I was an evangelical insider: Here’s what they’re saying about Trump’s loss.
I come from an evangelical leadership family so I track what’s happening. NEW recurring theme: Angry evangelical chat room exchanges are increasing where true believers argue. Just how “chosen” was Trump as “God’s instrument?”
Loss is causing panic. DID God choose Trump or not?!?
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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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4 Comments. Leave new
Thank you, Frank!
I always appreciate your voice in these matters. Having, myself, fled the White Evangelical cult that was influenced by the writings of your father, I am one of the people that can really understand, like you, the danger that these folks present to us, the country, and the world. Again, thank you!
It is important to remember that the Evangelical Christians who support the Republicans have been deceived. Christians, after all, are sheep. They follow. Christians are seldom the best and brightest. And, yes, your father was the primary leader who led Evangelical Christianity to the horrible state it is in today. But, your father did not mean for this to happen. Your father, and Billy Grahm, were very, very good Christians. It is extraordinarily important to understand that Jesus did not teach what so many in Evangelical Christianity now claims He taught. Jesus is not the problem and what He taught is not the problem. The problem is sheep who have been deceived by wolves in sheep’s clothing.
I am sad to say that, yes, Francis Schaeffer was one of those who led American evangelical Christianity down this disastrous and ugly path. Schaeffer Sr. was an influential voice, indeed highly influential, but that being said it should be added that he was not the first nor necessarily the primary voice within that movement.
What is less known is that initially he very much did NOT want to go down that path, instinctively realising that was not his true calling.
The following has to be said though Frank won’t like it if he reads it, but it was above all he who persuaded his father, against his better judgement, something he does not emphasise enough when talking about his and his father’s role in this movement, to go down that path. As Os Guinness, the best man at Frank’s wedding and a person who knew both men deeply: “(Frank) would boast that he could twist his parents around his little finger, and time and again he proved it.”
https://banneroftruth.org/uk/resources/book-review-resources/2008/fathers-sons-francis-schaeffer-frank-schaeffer-and-crazy-for-god/
Francis Schaeffer Sr. had two parts to his public ministry, one where he helped many people understand the intellectual fog of relativism and post-modernism that had enveloped and blinded them and helped them see their way out into the light — and helped the evangelical church come out of its cocoon and live IN the world — and the other being this tragic return to his dark fundamentalist roots: http://articles.ochristian.com/article8515.shtml
I prefer to remember him for the former rather than the latter.
Yeshua taught that “I and the Father are One” (by example those that follow him and the Father are also One”. He also taught “Knock and the door will be opened” (not hit the altar, repent, and accept the dogma to pry the door open).
John 8:32 KJV: And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.