Religious Right is "Trawling for Assassins" - Frank Schaeffer

Former Right-wing Evangelical Leader Speaks Out

November 19th, 2009
- The Rachel Maddow Show on MSNBC aired a segment in which Rachel had a discussion with former evangelical right wing leader Frank Schaeffer in which they talked about the ramped up level of vitriolic rhetoric directed at President Obama coming from the far right in America.

Rachel has been talking about this, most recently discussing the "Prayer for Obama" hype going around. Seems you can get anything from a tee shirt to a mug to a bear with "Pray for Obama: Psalm 109:8" scrawled on it.

What does Psalm 109:8 say? "Let his days be few, and let another take his office." And it goes on, in the next verse, "Let his children be fatherless, and his wife be a widow."

Rachel Maddow has expressed concern about it, but none as serious as that coming from the former evangelical leader, Frank Schaeffer. It's often those who have left America's fundamentalist religious movement who give us our best insight into that movement. Schaeffer told Rachel that in a religious context, "it means something more threatening."

"The situation that I find genuinely frightening right now," Schaeffer stated, "is that you have a ramping up of biblical language. And what it's coalescing into is branding Obama as 'not us.' Now he joins the ranks of the unjust kings of ancient Israel, who should be slaughtered - if not by God then by just men."

"Really, this is trawling for assassins," continued Schaeffer, "and this is serious business. It's un-American, it's unpatriotic, and it goes to show that the religious right, the Republican far right, have coalesced into a group that truly want American revolution. They cannot be dismissed as just crazies on the fringe." This bumper sticker simply says to them, 'It's open season.'"

"This is the American version of the Taliban. The Taliban quotes the Koran, and Al Qaeda quotes certain verses in the Koran, in or out of context, calling for jihad and bloody war and the curse of Allah on infidels. This is the Old Testament biblical equivalent of calling for holy war."