy 04:44
Resinous, what does that mean?
Kyle 04:45
Like uh, sticky and piney? If that makes sense?
Randy 04:49
Okay, yeah, sure. This is nice. It's different than King Sue. It's a little bit more syrupy, I would say. A little sweeter. Doesn't, doesn't have like the big huge bitter hops, but the hops sit on the back of my tongue.
Elliot 05:00
Normally you're the guy that says banana Kyle, but I'm getting the ripe banana.
Kyle 05:04
Interesting.
Elliot 05:04
Yeah. Especially like a brown ripe banana, really sweet.
Randy 05:08
It's not as big and bright as King Sue for me. I don't quite like it as much to be honest. But it's a damn good IPA, like this is very good. And it's, beer for me has different spots on my tongue and on my palate where it's doing different things. This one does very little on the front of my palate. On the back is where all the bitterness and the hoppy funk comes in.
Kyle 05:30
Yeah, and it's a pretty light drinking IPA, I think. It's maybe seven, eight sh percent, something like that. So not super low, but not super high either. I could drink easily a couple of these and feel pretty good about it. This has Citra hops, which is, tends to be the more fruity ones, kind of easy to remember, Citra. But also Motueka, I never knew how to say that, and one I've never heard of called Waimea. So that's interesting.
Randy 05:56
My life is not better for having know that, but thank you for researching.
Kyle 05:59
You're welcome.
Randy 06:00
Yep. So this is, again, can you tell us what this is again?
Kyle 06:02
Yeah. It's called Terror Dome from Saint Errant Brewing Company in Chicago, Illinois.
Randy 06:07
Delicious. Good stuff. Thank you.
Elliot 06:09
Yeah, enjoyed it.
Randy 06:09
Cheers.
Elliot 06:10
Cheers.
Randy 06:13
Well, Frank Schaffer, so thrilled to talk with you. Welcome to A Pastor and Philosopher Walk into a Bar.
Frank 06:19
Thank you.
Randy 06:20
Frank, you have a wild background. Really, really interesting. I mean, we could talk this whole episode just about your background and your history and where you, how you got to where you are now. But can you bring your listeners into a little bit about who you are, and really where you were, and how you got to where you are now?
Frank 06:37
Okay. So let me work backwards a little bit from today. And I'm 69. So in, in, you know, in seven or eight hours, we'll get back to my early years if I take it slowly. But okay, so today, I spent the day with my three youngest of five grandchildren that I have been doing childcare for for the last 12 years. And my wife Genie and I have been hands on caregivers because both parents work. And working back from that, I was a parent since the age of 17 when I got Genie pregnant, if you want to go to the other end of our lives. We've been together 51 years. Genie got pregnant in L'abri Fellowship, which was a ministry started by my parents in 1947. I was born in 1952. They were American Evangelical missionaries who had gone to Europe at the end of the Second World War to work with kids in bombed out cities. They located in Switzerland, because the infrastructure was still intact after the war, because Switzerland had been a neutral country and avoided the decimation of places like Holland and Germany and Italy and so forth. I grew up in a very small, humble fundamentalist missionary family with my three sisters, very low budget, in a little Swiss chalet, month to month, no money whatsoever, I can remember it was a big deal to have a roast chicken on Sunday divided between my parents and whoever was visiting us and my, my siblings. By the time I was a teenager, my dad was writing books. And he had become a worldwide phenomenon in the evangelical circles, not just in the US, but internationally. Books like The God Who Is There, Escape from Reason, works of philosophy and theology, with a big strong interest in art, art history, literature, culture. In 1970, when the abortion issue started coming up on the radar, Dad, like many evangelicals, this was before Roe v. Wade came down, would have said that he was either pro choice, or ambivalent on the issue of abortion, as in, this is a Catholic issue. The same was true of Dr. Billy Graham, the evangelist. The same was true of Dr. Criswell, the leader of the Southern Baptist churches at that time. He was also the president of the biggest Southern Baptist seminary. And I'm mentioning all this because in the years after 1973 and Roe v. Wade, and when we had made a film series called Whatever Happened to the Human Race, which was the big anti-abortion, pro-life statement, it became assumed after all of that that somehow evangelicals had always been ardent pro-lifers. In fact, the evangelical movement, at best, was very divided, very ambivalent, much the same way as if you had asked evangelicals at that point of time, white American evangelicals, who they voted for, a big proportion would have voted for Democrats, a big proportion for Republicans. The Republican Party in no way was the property of white evangelical culture. And the Democratic Party had not been written off as too liberal or anything else. So I'm jumping around a little bit because my family became known as founders of the religious right because dad, quote, took a stand on the abortion issue. The only reason he did is because, and, and this is going to come off as strange, I talked him into it. And I talked him into it because I was myself convinced that this was a huge watershed issue by someone by the name of C. Everett Koop, who became Ronald Reagan's Surgeon General, who at that time was the surgeon in chief of Philadelphia Children's Hospital, probably the leading pediatric surgeon in the world at that time. And he had become an ardent anti-abortion advocate much before Roe v. Wade for many, many reasons, theological, personal, ethical, because he was a doctor, he worked with a lot of premature babies and so forth, a lot of emotion involved, etc. I got Genie pregnant when we were 17 and 18, and we kept our child, that turned out to be my daughter, Jessica. And as a teen parent with fundamentalist Christian parents who had this child and had had people try to talk Genie and me into having an abortion, this isn't a good idea, the fact that we had kept Jessica and we were very in love with her made this, made me a very prime target for C. Everett Koop's propaganda. Looking back, and something I talk about in my book, in a portion of the book on the abortion issue that I have to cover because our family was so involved in it, I talk about the unfairness of my own views at that time--as this very young man, very brash, fundamentalist Christian, sure of himself, into certainty, judgment of others--we were provided a free place to live for five years, we were given medical insurance free, we ate in the communal dining room, never had to buy a grocery bag of food for five years, we had all the childcare needs met that you could possibly imagine. I had three sisters in the ministry, endless people who would help us with anything we needed. Just fast forward to the present tense. If every young man and young woman who were responsible for children, be they gay or straight or non-binary or pair-bonded or single, had the kind of support we had, we would be living in a Scandinavian country plus some here in the United States. So L'Abri Fellowship practiced actual family values. They didn't just talk about it, they put their money where their mouth was, they backed us up, and they backed up other young couples too. So our family stand on the abortion issue rested in my