Frank Schaeffer is uniquely placed to level the following critique concerning the American's right's, and the mainstream media's, excoriation of Barack Obama because of condemnation of America from Obama's ex-pastor Wright. Frank Schaeffer, son of seminal Christian right leader and author Francis Schaeffer, suggests there's a double standard at play which is both hypocritical and racist.
As Schaeffer wrote in an March 16, 2008 op-ed,
"When Senator Obama's preacher thundered about racism and injustice Obama suffered smear-by-association. But when my late father -- Religious Right leader Francis Schaeffer -- denounced America and even called for the violent overthrow of the US government, he was invited to lunch with presidents Ford, Reagan and Bush, Sr." Frank Schaeffer walks right up to the accusation - that it is hypocritical and it is racist. --Frank Schaeffer
Frank's father Francis Schaeffer thought "humanism always leads to chaos" and, as a seminal Christian thinker who studied under the Presuppositionalist theologian Cornelius Van Til along with R. J. Rushdoony, Schaeffer went on to write works in the 1970's such as The Christian Manifesto that helped inspire a radical politicization on the American Christian right which has transformed American politics. But Schaeffer's son Frank, groomed to follow in his father's footsteps, eventually took a different path, as suggested by the title of his latest book Crazy For God: How I Helped Found the Religious Right and Ruin America. As Frank Schaeffer writes,
Every Sunday thousands of right wing white preachers (following in my father's footsteps) rail against America's sins from tens of thousands of pulpits. They tell us that America is complicit in the "murder of the unborn," has become "Sodom" by coddling gays, and that our public schools are sinful places full of evolutionists and sex educators hell-bent on corrupting children. They say, as my dad often did, that we are, "under the judgment of God." They call America evil and warn of immanent destruction. By comparison Obama's minister's shouted "controversial" comments were mild. All he said was that God should damn America for our racism and violence and that no one had ever used the N-word about Hillary Clinton.
Dad and I were amongst the founders of the Religious right. In the 1970s and 1980s, while Dad and I crisscrossed America denouncing our nation's sins instead of getting in trouble we became darlings of the Republican Party. (This was while I was my father's sidekick before I dropped out of the evangelical movement altogether.) We were rewarded for our "stand" by people such as Congressman Jack Kemp, the Fords, Reagan and the Bush family. The top Republican leadership depended on preachers and agitators like us to energize their rank and file. No one called us un-American. --Frank Schaeffer
Frank Schaeffer walks right up to it - the attack on Reverend Wright is racist and the double standard Shaeffer himself has lived adds considerable weight to the accusation ; many of those on the religious and political right denouncing Wright, and Obama by extension, display an underlying racism because they themselves have engaged in hate speech which, it would seem, is acceptable when uttered by a white man by not when it is uttered by a black man.
