Crazy for God

Table of Contents

 

 

 

 

 

 

“We are fortunate that Frank Schaeffer’s path has taken him from the rigid fundamentalist thinking of his youth to where he is now, working not in stark black and white, but in the blessed gray from which true art arises.”

—Andre Dubus III, author of
House of Sand and Fog

“That
Crazy for God
isn’t just another James Frey-style memoir of personal dysfunction becomes clear with the subtitle, it’s alternately hilarious and excruciating.”

—
Boston Globe

“Part autobiography, part parental tribute, and part examination of how American evangelism got to where it is, versatile author Schaeffer tells a moving story of growing up and growing wise. . . . This story of faith, fame, and family in modern America is a worthy read.”

—
Publishers Weekly

“When Frank Schaeffer comments on the American religious landscape, the reader can rest assured they’re in the hands of someone who knows.”

—
Hartford Courant

“A story about the dangers of inauthentic faith. . . . An important book.”

—
Washington Times

“In this sometimes acerbic, sometimes hilarious autobiography, Frank Schaeffer takes us behind the scenes of a Christian upbringing like no other.”

—
Winston-Salem Journal

“With its up-close portraits of many of the leading figures of the American evangelical movement . . . Schaeffer has written a powerful chronicle of his experiences as a man who found himself at the center of a crucial moment in our recent history.”

—
Tucson Citizen

“This is not just a book about rejecting Christian evangelicalism. It has parallels in secular culture and is an honest read about family life and its challenges.”

—
Library Journal

“Interesting glimpses into the burgeoning religious right folded into a deeply personal memoir . . . Schaeffer is brutally honest. . . . He offers particularly eye-opening accounts of his personal encounters with the likes of Pat Robertson, James Dobson et al.”

—
Kirkus

“If [Schaeffer] spares anyone here, it’s not himself. And we forgive him . . . because he’s a world-class storyteller. . . . He can make us laugh, make us wince, and make us really think about things, all at the same time.”

—
Christianity Today

Other Books by Frank Schaeffer

 

FICTION
(The Calvin Becker Trilogy)
PORTOFINO
ZERMATT
SAVING GRANDMA

 

 

BABY JACK

 

 

KEEPING FAITH—A Father-Son Story about Love and the United
States Marine Corps (Coauthored with Sgt. John Schaeffer USMC)

 

 

FAITH OF OUR SONS—A Father’s Wartime Diary

 

 

VOICES FROM THE FRONT—Letters Home from America’s
Military Family

 

 

AWOL—The Unexcused Absence of America’s Upper Classes from
Military Service—And How It Hurts Our Country
(Coauthored with Kathy Roth-Douquet)

 

 

HOW FREE PEOPLE MOVE MOUNTAINS—A Male Christian
Conservative and a Female Jewish Liberal on a Quest for Common
Purpose and Meaning (Coauthored with Kathy Roth-Douquet)

Y
ou can be the world’s biggest hypocrite and still feel good about yourself. You can believe and wish you didn’t. You can lose your faith and still pretend, because there are bills to be paid, because you are booked up for a year, because this is what you do.

One morning in the early 1980s, I looked out over several acres of pale blue polyester and some twelve thousand Southern Baptist ministers. My evangelist father—Francis Schaeffer—was being treated for lymphoma at the Mayo Clinic, and in his place I’d been asked to deliver several keynote addresses on the evangelical/fundamentalist circuit. I was following in the proudly nepotistic American Protestant tradition, wherein the Holy Spirit always seems to lead the offspring and spouses of evangelical superstars to “follow the call.”

A few weeks earlier, after being introduced by Pat Robertson, I had delivered a rousing take-back-America speech to thousands of cheering religious broadcasters. And not long afterward, I would appear at a huge pro-life rally in Denver. Cal Thomas—once the vice president of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, later a Fox News commentator—would introduce me as “the best speaker in America.” The “anointing,”
someone said, was “clearly on this young man!” They were saying that I was a better speaker than my famous father.