reaction, and also then me needing to make another film series, because before Whatever Happened to the Human Race, I had directed and written, my dad had written, but I had directed a series called How Should We Then Live on art culture, and that had done very well. The last episode touched on Roe v. Wade, because it came up during the filming. Dr. Koop seized on that and said, okay, now you've got to make a whole series on the life issues. I needed another job. I liked the access to power we were getting in the Republican Party at that time. I liked the money. I liked the paycheck, the gold credit card. I liked Jerry Falwell's free jet he had lent me to go around the US and speak, often in my dad's place because he was battling cancer at Mayo Clinic. And I was completely caught in the trap of evangelical celebrityhood, sidekick-hood, if I could put it that way. Nepotism. All the things that turn the god business in America into basically a criminal enterprise, when you look at the big outfits and how they're running. And I was on the cusp of doing that for the rest of my life. Unfortunately, in terms of my own journey, when my dad died in 1984, I was just 30... I forget what age I was at that point. Within a year or two after that I really had a real change of mind and heart, which we can get into and I talk about in the foreword to this book, trying to explain who I am and how this book came to be. So that change of heart led me out of the evangelical community entirely and in a very different direction politically, and I started to grow up and I started to not be his sidekick anymore. My wife and I suffered enormously financially because there was a lot of money in what we were doing and a lot of stability, lots of ups and downs since, lots of concerns about money issues for 20, 30 years after that, as an author and a novelist and making shitty Hollywood B movies, putting a livelihood together any way I could, as long as it was outside of the evangelical ghetto, as it were. Looking at how our culture has become so materialistic and consumeristic and so sad, really, and so lonely in so many ways, I took five years to write and research this book, Fall in Love, Have Children, Stay Put, Save the Planet, Be Happy, which is basically an argument that we have the wrong idea of success in the United States, and that we define people by their career titles, job status, and income rather than by the quality of the relationships they have with other people, where we all find real joy no matter who we are, pair-bonded, parent or not. And of course I use a lot of examples of my own childcare joys and challenges with grandchildren. But the point I really make in the book basically is that you have a choice in life. And that is do you see yourself as a mother, whether you're male, female, non binary, in other words, a caregiver of those around you, or do you see yourself as a consumer in a sort of an Ayn Randian competition for status and money? And you really can't be both. Either you put the people in your life first, or you put your job title, status, career, and power achievements over others first. And, and so that's what the book gets into. But it comes out of an experience of having failed a lot, having struggled a lot, having found that the one golden through thread is the relationships that sustain me, while everything else has come and gone, including faith in Christianity, and all the rest of it. So in a way, I've spent the last almost 70 years testing the theories I put forward in this book.
Kyle 15:58
One quick follow up. How old were you when you were jet setting around the world with Jerry Falwell?
Frank 16:04
It sounds ridiculous. But I was, I started speaking as my dad's sidekick and replacement when he was ill in my late teens and early 20s.
Kyle 16:13
Okay, I was thinking you must have been pretty young. So on the theme of caregiving and mothering, how do you now view people like Falwell and how they used you? Can I say that? Do you feel like, do you feel like they knew that they were using a child?
Frank 16:27
Yeah. Boy, that's a lot of things. You're like, answering all our questions before we're asking them here. I have a question, a follow-up question about gender. Sure. No, I don't think I was used. I think I... Look, I, I regard myself as a manipulator, as someone who was completely culpable in the situation. There are no excuses at all. It's not that I was a young man and didn't know any better. I knew exactly. Look, when I got into the thing with Falwell and these other guys, I was very sincere. And my passage out of evangelical Christianity was comparing their huge, flaky, multimillion-dollar criminal enterprises to the, literally, the purity and kindness of the L'Abri Fellowship I had been raised in. I was raised in a genuine faith work with real parents who cared for people, who didn't rip them off, who didn't raise money in a specious manner. Dad worked on the side of his bed in a rocking chair on a tea tray, didn't even have an office or a desk. My mom was a secretary or one of my sisters. There was no money, we did not have a car. By the time Dad was a celebrity, and in my young 20s I began to meet Falwell, Dr. Dobson, Pat Robertson, all these other people and realize that in the case of say, Pat Robertson, he was quite literally becoming a billionaire, including owning shares in diamond mines in South Africa, and all this insane stuff. By the time I was flying around in Jerry Falwell's jet, I was already selling out. I had seen the inside of the machine and knew that it was rotten to the core, that these were egomaniacal, narcissistic people, liars, con artists, evangelical versions of Donald Trump, if you want to put it that way. Absolutely clear. And for a while, I was able to talk myself into the good we would do by being allied with these people, even though I knew they were scum. And and it took a while to break that. And really what began to make me want to get out was, A. comparing these mega ministries to the way my parents had run L'Abri and realizing that it had been exceptional, that the rule when it came to big time, celebrity Christianity was these were con artists. That was not, that my dad was the exception and his honesty and his integrity. So I look back on what he believed, and I disagree with a lot of it. But there is absolutely no way that he was a flake or a criminal. He had a lot of integrity, a lot of compassion. So that was my passage out. But of course, once I started looking at that, then everything began to fall apart because not only was he the exception, I began to understand that inevitably, the kind of ideas of exclusivity and certainty that Christianity preaches, and that in fact all fundamentalist religion preaches, whether Islamic or Hindu nationalism, Christian or otherwise, always leads to the same place, and that is either, you know, the big man, the guru, the leader, the dictator, okay, Pat Robertson, Billy Graham, whoever is the huge figurehead, Francis Schaeffer, or some sort of authoritarian system where it's, it becomes absolutely cruel, whether it's misogyny, anti-gay, whatever it is. So, by the time I got to the place where I was questioning my own involvement, I was ready to look at myself in terms of what I was becoming in this movement, and I was becoming, to be honest and frank about it, an asshole by divine right. Why by divine right? Because evangelical Reformed theology tells men that they're in charge of women, that they should discipline children, that God has somehow ordained them to be