I was shuffling forward in the communion line, with my five year old granddaughter Lucy in my arms. I was lost in gloomy thoughts, brooding on my past and on my doubts, failures, and my past meanness to my wife Genie (we’ve been married 44 years) when I was young, stupid and so woefully controlling as a teen “father.” I was feeling that going to church was a waste of time. I was feeling unworthy in every sense of the word and sinking into a gray depression.

Lucy is always in and out of my arms in church as she has been since she was born. So I’d actually forgotten I was holding her. (These days I hardly know how to be in church without a grandchild riding on my hip.) With my head bowed and my eyes closed I shuffled forward to the chalice to receive the “body and blood” through a ritual I don’t comprehend and that seemed entirely pointless that day. I was adrift in my melancholy. Then I felt the touch of Lucy’s hand on my face and—startled—opened my eyes.

It took me a moment to remember where I was. Lucy was gazing into my face. She wasn’t smiling, just gazing at me in that straightforward way that only a child achieves: with serious concentration and offering me a transparent “look” that had no agenda. She wanted nothing from me. All I saw in Lucy’s expression was unconditional trust. All I saw was a child who knows me now and who never expects anything but kindness from me. She did not know of my past sins, failings and bitter self-accusing regrets. Lucy was not judging me. I was accusing myself while she was just gently touching her grandfather’s cheek, checking to see why my eyes were closed.

Lucy inclined her head and kissed me. This thought crashed into my brain: I am being seen as I’d like to be perceived, not as I see myself. I have seen the face of God.

Our best hope is not found in correct theology, but in the love we express through action rather than words. Our best hope is that love predates creation and thus that the Creator sees us as ever young. Our hope is that when we look at God through the eyes of the loving Christ we will see who God really is. Our ultimate hope is that God will be looking back at us as we’d like to be seen.

**This article is an excerpt from Frank Schaeffer’s new book  WHY I AM AN ATHEIST WHO BELIEVES IN GOD How to Create Beauty, Give Love and Find Peace to be published June 1

My friend’s attitude pissed me off. I shouted, “Are you kidding me? Taking care of my grandchildren is the only thing I’ve ever done I feel entirely happy about! Anyway, Jesus liked hanging out with women and kids too! So f*&! you!”

Let me explain…

I’d just picked up Lucy and Jack at kindergarten and preschool when a friend called. Jack goes to preschool three days a week and Lucy goes to kindergarten five days a week. My grandchildren attend in the morning and my wife Genie and I take care of them every afternoon. Picking up the children has evolved into quite a ritual. I prepare snacks for them, usually sliced apples for Jack and a banana for Lucy, and/or Greek black olives and sliced tomatoes for her and cheese and crackers for him. The twenty minute drive home usually involves a stop to watch the 1: 09 PM train from Newburyport to Boston go under the bridge on Route 1-A and sometimes a stop at a local farm to feed the animals. Trains are Jack’s big thing. The driver always sounds the bell and blows the horn when we wave.

So anyway, this friend happened to call soon after we got home. I was watching the children paint a huge picture on fifteen feet or so of butcher paper I’d just unrolled across the kitchen floor when my friend asked me what I was doing. I answered, “I just picked up the grand-kids, ” then without thinking I added, “I love hanging out with the other young mothers at preschool.”

There was a pause in our conversation while my friend — a successful entertainment attorney in LA who I’ve liked, worked with and bickered and fought with for years — processed my words. He repeated my statement with an ironic inflection on the word “other.” “The other young mothers?” he said several times and laughed. I laughed too. Still– my inadvertent remark made sense to me. When I pick up Lucy and Jack I’m one of the few men at the preschool and the only grandfather. One or two dads come in and hurriedly collect their kids. They’re entering an almost exclusively females-and-children zone where only women care for the kids, a throng of mothers gathers and everything is on a child’s scale, from the-low-to-the floor potties, to the small chairs gathered around tables loaded with finger paints. The outnumbered fathers scamper in and out as if to linger might cast doubt on their manhood.

