Crazy for God

by Frank Schaeffer

  “If we win, the first person they’ll put against the wall and shoot will be me!” I yelled at Genie.

  “Then why are you doing this?” asked Genie.

  “I’m fucking stuck! How are we supposed to earn our living if I quit? I’ve never even been to college! I don’t know how to do anything!”

  “What about going back to painting?”

  “How will we live?”

  “You’ll have shows.”

  “It isn’t that simple. I’ve let all my contacts go cold. And anyway, I wasn’t even making that much. We’re stuck!”

  “We can live more simply.”

  “I just don’t know how to get out!” I screamed.

  Genie saved me. I didn’t know it, but what she said next was my door back to sanity.

  “Why don’t you just quit and write a novel, you know, tell all those stories you tell the children about your vacations in Italy, something like that?”

  I didn’t act on Genie’s advice right away.

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  Where we had once had art festivals, the evangelicals we were “part of” wanted to ban books. Where we inhaled Altman and Bergman, they wanted to protect their children from “filthy movies” and stop their teens from seeing anything R-rated at all!

  Where homeschooling had meant freedom for me—albeit chaotic, crazy freedom—homeschool leaders like Mary Pride (whose books I got published and who owed me her platform) were pushing homeschooling as a means to isolate and brain-wash a generation of children.

  The evangelical homeschool movement was becoming profoundly anti-American. And Dad and I had done our part to empower them. The biggest laugh of all was that my home “school” experience was held up by some as proof that homeschooling was a great thing! Edith Schaeffer had homeschooled the great pro-life firebrand Franky, so this must work!

  The Evangelical homeschool leaders were doing all they could to undermine the credibility of the public school system. The public schools taught sex education! The public schools taught evolution! The public schools had no values! In fact, you were a bad parent if you didn’t homeschool, or at least send your child to a “Christian school.”

  The idea of public space, the ideas that led to the building of my father’s and my favorite places, for instance all those civic works in Florence and the piazzas we so happily strolled, was the very idea that the evangelical homeschool movement unwittingly wanted to destroy. They wanted no public spaces (physical or intellectual) to be shared by people of all beliefs. They wanted only private spaces, where they could indoctrinate their children free from “interference.”

  Of course, many parents were also driven to find all sorts of solutions for educating their children in the face of a very broken public school system that in places was so minimal, unimaginative, and awful that putting a child in a public school amounted to abuse. (One only has to read the post- 1960s statistics on the drastic decline of classical music record sales in America to see that something has gone terribly wrong with public “education.”) The problem with the evangelical homeschool movement was not their desire to educate their children at home, or in private religious schools, but the evangelical impulse to “protect” children from ideas that might lead them to “question” and to keep them cloistered in what amounted to a series of one-family gated communities.

  There were many parents I knew (including many evangelicals) who were homeschooling who used their daily contact with their children to expand, not diminish, their children’s exposure to the bigger world. That said, by the 1970s the evangelicals as a whole had come up with an alternate “gated” America: “Christian” education, radio, rock, makeup, publishing, schools, home-schools, weight loss, sex manuals, and politics. It wasn’t about being something but about not being secular, about not having nudity, sex, or four-letter words. What it was for, no one knew.

  What was so strange was how evangelicals learned to use all those worldly tools that their fundamentalist grandparents stood against and that, as a child, I was forbidden from even knowing about. They were now using rock, TV, and movies to construct an alternate reality. But they were using these “worldly tools” in a way that was odd: it was not to involve themselves with their culture and learn from it, but to hide from other Americans and create private space.

  Mom may have banned “jazzy music” when I was little, but our bookshelves were full of real books. I was never warned away from reading anything I wanted (except from schmaltzy Disney crap). A good book was a good book, and so what if Mark Twain didn’t like Jesus? Twain was still a good writer. I was never protected from the wrong people either. L’Abri welcomed the wrong people. Mom and Dad’s idea of the Christian life was not to retreat behind high walls.

