Crazy for God

by Frank Schaeffer

Genie was pregnant with John when we moved. We thought electric fans would be enough to keep us cool in one of the hottest, most humid summers on record. We went looking for a pro-life doctor to take care of Genie and deliver the baby. We couldn’t find food we liked in the supermarket, and the bread was horrible. Humidity-sodden hunks of plaster were falling from the old cracked ceilings in the heat. There was no screen porch—we added one later—and we huddled inside around the fans. Jessica, age ten, Francis, seven, and I worked outside slathered in Off, clearing sumac and poison ivy from enough of the front yard so we could start to get the garden back to where it had been in 1960, when the owners had moved out and began renting the property.

  John was born. Gradually our new house became home. We learned that if we cut the grass short, cleaned up our yard, and avoided being outside at dawn and dusk, the garden was lovely. We discovered that if you looked around, there were very good builders and tradesmen in our area, like Gerry the plumber; Rick, our carpenter; and Don, our electrician, who were skilled and conscientious and became our friends. Then, much to our joy, Bill and Jane opened Annarosa’s Bakery in Newburyport, the best bakery in America, maybe in the world. And we bought air conditioners. And the tours that used to take me away from Switzerland for weeks could be broken down into mostly overnight trips now.

  The children had a hard time adjusting from the excellent Swiss school system to the small inept private school we put them in. And a year later, when we enrolled Jessica in a swanky local private middle school, she still had a tough time. The Swiss children were just that, children, unconcerned by fashion. Jessica didn’t have the “right” shoes; she had the “wrong” slacks and tops.

  We still traveled back to Switzerland once a year for our ritualistic family reunions. The fights got worse each year. At the last reunion, Dad yelled at Mom because it was our twelfth reunion and her T-shirt design that year was a clock with the hands pointing to two minutes to midnight. Dad was dying of cancer and hated that image.

  “Why did you make this fool thing?” he yelled. “That’s nice, two minutes to midnight! Just what I want, some omen that I’m dying and won’t make next year’s reunion!”

  Dad didn’t make it.

  51

  The influence of the right-wing fundamentalists we were working with rubbed off on us. I wrote several more liberal-bashing books about American “decline.” Dad also moved to the right, or should I say back to his fundamentalist roots. His new, harsher persona even bled back into L’Abri and the heart of our family.

  From the mid-1970s until he died, Dad was drafted (from time to time) by the Missouri Synod Lutherans, Southern Baptists, and other conservative denominations as a kind of intellectual heavy gun-for-hire. They were fighting their own updated versions of the 1920s antimodernist battles. The fight was against a new crop of “liberal” theologians who were “infiltrating” heretofore solidly conservative denominations and seminaries. These theologians were not fundamentalist enough. They were not strong enough on the issue of the inerrancy of the Bible or were “weak” on our social issues, like abortion—or, even worse, were prepared to compromise with people even more liberal than themselves. (“Inerrancy” was the belief that the Bible is literally true with no errors of fact in it, even when it seems to be contradicted by science or history or within the text itself.)

  Dad, like some old warhorse long absent from battle, jumped into the fight over the inerrancy of scripture. He spent the last years of his life intermittently shuttling between secret and public meetings where he was used by hard-liners to stiffen the spines of various seminary and denominational boards so they would make the necessary break with their own people and fire “untrustworthy” professors. Dad was telling people to “take back” their denominations before it was “too late.”

  Priscilla was aghast that Dad was turning back to his former passion for doctrinal purity and away from his more enlightened views. She told me that the denominational fights that Dad got involved in in the late 1970s reminded her of her traumatic youth in the 1940s and early ’50s, when our family was deeply embroiled in the bitter splits between various fundamentalist groups. Priscilla mourned this return to the “ugly days.” She was very upset and accused me of being “part of this,” because it was my movies and book deals that “got Daddy back into this mess.”