At that moment, the Schaeffers were evangelical royalty. When I was growing up in L’Abri, my parents’ religious community in Switzerland, it was not unusual to find myself seated across the dining room table from Billy Graham’s daughter or President Ford’s son, even Timothy Leary. The English actress Glynis Johns used to come for Sunday high tea. I figured it was normal. They were just a few of the thousands who made it through our doors. Only later did I realize that L’Abri attracted a weirdly eclectic group of people who otherwise would not have been caught dead in the same room. My childhood was, to say the least, unusual.

When Gerald Ford died in January 2007, I recalled that on the day he had assumed the presidency, his daughter-in-law Gayle was babysitting my daughter Jessica as her job in the work-study program at L’Abri, where Mike Ford, the president’s son, was a student.

Mom and Dad met with presidents Ford, Reagan, and Bush Sr. and stayed in the White House several times. In the 1990s when my mother Edith—then in her eighties—heard that George W. Bush might run for the presidency, she exclaimed, “What? But Barbara asked me to pray especially for young George. She didn’t think he had what it took to do anything.”

Given the fact of my family connections to the Republican Party, it was somewhat ironic that when James Webb was elected to the Senate from Virginia by a razor-thin margin in 2006, giving the Democrats their first new majority in years, I was credited with helping Webb. Or, to put it another way, judging by the hate e-mail I got from my father’s fundamentalist followers and other assorted Republicans and conservatives, I deserved some of the blame.

I had long since left the evangelical subculture when I wrote an op-ed for the
Dallas Morning News
that was picked up by several hundred blogs and posted on the front page of James Webb’s campaign Web site. I had defended Webb against a series of scabrous attacks wherein his novels were smeared and he was even labeled a “pedophile” because he had described a sexual tribal ritual. I noted that Webb is a serious novelist whose work has been widely praised by many, including Tom Wolfe, who called Webb’s books “the greatest of the Vietnam novels.”

I also took the Republicans to task for doing to Webb what they had done to another war hero, Senator John McCain, back in the 2000 Republican primaries. I went so far as to say that, in disgust, my wife Genie and I were switching from being registered Republicans to independents.

A few days after this op-ed was published, I wrote another piece, this time for the
Huffington Post,
about the reaction to my departure from the Republican Party. This was picked up by dozens of Democrat-friendly blogs. As the congratulatory e-mails poured in, I was reminded of the welcome given new believers when they convert from some particularly hideous life of sin. Then the
Drudge Report
and dozens of other right-wing and/or evangelical outlets alerted their faithful to my treason.

Furious e-mails flooded in. They fell into two categories: The evangelical “Church Ladies” said they hadn’t read Webb’s novels but were shocked by his immorality nonetheless and went to three- and four-page single-spaced quivering lengths to justify the Republicans’ tactics; the second group were simply profanity-spewing thugs. The Church Lady e-mails contrasted markedly with the insults. It was as if I’d stumbled into a Sunday school picnic at a Tourette syndrome convention.

“As a Christian the best question you could ask is what would Jesus do? He wouldn’t give Webb’s books a pass just because he’s a veteran. . . .”

“I have never read any of Mr. Webb’s novels. However, the excerpts [in the
Drudge Report
] are very disturbing. . . . As for the Bible, yes it has all the things you mentioned: rape, murder, adultery, masturbation, etc. However, the Lord did not give us graphic details. . . . And I hope as Christians we can remember that and be a voice crying out against ALL the ugly things. . . .”

When combined, the hundreds of e-mails seemed to boil down to: “Do what we say Jesus says—and if you don’t, we’ll kick your head in!” The reaction confirmed why any sane person would run, and keep on running from the right-wing/evangelical /Republican morass as far as their legs would carry them, something I’d been doing for more than twenty years. But I had brought this upon myself. The truth is that, with my father, I had once contributed mightily to the creation of the right-wing/evangelical /Republican subculture that was attacking me.