  I was getting queasy. I had gone from wanting to be an artist and movie director, to helping empower the types of people who would burn my paintings if they ever saw them. Some of them were even planning to stone some of my friends to death—literally.

  At a second secret strategy meeting (also related to founding the Rutherford Institute), Pat Robertson told us proudly about burning a reproduction of a nude by Modigliani that he used to have over his fireplace. He said that as soon as he got saved, he’d taken it down.

  As Pat told us his art-burning story with many a shiver, as if he was confessing to have once been a mass murderer before he “met Jesus,” Dad squirmed. I stared in his direction, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. My father loved Modigliani, and sometimes talked about how Modigliani “retained the human” in his art, in contrast to Marcel Duchamp. (I had often seen Dad’s Modigliani art book open on his chaise longue.)

  At that meeting there was also a character named Gary North in attendance, one of the twilight-zone religious-right strategists I’d run into once in a while on the road, someone Dad felt was a nutty gold-standard fruitcake. North was a leading Theonomist in the so-called Reconstruction Movement, led by Rousas Rushdoony, who happened to be North’s father-in-law.

  The Theonomists—otherwise known as Dominionists; in other words, people who believed in taking “dominion” over society and the world in the name of Jesus—believed in restoring American law to its strictest Puritan origins. They wanted to make America into a modern-day Calvin’s Reformation Geneva. They were our version of the Taliban. They were antitax, antigovernment libertarians (when it came to economics), but on social issues were working to replace secular law with Old Testament biblical law.

  The Reconstructionists were releasing a steady stream of position papers, books, and magazines and holding conferences all over the country. They had a national following that included Howard Ahmanson (heir of the Home Savings bank fortune) who would later help bankroll the “Intelligent Design” movement.

  John Calvin, Oliver Cromwell, and the nastier Old Testament prophets were the Reconstructionists’ heroes. And according to the law in John Calvin’s Reformation Geneva, women pregnant out of wedlock were to be drowned along with their unborn babies, and of course homosexuals were to be killed and heretics burned at the stake.

  Dad regarded Rushdoony as clinically insane. And Rushdoony’s program, if realized, would have included the execution of homosexuals and adulterers.

  Dad never had liked John Calvin. In fact when L’Abri became more formal and added a study center where students could listen to taped lectures, Dad named it “Farel House” after the French/Swiss Reformer Guillaume Farel, who was principally responsible for bringing the Reformation to the French-speaking part of Switzerland. As Dad always said, “Some people wanted to call it ‘Calvin House,’ but Calvin was too harsh. I like Farel better. He was gentler and less reformed than Calvin theologically.”

  The Theonomists, Reconstructionists, and Dominionists were the theocratic/authoritarian-party-in-waiting of American Christendom. And we Schaeffers were helping them expand their national base, because they were showing up at our events and using some of our books to give their views a little more credibility. And I was on the Rutherford Institu
te board as a founding member, along with Gary North.

  We were supposed to be strategizing on how to fund the Rutherford Institute. But that day all North wanted to talk about was buying and hoarding gold as a hedge against the inevitable “complete collapse” that was about to engulf the world economy, that and patterns of radiation distribution from our major cities that would soon—and inevitably—be bombed by the Soviets. (North wrote a book—Fighting Chance—advocating the building of backyard bomb shelters, and later he predicted a worldwide catastrophe at the so-called Y2K.)

  John Whitehead, who in private life wasn’t such a bad guy—he was a closet Beatles and Who fan and kept posters of works by Edvard Munch in his office—was looking slightly crazed and trying to keep the meeting on track. But Gary North kept quoting his latest study about which Western states we should all buy land in, given the prevailing wind direction from the big cities.

  Dad seemed lost in a depressed daze. He had recently been saying privately that the evangelical world was more or less being led by lunatics, psychopaths, and extremists, and agreeing with me that if “our side” ever won, America would be in deep trouble. But by then Dad was dying and knew he had very little time left. There was no time to change his life or his new “friends.”

  All I could do was to bitterly regret what I’d gotten him into. I still do.