patriarchal bullies, and that this is the way God intended things. So all the worst testosterone-driven tendencies of, you know, male proclivity to push people around, not only is enhanced by so-called Biblical Christianity it's demanded. So when I say an asshole by divine right, I mean that exactly. You know, you are groomed to be an asshole, but you're told that this is what God intended. So when I saw that, then the choice was really between a marriage that worked to a woman I was in love with, starting to listen to her, change for her, or continue believing what I believed and acting in this, in this asshole manner. So that combined with the fact that I had slapped my daughter, had fits of temper, every time I came off the road--I was gone six months of the year--I came back in a horrible mood. Everything, you know, began to disintegrate. So for me, it was a choice of trying to choose a lifestyle of more integrity on one hand and not be part of a vast criminal enterprise, which is the evangelical movement in the United States, and, and have a marriage to a woman I loved work, or continue to go in this direction that was literally driving me mad and turning me into a monster because I was so angry with myself and the world around me and so frustrated. And then the nepotism was the other side. You know, you wake up one morning, if you're Prince Charles and you wanted to be an architect, say, or a city planner in his case, and somebody tells you no, sorry, mate, you're the king of England. You know, well, wait a minute. I didn't pick this. So being Francis Schaeffer's son in an environment where you're regarded as a mini-prophet, because somebody's got to keep the machine going of the Francis Schaeffer ministry, outreach, book sales, film rentals, all this stuff. You know, I kicked against that as well, just for aesthetic reasons, because evangelical world's so ugly and bare of cultural anything. All that came together in a, in a journey out. And then of course, the, the through line is the thing that I talk about in this book. And that is that what you gradually discovered is that the relationships, when they worked, were the area of life where you actually found joy and happiness. Well, why is that? Well, in evangelical days, I would have said something to the effect that that's how God created us, and so forth, and so on, and so on. And of course, the real truth of the matter is that when you do a little studying, which is why this book took five years, because I had sciency friends who kept telling me I had to read this book and this book and this book, having gone a little deeper, we actually evolved to be caregivers. It's the only reason any human being is here. So your parents may have been jerks and dropped the ball, or you might have been adopted and not know who your parents are. But somebody back there shared some food. Somebody back there took care of somebody back there, an ancestor of yours when they fell down and broke a leg. They didn't just leave them by the trail. They brought them back to the village in a hunter-gatherer society, you know, put them next to the fire and nursed them. If you take the caregiving element out of human evolution, none of us exist. And so what I look at in the book and talk about is not new to anybody who's done any reading in biology and evolutionary psychology and so forth. It's, you know, the facts are all out there. But it was new to me, because I was raised in an evangelical home where studying this kind of stuff, you know, was not what you did, you studied the book of Genesis if you wanted to talk about creation. So I don't come from a sciencey background. I'm pretty well read, but I had never really delved into it. But I spent five years really, really looking at it. And what amazed me was that what we evolved to be was very happy people when we are caring for others. So all the studies of brain science and chemistry, and oxytocin and the love hormone, and all of this tells us that we evolved to get tremendous reward for caring for others, much, much higher than anything we get from making money or position or career or, you know, corner offices and all this crap. The real joy in life is all in this area of mothering. And when I say mothering, that has no gender connotation at all, I'm not using it in that sense. But caring for others. So as an older guy, who suddenly finds himself caring for three little grandchildren for the last 12 years, and finds this is the happiest period of my life so far, and that I share that with a lot of other people, not just grandparents, but people, you know, George Clooney says you'll never get married, he does, he has children, he says he wishes he had now done it 20 years before. David Letterman, the only real meaning in my life is my son and the fact that I committed adultery but my wife took me back and, and now I've got my life together. You see this again and again, repeating with males and females, non-binary people, gay people, and so forth. Brain studies that show that gay adoptive parents develop exactly the same hormonal reactions in their brains when they closely bond with children as a biological mother with a newborn baby when she's breastfeeding the child. So science tells us that what I talk about in the book here, okay, to wave my book around the way Falwell used to wave shit around on the pulpit, you know, send me 25 bucks and I'll give you the book or whatever. You know, this actually all makes sense. So what I stumbled into and realized was making my life happy, and what is missing in so many lives where everything is put ahead of relationships and our connection to other people, makes sense. So I go into details in the book. I have a legislative agenda for what needs to change in our culture in terms of social safety nets to allow people to do this. I talk about the science of it, that it's all shifted from survival of the fittest to the survival of the friendliest. I have a lot of that. But I also have stories about my grandchildren and what has worked for us. And that's, you know, where the book comes from, but it comes out of this life journey. Yeah.
Kyle 17:45
So I don't know if you know who Kristin Kobes DuMez is or have heard of her book, Jesus and John Wayne, but we talked to her a little while ago.
Frank 20:10
I've heard of the book, yes, I can't remember her name.
Kyle 21:35
Really excellent book, highly recommended.
Frank 21:39
Yes.
Kyle 21:46
Making waves, good waves. And one of the things that she argues in that book is that a sort-of a common thread that runs through kind-of the whole history of American evangelicalism, and is really, turns out to be kind-of the core of it, because it unites people who are very disparate theologically--so people as different as, say, John MacArthur and John Piper and Mark Driscoll and you know, James Dobson, maybe even your dad, I don't know--the sort of thing that got all those people who like, very much disagreed with each other about some really significant theological things, the thing that brought them all to the table and enabled them to unite and actually fundraise for each other and, you know, promote each other's work was, it turns out, the suppression of women. That it's this deep complementarian, which just turns out to be patriarchal, thread of what you'd probably call misogyny. So since you kind-of have an inside track with some of those specific people, what do you think of that claim? Does that seem right to you, that, that it was at the end of the day just the suppression of women that they were after?
