Crazy for God

by Frank Schaeffer

  “If you get sent out as a missionary to darkest Africa,” Mom would say, “it’s just as important for you to bring a see-through black negligee as to bring your Bible, if you want your marriage to be good and keep your husband happy.”

  The more Mom talked about how amazingly God had made our reproductive organs, and the more she told me how I was to save those organs for marriage, the more I wanted to try them out. I was like a starving child given an endless restaurant tour by an expert chef while being commanded not to touch or taste anything until I grew up!

  What was happening to my body was also monitored by Mom. Years ahead of time, I was forewarned about the “changes about to take place.” I was on the lookout for the pubic hair Mom said would soon grow and the wet dreams Mom said would soon trouble my sleep. When at last I spotted the first fuzz of pubic hair—I was about twelve—it was as if I was witnessing some biblical prophecy being fulfilled. And the so-called wet dreams Mom loved to tell me that God would some day “send as His way of relieving your desires until He brings you the girl he has chosen for you to marry” never materialized, probably because I never gave God the chance. I had been taking care of my needs for years on my own.

  Life had two huge demarcation lines, a cosmic before and after, from which everything else flowed. There was salvation, the crossing of the line from light to dark. And there was marriage, and life before “the wedding night” and life after.

  Life before the wedding night was a constant battle to resist temptation; life after, a nonstop romp wherein you could become “one flesh” as much as you wanted, look up the skirt of your beloved, see her naked all you wanted, and all she had to worry about was yeast infections and urinary tract infections, “common to newlywed young women.”

  I kept thinking that every pretty girl who got off the bus in Huémoz and walked up the front steps to L’Abri was maybe The One. That was one obsession; the other was that I worried that I could not remember a specific moment when I’d accepted Jesus.

  I just always believed in him. But wasn’t that like being a Roman Catholic? They didn’t get born-again; they just trusted in men’s traditions and sacraments. I would ask Mom, and she said that we could make sure by praying right then and there, again.

  I would pray the sinner’s prayer quite often: “Dear Heavenly Father, we just come to you to say we are sinners and that we are trusting in the saving grace of Jesus, who died for us on the cross. . . .” But I never got that feeling of “inexpressible joy” that other people, former pagans and Catholics and Jews and liberal Protestants and deflowered fallen women, got, or said they got, when they were saved.

  When a pagan accepted Jesus, my sisters would rush down to the living room and play the scratched, much-abused “Hallelujah Chorus” from the Handel’s Messiah on the record player. And everyone would run around talking about how the angels in heaven were rejoicing over this or that lost sheep. Then the newly redeemed gave up smoking, or married the girl, or quit studying to be an architect and went to Covenant Seminary in St. Louis instead.

  I may not have had a dramatic conversion, but I had no intention of letting the second of life’s big moments pass me by. I might not know the exact moment I passed from dark to light, but I was on the lookout for the right woman from the time I was about eight.

  15

  I believe that my parents’ call to the ministry actually drove them crazy. They were happiest when farthest away from their missionary work, wandering the back streets of Florence; or, rather, when they turned their missionary work into something very unmissionary-like, such as talking about art history instead of Christ. Perhaps this is because at those times they were farthest away from other people’s expectations.

  I think religion was actually their source of tragedy. Mom tried to dress, talk, and act like anything but what she was. Dad looked flustered if fundamentalists, especially Calvinist theologians, would intrude into a discussion and try to steer it away from art or philosophy so they could discuss the finer points of arcane theology. And Dad was always in a better mood before leading a discussion or before giving a lecture on a cultural topic, than he was before preaching on Sunday. I remember Dad screaming at Mom one Sunday; then he threw a potted ivy at her. Then he put on his suit and went down to preach his Sunday sermon in our living-room chapel. It was not the only Sunday Dad switched gears from rage to preaching. And this was the same chapel that the Billy Graham family sometimes dropped by to worship in, along with their Swiss-Armenian, multimillionaire in-laws, after Billy—like some Middle Eastern potentate—arranged for his seventeen-year-old daughter’s marriage to the son of a particularly wealthy donor who lived up the road from us in the ski resort of Villars.

  Did the followers of Billy know that he’d plucked his seventeen-year-old daughter out of her first semester at Wheaton College to marry a man almost twenty years older than her whom she had never met until Billy introduced them? Would they have cared?

  Every human being has a dark side. But when you are being hailed as a conduit-to-God, the fact that you are a mere human—or, in the case of Billy Graham, just plain bizarre—has to be ignored by your followers for the same reason that the tribes of Israel really and truly had to keep on believing in Moses’ abilities as they wandered lost in the desert. Believing in “things unseen” is tough. That cloud must be a “pillar of fire” right? And the coincidental windstorm or earthquake has to be some sort of “parting of the Red Sea.” Believers tend to grasp wildly at anything that gives them hope, including clinging to religious leaders who throw things at their wives, then preach on love or run out of food on a pilgrimage to some promised land.