Related: On respect, responsibility, and Mrs. Hall’s open letter to teenaged girls

After a year of my showing up almost every day, the moms are used to me. We know each others’ names. Some moms know I’m a writer, so the unkempt look is explained. One mom must have looked me up online because she discovered I’d been on Oprah and other TV shows. Even a minor celebrity gets cut some eccentric artist slack, at least in our friendly-to-writers Boston area. These days I could show up in my bathrobe and slippers and no one would mind. I’m just one of the gang.

“We” young mothers discuss which child of ours has a cold and how fast we’re all going to catch it, which child wakes up in the night, the quantum leap a little girl suddenly made with her drawing skills, who is pregnant with her second or third child, (even I draw the empathy line there), strategies for helping a little boy who is scared of pooping, the new job one mom just got and how happy she is because at last she has health care insurance, and a single mom’s trouble organizing her childcare schedule, now that she’s on the night shift at the hospital where she’s a nurse.

For once everyone in the room knows what the person next to them is experiencing. No matter who we are to the outside world, here, together with our children, we’re at our most transparent. Unconditional love leaves no place to hide. There is terror in our love too. Every child we’re meeting represents the most important part of our lives. Every mother knows her life hangs by a frail thread. Her well-being is utterly dependent on the vulnerable little human being who has kidnapped her heart. With complete love comes the fear of complete loss.

So when my friend teased me good naturedly I was annoyed. He was just kidding and we’re very old friends, but I detected a note of condescension, maybe even a bit of pity in his voice. He was sitting in a plush Santa Monica office with a view of the Hollywood sign. He lives in a world where life’s meaning is measured by meeting the “right” people. Been there, done that, though I’ve long since abandoned the movie business where, in the 1970s and 1980s, I’d directed four forgettable feature films, as well as some thirty hours of documentaries. Since leaving “the business” I’ve become a full time writer of fiction and nonfiction and am able to work out of my home and therefore lucky enough to have reorganized my life around my grandchildren.

In my new book And God Said, “Billy!” exploring the roots of American religious delusion, and offering another way to approach true spirituality, I make a point of making one of “my” women the hero of the book, and also of exploring just how the so called church has failed women. In my mind you can more or less judge an entire culture by simply asking one question: How do they treat women? And: How do they treat children?

In America childcare doesn’t rate high on the list of sexy let alone cool, jobs. Maybe that’s why my friend wanted some reassurance that I was still writing, and hadn’t given up on my literary career to “just take care of those kids.” He said, “Haven’t you already raised your family? I mean can’t they just get a babysitter or something?” Like I said, my friend’s attitude pissed me off. I shouted, “This is the only thing I’ve ever done I feel entirely happy about!”Then, I added,  “Anyway, Jesus liked hanging out with women and kids too! So f*&! you!” I’m not sure that counted as “sharing the gospel” with my “unsaved Jewish friend, ” as my evangelical missionary mother would have put it. But still, logical or not, that remark cut to the heart of what I believe about Jesus, life and what matters.

What’s unusual, given the Middle Eastern/Roman Empire first century context, are the stories about Jesus reaching out to inconspicuous women on the fringes of society. Transposed to today’s Hollywood the stories about Jesus liking women are as unlikely as a story would be about a hot young director canceling his pitch meetings with the heads of the studios after years of trying to break into the business, to instead, just hang out at preschool with mothers and kids! Now that’s something it’s hard to believe anyone would make up!

Even that analogy fails to capture how unlikely it was that the stories about Jesus hanging out with all the “wrong people” were made up. For a start the people writing them down disapproved of his inclusive actions. And if the story of Jesus blessing a menstruating woman for surreptitiously touching him was calculated to make other first century Jews “accept Jesus, ” then the gospel writers were the worst public relations men in history. They might as well have claimed Jesus drank pig blood every day for breakfast. Leviticus 15:25 says, “If a woman has a discharge of blood for many days, not at the time her [period], or if she has a discharge beyond the time of her [period], all the days of her discharge she shall continue in uncleanness. … Every bed on which she lies during all the days of her discharge shall be treated as [unclean]. … Everything on which she sits shall be unclean … Whoever touches these things shall be unclean.”

However much it must have made his chroniclers cringe they reported that Jesus publicly identified with diseased outcasts, even with an “unclean” bleeding women! And Jesus’ thoroughly un-first-century “icky” antics didn’t stop with lepers and menstruating women. He held a dead girl’s hand! Jesus did this notwithstanding explicit commands in the Scriptures such as “He shall not go in to any dead bodies nor make himself unclean, even for his father or for his mother, ” (Leviticus 21:11).

