Right Wing Fringe Lunatics

Rachel Maddow talks to Frank Schaeffer about why a good deal of conservatives when polled said they weren't sure if President Obama was the anti-Christ.

Maddow: I do not know what possessed this polling firm to ask whether or not that people think the President is the anti-Christ, but they did. Does the response rate among conservatives surprise you? More than one in three saying yes or they don’t know.

Schaeffer: Well I was a child when President Kennedy was assassinated and my mother thought that because he died of a head wound foretold in scriptures of the anti-Christ he would be resurrected as the anti-Christ. She thought this might be a possibility. So those of us who come from the evangelical subculture have been weaned with our mother’s milk on a changing case list of villains. It might be Kennedy to one generation, Obama to the next.

But the larger point this brings up is that the mainstream not just media but culture doesn’t sufficiently take stock of the fact that within our culture we have a subculture which is literally a fifth column of insanity that is bred from birth, through home school, Christian school, evangelical college, whatever to reject facts as a matter of faith.

And so this substitute for authentic historic Christianity, and I may add as a little caveat here, I’m a church-going Christian, really brings up the question. Can Christianity be rescued from Christians? And that’s an open question. And when you see a bunch of people going around thinking that our President if the anti-Christ you have to draw one of two conclusions.

Either these are racists looking for any excuse to level the next accusation or they’re beyond crazy. And I think beyond crazy is a better explanation and that evangelical subculture has rotted the brain of the United States of America. We have a big slice of our population waiting for Jesus to come back. They look forward to Armageddon. Good news is bad news to them. We talk about the Left Behind series of books that I talk about in my book Crazy for God.

What we’re really talking about is a group of people are resentful because they know they’ve been left behind by modernity, by science, by education, by art, by literature—the rest of us are getting on with our lives. These people are standing on a hill top waiting for the end and this is a dangerous group of people to have as neighbors. And they’re our national neighbors. And this is the source of all these insanities that we see leveled at the President. One way or the other they go back to this little evangelical subculture.