In another life, Frank Schaefer would probably be an evangelical leader and someone with a powerful position in conservative politics.

His father was the influential Christian theologian Francis Schaefer and Frank himself

along with his father have helped create the modern religious right. Frank is the

author of Crazy for God how I grew up as one of the elect, helped found the religious right and live to take all or almost all of it back, which is an awesome title.

And more recently he wrote, why I am an atheist who believes in God.

Frank, did I get that right, and thank you for being with me?

You got all of that right.

Excellent.

So for those of us who are listening

who don't know your Christian background, can you tell us about what that is, what that meant I guess in the broader evangelical spectrum and why that all changed? and then I want to ask you about

kind of your political conversion after that. Sure well you know a thumbnail of

this has to go back to the fact that I was born in Switzerland in 1952 to two

missionary parents who would come over at the end of the second world war to work

with kids in bombed out cities. They were very obscure, they were

very unknown, they were American Presbyterian. My dad was a pastor. My mom

came from a long line of missionaries going right back into the 19th century.

So I guess the thumbnail here is that I grew up in a fundamentalist

evangelical American home of expatriates living in a little village on a mountainside.

So kind of, if you think of concentric circles, you know, we were foreigners in a foreign

country kind of weird people on the fringe of a little town with a weird religion

that the Swiss around us looked at as odd and so really my background starts there and then

my dad as the years progress began to write and he

...