Crazy For God
How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (of Almost All) of It Back, by Frank Schaeffer (Carroll & Graf, 2007)
If I say that Frank Schaeffer's Crazy For God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back is a very strange book, I'm mindful of the author's anticipation of my response. If I didn't know anything about his world until I read his book, he knows why.
The Times "best-seller" list was misleading. Evangelical books were often outselling the Times' best-sellers. But the paper did not bother to count sales in religious bookstores. The people hurt most weren't evangelical authors (our books sold anyway); rather, the losers were Democratic Party leaders and other liberal readers of the "paper of record" who were blindsided by subsequent events. The Times' readers were not given a heads-up about what was going on "out there."
I read this passage with something like the transfiguring shock that Isabel Archer feels when she finally grasps the nature of the relationship between Mme Merle and her husband. At the end of a violent onrush, the world, all too alarmingly, makes a great deal more sense than it did before. A few pages later, my enlightenment was complete.
If things had fallen out slightly differently, the [pro-life] crisis centers just as easily could have been bastions of the Democratic Party, or at least nonpolitical. Abortions had been mostly a "Catholic issue," just as Bishop Sheen had said. And at first, most evangelical leaders, following Billy Graham's lead, weren't interested in "going political." When Dad asked Billy why he wasn't taking a stand on abortion, Billy answered that he had been burned by getting too close to Nixon and was never going to poke his head over the ramparts of "I-only-preach-the-gospel" trench again. He said he didn't want to be "political."
[...]
Even some people on the pro-choice side were shocked by the callousness of pro-choice supporters. For instance, in an article in the Village Voice, "Abortion Chic — The Attraction of Wanted-Unwanted Pregnancies" (February 4, 1981), Leslie Savan, a self-described pro-choice advocate, discussed how abortion had become "subliminally chic." She quoted women who deliberately became pregnant, without any intention of carrying their babies to term. Some of the reasons Savan listed that the women had given her for getting pregnant, then aborting, were "A desire to know if they were fertile, especially if they had postponed pregnancy until later life ... To test the commitment of the man ... Abortion as a rite of passage."
The debate became vicious. And Dad and I went from merely talking about providing compassionate alternatives to abortion, to actively working to drag evangelicals, often kicking and screaming, into politics. By the end of the Whatever Happened to the Human Race? tour, we were calling for civil disobedience, the takeover of the Republican Party, and even hinting at overthrowing our "unjust pro-abortion government."
By the time I was through with the chapters in "Turmoil," Part III of Mr Schaeffer's memoir, I felt that I had been complicit, at some point in my past, for the conservative, Christianist ascendancy. I'd been tempted by contempt for evangelicals, and, like the Times, I'd thought that it was unnecessary to pay attention to them. I had never thought about the Americans for whom Frank Schaeffer's was a household name. All I had seen was the strange fruit of a pseudo-revivalist's galvanization of the patriarchy.
*
What makes Crazy For God strange is the cognitive dissonance between its subtitle and the bulk of its contents. If there's a phrase that doesn't describe Frank Schaeffer, the youngest child and only son of Francis and Edith Schaeffer, American prophets of Biblical inerrancy and the redeeming virtues of the fine arts who established a sort of youth hostel/academy called L'Abri, in Switzerland, after World War II, it's "crazy for God." Far from being a holy young man, Frank was "known in some circles as the 'Little Shit from Switzerland'." Reading about his childhood and adolescence will remind readers a line of books running from Auntie Mame to I Capture the Castle, the common theme of which is childhood, benignly neglected by daffy grownups.
With three older sisters and a mother who liked to talk "frankly" about sex to her children, I had been swimming in a sea of female secrets and absorbing titillating inside knowledge since I could remember. Mom skipped the birds and bees and cut to the chase. By the time most boys were beginning to wonder if girls were different from them "down there," I was awash in menstrual cycles, ovaries, the inside dope on my sisters' urinary tract infections, Mom's diaphragm — "We're not Catholics, and spacing your children is a good idea" — even intimate knowledge about how sex could help Dad's Moods.
Living this life against a background of "students" — the "average guest at L'Abri was a pretty girl in her early twenties, full of questions — 'deep questions' were even better — about God, about life, and about relationships — above all, marriage" — Frank grew up both pampered (or as pampered as his parents' sometimes exiguous finances permitted) and wild. His idyllic experiences at an English prep school, spoiled only by the undiagnosed dyslexia that prevented him from passing his CEs, followed by rather stormier times at an upstart public school in Wales left him disinclined to mature, with a taste for the benefits of manhood (sex with pretty girls) without its burdens. Instead of striking off on his own and going to college, he simply grew into the family business, without much regard for his own personal commitment to any kind of faith, much less to his parents' very traditional Protestantism.