  Dad was rudely shocked by the true state of American “mainstream” evangelicalism. Before Dad got famous in the early 1970s, those evangelicals who came to L’Abri were usually not so typical. They were self-selecting, often the cream of the crop of more open-minded believers. That was also true of schools and churches that had invited Dad and Mom to speak, before my parents became so powerful and before evangelicals got so politicized. For instance, Dad used to speak at the relatively moderate Wheaton College but was never invited to far-right and racist Bob Jones University and would not have gone if he had been invited.

  It must have come as a shock to Dad to be plunged into the heart of the American evangelical scene in the 1970s and 1980s, and to suddenly see just who he was urging to take power in the name of returning America to our “Christian roots.” Who would be in charge? Pat Robertson? Jerry Falwell? Gary North? Dr. Dobson? Rousas Rushdoony? And what sort of fools would “our people” elect as president or for Congress, given that they had so easily been duped by the flakes, madmen, and charlatans they were hailing (and lavishly funding) as their spiritual leaders?

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  I had such a reputation as a hard-assed pro-life fundamen talist that in the early ’80s, the editors of an evangelical satirical youth-oriented magazine, The Wittenberg Door, put a picture of a mud-throwing child labeled “Franky Schaeffer” on their cover. What they were accusing me of (accurately) was that I had been attacking other evangelicals for their lack of commitment to the pro-life cause. For instance, I had been going after Christianity Today magazine in a series of articles in my newsletter The Christian Activist—we had about 150,000 readers—that generated hundreds of critical letters to the Christianity Today editors. By then, Dad and I were both saying that evangelicals who would not take a stand on abortion had denied their faith.

  By the early ’80s, most evangelical leaders (who wanted to keep their jobs) came over to our side on “the issue” or were intimidated into silence if they still had doubts. But the spiritual-versus-political debate was over. Billy Graham might be maintaining his nonpolitical stance, but we activists had won. Evangelical Christianity was now more about winning elections than about winning souls.

  After I read the Wittenberg Door cover article, I sent the editors a photograph of myself throwing fistfuls of mud while dressed the same way as their mud-throwing cover model. They ran the picture, along with an editorial comment that my sense of humor surprised them.

  Their surprise was a wakeup call. I’d never thought of myself as some kind of square jerk that other people would presume had no sense of humor! What, or who, was I turning into?

  I was at the annual Christian Booksellers Association convention (CBA). Dad was very ill. (I think this was in 1983.) I had recently delivered a keynote address at the National Religious Broadcasters (NRB). I was at CBA signing copies of my evangelical books for eager bookstore managers and their wives, who were lined up for several hundred yards at the Crossway Publishers’ booth.

  Everything was for sale. Everything was copied from the secular world but made bizarrely religious. Everything was taste-in-your-ass horrible, including the evangelical version of the “Budweiser” towel, a rip-off of the then-popular Budweiser commercial “This Bud’s for You!” There was a lookalike beer can on it with two crucified hands and the logo, “This Blood’s for You!” being offered at the convention. It was very popular.

  A few days after my book signings at the CBA, I wrote a scene for some future movie I was thinking of making. It reflects the split personality I had developed. One moment I was meeting and greeting, and the next scribbling a poisonous little fantasy about the people I was such a hero to who, in my mind, I was calling “the low IQs.” I was referring to myself, and other evangelical leaders, as the “Famous Christian of the Hour.” The fictitious conversation takes place between Allison and Andy. Andy has never been to an NRB or CBA, and Allison is explaining these evangelical trade fairs to him: “Okay, Andy,” Allison said, “I’ll explain it all to you. At the National Religious Broadcasters, the point is the herd of low IQs try and get close to the Famous Christian of the Hour, like people do sucking up to movie stars. And then there is this dance number where the ‘little people’ low IQs surge around the Famous Christian and tell the asshole how great he or she is. And the Famous low IQ has to pretend he is just so glad to see each and every precious nobody low IQ and pretend that he is in no hurry to get away from the scum, and back to his six-room, luxury hotel suite. So his ‘people,’ the little knot of assholes around him, are forced to keep tearing the Famous Christian of the Hour away from the flock of nobody low IQ ass-kissers, that he keeps hugging like they’re his mother, because the Famous Christian of the Hour still has fifty meetings to do that day upon which the fate of the Lord’s work on this earth depends, in other words whether or not the Famous Christian of the Hour gets his syndication deal renewed for another year on a thousand Christian radio and TV stations.