And after touching lepers, and the dead, Jesus hung out with whores!

The fact that Jesus was seen as having friendly public contact with women and other nobodies was bad enough. That alone was an act of rebellion against all the things good upright self-regarding male Jews believed in. But Jesus’ whore-embracing was a double slap in the face to the Bible-thumpers. In their minds it put Jesus on the side of the pagan, prostitute-condoning Roman occupiers. Yet, the anointing of Jesus by a prostitute is one of the few events reported in each of the four gospels. Jesus is willingly anointed with expensive perfume and– he likes it! There are protests by his followers, not to mention by Jesus’ enemies– the religious leaders of his day. Matthew’s gospel says that the “disciples were indignant.” Luke calls the woman doing the anointing, “a woman in that town who lived a sinful life” — which is a nice way of calling her a hooker.

The Jesus story is still out of sync with the way we treat females. Rather, we’re still out of sync with Jesus. Women are still abused, raped, killed, marginalized, belittled and insulted. And females come in for an extraordinary amount of abuse online, especially women writers who express opinions about women’s rights. They are attacked viciously in ways few men are with lashings of sexual innuendo, threats of violence and worse. One in three American women live on the brink of poverty. Few women have sick days at work and zero flexibility to care for children when their kids are ill. An observer from another planet, who looked strictly at the numbers of women earning minimum wage with no access to good child care and health care, would conclude that America is a country that hates women, hates children and is working to destroy families.

Also by Frank: Mass Killing is our Idea of Patriotism

And, we’re still obsessed by the “otherness” and “uncleanness” of female bleeding! Disparaging talk about women’s menstrual cycles is as ubiquitous as it was two thousand years ago, and just as stupid. Today’s Pharisees talk about “monthly work loss.” Politicians, and fundamentalists cite menstruation as yet another “proof” that only men can serve God and country, or be priests or ministers. They insist that women are “equal, just different.” These are the same bigoted fools who say that because Jesus “only had male apostles” that there can’t be female priests. Why stop there? Jesus never used antibiotics in his healing ministry either!

As for Jesus’ so-called followers today,  when it comes to attitudes about women we still might as well be in first century Israel. Given the example set by Jesus you’d think the churches created in his name would have led the way on women’s rights. You’d think political leaders from so called Bible-belt states would be leading the charge on raising the minimum wage, guaranteeing maternity and paternity leave, bringing older working women back into the education loop and fighting for early childhood education programs: IN THE NAME OF THEIR FAITH.

The opposite has been the case. As they say in Italy, “the fish rots from the head.” When it comes to churches setting an example, there hasn’t been a female pope in two thousand years of church history. The Roman Catholic bishops and their far right loony evangelical culture war co-belligerents, have even led the fight to deny women health care insurance coverage for contraception! Meanwhile in the so-called Bible belt of the USA, church attendance hovers at around fifty percent. Social services are minimal. Women are banned from most evangelical and all Roman Catholic and Orthodox pulpits. Child care funding is minimal. The mostly evangelical GOP wants to cut food stamps. And the“Tea Party” congressmen thrive on the lies they tell about America’s first black president while also trying to stop his programs to give healthcare coverage to everyone and insurance coverage to women for contraception! So much for… following Jesus.

I’ve watched liberal and right wing commentators alike blame the president for being lynched. They say “he’s not reaching out enough” or “he’s too cold.” It’s the equivalent of assuming that the black man being beaten by a couple of thug cops must have “done something.”

I am a white privileged well off sixty-one-year-old former Republican religious right wing activist who changed his mind about religion and politics long ago.  The New York Times profiled my change of heart saying that to my former friends I’m considered a “traitorous prince” since my religious right family was once thought of as “evangelical royalty.”

I’ve just spent the last 7 years writing over 200, 000 words in blogs and articles in support of President Obama. My blogs on the Huffington Post alone would add up to a book in support of the President of over 300 pages. Weirdly, I just realized that through all my writing, this has been the first time in my life I’ve personally gone to bat for a black man. It just happens that he’s a president. But my emotional stake in his life is now personal.