  John Sandri, Priscilla’s husband, paid a heavy price for Dad’s rekindled fundamentalist enthusiasms. John had been giving well-attended Bible studies in L’Abri that some of the more strictly Calvinistic L’Abri workers (including Ranald and Udo, who for once agreed on something) said were bordering on “heresy.” John was reading the Bible as a literary work, and not giving it the “correct” theological spin. John was a liberal! The sky was falling! John had compromised!

  John’s “crime” was his interest in how the Bible states things and how you draw meaning from the biblical text. John knew that if you push the so-called Sola Scriptura Calvinist approach and the “inerrancy” ideas to their absurd limit, all real study of the Bible stops. It becomes a magical text. It is no longer open to interpretation. Dogma replaces study, because scholarship can only be meaningful when you are allowed to ask real questions and let the chips fall where they may.

  It was decided that John should no longer teach in L’Abri. Dad instigated this anti-John, purity-of-the-visible-church purge. In the case of John—who was by far all of our family’s favorite person and the picture of kindness and Christian love, as well as common sense—the absurdity of trying to demand one-note theological purity became clear.

  If L’Abri produced one true saint, one self-effacing gentleman willing to help everyone do everything from clip their hedges to solve marital problems, to do their taxes, one real biblical scholar, it was John Sandri. If John—who spent a good part of his life selflessly nursing my sister Priscilla after her three massive nervous breakdowns—was no longer good enough for L’Abri, then who was?

  But how could Dad be running all over America giving fiery speeches on the inerrancy of the Bible and the “purity of the visible church,” when his own son-in-law had quietly evolved into the type of Bible scholar that Dad was insisting the Southern Baptists, Lutherans, and others fire from their seminaries? So Dad did to John what he had refused to do to me when I got Genie pregnant: he made a public example of him.

  Dad went so far as to come up with a statement that everyone in L’Abri had to sign if they wanted to remain in the work. It was a McCarthy-type loyalty oath to the “inerrancy of scripture” concept. And of course John, to his credit, didn’t sign. Everyone else, to their discredit, did.

  The updated fundamentalism-versus-modernism battle that Dad let tear his family apart seemed to bow him down. He kept telling me how sorry he was about John. He also kept saying “But what choice do I have? I can’t take the public stand I take on the scriptures and not do anything about John!” And Dad unwittingly set the stage for the power struggle in L’Abri that happened after he died. Once fundamentalists start to sniff out “impurities,” they don’t stop.

  John was Dad’s favorite son-in-law. He had always told me that. How could Dad have been so cruel? Maybe there were just too many people treating Dad like a prophet. Maybe he had just gotten too used to always being in the spotlight, a hush falling on any gathering when he spoke.

  When L’Abri banned John Sandri from teaching, they asked if he would stay on nevertheless and help run the work! The smallness of our village, with John living a few hundred yards from the other L’Abri chalets, made his banning doubly absurd. Since John had the best (in fact the only) day-to-day knowledge of everything from residency permits to taxes, from the tricky water heater in some chalet to who in the village could fix a rotting roof, and since he did all L’Abri’s complex international financial, tax, and insurance work, he was irreplaceable. And since John, unlike Dad at that point, didn’t take himself too seriously, he volunteered to help out, rather than let The Work collapse under the weight of an absurd theologi
cal fight.

  It was a lesson I never forgot. To me, John’s selfless actions came to represent what faith looks like when lived, as opposed to what theological “purity” looks like. And one reason I still bother to struggle to have faith is because of John Sandri’s example. He truly returned good for evil.

  My sister Priscilla remembers her husband’s mistreatment in a kinder, gentler light. I don’t think she can bear having to choose between her husband and our father’s memory, so she puts the rosiest spin on these events possible. And in a way, her lack of bitterness—even perhaps her state of denial—is as inspiring as John’s forgiveness of those who wronged him.