Frank 27:11
Yeah. And I'll go further than that and say that one of the reasons I wrote this book--way down the list, okay, it wasn't a reactionary book--but a reason to make it seem to me, yeah, this is worth it about year four, you know, when I was losing steam, was that I think what we were doing in the 70s was selling, and the 80s, was selling fake family values. And that really was about the suppression of women. It started with a huge gut reaction against the feminist movement. Let's put this back in the box. Men are supposed to be in charge. In addition to which, the kind of men that rose to leadership positions within the evangelical community were the kind of men who naturally gravitated toward the suppression of women anyway, because most of these guys were and are bullies. If you look at the way they run their quote unquote ministries, these are fiefdoms in the hands of sociopathic narcissists who really don't give a shit about other people and are real liars on top of it. And they, they don't like having anybody stand up to them, much less quote, "a woman." And so essentially, the entire reaction of the evangelical community against Roe v. Wade was rooted way before that in a reaction against feminism, per se, and social equality with men and women, long before career opportunity or anything like that even came into it. And where do you see the proof of this is that the logic of the anti-abortion movement would be to embrace the kind of social policies I talk about in this book and call for legislatively. I'll just give you one example: anti-discrimination laws on the books that make it a crime to demote somebody or have them be less effective in their work because they take parental leave to take care of a child. Where has been the big evangelical push for that? Where's the evangelical push for a stipend for all parents who are caring for children, so that either a biological father or mother or adoptive parent, a non-binary person, can stay home and care for a preschool child? Where's the adjustment of our social security system that pays for the years spent caring for a child at home on a par with the people who paid in through a career outside the home? None of these pushes for social responsibility and equality, which would lift the role of caregiver and make it, to use terms of post-COVID America, into an essential career have ever been put forward by the same evangelical groups that wanted to prevent women from getting contraceptives on their health care insurance, as Hobby Lobby did going to the Supreme Court for it, run by evangelicals, or access to abortion. So you could still have an argument, I would anyway, saying that abortion should be legal. But at least the pro-life evangelical position would be tenable and respectable intellectually, if they had been the spearhead for a legislative agenda to guarantee authentic family values. For instance, that we would be living in a country where a young female resident at Massachusetts General Hospital would be able to take a year off, or two years off, to care for a newborn child, would have had a place to breastfeed or pump milk, would have returned to her career with no even social look at her in an awkward way, saying why did you do that, let alone have to start over or loss of pay in a career or less advancement, that it would be a no brainer that her husband's in law school and he's the one that stays home with their newborn for a year and, both socially and legislatively and in terms of tax strategies, and all the rest of it, that all these family values would actually be written into the fabric of American culture, including fashion. It would just be expected. That's what a pro-life culture would look like. That's what pro-family would look like. Since no evangelical leaders at all pushed for any of those things, even little tiny elements of them, let alone the sort of legislative agenda I call for in the book, we know that whatever their motivation was, it was not to help families. It was not to strengthen relationships. It was not to lift relationship ahead of career in terms of the meaning of life and what actually matters and gives joy. In fact, the careerist push for success of the sort of American white male evangelical careerist, who goes to work, leaves his wife at home, and all the rest of it, if there was any element of the culture that you know, that was the most dutiful disciples of Ayn Rand, it was the evangelical white American male spearheading a massive ministry. And I remember getting a letter from one of Billy Graham's daughters after my memoir Crazy for God came out where I detailed some of the truth about all of this, and she said, you have told the truth, we were sacrificial lambs. And what she meant by that is exactly what I'm talking about, in a macho male culture, assholes by divine right, the wife and kids stay home, the husband does all this big powerful shit, and he's in charge. So, you know, the fact of the matter is the least pro-family groups in America have included in them evangelical leaders when it comes to what really would have mattered. So we were selling fake family values. Fall in Love, Have Children, Stay Put, Save the Planet, Be Happy is an agenda of actual family values. In other words, if what I call for in this book happened, socially, politically, legislatively, morally, spiritually, we would actually be living in a pro-family culture. And when I say pro-family, I don't mean traditional nuclear family. I'm talking about pro-family across the board. A teenager, high school student who got pregnant at 17, you know, and wanted to keep that child would find an entire system in place to help her not only have the child, keep the child, pay for the child, have an education, have a career, come home and take care of that child, if she wanted to take a couple of years off--I'm talking about a single mom here--there'd be an entire universe in place to make that happen, in the same way that we have entire universes to make other things happen. The same would be happening in terms of the cost of education, medical care, all of this. So what I'm calling for in the book here, in the weird way, in a sense, is to call the bluff of the so called "family values" folks and say, okay, you've been talking about family values, here it actually is. Put your money where your mouth is. Do this or shut up. That's what this book is about.
Randy 34:04
It's interesting, Frank, because I think with the rise of Trump, it's almost as if the former family values crowd have kind-of just like willingly thrown away that agenda. It's no more family values.
Kyle 34:15
They're not even claiming it anymore.
Randy 34:16
No.
Frank 34:16
They’re not even pretending.
Randy 34:16
No, yeah. So Frank, you know, there's the misogyny and patriarchy that's driving and fueling a lot of this, that you were a part of, you were part of the machine, I can't stress that enough to our listeners. It's not from the outside looking in. This is from with, from in the limousine and in the private jet. But you have this point in your book, it's this little paragraph in your introduction, where you talk about how maybe the LGBTQ community's struggle and journey towards acceptance might be a model for how to practically walk out what you're advocating for in the book. And I found that really fascinating and kind of compelling. Can you flesh that one paragraph out for us just a little bit?
Kyle 34:28
Not even a facade.
Frank 34:53
Well, I could read it to you, but I think I'll just talk about it. The point I was trying to make is that you know, again, in contrast to the evangelical community that has talked about all this, the one shining example we have in the US that I can think of right now, has been the emergence of the Gay Pride movement that came out of Stonewall, and then became the whole LGBTQ movement, because they are, as an identifiable movement, alone, the only group of people in this country that have actually declared that the right to love and the ability to have relationships, in their case, ones that were not approved of by the majority of society for a long time, trumped everything else. In other words, we're willing to come out and lose a job to maintain that relationship with a boyfriend, or girlfriend for a lesbian couple. We're willing to be spit upon and beaten up to maintain the right to love the person we want to love. We're willing to go to court and fight for the right to marry somebody we want a right to marry. We want to fight for the right to have a child by either IVF or by adoption or whatever it may be as a gay couple. That community are the only people--not evangelicals, not straight white heterosexual males--the gay community, to use the old terminology, but let's just say, you know, inclusive of the non-binary community today and so forth, this is the only group of people who have stood up and said, we are going to fight for the right to put relationships, caring for others, mothering, if you like, love, ahead of every other value this country holds up as dear. It is the exact opposite of what you might call the shareholder corporate mentality. We are willing to sacrifice all of that for the right to have relationships. And they're the only identifiable group that's done that. So I hold them up at the beginning of the book and say, hey listen guys, we have, the agenda for us has been set by the fight, Stonewall foreward, of this community, on behalf of all of us. Now let's all start to demand the rights that the activists of the gay movement of the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s fought for when they came out and said, we're not going to take this anymore, we demand the right to love and be loved. It's time that all of us do this. So this business, for instance, I've been talking to a lot of women who were interested in this book before it came out about the fact that they find themselves in their careers having to lie about their own family values. They're going to do a school pickup, but they're on the phone telling people they're in the office. They never put on their resume that being a mother or being a parent has helped them in terms of formative experiences that make them qualified to run a company. My daughter is