So I’ve changed from a white guy who used to read news about some black man getting shot or beaten by cops or stand-you-ground types who assumed that the black man must have “done something, ” to a white guy who figures that the black man was probably getting lynched. I’ve changed ideology but I’ve also changed my gut intuitive reactions.

I’ve changed because if this country will lynch a brilliant, civil, kind, humble, compassionate, moderate, articulate, black intellectual we’re lucky enough to have in the White house, we’ll lynch anyone. What chance does an anonymous black man pulled over in a traffic stop have of fair treatment when the former editor of the Harvard Law review is being lynched?

Related: On Hating President Obama

One famous liberal commentator wrote a book on how Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neil could disagree and still be friends. Why, he asked on many a TV show promoting his book, couldn’t President Obama be like that? Because, I yelled at the screen, those two men were white Irish Americans and part of a ruling white oligarchy.

Because, I yelled, you might as well ask why Nelson Mandela didn’t talk his jailers in South Africa into seeing reason.

Because, I yelled, the president is black and anytime he’s reached out he’s pulled back a bloody stump.

Because, I yelled, liberal white commentators have been as bothered by a black man in the White House, who’s smarter than they are as much as right wing bigots have been bothered.

Because, I yelled, President Obama has been lied about, attacked, vilified, and disrespected since Day One.

Because, I yelled, this country may have passed laws so blacks can vote and eat in a white man’s world, but in our hearts are stuck in a place more like 1952 than 2013.

We’ve been watching a slow motion lynching of a moderate brilliant family man, a father, and faithful loving husband. The Republicans in Congress are so dedicated to lynching the President they’ve been willing to shut down our government and risk the future of our economy.

Evangelical “Christians” have been so stuck on putting a rope around this black man’s neck they have denied their faith and been the backbone of the lying Tea Party who spawned the so-called “birthers” and the rest of the white trash driving our news cycle.

Roman Catholic bishops have denied their tradition of helping the poor and been so eager to destroy this president they aligned themselves with white Evangelical bigots and tried to stop health care reform, all because the President wants to give women a fair shake. The bishops even called him “anti-religious” because the president wants insurers to pay for contraception.

This is a slow motion lynching of a black man who is so moderate and centrist that he favored Wall Street enough so that the Left is all over his case. He’s so “radical” and “leftist” and “hates America” so much, and “coddles our enemies” so much, that he killed bin Laden and used drones to kill our enemies. He’s such a “socialist” that he presided over the revival of our economy from the worst recession since the Great Depression, and led us to the present day stock market boom. President Obama is such a “Marxist” that he tried to give insurance – not socialized medicine – to all Americans.

President Obama never answered back to the disgusting southern right wing rubes from the former slave states that have tried to belittle, mock and stymie his presidency shouting “You lie” in a million ways, while actually meaning “You lie, n****r!”

Also by Frank: Uncool! Google and Facebook’s Human Trafficking Complicity

And did the “enlightened” Left have President Obama’s back? No. They carp about his “failure” because a website was slow to get running! The white privileged “progressive” few were too busy blaming him for getting lynched and telling him how to craft policy while a rope was put around his neck again and again and tightened with each filibuster, each lie told on the radio, each self-defeating scorched earth action to stop him from succeeding, even if it meant taking us all down too.

We don’t like to admit who we really are. So we make excuses and blame the victim. I’m ashamed for our country, a country my Marine son fought for in two stupid wars this president has been working to end. And I’m still rooting for the best, smartest and most decent man who has been president in my lifetime. I pray for his health care reform to succeed. I pray for his immigration reform to succeed. I’m amazed he’s gotten anything done, but he has, even while the lynch mob gathers again and again to laugh, lie and spit and claim he’s “failed” while “liberal” commentators nod sagely and talk about his “mistakes” as if President Obama has been playing on a level playing field.

We have a lot to do to heal this country of the damage done by the right wing Obama-haters and the Left wing know-it-all pundits who did not have his back because they don’t have the honesty to admit that we still live in a backward racist swamp of prejudice. Maybe in 50 years our country will be worthy of someone of President Obama’s forbearance again. For now we can just hope that the hatred of the Republican Party for our first black president doesn’t drive us to the brink of ruin again as they strip food from the mouths of the poor, and try to get people to not sign up for health care, just to get even with the black man they swore to destroy from the day that “uppity” black who is smarter than all of them put together took the oath of office.

