Mao Zedong-Style / Trump-Style

I grew up in an evangelical, fundamentalist right-wing family that played a direct part in preparing America for the presidency of Donald Trump.

We didn’t know it at the time, but in the 1970’s and 80’s, by making the anti-abortion issue the Evangelical Republican Litmus Test, we opened a door to a new kind of fanaticism that has swept America and has in turn been swept away by Donald Trump.

What I mean by ‘swept away’ is he has turned that fanaticism into a personality cult which bears no resemblance even to the kind of right-wing Christianity that we espoused in the 1970’s and 80’s.

These folks deny facts. They don’t believe in Climate Change. They don’t believe in science. They include a lot of people in their number who are part of wild conspiracy theories. They are easily led. Led now, more than ever, by Donald Trump.

Donald Trump has now crossed the line in the COVID-19 crisis, from simply a buffoon; a clown; a reality TV star into power and ego, into someone who now is cast in the mold of people like Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Stalin, and other totalitarian, authoritarian leaders who have proved willing to sacrifice their own people to cling to power.

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How do we make our way back into love, beauty and creation? Discover my book Letter to Lucy: A Manifesto of Creative Redemption—In the Age of Trump, Fascism and Lies, a multi-touch book about art, love and parenting, from the fall of the Byzantine Empire to the prophetic music of Green Day and everything in between. Read the first chapter for free on your kindle fire or iOS device. Available now on Apple Books and Amazon Kindle Fire.
 

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Caught between the beauty of his grandchildren and grief over a friend’s death, Frank Schaeffer finds himself simultaneously believing and not believing in God—an atheist who prays. Schaeffer wrestles with faith and disbelief, sharing his innermost thoughts with a lyricism that only great writers of literary nonfiction achieve. Schaeffer writes as an imperfect son, husband and grandfather whose love for his family, art and life trumps the ugly theologies of an angry God and the atheist vision of a cold, meaningless universe. Schaeffer writes that only when we abandon our hunt for certainty do we become free to create beauty, give love and find peace. Available now at Amazon.
 

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In 1998, Frank Schaeffer was a bohemian novelist living in “Volvo driving, higher-education worshipping” Massachusetts with two children graduated from top universities. Then his youngest child, straight out of high school, joined the United States Marine Corps. Written in alternating voices by eighteen-year-old John and his father, Frank, Keeping Faith takes readers in riveting fashion through a family’s experience of the Marine Corps: from being broken down and built back up on Parris Island (and being the parent of a child undergoing that experience), to the growth of both father and son and their separate reevaluations of what it means to serve. Available now at Amazon.

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