Dear Editor,
In attempting to absolve Francis Schaeffer of the charge of fomenting the Religious Right, Ian Cooper (letter, April en) quotes a number of the great man’s texts but ignores the most compelling one – his Christian Manifesto (Crossway, 1981). Here Schaeffer is completely clear about the duty of Christians to give active support to the movement. He sets out its basic ideas – that Christians should promote Biblical law as the foundation of the state; the illegitimacy of the secular state; and abortion as today’s defining political issue.
Darryl Hart calls Schaeffer the ‘intellectual father’ of the Religious Right: he contributed its central philosophy, and gave strong personal encouragement to the founders of the movement (such as Falwell). He was the acknowledged ‘guru’ of the first generation of its evangelical leaders. Whether he might later have distanced himself from them is speculation – there can be no doubt that he was among those who created the Religious Right, and was arguably the most important of these.