God bless you Mr. President. I’m praying for you. I am so very sorry. But take heart, in the long reach of history the door you opened will stay open for the millions of Americans of all colors, genders and beliefs who will follow you. They will bless your name. So will history.

mistydawnphoto / Shutterstock.com

Is atheism a belief system in itself? Frank Schaeffer, author most recently of And God Said, Billy!, says yes indeed! In fact, Frank says it is one of the great world religions with it’s faith statement being the non-existance of God. Thoughts?

There is something extraordinarily dangerous and ugly at the heart of American life: literalistic religion. There is something extraordinarily beautiful and enlightening at the heart of American life: literalistic religion. Now there is a movie that explores this paradox: what’s uniquely best about America — religious freedom — is also our continuous downfall.

I’m an author and commentator not a journalist. So it’s not often I get the pleasure of stumbling on what’s called a “scoop.” This time I’m beating the rest of the media to a big story. My scoop is to introduce a movie to you.  American Jesus is an important documentary that will redefine how the world looks at America and how we Americans look at ourselves. I only know about this movie because I’m in it. So last week I had the privilege of seeing an advance screening.

Premiering at the Woodstock Film Festival (and in Spain) on Oct. 4th American Jesus documents the strange relationship between faith, materialism, politics and personal spiritual passions in what is a uniquely American inner life. American Jesus asks how dynamic and loving faith may coexist with the darker side of cynical empire building and magical thinking. In asking this question, with a level of intuitive intelligence I’ve never seen before in a film on religion,  American Jesus shows us how the best and worst coexists in big time American religion. The movie shows us the paradoxically improbable combination of idealism and crass grasping for riches and striving for power. This combination of the venal and the sublime is what American religion is. And this matters because we impact the rest of the world as the world’s only superpower. What we believe translates into global, often violent, action.

Two years ago I got a call. Would I agree to be interviewed for a European film to be called “American Jesus” exploring the world of American religion. I was not paid for the interview nor do I have any official connection to the project. The crew arrived and spent a day in my house filming and interviewing to me. They left and I forgot about the movie.

Two years later Brent Kunkle, the producer, sent me a link so I could watch the completed film. It turns out that director Aram Garriga‘s pilgrimage across America to make his movie resulted in a stunning and beautifully made film record of an outsider’s clear-eyed view of the impact — both personal and political — of Christianity in modern American life.

Garriga is the new Alexis de Tocqueville. In American Jesus he doesn’t take for granted what to us Americans is  so familiar it’s hardly noticed. Garriga brings a  fresh perspective to the outsized place religion plays in our life, politics and national ethos. “American Jesus” is to religion what de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” (1835) was to our national life then: a revealing outsider’s exploration of truths we Americans are too close to, to clearly see.

My personal history prepared me to understand just what an accomplishment this movie is. As an insider’s insider to the world of American religion I was described by the New York Times like this: “To millions of evangelical Christians, the Schaeffer name is royal, and Frank is the reluctant, wayward, traitorous prince. His crime is not financial profligacy, like some pastors’ sons, but turning his back on Christian conservatives.” I grew up as the son of an American religious leader (religious right founder Francis Schaeffer). I not only lived in the pressure cooker of big time American religion my family was part of the political and religious history of modern America.

Related: The Pledge of Allegiance, Two Reasons Christians Should Not Say It – by Matt Young

As my dad’s sidekick schmoozing with congressmen, famous preachers and even US presidents, I watched and participated during the 1970s and 80s as fundamentalist religion shaped American politics. I’ve charted my fraught and funny journey out of big time American religion in my book on the inner anatomy of religious delusion: And God Said, “Billy!” Thus my perspective on the film is one of someone who has lived through the events the movie explores. Been there-done-that. And I can tell you this movie gets the details right! It also goes a long way toward answering a rhetorical question I asked Rachel Maddow when she was interviewing me on the Rachel Maddow show on MSNBC: “Can Christianity be rescued from the Christians?”