  Priscilla writes:

  Dad did change his emphasis in his later years. His books had been published and he spent more and more time in the United States lecturing and going back into the U.S. “church world.” His burden became caring for where the evangelical churches were heading. It was at this time that he got cancer, meaning even more absences from Huémoz. What I missed was the one-to-one involvement with our students, his discussions with nonreligious language. I was sad but it didn’t affect me personally, as working in Swiss L’Abri the workers here were going on in the old involvement of one-to-one discussions with the students, as we still do today. Of course when he would return for short stays in Huémoz, Dad would carry on Saturday night discussions in the chapel and preach on Sunday mornings, but it couldn’t be the same as before.

  My husband John and Dad did have some theological differences about the wording of Christ’s place in the Trinity. They discussed for hours. Dad was distressed since he was so fond of John. But finally after tears over the situation, Dad realized that although John wasn’t heretical, the way he expressed himself was misleading. Actually, it took me longer to understand John’s position but over the years, as I’ve listened to John’s New Testament teaching I’ve become more and more excited by it and do understand what he is really saying.

  52

  I was not getting rich off the film productions, let alone the seminars. I never paid myself more than $39,000 a year from my Gospel Films budget or, later, from Schaeffer V Productions and, for most of the time, earned less than that. (Even back then, that wasn’t much.) And I didn’t milk the “perks.” But soon I was earning a lot more, when I started to get book royalties from my evangelical books, several hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for a few years, that I invested very badly and more or less threw away. (My father and mother gave half their royalties to L’Abri and then gave away an additional ten percent of what they kept on top of that. Even so, they suddenly had plenty of money.)

  But besides the pro-life cause—in which I sincerely believed—it was never about the money anyway. It was about self-righteousness, adrenaline, and power. Nevertheless, I was starting to get tired of the whole thing.

  Jim Buchfuehrer writes:Frank had become a name in the evangelical world equal to his father. He was a much better communicator and learned much from his father. Frank had spoken at all the big events in the evangelical American world such as the Southern Baptist Convention. Whatever the venue Frank always stole the show.

  Everybody was calling. I was fielding all the calls; serve on this board, consult here, all the top evangelical leaders were calling saying, we want Frank to be on this board, speak at this conference. We were in the driver’s seat so to speak. But that was the last thing Frank wanted. It was time to move on. . . .

  The Francis Schaeffer of the Uffizi, who hiked with me and told me that he had doubts about many things, even God, gradually disappeared, and the absolutist defender-of-the-Bible and father-of-the-religious-right took his place. The young painter I had been was gone, too. And even the young idealistic pro-life activist was fading away, to be replaced by a pain-in-the-ass upstart earning great book royalties and speaking fees from hanging onto his father’s coattails and shrilly denouncing “secular America” and the evils of liberals.

  I was turning our cause into a solid profession. Roe v. Wade turned out to be my personal lucky break.

  Most absurd of all, I really knew nothing about the real America. I might as well have been raised on Mars. My ignorance went far beyond not knowing to stop for school buses! Once I moved to the States, I gradually came to realize that my version of “America” had come from others: first, from my parents’ jaundiced view of the country they left in 1947 (it was being “taken over by theological liberalism”); second, from the political battles we were plunged into. I had no context, no sense of proportion, no hands-on experience.

  As I became a more and more successful “professional Christian,” I began to sense the depth of my ignorance about the country I was talking about. On the road, I’d be parroting the party line, saying that America was godless and doomed. But the America I was actually experiencing (for the first time as a resident) was not doomed. It was more complicated and wonderful than I had ever imagined. I began to get the feeling that maybe I was on the wrong side.

  The public image of the leaders of the religious right I met with so many times also contrasted with who they really were. In public, they maintained an image that was usually quite smooth. In private, they ranged from unreconstructed bigot reactionaries like Jerry Falwell, to Dr. Dobson, the most power-hungry and ambitious person I have ever met, to Billy Graham, a very weird man indeed who lived an oddly sheltered life in a celebrity/ministry cocoon, to Pat Robertson, who would have a hard time finding work in any job where hearing voices is not a requirement.

