From Home Schooling to Religious War (MERGED)

[gustava]

Caveat: Not all homeschoolers want to foment religious war: just the Bates and Duggars and their ilk.

http://www.salon.com/2015/01/20/the_rig ... gious_war/

[apple1]

OK - I will just say it...

Every time this guy (Frank Shaffer the younger) comes up, my immediate reaction and instinct is -

This guy is still an extreme fundamentalist. He just switched sides.

I don't care to take hours to split out and debunk what's wrong with his writing. The falsehoods are so mixed in with truths (and there are many truths - but not all) it's just not worth it.

Sometimes the same extremist, see only black and white and no grays, personality that the person exhibited as a religious fundamentalist is unchanged, except for being redirected in an opposite fashion. That's my reaction to Shaffer.

[doggie]

this really explains a lot all the digger hate of schools. all the other fundy hate of it too. this is a long article.

http://www.alternet.org/tea-party-and-r ... merica-and

As someone who participated in the rise of the religious right in the 1970s and 1980s, I can tell you that you can’t understand the modern Republican Party and its hatred of government unless you understand the evangelical home-school movement. Nor can the Democrats hope to defeat the GOP in 2016 unless they grasp what I’ll be explaining here: religious war carried on by other means.

The Christian home-school movement drove the Evangelical school movement to the ever-harsher world-rejecting far right. The movement saw itself as separating from evil “secular†America. Therein lies the heart of the Tea Party, GOP and religious right’s paranoid view of the rest of us. And since my late father and evangelist Francis Schaeffer and I were instrumental in starting the religious right — I have since left the movement and recently wrote a book titled “Why I Am an Atheist who Believes in God: How to Give Love, Create Beauty and Find Peace“ – believe me when I tell you that the evangelical schools and home school movement were, by design, founded to undermine a secular and free vision of America and replace it by stealth with a form of theocracy.

This happened because Evangelical home-schoolers were demanding ever-greater levels of “separation†from what they regarded as the Evil Secular World. It wasn’t enough just to reject the public schools. How could the Christian parent be sure that even the Evangelical schools were sufficiently pure? And so the Christian schools radicalized in order to not appear to be “compromising†with the world in the eyes of increasingly frightened and angry parents. (My account here of the rise of the home school movement is not aimed at home-schooling, per se, but at parents who want to indoctrinate, rather than educate.)

The Evangelical home school movement was really founded by two people: Rousas Rushdoony, the extremist theologian, and Mary Pride, the “mother†of fundamentalist home-schoolers. I knew them both well.

Until Rushdoony, founder and late president of the Chalcedon Foundation, began writing in the 1960s, most American fundamentalists (including my parents) didn’t try to apply biblical laws about capital punishment for homosexuality to the United States. Even the most conservative Evangelicals said they were “New Testament Christians.†In other words, they believed that after the coming of Jesus, the harsher bits of the Bible had been (at least to some extent) transformed by the “New Covenant†of Jesus’ “Law of Love.â€

By contrast, the leaders of Reconstructionism believed that Old Testament teachings—on everything from capital punishment for gays to the virtues of child beating—were still valid because they were the inerrant Word and Will of God and therefore should be enforced. Not only that, they said that biblical law should be imposed even on nonbelievers. This theology was the American version of the attempt in some Muslim countries to impose Shariah (Islamic law) on all citizens, Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

[gustava]

I started a thread on this.

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[August]

In all the recent discussion of Islam and violence, no one has brought up the dominionists. It's even creepier than ISIL in my book.

[Soulhuntress]

It may just be me but Frankie Schaefer is a lot like RC Jr. :pink-shock:

[Arete]

I cannot STAND Frankie Schaeffer. He is a poser in every cause he takes up. He spent over 20 years trying to make himself an authority in Eastern Orthodoxy. I see he has finally given up and is now trying to remake himself into a liberal pundit.

Daddy issues, he haz them.

[formergothardite]

I tried to read one of his books and couldn't make it past the second chapter.

[gustava]

So the problem is the messenger?

[IReallyAmHopewell]

Frankie's NOVELS are what matter. Portofino, Zermatt and Saving Grandma--every person on this board should and buy and read them. Hysterically funny--the OTHER side of being the child of Pre-Martha-Stewart-Mother Edith Schaeffer (The Hidden Art of Hmemaking) who is still the Gold Standard of Evangelical wives. Just read the novels.

[apple1]

So the problem is the messenger?

For me, it is not only the messenger, but also that (IMO, of course) he mixes in exaggeration, even flat-out falsehood, with the truth, making it way too difficult to "spit out the bones and eat the meat".

[gustava]

For me, it is not only the messenger, but also that (IMO, of course) he mixes in exaggeration, even flat-out falsehood, with the truth, making it way too difficult to "spit out the bones and eat the meat".

Would you give an example of a flat out falsehood? (Not snarking, truly curious.)

[apple1]

Would you give an example of a flat out falsehood? (Not snarking, truly curious.)

Without expending too much effort, right off the top of my head -

"The rejection of public schools by Evangelical Protestants" -

There are plenty (possibly even most) of "evangelical Protestants" who educate their kids in public schools. Evangelical Protestant =/= extreme fundamentalists, nor ATI, nor Duggar/Pearl/etc lookalikes or wannabes. I consider this painting inappropriately with a broad brush to be falsehood. A grain of truth does not a whole truth make. JMHO. Others may have other opinions.

[gustava]

Without expending too much effort, right off the top of my head -

"The rejection of public schools by Evangelical Protestants" -

There are plenty (possibly even most) of "evangelical Protestants" who educate their kids in public schools. Evangelical Protestant =/= extreme fundamentalists, nor ATI, nor Duggar/Pearl/etc lookalikes or wannabes. I consider this painting inappropriately with a broad brush to be falsehood. A grain of truth does not a whole truth make. JMHO. Others may have other opinions.

Thank you. I definitely understand a broad generalization. However, does this broad brush completely undermine what he says?

[apple1]

Thank you. I definitely understand a broad generalization. However, does this broad brush completely undermine what he says?

It doesn't completely. (I thought this was part of my previous post).

It does mean that it takes way too much effort to sort out the truth from the exaggeration from the falsehood, making it not worth it to me. Add to that my opinion that he gives himself way too much importance and his writing style is cumbersome - to me, he is not worth the read.

Again JMO.