American Jesus shines a bright light on big time American religion and its effect on society and on the world. Through interviews, with such clear-eyed thinkers as Michelle Goldberg, American journalist and author,  the movie also intimately explores the quest for meaning so many of us find in our personal struggles to reconcile ourselves to mortality through religion. The movie also highlights how the wounded churches in America spread their contagion globally.

And the movie is fair to religion. For instance it provides a platform for the well known and deservedly admired evangelical Shane Claiborne, to speak up. Shane is an author and leading figure in the New Monasticism movement as well as one of the founding members of The Simple Way. Shane talks about his Christ-centered work with the outcasts of our society. And having him in the movie is a clear indicator that the director is not out to “get” religious people because he shows some of the best American religion has to offer in terms of social justice issues and compassion. The film also includes luminary evangelical filmmaker and musician Steve Taylor, street minister to the indigent,  Pastor Bob Beeman (of Nashville) and the remarkable author Jason Boyett. These interviews bring the viewer into a deep and nuanced dialogue with some thoughtful religious people who have deep insights into faith and spirituality and even share their doubts about their most intimate hopes and beliefs.

In a way this film is a plea for the true spirituality that can survive the false gods of commerce and power. Sincere believers will not feel threatened by this film, rather affirmed by its debunking of all that is worst in religion. That dark side of faith hurts the witness of faith more than anything any so-called new atheist writer has to offer.

Since few outsiders ever understand the “flavor” of what really animates the vast subculture of American religion the movie opens a new world to non-Americans and/or to more secular Americans struggling to understand – for instance – how religious delusion has shaped American foreign policy. Because America is powerful understanding what makes America “tick” is not optional. That’s why I say that this film should be required viewing for everyone, at least for every world leader. What political leaders who deal with America need to know is that what motivates so-called American exceptionalism is not rational. It is rooted in magical thinking.

America, like some of the more fundamentalist Islamic countries trying to impose Sharia law, brings irrational religious conviction to world affairs. For instance America’s long involvement in the Middle East, and twelve years of non-stop war in Iraq and Afghanistan, can’t be understood outside of the context of religious delusional thinking explored in American Jesus. This context is the eschatological fantasies of “End Times” theology that leads so many Americans – including many right wing political leaders – to conclude that America is helping to fulfill biblical prophecy by taking sides in various Middle Eastern conflicts.

Also by Frank: Progressive Christianity is as Broken as Evangelicalism…Here’s How to Fix It

If the ayatollahs of Iran look crazy to many people then so should the religiously deluded American public be branded as nuts. It was this group of people, mostly evangelicals, that voted for George W. Bush and other evangelical American leaders that believed or at least paid lip service to, literalistic biblical interpretations of unfolding world events. These are the people that took us into needless bloody non-stop wars.

What the movie exposes is the truth that in the American religious community life goes on as if the Enlightenment had never taken place. A look at the so-called Creation Museum proves this. In what other place on earth could millions of visitors approve the obliterating rewriting of science and conclude that the world is 6000 years old and that dinosaurs coexisted with humans? In what other country is foreign policy hostage to a literal belief in events leading to the so-called return of Christ?

For the people who wonder why American foreign policy seems insane at times one answer to their questions about America is this movie. At the heart of the superpower that leads the world are many leaders who believe in cartoonish myths. American Jesus is a brilliant warning about where these cartoon characters will take us all unless challenged.

And yet American Jesus takes a compassionate look at  many religious people of good will who find meaning and beauty in their spiritual faith. The movie is a tribute to them as well as a subtle warning about the political and religious leaders who seek to manipulate sincere faith for their own enrichment or worse, to gain power.

The price of a scoop is that I’m ahead of the review curve. The movie isn’t out yet. I’ve begged the filmmakers to get this movie in front of the legions of Americans and non-Americans who will be astonished by its scope and sensitivity. But there’s a protocol in securing the best possible distribution. That process is just beginning with the premiere in Woodstock.

Meanwhile, there’s the website which the producers will be expanding in the coming weeks. While American Jesus is in its festival run, tune in to the website www.americanjesusthemovie.com  for what I trust will be screenings near you, and so you can keep track of the commercial release soon to follow.

Then, when you get the chance, WATCH THIS MOVIE!