  Dad and I were sitting in Falwell’s study just after Dad spoke at Jerry’s church. (Later I preached there, too, endorsed Falwell, and also gave a talk to the whole student body at Falwell’s college.) Out of the blue, Jerry brought up the gay issue. Dad said something about it being complicated, and Jerry replied: “If I had a dog that did what they do, I’d shoot him!”

  The offhand remark came from nowhere. Jerry wasn’t smiling. He was serious and just tossed his hatred out there the way gang members throw down hand signals. Dad looked nonplussed but didn’t say anything, though later he growled, “That man is really disgusting.” Later still, Dad commented: “You can be cobelligerents, but you don’t have to be allies.”

  Dad, Jim Buchfuehrer, and I were with Pat Robertson in a secret meeting Pat called to help John Whitehead, Jim, and me set up the Rutherford Institute, a (then new) group that was going to be the “Christian answer to the ACLU.” I was a founding board member, along with John Whitehead and Jim Buchfuehrer. It was a measure of our absurd paranoia that the meeting was “secret.” (John Whitehead was a lawyer who had the idea to start the new ministry, and he would lead it.)

  While the ACLU was suing to keep Christians out of public life, the Rutherford Institute would sue to protect Christians’ rights, or at least the “last vestiges of rights that have not already been stripped away by the secular humanists in the courts.” And the ACLU made our lives easy. We thanked God every time the ACLU sued municipal governments to get crèche scenes off public property, or stopped some school district from allowing prayer before football games, or sued to take some dusty plaque with the Ten Commandments off some obscure statehouse or court building. Our fund-raising (and often the Republicans winning the next election in some locality) depended on the ACLU “outrage” of the day.

  Since the ACLU was the Rutherford Institute’s mirror image, depending on us stupid fundamentalists doing stupid things, just as we depended on the stupid actions taken by the sort of lefties who lie awake at night worrying about the “In God We Trust” inscription on coins, life was good for all concerned.

  “Standing up to the ACLU” was so popular that several dozen other Christian civil liberties groups were springing up at the same time as Rutherford was founded by John Whitehead, Jim, and myself. America-the-hysterical is a profitable place for shrill activists of all persuasions. In some back room, away from the TV cameras, the busybody do-gooders who ran the ACLU and like-minded organizations, and the busybody do-gooders who I was wo
rking with on the religious right, would have understood each other perfectly. We all claimed that the only thing that could stop the loss of “all our rights” was us! Just send in your donation today! “Urgent! Open this time-sensitive material right away!” The sky always had to be falling, otherwise we all—of the paranoid left and delusional religious right—would have been out of a job.

  While we were with Pat at those meetings, Dad and I were also going to be on the 700 Club—again. So after the closed-door meeting ended, Dad, Jim, and I were standing in the green room before the show in a circle of prayer—in other words, squeezing some stranger’s sweaty hands with our heads bowed.

  Dad looked about as comfortable as a cat being held over water. The man to my left, a preacher from Kansas City with bad dandruff who claimed that his church had just been “closed down by the IRS for preaching the Word,” called out “Thus sayeth the Lord! We must repent!” And Pat’s producer bellowed, “Yes, Jesus and Amen! And Aaaamen!”

  The preacher from Kansas City had just “interpreted” someone’s “tongues” utterance that had been shouted moments before, something like “Nagaz, shagaz, spiffy-biffy blabooo!” In other words, he translated the godly gibberish of the “heavenly language” into English.

  We all held hands while people shouted out this and that to God, or whispered heartfelt prayers, until a very cute girl in a tight pink dress opened the door, quiet and prayerful and oozy as Liquid Plumber, and the producer murmured a last “Amen and Aaaamen!” and the oozy cute girl whispered, “Pat’s ready, praise the Lord!”

  Then we started to shuffle for the door. But we tried to act polite because even though we all wanted to get down the hall first to see Pat, so we could get a couple of seconds of his undivided attention and make sure he put in a good plug for whatever we were hawking that day—the point is, you want Pat to tell the director to cut to a close-up of your book when he holds it up—we didn’t want to look like we were too pushy, because of all that stuff in scripture about being meek that we were still supposed to believe.