One of the little surprises of Crazy For God is how traditional, indeed, the senior Schaeffers' Protestantism was, at least until it collided with the Right to Life movement. This does not emerge explicitly until Chapter 18, well into the first part's memoir of an intensely unusual childhood. Frank's parents' faith was mainline — if you drew the mainline where it was in 1750, before the philologists started hacking away at the textual integrity of the Gospels, and long before "enlightened" Protestants developed a profoundly metaphorical theology in the 1920s. Scriptural inerrancy was not necessarily incompatible with higher education, and fundamentalists like Francis Schaeffer had little in common with the crude revivalists of the American South. "Dad spent the rest of his life trying to somehow reconcile the angry theology that typified movement-fundamentalism, with a Christian apologetic that was more attractive. He maintained a rather fierce enthusiasm for an absolutely literal interpretation of scripture that I believe he held on to more as emotional baggage ... than for any intellectual reason." In other words, the man compartmentalized, worshiping both the Jahweh of the Pentateuch and the Creator of, among many, many other wonderful things, the classical music that he loved.
So there are rocks under the rocks here. Hold L'Abri up to the Alpine sunlight on a fine day, and it begins to look like a hippie commune, which it most certainly wasn't — except that one's proper bourgeois parents would have been equally disapproving. The intensity is what sets the Schaeffers apart from the Americans back home — and what draws the "students" like flies. It is all the more attractive for being entirely seemly. The Schaeffers are good people at heart. Dad has a temper, and is prone to depression, and Mom seems to have displaced a few problems here and there, but they mean well and, by and large, do well. By not throwing Frank out of the house at a decent age, however, they make it almost impossible for him to grow up. It's the sort of failing that's "not their fault."
*
How did Frank Schaeffer morph into a Right to Life crusader? When explains, it makes a great deal of sense.
There was nothing intellectual, let alone religious, about my visceral opposition to abortion. My antiabortion fervor was strictly personal. It had a name, Jessica, my little girl, proof that conception is good, even an unexpected teen conception. I knew that "unwanted" can become very wanted indeed. I also think that my gut reaction against abortion originated back when I was a child pressing my ear against a series of fat lovely bellies of my sisters, various unwed mothers (who were guests), and several L'Abri workers and listening to all those unborn babies' hearts beating. There was also another very personal motive: all the CP [cerebral palsy] kids at Chalet Bellevue I had played with, and, in the case of Jean Pierre, merrily jacked off with. I didn't want people just like my spastic friends to be eliminated. And perhaps my polio, being the only "Yank" in an English school, my dyslexia, and a weird childhood, all also gave me a natural empathy for outsiders, and the unwanted.
Without an anchor planted firmly in faith, however, Frank was swept up by the cause into the sheer excitement of public appearances. He and his father become stars of the Evangelical Right — and then he, alone, is a star. This leads, naturally if sadly enough, into a troubled career as a movie producer. It's a good thing that the subtitle assures us that the author "lived to take all of it back," because Frank's prospects for living at all look rather poor as the book draws to a close. The miracle that saves him is quiet enough: it is the faith of his movie partner, Jim, in the Greek Orthodox Church, of all things, that brings Frank round. That salvation comes through another person, and not by means of a private revelation, seems utterly in keeping with the character of this unflappably gregarious man.
Perhaps I converted to the Greek Orthodox Church (rather than simply abandoning religious faith) because spirituality is a way to connect with people and might even be part of a journey toward God. (If there is a God.) According to Jesus, community is spirituality: "Love one another."
In the end, it was the very strangeness of the life traced in Crazy For God that impelled me through its chronicle of a world that, however humanly attractive, I should never have found congenial. In the strangest trick of all, that strangeness twisted round and round several times until suddenly it was not strange at all, but the country that I'd grown up in. Instead of being embarrassed for the nakedly honest writer (and there is much, as he avers, for him to be embarrassed about), I found the partitions of my own prejudice flying up into nowhere, leaving me alone with people whose religious fervor, however distasteful when I thought about it, looked and felt not only human but humane. Not every reader, however, will forgive the opportunistic young protagonist his deal with the devil of celebrity. (March 2008)
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