  In his “year of doubt”—as Mom always called it—Dad had spent the better parts of several months pacing in our old Champéry chalet’s hayloft. He was considering giving up his faith. Things no longer made sense to him. Somehow he convinced himself to still believe. And in 1949 (at about the same time Dad was pacing), Billy Graham was also suffering from doubts and had a similar re-conversion. Billy walked into the woods, laid his Bible on a tree stump, and prayed for more faith. Suddenly he just knew it was all true!

  To an outside observer, these self-fulfilling miracles of renewed faith might be open to question; they might even seem to have something to do with the fact that Dad and Billy, and many others, had a vested interested in their belief, belief through which they found meaning, the respect of others, and also earned a living. But since Billy mentioned to Dad—at least half a dozen times over thirty or so years of knowing each other—that he was terrified of dying, maybe Billy’s moment of sublime revelation hadn’t quite done the trick. As for Dad, his temper and violent rage at my mother lessened with time but only disappeared altogether when he was dying of cancer. God might have given Dad faith, but he never did manage to get him to be polite to his wife.

  Flimsily based as Billy’s reason for faith was, it did not stop half a dozen presidents accepting at face value the received wisdom that God had “called” Billy to be “America’s chaplain.” And when it came to how Dad sometimes treated my mother, other L’Abri workers looked the other way. They must have heard the screaming, and some must have known there was abuse. They did nothing. And to the faithful, Dad was, in the words of Christianity Today magazine, “a great oak” of Christian leadership, something they called him when he died. That the great oak abused his wife was beside the point.

  Even presidents need to believe in something. And since the something in question is invisible, the worldly qualifications of the prophet and soothsayer don’t count. So it makes perfect sense that Billy became a religious leader. Billy had his flash of faith at the tree stump, and successive presidents had Billy.

  Falling in faith and falling in love can be understood the same way. People fall in love with no evidence of how a relationship will work out and no real knowledge of who their partner is, let alone who they will be ten, twenty, or thirty years later. There are no good reasons. And people get “saved,” and pick a
religious leader to follow, in about the same way.

  We never have any real information about anything important. It takes a lifetime for the ramifications to be worked out. Billy always worried that he had never been to seminary. But a Bible on a tree stump is as good as a hundred years in a seminary studying invisible “truths.” And the fact that my dad was called Dr. Schaeffer, when his doctorate was an honorary one, made no difference either. The most ridiculous thing in the world is a PhD in theology, an oxymoron if one ever existed.

  The irony is that we all—secular or religious people alike—make our biggest life-shaping decisions on faith. Life is too short to learn what you need to know to live well. So we make a leap of faith when it comes to what we should believe in, who we will marry, and our careers. Who we happen to meet, one conversation when you were eighteen, the college course you happened to sign up for, the teacher you liked, the elevator you missed and the girl you met in the next one, decide whole lives. You would have to live a lifetime to be qualified to make any big decisions. And since we can’t do that, we trust to luck, religion, or the kindness of strangers. Only the trivialities—say, buying cars, washing machines, or airline seats—are chosen on the basis of good information. I’ve always known I like aisle seats, but what does one really want in a wife? And spiritual leaders are selected like spouses, not like airline seats. There is never a good reason, just a feeling, just that fear of death that must be overcome somehow by something—by religion, or orgasms, or art, or having children, or politics—by anything that interrupts the contemplation of oblivion.

  The paradox is that sometimes the less it makes sense, the better it works. And the less one knows about the “holy” people we follow, the better. One of the mysteries of human need is that religious leaders must become more than the sum of their fallible, sometimes awful, parts, because other people need them to be more. This does not make the religious leader a hypocrite; it just shows that the rest of us are desperate.

  So when Billy preached, no one wanted to know why he’d gotten his daughter into an arranged marriage with the son of a very wealthy donor. And when my father stepped up to preach at a multitude of Christian colleges, few knew, or would have wanted to know, that my sisters and I sometimes huddled in our beds listening to the dull roar of his voice as he screamed at my mother and occasionally abused her.

  16

  In some marriages, a husband and wife are said to complete each other. In the case of my mother and father, they also competed. Each was such a powerful force that they sometimes seemed to eclipse the other. Dad was abusive at times, but my mother was in no way intimidated. In fact, she seemed to relish her martyr status. And she loved him, as he did her. In some ways they had a very good marriage, with some horrible moments. In other words, they were like most people.

  Where they were perhaps different from most was in their fierce competition in the arena of “Christian work,” especially as fellow evangelical authors. And what they never intended, but was also part of their legacy, was that they drove their children crazy.

  Mom always let us know not only how hard she was working but how many demands Dad was loading her with. And Dad always let us know how depressed he was at having to face “all those people.” So their competition began as a competition in martyrdom. Serving the Lord was tough, a “spiritual battle.” They both gloried in all they gave up for God.

