He is arguably the worst president in the history of the United States...

states Frank Schaeffer in his interview with John W. Whitehead of The Rutherford Institute. The following is a very small part of a very interesting conversation.

JW: What do you think of George W. Bush as the Christian president?

FS: He is arguably the worst president in the history of the United States. He is unfit for the office of president of the United States. He has trouble speaking the English language and articulating a point of view. Second, he has led us into a war—in which my son, by the way, fought—on false pretenses. That is a terrible thing. Bush is personally responsible for the displacement of the Christian minority in Iraq. It was the last large Christian minority anywhere in the Middle East, and it has been destroyed. It is ironic that someone who proclaims he is a Christian president has single-handedly started a war that has undone the last Christian minority in the Middle East. Now it is wall-to-wall Islam from Tehran all the way to the Mediterranean with the exception of Israel. There is not one place outside of Syria that still has that intact Christian minority now.

JW: Are you opposed to the war in Iraq?

FS: Absolutely. We had a legitimate cause to go into Afghanistan, and it was the right thing to do. It was the only logical response to 9/11. But Iraq was a completely misbegotten fiasco from the beginning. It was unnecessary and will only make our world situation worse.

JW: Do you think it is ironic that the Christian Right supports the war and has raised very few moral questions about it?

FS: Yes. Because of my son’s service in the Marine Corps, I’ve written on the subject of who serves in the military and who doesn’t. There is no question about the fact that when you have the Religious Right, the neoconservatives and others supporting the war, it is hypocritical when you discover that there is no preponderance of their own children who volunteer and serve. This is a fundamentally immoral situation, especially when you have someone like James Dobson who could use his prestige to call for his followers’ children to volunteer and serve. They typically make the moral case for the war without anybody having to actually sacrifice for it. It puts an immoral blossom on the whole enterprise. Also, it would be something that I would think Christians would want to talk about, as well as the fact that a Christian minority in the Middle Eastern Islamic country has been destroyed.