a CEO of an investment company. And she says, talks about how so many young women in her company don't even want to talk about romantic attachments, let alone children, as if somehow family life is something you can't mention or you're, you're looked at as unqualified and unprofessional. And as my daughter says, and I quote her in the book, you know, men started these companies, and the idea was the family was at home and out of sight. And, you know, the more professional you were, the less any other element came into it. This kind of holistic approach of living your life in the open. You know, I was talking to Felicia Davis in my own podcast, which is called In Conversation with Frank Schaeffer. She was saying, you know, she's so done with this. She's the CEO of the Chicago Women's Foundation, tremendously powerful black woman who was chief of staff for Rahm Emanuel in the city and before that a detective on their violent crime squad for 10 years. I mean, we're just talking amazing woman and a mother who's had you know, raised children, and so on and so forth. She was saying she's completely done with it. That caregiving is the number one priority, and when she goes to care for her old mother who's unwell right now, she doesn't tell people she's in the office anymore. She says, I'm taking care of my mom today. Deal with it. And I, and I'm talking to moms and parents, male and female parents, and so forth, who were saying the same thing. They're not pretending anymore. And of course, COVID broke some of those barriers because somebody walks, you know, a kid walks through a Zoom call, toilets flush in the background, toddlers run through the picture. You can't pretend that you're not sitting at home when you're sitting at home, working from home because of COVID. And then now having maybe chosen to stay home, which is another thing the book is about, in saying look after COVID, do we really want to go back to normal, quote unquote, the way things were? Or do we want to learn what worked better for people in terms of family structure and so forth during the pandemic? So, I hope that this book is part of a trend that is smashing the barriers between private and public life and between, between our family lives and relationships--be they pair-bonded or gay, straight, with kids or without kids, irrespective of that--this book is for everyone because it's a book about where do we put our priorities? And part of that is by telling the truth of what's important to us. And, and I urge people, for instance, not to move just to get a job that's going to make more money. I mean, people move 11 times on average in America, and then they wonder why they're lonely and don't know anybody and why they have a problem and there's no one to call. And who's going to help with the kids? Well, you know, your grandparents are in Florida, you're in Albuquerque, New Mexico, now you're moving to San Francisco because you've got this high-tech opportunity, or whatever it is. And then it's like, this kind of atomizing of our lives with no connection, obviously, we've designed a culture that would, that really, you know, if you were trying to put together a society that would make relationships impossible and dead ends, we've done it.
Randy 40:42
Wow. Yep. It's interesting. I'm a pastor, and I've got a good friend who took a job at a mega church in our area and quickly realized that the only way to get about two hours with his family, from four to six, is to basically lie and say, I'm in a meeting, I can't, I can't, you know, be in your meeting, because I'm already in a meeting, because when he would say, I want to have dinner with my family, it wasn't good enough for the church. This is a mainline evangelical Protestant church. It wasn't good enough for the people. He had to actually lie to have time with his family. It just tells you how much of that culture, this consumeristic, capitalistic culture, has seeped into the church to such great effect that it's not just the church leaders, the white male church leaders who are hungry for power, misogynistic, will do anything to put more butts in the seats and more money in the coffers. It's actually the people who are in the pews as well, to be honest with you. It's seeped into all of us. So I think this book, Frank, is so important, and so jarring when, when I read it, it's just this brilliant critique on how far our society has gone. It's not just that this has just happened, you know, recently, it's that the whole thing is built to pull people apart. I enjoy also the, the amount of COVID that's in it, because this book, in many ways, seems like it was born out of your experience during COVID and what, what COVID taught you. Can you tell us a little bit about that, Frank?
Frank 42:07
Well, you know, I was four years into the project and COVID hit and it was basically, you know, really strange, because I was so sad about COVID, but everything I was calling for in the book in terms of reconsidering our priorities was forced on us. So essentially, it's almost like the cosmos said, okay, we'll create the context for Frank's new book here. Because, you know, what would have seemed far fetched before COVID, you know, stay home, I mean, look at the thing, "Fall in Love, Have Children, Stay Put," you know, all of a sudden, yeah, stay put was what you had to do. And we, and as these, as these pandemics cycle through, because we've so messed with nature,that, you know, it isn't just going to be COVID, you understand, this, welcome to the rest of your life, it's always going to be something now, like, very similar to this, environmental catastrophe, and so forth. You know, you better figure out what's important to you. That's what the cosmos is telling us now. You know, you have messed with Mother Nature and Mother Nature is pissed. So if you can't circle the wagons and know who has your back and who you love and who you'll care for and who will care for you, you are pretty screwed right now. Because this is no time to be alone and unattached. And it's only going to be more so as things keep moving forward. So essentially, all this happy clappy Ayn Rand masters of the universe bullshit, you go off and start Google or something, good luck with that. And Google and other corporations are being challenged. In fact, Google had to do a statement a while back saying that if people did not return to the office, they were going to take a pay cut, and everybody who wanted to stay home agreed to the pay cut. And, you know, American corporate leaders are going to find out that COVID has made their workforce less malleable, because people got a tiny taste of what actual human life is like, where you are forced to look inward and be contemplative and have a little quieter life. And you wake up one morning, you say, you know what, I didn't need all that shit. Besides which, I can do exactly the same job sitting here with my laptop, why am I doing this? Or whatever the question may be, or a mom who got more time with her toddler, whatever, a dad who stayed home and said, and he says, you know what, I mean, look at what I've been missing all this time. So we've all been forced to look at this. But the, the thing I talk about in the book is that, first of all, the way we run these corporate values of shareholder value is contrary to the way we evolved. That's the big point I'm making. Don't, don't be surprised you're unhappy when every gene in your body is screaming, what are you doing to us? I mean, seriously. We are built a certain way. This has nothing to do with created in God's image or how we're intended to live or morality, none, none of that. This is just straight up what works. And what works for human beings, all right, duh, and amazing that you even have to say this, is that someone cares about you, and you have people to care about. And when you don't have those things, because you built a society in which your kids are shoved into preschool, daycare, you're in, in work, you have to lie about time you want with your family because corporate philosophy doesn't take into account human need, oh, and by the way, grandparents are nowhere in sight because you waited till you were 47 for IVF and now they're 100 or they're dead or they're locked away in an old folks home or they were idiots and moved to Florida because they don't like shoveling snow and they moved away from their grandchildren, because everything in our culture pushes us away from each other. We're all put into these compartments. And a lot of them are stratified by age. So the toddlers are off here, these people are off there, the idea of community or you know, the idea of the old Italian farm in Lombardi, for instance, or on the Ligurian coast where they just added a new wing to the building when somebody had more babies or family or another generation moved in. You know, there's the great grandparents and the grandparents and the parents and the grandparents are raising the kids so the parents can work on the farm or in the vineyard or the olive grove. This is how, you know, human beings functioned until very, very recently. And so basically everything we're doing in terms of compartmentalizing our lives into career and family, education... You know, you have all these poor college kids that I meet when I go speak at schools basically saying they don't dare fall in love. Or if they're in love, they push the career away, because hey, everybody's telling me I gotta get a master's degree first. And so why would I get, why would I be in a pair-bonded relationship now? I can't get serious about this, it'll hurt my career. Push it a little further. How could I have a child now? You know, if I don't get my career established, first, how can I have a child? So we have a multibillion-dollar, actually closer to a trillion-dollar industry of fertility, because we haven't even looked at our biological clocks and said, how do we accommodate that? Everywhere you look at it, it's out of sync with what actually works for human beings. So you know, anybody that looks in this book and says, oh, Frank's calling us back to a traditional thing, yeah, I am, but not traditional American. I'm calling us back to traditional hunter-gatherer societies where we all shared the work together.
