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Sex, Mom, and God

How the Bibles Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics — and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway

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1 of 1 copy available
1 of 1 copy available
"A penetrating analysis of political extremism, with a moving and at times hilarious account of growing up in one of the Christian right's most influential families. Few writers command Frank Schaeffer's intimate understanding of right-wing radicalism, and even fewer are able to share their insight as entertainingly and with as much moral weight as he has in Sex, Mom, and God."—Max Blumenthal, author of Republican Gomorrah
"Mom was a much nicer person than her God. There are many biblical regulations about everything from beard-trimming to menstruating. Mom worked diligently to recast her personal-hygiene-obsessed God in the best light."
Alternating between laugh-out-loud scenes from his childhood and acidic ruminations on the present state of an America he and his famous fundamentalist parents helped create, bestselling author Frank Schaeffer asks what the Glenn Becks and the Rush Limbaughs and the paranoid fantasies of the "right-wing echo chamber" are really all about.
Here's a hint: sex.
The unforgettable central character in Sex, Mom, and God is the author's far-from-prudish evangelical mother, Edith, who sweetly but bizarrely provides startling juxtapositions of the religious and the sensual thoughout Schaeffer's childhood. She was, says Frank Schaeffer, "the greatest illustration of the Divine beauty of Paradox I've encountered . . . a fundamentalist living a double life as a lover of beauty who broke all her own judgmental rules in favor of creativity."
Charlotte Gordon, the award-winning author of Mistress Bradstreet, calls Sex, Mom, and God "a tour de force . . . Sarah Palin, 'The Family,' Anne Hutchinson, adultery, abortion, homophobia, Uganda, Ronald Reagan, B. B. King, Billy Graham, Hugh Hefner — it's all here. This is the kind of book I did not want to end."
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    • Library Journal

      June 15, 2011

      Schaeffer, public speaker, filmmaker, novelist, and former fundamentalist Christian, presents the third book in his "God Trilogy" (Crazy for God; Patience with God). His title refers to three topics that are very important to his thinking and intimately tied together. Schaeffer learned all about sex and God at his mother's knee--unlike most parents, she explicitly told him on many occasions her feelings and ideas about both in great detail (including, for sex, the physical aspects). Schaeffer's family believed the Bible to be God's infallible word and true in every detail, so his mother used the sometimes lurid Bible stories to illustrate her beliefs and provide authority for her thinking. In each chapter Schaeffer dwells on a particular aspect of his mother's thinking and uses it as a stepping-off point to discuss other experiences of his own life and work. There is no firm chronological order here, and the narration often skips around temporally, which may make it hard for some readers to keep straight. Crazy for God is an easier (strictly temporal) autobiography. VERDICT This is well worth reading, highly entertaining, and very informative about the recent history of American evangelicalism. It will appeal to readers interested in the world today, memoir, or religion.--James F. DeRoche, Alexandria, VA

      Copyright 2011 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

    • Kirkus

      May 15, 2011

      In the third installment of the "God Trilogy," prolific novelist and nonfiction author Schaeffer (Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don't Like Religion (or Atheism), 2009, etc.) tells "the truth" about his mother's curious impartation of religion and sex.

      The author's mother Edith played as much a spiritual role as his father, the late Evangelist Francis Schaeffer, and continues to do so at 96, though her memory loss and sight deterioration defy them both. The book shines in sections centered on Edith, a "life-embracing free spirit" whose sexual education of her son began with a show-and-tell of her diaphragm to him at age eight while on a family vacation. This candid abandon extended to matters outside of sexuality as well. The author distinctly remembers Edith praising a God that foreknew and condoned the miscarriage of her first male child in favor of subsequently giving birth to Schaeffer. He attributes life growing up with three sisters as vital to his affinity for women in later years, though they usurped too much of his parents' time and attention back then. As a woman who'd sacrificed a dancing career to become a religious juggernaut, Edith's fiery personality and sexual extroversion were contradictory to the piousness that defined her, yet she managed to formulate extraordinary interpretations. From advising women to wear sheer, black lingerie to keep their husbands' interest to confessing Francis' sexual demands on her--all were justified with biblical significance. A consummate memoirist, Schaeffer fills the narrative with interesting anecdotes about his sex life, like a nervous first-time encounter with a French woman and the ice-girl he fashioned (and attempted to mate with) while growing up in the Swiss mission his parents founded. The author's heated rejection of modern Evangelicalism and discussions of abortion, Reconstructionist movements and even Sarah Palin rob the memoir of the loving glow cast by Edith's legacy, but the sage conversation on a New York-bound bus with a distraught Asian girl is warmly resonant and a befitting conclusion to an occasionally disjointed book of ruminations, memories and frustrated opinion.

      Sweet and savory familial adoration.

      (COPYRIGHT (2011) KIRKUS REVIEWS/NIELSEN BUSINESS MEDIA, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.)

    • Booklist

      May 15, 2011
      Schaeffer is the son of the late evangelical pastor Francis Schaeffer, one of the founders of the religious Right, but it is the authors indomitable mother, Edith, who is the central figure in this startlingly honest work, which is part memoir and part religious history. The younger Schaeffers evangelical mother comes across as both very sweet but also shockingly candid about sexual matters, discussing with her son, even at a young age, issues that many readers will find hilarious, if inappropriate. In between discussing his unconventional upbringing, Schaeffer also comments on the rise of Sarah Palin and Rush Limbaugh and chronicles the evolution of the right-wing movement from Roe v. Wade to the growth of a separatist Christian agenda, all the while criticizing its increasingly politicized nature. He even goes so far as to suggest that he and his father contributed to the antigovernment rhetoric that is such a focal point of far right-wing thought today and, thus, feels at least partly responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing and subsequently similar crimes directed against the government. Intriguing fare.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)

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