āMom 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.ā
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 āright-wing echo chamberā are really all about.
Hereās a hint: sex.
The unforgettable central character in Sex, Mom, and God is the authorās far-from-prudish evangelical mother, Edith, who sweetly but bizarrely provides startling juxtapositions of the religious and the sensual thoughout Schaefferās childhood. She was, says Frank Schaeffer, āthe greatest illustration of the Divine beauty of Paradox Iāve encountered ā¦ a fundamentalist living a double life as a lover of beauty who broke all her own judgmental rules in favor of creativity.ā
Charlotte Gordon, the award-winning author of Mistress Bradstreet, calls Sex, Mom, and God āa tour de force . . . Sarah Palin, āThe Family,ā Anne Hutchinson, adultery, abortion, homophobia, Uganda, Ronald Reagan, B. B. King, Billy Graham, Hugh Hefnerāitās all here. This is the kind of book I did not want to end.ā