  Mom was best at the martyrdom game. When she wrote to me, as she did almost every day while on her many L’Abri speaking trips with Dad—when he was lecturing and preaching all over Europe and later all over the United States of America—she would sometimes include a story about her long suffering, the way she did in this typical letter she wrote to me in 1961 from Holland, when I was nine, which is reproduced here in full including the use of capitalization found in the original:Dear Frankie,

  I had a special blessing from the Lord today. Fran had to spend the night over in Rotterdam so I was here at this lovely little hotel all alone. I was able to sleep for an hour and a half last night, then got up to type all the letters Dad dictated as well as write to you. The special blessing was that with Fran away I had time to get all my work done and also to wash and iron Fran’s clothes. You see before he left he said, “Edith, you make sure you have ALL my clothes clean and pressed BEFORE I get back tomorrow!!!” Well, I had been praying about how I could wash and iron all his clothes AND type up all his correspondence. And the Lord showed me because with Fran away for the night I didn’t have to accompany him to the dining room and eat. And so I was able to skip all my meals and not sleep till 3 AM and was able to wonderfully use those extra hours the Lord gave me to do all the work. Then when Fran got back the next day since the Lord had provided me with a room with a bath I took a really relaxing twenty minute bath! And do you know what? In spite of the fact I’d had practically no sleep, had been doing Fran’s laundry in the hotel tub and typing up his letters, and had not eaten for 24 hours and had also found time for 3 hours of uninterrupted prayer, in spite of all this, when Fran came back I felt and looked as fresh and rested as if I had been on a nice long vacation!!! Love Mom.

  Dad would write short postcards, like this one he wrote from that same trip to Holland:Dear Frank, Today the canals here are frozen. Kids your age are skating on them from town to town. Be good and obey Susan till we get home. I love you, Dad.

  I’d be home with Susan and Debby. (Priscilla was married and in St. Louis, teaching French to put John through seminary.) And Susan was in charge. Susan loved to play doctor, nurse, psychologist, mother, spiritual guide, and teacher with her little brother, practicing on me for all the roles she imagined herself playing later in life. And when Mom was away, Susan was, at last, able to do all those things I needed done to me under the heading “If I was your mother. . . .”

  When I was five, Susan was sent to bed for a year after she was diagnosed with rheumatic fever. From her bed, she provided a dayschool. I would sit and color and play at a little table next to her bed in her tiny chalet room. Susan was fiercely patriotic, and before “class” each day she would lead me in saying the American pledge of allegiance, something my parents never did. It is thanks to the fact that Mom was away so much, and to Susan’s experiments in child-rearing, that I learned to read at all. Mom was not lax, she was just nonexistent during the day. All her time and attention was given to L’Abri. And therefore I was gloriously free to roam my mountainside, follow any of the students around I liked, invent endless games, visit Jane and Betty, play in the village, watch rabbits and chickens being killed, fields being cut, hay turned, cows being milked—and avoid schoolwork.

  With Susan in charge, I’d feel as if I had been living in some carefree Italian village that had just been taken over by the Germans. I’d have to sit inside for hours on sunny days actually working! And Susan had been told she could discipline me. Her method was to slap me, or do the dreaded “Indian wrist burn” where she clenched my wrist in her hands and rubbed my skin back and forth between her fists till she raised welts, or roll me up in a bedsheet, making a full-body straitjacket out of it. She would pin this down the back and leave me face-up, lying entombed on my bed. I could struggle free by wiggling around for a while but when Susan came back, if the sheet was loose, say after the one-hour sentence was done, then the time I’d have to stay imprisoned would be doubled.

  In another family, Susan would have grown up to be the first woman bishop of some denomination, a prison guard, an astronaut, or the first female general in the United States Army. In our Reformed Presbyterian denomination, Susan could never be a minister, teaching from the pulpit being reserved for men. But she did become a zealous missionary when she followed my parents into L’Abri.

  It was Susan who kept trying to remind my forgetful parents to “do something about Frankie!” And she tried to teach me as best she could. And once Susan was married to Ranald, they showed me a great deal of kindness. Ranald would take me camping, wrestle with me, and take me on hikes. When
they came back from their honeymoon in South Africa, they brought me a real elephant’s toenail, an African spear, a drum, and a piece of ivory.

  Susan was a gifted (if somewhat terrifying) teacher, and in later years she wrote several books on education inspired by the work of the education pioneer Charlotte Mason. And of course my childhood “memory” of Susan’s draconian discipline looms large. She probably only wrapped me up once or twice, slapped me rarely, and maybe she was just showing me how to torture someone while demonstrating the Indian wrist burn, not punishing me. Although when Susan knocked me down by smashing a colander full of wet spaghetti over my head, that was real enough.

  17

  Since I learned to read with the threat of Susan’s winding sheet and/or a solid slap hanging over me, I deeply resented Dad’s need for nightly sexual intercourse. If only, I thought, he could have gone for a week or two without Mom and let her stay home!