Elliot 47:26
Friends, before we continue, we want to thank Story Hill BKC for their support. Story Hill BKC is a full menu restaurant, and their food is seriously some of the best in Milwaukee. On top of that, Story Hill BKC is a full service liquor store, featuring growlers of tap available to go, spirits, especially whiskies and bourbons, thoughtfully curated regional craft beers, and 375 selections of wine. Visit storyhillbkc.com for menu and more info. If you're in Milwaukee, you'll thank yourself for visiting Story Hill BKC, and if you're not, remember to support local. One more time, that's storyhillbkc.com. Support is also in from Morley Maple Syrup, located in northern Wisconsin, I got a chance to catch up with John Morley on Zoom. How's it going?
John 48:11
Hey, we're, we're, I've never done this before out here at the sugar house. This used to be our old evaporator room where we made syrup, but by the tables there, I do have some bourbon barrels aging. Those will get bottled, hoping next week. We partnered up with 45th Parallel, a distillery out of New Richmond. And I don't know, what do you think, they've been around 15 years now or something like that. So we're gonna get their freshly dumped bourbon barrel, we'll put syrup in it, and I'll age it at least eight months, and then I'll dump the barrels and next week, I'll drop them back off to them. And they'll put the bourbon spirit back in it, and then they'll have a maple bourbon, is what they run with it.
Elliot 48:53
I've had a chance to try Morley Maple Syrup, and the bourbon flavor is excellent. It's appropriately subtle and great with any bacon dishes. So you'll want to pick up some of that. They also have a variety of other flavors, including jalapeno, which is really interesting and also very good. Of course, you can also find classic maple syrup, which has tasting notes of tree, nature, and happiness. You can find all of this and more at morleymaplesyrup.com. That's morleymaplesyrup.com.
Randy 49:28
So speaking of evolution, wiring us like this for caregiving, for mothering, I, I'm with you in, I'm a Christian, but I see evolution as the process by which God created all things. So would you be comfortable with some, some of our listeners might be bristling a little bit and saying, oh, is that really evolution or is it fill in the blank? Would you be comfortable with us inserting the Imago Dei, perhaps, as one of the reasons why we're wired for relationship--why we're, why things are falling apart is because we're not, we're not reflecting this thing that we've been created in light of, which is a relationship that is Father, Son and Spirit by nature--would you be comfortable with that interchangeability? Or is that something that you're not comfortable with, Frank?
Frank 50:09
I would, I would say, short answer, I'm very comfortable with it. Longer answer is I'm very comfortable with it because however one gets to the truth of the fact of what human characteristics actually work to our advantage in terms of providing joy and comfort and stability and love in life, I don't care what you call it. But the fact of the matter is, evolution is real. That's how we became what we are. If there's some grand design behind that, fine. I, it happens not to be my view, or put it this way, I'm ambivalent about that because I, you know, I don't believe in those sorts of certainties. But on the other hand, that's a much better explanation than saying, somehow, corporate America has come up with some brand new good thing that trumps reality. And that's where we are now. So the real leap of faith is not a Christian or a deist saying they see God's hand in this. The real leap of faith is people who trust Ayn Rand and corporate philosophy against all the evidence of evolution and Christianity, if you could put it that way.
Randy 51:12
Sure, sure.
Frank 51:13
So in this case, the evolutionist and the Christian theologian, you know, would be completely on the same side. And for the same reason, and that is that in the real world, what makes human beings happy is the quality of their relationships with other people and the care they receive and the care they give, and where they put themselves geographically to receive that care. And really funny things come forward. I mean, I have this in my book, you know, when it gets into caring for grandchildren, which I'm interested in because I do it. You know, there was this whole Berlin study I cite that was backed up by another study in Belgium and one in the States, that when it comes to longevity, the most predictable element in somebody living longer than average is not smoking, or even diabetes, it's whether they have a daily and regular interaction with a grandchild, when it gets to my age group. And this has nothing to do with spirituality and God's intent. Or you could say everything does, you know, be my guest. But the fact of the matter is, when you have a close relationship with a young person, okay? Rather than, say, going to an elder hostel thing, and you're doing a pretend university course to keep your brain alive or going on a cruise, when you have that loving relationship with a young person, as an older person, you do better than someone who is simply living alone in any circumstance or in a retirement village. So the ludicrousness of these retirement villages where no one can be there unless they're over 55 or 60, when science, actual science, tells you that older people do best in a regular, caring, responsible relationship with young people, you know, the fact that everybody functioned this way, and it really does take a village, and it has always been the function of older people to allow younger parents the freedom to do their work--till the field, cut the grain, tend the olive grove, build the wine press, go out to sea and fish while the grandfather remains on the on land with the child--this is how it all has always worked. And we come to modern America, post industrial revolution--that would include the UK and European countries--and we say sorry, all, all bets are off. You're all now alone. This is the stage of your life called education and career; you are to put that first and pretend none of this exists. And by the way, if you can earn money by moving away from your family four times, so now no one's around you, do that too, because you really should go for the maximum amount that you can earn. And then at the end of the day, we look at all the studies coming out by Cigna and everybody else saying we are the most lonely generation that's ever existed in the United States, we are the least satisfied. Parents never feel they have the time to be with their children. Oh, by the way, our kids are committing suicide at rates that were unimaginable to any other generation. Other than that, you know, how is it all working for you? That's where we are. And that's what the book talks about. The great news is that with or without a huge legislative change, which has to happen, we can make individual choices that buck the system and adopt other priorities, and already push our own lives in a better direction if we just start making some better choices. And that applies to most people.
