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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 |
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Amazon Sales Rank: 1652
Publication Date: 2008-09-29
Publisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN: 0306817500
Type: Paperback
Number Of Pages: 448
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By the time he was nineteen, Frank Schaeffer’s parents, Francis and Edith Schaeffer, had achieved global fame as bestselling evangelical authors and speakers, and Frank had joined his father on the evangelical circuit. He would go on to speak before thousands in arenas around America, publish his own evangelical bestseller, and work with such figures as Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Dr. James Dobson. But all the while Schaeffer felt increasingly alienated, precipitating a crisis of faith that would ultimately lead to his departure—even if it meant losing everything. With honesty, empathy, and humor, Schaeffer delivers “a brave and important book” (Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog)—both a fascinating insider’s look at the American evangelical movement and a deeply affecting personal odyssey of faith.
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Review: 2009-11-14
Better Late than Never
A review of this book I wrote for publication did not make the cut. Rather than have it never see light, here it is:
Better Late Than Never
Edmund D. Cohen
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, by Frank Schaeffer (New York: Da Capo Press, 2008 ISBN: 978-0306817502) 448pp. Paperback $16.00
This memoir will almost certainly be the last insider exposé from a significant figure in the Religious Right movement of the 1980s. Other secondary figures, such as Gerard Straub, Austin Miles and David Brock, published exposés while their experiences were still current. Schaeffer has waited until he was almost elderly, to come to terms with things that took place a generation earlier. Still, his memoir--taken together with some additional disclosures in his Huffington Post pieces and interviews such as the one on "Fresh Air with Terry Gross"--is indispensable as primary source material.
Frank Schaeffer--known in those days as "Franky"--is the son of Francis A. Schaeffer (1912-1984.) A graduate of Westminster Theological Seminary in its early days and a protégé of J. Gresham Machen, the elder Schaeffer had been formed by the marginalization of fundamentalists by modernists in the early Twentieth Century. He became prominent as the author of popular fundamentalist Christian books that were nonetheless literate and had a patina of intellectual respectability. He wrote about how the humanities and Christian faith necessarily had to be reconcilable. His readers seemed not to notice that he never quite reached the point of effecting any such reconciliation. He founded and operated a Christian retreat center at L'Abri, Switzerland, with an eye to evangelizing veterans of the sixties counterculture. Together with the renowned pediatric surgeon, C. Everett Koop, the elder Schaeffer made reaction against the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision into a key rallying point for the emerging Religious Right movement. Before the two took it up, opposition to abortion had been seen as a Roman Catholic specialty. Some conservative Protestant bodies had to reverse staked-out pro-choice positions, in order to be on what became an anti-abortion band wagon.
During his final two or three years while he was dying of cancer, the elder Schaeffer went off on a militant theocratic tangent. He made high-profile, railing pronouncements to the effect that Christians were obligated take over political power in America, and disenfranchise those not sharing their beliefs.
Frank Schaeffer grew up in L'abri. The lack of suitable schooling there shut him out of the elite stateside higher education that was normal for that family. But he showed talent for fiction writing and film-making. He honed his skills on compelling anti-abortion videos, shown in many a church basement in the eighties. During his father's last years, he often served as a stand-in speaker for him. He was present when his father hobnobbed with the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson--colorfully expressing disdain for them afterwards in private.
Within the four corners of the memoir, there ought to be more than there is, answering to its expansive title. It mostly describes the minutia of Frank Schaeffer's early life. It is as if he never got past the mode of writing for an adoring readership, hungry for any scrap of information about its royal family. The Schaeffer family may have been a bit dysfunctional, but not in any extraordinary or interesting way. The memoir further exasperates by its author's persistence in esteeming himself more interesting than he really is. It contains little analysis. There is little to put what it does cover into a context beyond its author's immediate personal experience. Were it to be judged exclusively on its merit as writing, this memoir would be a doorstop rather than a milestone marker.
That said, there is a virtue here that deserves appreciation. Frank Schaeffer still yearns for those parts of Christian doctrine that exort devotees to be patient, tolerant, benign and do no harm. What he drives at but does not articulate is his astonishment that his father, whose maturity as a Christian ought supposedly to have endowed him with a reliable ethical compass, could be led down a primrose path by such inferiors as Robertson, Falwell and Paul Weyrich.