  “See in most trade shows they’re only trying to sell you some regular harmless shit, computers or guided missiles, whatever. But at the National Religious Broadcasters and/or the Christian Bookseller’s Association, what’s getting sold is God. And since God won’t show up and get franchised, the assholes with the booths have to kind of make up a bunch of God-awful shit to sell in his place.”

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  When Dad died, Ronald Reagan wrote this note to Mom:Nancy and I express our deep sympathy to you and your family on the death of your husband. We want you to know that you are in our thoughts and prayers.

  While words are inadequate to console you on your loss, you can take comfort in knowing that Dr. Schaeffer will be greatly missed by all who knew him and his work. He will long be remembered as one of the great Christian thinkers of our century, with a childlike faith and a profound compassion toward others. It can rarely be said of an individual that his life touched many others and affected them to the better. It will be said of Dr. Schaeffer that his life touched many and brought them to the truth of their Creator. In June of 1982, Francis last wrote to me and enclosed a copy of an address he had just given which described in moving terms that “final reality” which is God. Dr. Schaeffer drew all his strength and spirit from that source and shared that message with a waiting world. Now he has found his final home.

  May God grant you his peace in serenity which is only His to give. With our sincere condolences.

  Sincerely, Ronald Reagan,

  The White House, May 17, 1984

  Author, former editor of Punch magazine, and Dad’s friend Malcolm Muggeridge wrote: “Francis was a great Christian doing a great Christian work. I’m g
lad to think that the last time we saw one another—at the great pro-life rally at Hyde Park in London—perfect harmony and affection united us.” (Dad and Muggeridge had led a pro-life rally in Hyde Park a year or two before Dad died.)

  Sir Bernard Brane, Member of Parliament, wrote: “On behalf of the British pro-life members of Parliament, and peers of the realm, we join in paying homage to the memory of Dr. Francis Schaeffer, who did more than any individual throughout the world to rally the Protestant conscience on abortion. We salute him.”

  Bill Buckley, writing in the National Review magazine (June 15, 1984), said “It was his commitment to the truth of scripture that made him such a foe of totalitarianism and relativism, and caused him to champion freedom and the sanctity of human life.”

  Jack Kemp inserted this in the Congressional Record (May 15, 1984): “Wherever he went, Dr. Schaeffer had a profound influence on people. Dr. Schaeffer was not an ‘Ivory Tower’ theologian but a great prophet and a great Christian leader.”

  Time called Dad a “leading evangelical scholar,” in their obituary.

  Dad’s funeral embodied all the chaos, make-it-up-as-you-go insanity of evangelicalism. It was to funerals what “personalized” weddings are to marriage, ones where the young couple compose their own vows while some friend “really like into guitar” provides the music.

  There is a good reason we humans take refuge in the collective wisdom accumulated over time as expressed in liturgies and cultural habits of long practice. And the arrogance of the Protestant notion that one’s individual whims are equal to all occasions manifests itself in innumerable bad hair moments and in dreadful church services, let alone at innumerable do-it-yourself weddings. But funerals are supposed to be serious. Creativity isn’t always good.

  How do you bury a Protestant pope? There was nothing to fall back on. When Mom decided to use his funeral as a “witness,” throw open the doors, and turn the-burying-of-Francis-Schaeffer into what amounted to a farewell seminar/trade show, no one could stop her. How do you say no to a grieving widow? Only Mom wasn’t grieving. She was folding Dad’s death into The Work, and rather cheerful about the whole thing.