Kyle 54:26
Yeah. So Frank, I'm a philosopher, and I kind-of think about everything through that lens, and the parts of your book specifically about evolution reminded me of teaching Jean-Jacques Rousseau to my students and his takedown of Thomas Hobbes, and how, you know, it's basically civilization that's corrupted us, what we need to do is get back to nature--of course, he had very specific, very patriarchal views of what that would look like--but, you know, the idea that all of the sort of suffering that we experience in our life, our psychological suffering in particular, is due to building this artificial thing that has all these built-in expectations, and forgetting what we actually, you know, came out of nature to do. And he makes the point against Hobbes that, you know, what Hobbes missed--who has a very low view of human nature--what he missed was that in order to be a good citizen, you have to first be a good parent, a good brother, a good, whatever. And I'm also reminded, in connection with that, of some current, say, biologists, primatologists, a guy named Frans de Waal, for example, who argues very similarly that, you know, people look at evolution critically as saying, look, if you just want to understand human nature through the lens of evolution, you're gonna end up with this really violent, selfish, group-oriented kind of thing, but that's not accurate, because if you look at actual primates, they have, they have empathy, they have reciprocity. He tells this really interesting story of, I think it was a chimp who had gotten up on top of a building and wouldn't come down. And so they tried to entice her down in every way they could think of, bananas, everything, none of it worked. And so eventually, the trainer lay down on the ground and pretended to be hurt, and cried, and the chimp came down to comfort her. And so you see this stuff in there too. And people like Frans de Waal will point out, both of those things are in, are in evolution. And so I want to put the point a little bit critically to you, let's acknowledge everything you've said, all of that pair-bonding stuff, all of that caring for each other stuff, that all is in our evolutionary nature. But so is the group, kind-of, xenophobia and inwardness and fear of the other--you acknowledge that, frankly, in the book. So if both of these, do you think one trumps the other ultimately? Is this an eternal struggle? Like, are the--maybe this is the question I want to ask--are the resources for overcoming the negative side of that actually within evolution? Or do we have to look elsewhere?
Frank 56:46
No, they're within evolution. And I can prove that 100%. This is not a scientific proof, but I think it's a good one. And that is the three of us are sitting here talking. That if the group xenophobia, warlike killer nature, cruelty of humanity, all of which is there, had consistently trumped the survival of the friendliest, none of us would have made it. We are only here because generation after generation after generation of our primate ancestors did not drop the ball. They did come to the wounded. So that yes, you have horrific suffering. Yes, you have unlimited cruelty. Yes, we are planet-destroying parasites. All of that is true. But when it comes to the actual survival of the human race, the fact that we are sitting here proves absolutely and categorically that the human community has managed to transcend again and again and again and again and again and again and again, in millions and hundreds of millions of individual instances of caregiving transcending selfishness, of sacrifice, and selflessness transcending grasping-ness, and we see this as a trend, which is why I, you know, I'm writing my book as a very hopeful human being. I am an optimist. Because I think that most people given half a chance gravitate towards selflessness. And I don't think that's a Pollyanna, kind-of Oprah-esque wishful thinking, you know, that is the way we operate. That is the way we roll. Now, the tabloid headline is always the tragedy. But the hundreds and millions of people who go through the day caring for the people around them, you know, if you fall on the street, in most American cities, where you could also be shot by a random killer, or gunned down in a mass killing or whatever it may be, most of the time, someone will call 911. And somebody will show up and do something. That's actually the way the human race functions. So it's a good, it's a good way to see this. Yes, the mass shooter guns 50 people or so down in, in Las Vegas from a hotel window, but the majority shows up trying to help the people who have fallen down before they bleed out. And they're help, they're dragging strangers to safety. And they're doing that by the thousands, not by the hundreds, not by the one. And so that is the anatomy of the entire human journey. So that we are, we have a right to be optimistic about the value of human relationships, because of the fact you and me are sitting here, and we know what jerks we can be. And we know how selfish we are. And we know the horrors other people have suffered. And we know the cruelty that we ourselves have inflicted on others. But the empathy has triumphed and the proof is any of us made it. We are not, we are not genocidal maniacs, because we're here, aren't we? And generation after generation after generation of parents and lovers and friends and acquaintances and strangers stepped up that you will never meet. And it's the only reason you're going to draw your next breath. You will never know who they were, but they were there for you or you wouldn't be here. The anonymous nurse who cleared the airway, the midwife in a hut somewhere, the person who found that child by the trail and picked them up and took them back to the tent and fed them something. This is the history of the human race. We are caregivers. And when we design a whole culture as modern Northern America has been designed, along corporate values, that makes a mother with a child at home lie to get some time to take that kid to the doctor because it seems unprofessional and she fears for her job advancement, then we've created a fucking monster. And it has, it has to be undone. Because it flies, because had we always behaved this way, if corporate America had been in charge in the ancestral village of whatever stage of evolution you look at, we'd all be gone. None of us would have made it if Google had been driving evolution, or Facebook, or all these hotshot companies, none of us would be here, because that ethic doesn't breed life. It's narrow and stupid. It's the stuff of the extreme sports where you go to a mountaintop in a helicopter, risking every rescuers life, cecause you know, some stupid company has given you the money to stick something on your helmet, now you're gonna dive off because you want this experience, you don't see anybody around you. The opposite of that is the nurse who's in some ICU unit tonight risking her life caring for a COVID patient she's never met because some idiot didn't get the vaccine, but she's still there doing her job. But guess what, there's more of her than there are of the assholes jumping off clifftops to take videos of themselves because Red Bull's going to sponsor them. There's more of that nurse than them. How do I know that? I can prove that for the whole of human history. Why? Because you're sitting there and I'm sitting here, and had they all been Red Bull guys jumping off cliffs for thrills, or, you know, the Wehrmacht marching into Poland, or whatever you want to look at, none of us would be here. Because the ethic of the startup that doesn't give a shit about anybody and won't even pay its taxes and moves it all overseas so it doesn't have to deal with American corporations and builds itself a rocket to get to Mars first, if that's how everybody had rolled, no human would have survived. It survived because most human beings care about other people first. And in our culture, sadly, we have to hide that caring because it's considered non-professional. So mothers have to lie when they go pump milk and pretend they're doing something else. Well, that has to end and that's what my book is about.