While it may have taken him way too long to sort that all out, Frank comes off as a decent person. One gains the distinct impression that there are things he could not be induced to do. Eventually he converted to Eastern Orthodoxy. He opted for an unchanging form of Christianity, allowing no room for its clergy to establish a cult of personality, or to politicize the faithful. Epistemology never interested him. For him, religion is a practical matter of personal integration and social organization. He speaks so respectfully of other religions and of Secular Humanism that he could pass for agnostic.
Even before he arrived at the viewpoint the memoir reflects, Frank Schaeffer did attempt to warn against electing George W. Bush President. Frank was genuine enough about his pro-life views to oppose the death penalty just as he opposed abortion. For him, the proliferation of executions while Bush was governor of Texas sounded an alarm bell. When he witnessed the professing Christian governor not only refuse to delay Karla Faye Tucker's execution, but do so laughing and smirking, Frank made up his mind that such a man ought not be President. In 2000, he made the rounds of the right-wing radio talk shows, campaigning for John McCain. In 2008, he voted for Obama. Good for him!
Review: 2009-11-04
at last...
At last, someone credible, intelligent, experienced, legitimate speaking from within the Christian subculture against the bazaar nonsense that is prevalent within this derailed religion. Frank writes like he and I are sitting on leather couches at a cigar pub--candid, transparent, and vulnerable. What an encouragement to post-modern, post-christian thinkers who seek a clear conscience as they wrestle with a faith that is both dear to them and infected with poison. Perfect timing for the nation filled with Christian alumni needing permission to come out of the closet with their age-old hunches.
Review: 2009-10-24
Mis-titled but Buy it Anyway
This book is a fantastic read. I couldn't put it down. The title is misleading, since he certainly wasn't crazy for God - far from it - he was mocking God and his parents from an early point in the story. A better title would be L'Abri Made Me Crazy - though it wouldn't sell as well. And though the subtitle indicates he helped found the religious right, in reality, he and his family would probably occupy about two paragraphs in a chapter on the religious right of the 1980s. He seems to have had only limited contact with many of the religious right leaders he criticizes.
But this book isn't about the religious right. It's about Frank Schaeffer and his well meaning but kooky (in his account) family. It's about the Schaeffers and their one-of-a-kind missionary compound in a village in Switzerland. Thirty years ago, when I was in high school, I really got into some of Francis Schaeffer's books - thus my interest in this book. When I got to college, I learned that the elder Schaeffer didn't understand the history of philosophy very well, and I learned philosophy in a more usual way, and that was that. Probably strengthened my faith, really.
What seemed most interesting about L'Abri in its heyday were the mystery, superiority, and "intellectualism". (A lot like the Moral Rearmament movement that flourished twenty years earlier, and was located a few miles away in Switzerland (their head, Frank Buchman, also an American of German extraction - set the groundwork for Alcoholics Anonymous. He also ministered to the rich and famous)). Frank Schaeffer's book goes a long way to explaining, for me, what the mystery was all about. This book certainly also helps me to have a better framework for thinking about the evangelical elite that studied at L'Abri and what, in fact, formed the basis for their perspective on the Christian faith.
In the end, Frank Schaeffer is to the history of American religion and Christian theology what his mother was to child rearing and his father was to philosophy: a dogmatic but shaky guide. For those who want to learn how things got the way they are with evangelicalism in America I recommend George Marsden's Fundamentalism and American Culture (Oxford University Press, 2006), Lyle Dorsett's Billy Sunday and the Redemption of Urban America (Mercer University Press, 2004), Dorsett's A Passion for Souls: The Life of D.L. Moody (Moody Publishers, 2003), or Marshall Frady's Billy Graham: A Parable of American Righteousness (Simon and Schuster, 2006). There are many other great books, too, but these are some that are particularly well written and insightful (and are certainly not "lives of the saints").
If not a scholar of religion, Frank Schaeffer is clearly a world authority on the Schaeffer clan, and it would be hard to find a more readable book on evangelicalism in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. This is also a moving personal memoir. The story of Franky, his parents, and L'Abri is a doleful tale, now told in three novels and a memoir. I'm not sure another account from Schaeffer, Jr. is warranted, but I'd sure read it if it came out.
Review: 2009-10-21
Crazy for God
It proved to give me some interesting insights as to how abortion rights became entangled in the right wing conservative side of politics.
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