Randy 1:02:50
Yeah. It's remarkably optimistic. I mean, incredibly optimistic.
Kyle 1:02:54
Yeah. It's hopeful.
Randy 1:02:55
Frank Schaeffer. The book is Fall in Love, Have Children, Stay Put, Save the Planet, Be Happy. I want to call you radical because you sound radical, Frank, but it's so damn traditional, what you're calling for, I can't do it. The book is going to be a challenge for, I guarantee you, each and every listener. The values we've all been shaped, if you're in a first-world country listening to this, we've all been shaped by the value system that Frank is telling us is tearing us apart. So thank you for writing this book, Frank. And I'm just super, super excited about the fact that we're talking to a person who came out of the evangelical superstar culture that almost killed him, and he wound up being saved by his grandchildren. That's someone that I'm willing to listen to.
Frank 1:03:40
Thank you. Well, that's, that part of this whole interview is true. I have been saved by my grandchildren, literally. So thank you for saying that.
Kyle 1:03:49
Yeah, that's awesome. It's, it's funny. I hope this doesn't sound trite, I don't intend it that way, so, my wife and I are huge fans of Fred Rogers, he's kind of like our moral exemplar, in some ways. And what you were just saying really brought to mind some things he said. He won an award for something, and he stood in front of this crowd of celebrities, and instead of thanking them for the award, he said, now we're all going to take a minute and I want you to think to yourselves of the people who loved you into being. And he just stood there in silence for like 20 seconds. And everybody in the room wept. Cuz I think, this really jibes with, with what you're getting at. That's, that's deep in our DNA, if you want to put it that way.
Frank 1:04:24
Yeah. And I, and I would just say, listen, you know, if there's anybody out there, when you do read this book, and I hope you do, and you want me to do something with you, or for you, as in you have a book club or some group, I will do anything I can to get this message out. I'm not difficult to reach, and please, I will respond. So you know, book clubs, anybody, if it's just you and your mother-in-law and you want to call yourself a book club, I'll be there with a Zoom call for you at some point to discuss this book, and do whatever it takes to get the word out. So you know, I am not a big deal. I am easy to reach and I will respond, and I can get back to people who email me and ask for things, and I really, really, really want to do what I can to get the word out. So please do ask me for stuff.
Randy 1:05:08
So that's remarkably generou, Frank. Let's say that, I guarantee you some listeners will want to do that. Where can they get in touch with you? What's the best place to track you down?
Frank 1:05:15
Just email me, frankaschaefer@aol.com. And you can post that. I don't care if my personal email, I have a Gmail account that I check just for business stuff, but my personal email account, I will respond to, just put on the subject line what it is you're looking for, where you heard about this, and I'll get back to you, and you can put that up with this.
Randy 1:05:34
That's amazing. Frank Schaeffer, thank you for joining us. It's been a pleasure to chat with you.
Frank 1:05:39
My pleasure. And listen, thank you guys for taking the time. I really appreciate it.
Elliot 1:05:46
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Randy 1:06:12
Let me ask you one last, this is probably off the record, but we're still recording...
Frank 1:06:21
Recorder's still running, so anything you want to use.
Randy 1:06:24
Billy Graham is such a beloved cherished figure within the, you know, evangelical movement. I feel like I'm asking a question that might break countless hearts, but you knew Billy Graham a little bit?
Frank 1:06:34
Yes I did. Yeah, I knew him and his family and his daughter Gigi and I were friends and we go way back. And there's all kinds of intertwined family history. Ruth, his wife, was one of my mother's best friends. And you know, we had countless interactions with them.
Randy 1:06:46
What kind of man was Billy Graham?
Frank 1:06:47
Billy Graham was totally sincere, believed in what he was doing, and was not part of the vast criminal enterprise known as American Evangelical Christianity. He got caught up in it by the time his son Franklin was pushing him to appear with Trump and these other guys. He was no longer himself. And he was taken advantage of by a very pushy, far right wing, grasping son, who sadly was not at all like Billy. But Billy has a lot of integrity as a human being. It was 1954, he insisted on integrating his evangelistic meetings in the South. This is before anybody in the so called secular culture was even doing this kind of thing. He put his money where his mouth was. I have, you know, I've never heard a hint of impropriety about Billy and Ruth. They were in love. They were married. They were great. They were an exemplary couple, you know, faithful and kind to each other and to others. Ruth was always nice to me, his wife, Billy was always kind to me. Gigi is a lifelong friend. I still have breakfast with her when I'm in part of, her part of the world. It was all good. Where it all goes to pieces is the modern Billy Graham manifestation with Franklin. And now all you need to know about Franklin is this, and I'm not telling tales out of school, it was covered extensively in the Washington Post. So you can Google this and look it up if you don't believe me. And that is Ruth was adamant when she was dying that she wanted to be buried in Montreat in her family, near her family home in a little country cemetery. And her son wanted to bury her at the Billy Graham Center to become a draw for fundraising in a sort of a mausoleum and, and she was so angry about it, she got her lawyer to come in and draw up a legal document with witnesses. And Franklin went against that and literally had her body shipped off against her wishes and against the wishes of other members of the family. And the reason why is he figured that way he, Billy, would agree to be buried wherever Ruth was, and Billy did, because he wanted to build a, a sort of a Protestant version of a Vatican, you know, structure with, with almost relics on board, horrible stuff. You know, who, who buries their mom where she doesn't want to be buried and has begged you not to be buried there? That's Franklin. That's all you need to know. Finished. I mean, there's lots of other shit about him. But all you need to know about Franklin is that his mother went to the extent, in a hospital room in Washington, bringing a lawyer in to try to stop what her son wanted to do with her body--this is while she was alive--and he got his way and he had her buried there, and that's all you need to know about Franklin Graham. Billy, on the other hand, was a man of integrity and decency. I don't agree with the theology anymore. But if any, you know, if, if, two lines were forming, and if his kind of Christianity prevailed in the United States, with many lapses and being too political and we all make mistakes, and God knows I have, but that said, he was a very decent human being.