Sex, Mom, and God

by Frank Schaeffer

  Ronald Reagan,

  The White House

  May 17, 1984

  Dad is buried in Rochester, Minnesota. He died there following many years of on again, off again treatment at the Mayo Clinic. During those years (1977–1984) I often filled in for him on the bigtime American Evangelical circuit. I was already his young sidekick in the antiabortion crusade we’d launched. His illness extruded me to another level of notoriety. If some group or other couldn’t get “Schaeffer himself,” it would settle for his “up-and-coming” son, who, it was rumored, had “inherited the mantle.”

  When Dad suffered through his many chemotherapy protocols, or when my father hit bottom during the tumultuous ups and downs of cancer, cast down by “poor blood counts,” “platelets” that were “too high” or “too low,” and all those other bodily betrayals our family learned about the hard way, I’d be out there keeping the Schaeffer-Saving-America-From-The-Liberals road show going. I’d visit Dad in Minnesota, visit my wife and young children in Massachusetts (where we were living by 1980), and then hit the road—again. I’d do this over and over and spend weeks on end running around North America and speaking to huge audiences that had gathered to hear Dad but got me. For instance, I was the keynote speaker to 24,000 pastors at one year’s Southern Baptist Convention in the mid-1980s and to 15,000 religious media leaders at the Religious Broadcasters Convention. By the time I’d spoken to hundreds of groups and hundreds of thousands of people coast to coast, I’d gained a reputation in the Evangelical netherworld as a “hot” rising “star” and “anointed speaker.” Then I began to get my own invitations to the very biggest events, and by then no mention was made of Dad. I was “set,” except for the fact that I was becoming rapidly disillusioned.

  Before those blood counts took their final dive, Dad decided he’d be buried in Rochester, somewhat oddly, since the only thing that brought him to town was cancer and the closest family member (me) lived 1,300 miles away and the rest were in Europe. He was buried in Minnesota notwithstanding the fact that we had a family plot in Philadelphia where Dad’s father is buried and another plot in Switzerland where his mother is buried. There were (and still are) seven empty spaces in those plots. Dad lies in splendid isolation in a town that has no associations or history for anyone in our family, other than that he died there.

  Rochester gave me the screaming willies from the moment I set foot on Main Street. It struck me as a sort of medical version of Lourdes, filled with the lame and terminally ill from all over the world who had staggered to this particular destination-of-lastresort full of hope and yet redolent of fear. The population (to put it mildly) appeared far from well. And hanging around this strangest place on earth, a nowhere town with more CAT scans and MRIs than parking meters, I, too, soon felt far from well.

  The first time I visited, I was sitting in the lobby of a large hotel across from the clinic. I was eating lunch with Dad. An exceedingly pale elderly man who had yellowish skin and who was swathed in several overcoats and many scarves sat down across from us. He was dressed as if in Siberia—even though folks in the Midwest like to heat their buildings as if they’re trying to cook food in them. I mean use the room to cook with. (The restaurant was heated to what felt like 120 degrees.)

  Moments into eating his meal the man pitched forward and crashed facedown into a large bowl of split pea soup. I was also about to tuck into the same soup “of the day” but paused with the first spoonful poised halfway to my mouth. He was hustled off into an underground passage that connected the hotel to the clinic. His removal via a gurney was expertly handled by some of the hotel’s staff. The waitstaff was well prepared for this eventuality. Gurneys and wheelchairs were parked in tidy rows by the allyou-can-eat (but probably don’t want to, given the condition of the egg salad) salad bar, along with the extra oxygen cylinders. The waiters handled the situation as casually as if they were refilling a guest’s water glass—rather refilling pewter imitation steins since the “décor” was Midwest/medieval, replete with fake suits of armor and restrooms marked “Maidens” and “Knights.”

  I didn’t eat that soup. And the longer I stayed in town and the more I visited over the years, the more I was sure I had one or more fatal illnesses. After a year or two of virtually monthly visits, I was talked (by Mom) into getting a “full checkup since you’re here, Dear, and it’s a great opportunity.”

  I spent five glassy-eyed days in neon Limbo shuttling to various departments for blood “work-ups,” scans, and probing. You see I was an “A-List” patient, so I got the full Mayo treatment. There were a number of born-again doctors there who were fans of my parents, so I got no ordinary checkup but, as one doctor proudly told me, “the same level of care that we’re giving the King of Saudi Arabia, who’s here right now, too.” (It was true; I’d seen the Saudi royal family’s huge jet incongruously parked in Rochester’s tiny airport three days before.)

  There was one perk, though, or blessing or whatever you call it: Evangelist Billy Graham was a “lifelong hypochondriac” (as his wife, Ruth Graham, once told me over tea while Billy was getting a CAT scan), and so he was also at Mayo several times over the years. Dad and Billy and I met, or “the Lord drew us together,” as Mom put it. Our various meetings took place in the shadow of death and illness (real or imagined), so that made our comparing notes on our joint efforts to Save America seem all the more urgent. We alternated colonoscopies and chemo, checks for bad sunspots and worries over the size of our respective prostrate glands (mine was fine) with our dire predictions about where the Secular Humanists were “taking the country.” At other times we compared notes on whether this or that American president Dad and Billy had met with “really knows the Lord personally or is just faking it to get our people’s votes.”

  Dad is still in Rochester, waiting for Mom’s body to be shipped from Switzerland to join him. As I write this, she lives across the street from my sister Debby. As for poor old Billy Graham, his future burial arrangements are even less appealing than Mom’s.

  According to a Washington Post story,3 a feud erupted in Billy’s family over where he and his wife, Ruth, were to be buried. Was it to be in Charlotte, North Carolina, at the Billy Graham Museum erected in the vicinity of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association headquarters? Or should their remains go to a small private site near their modest family home in Montreat? Franklin Graham, the (then) fifty-six-year-old “heir” to Billy’s ministry, insisted that the burial spot be at the $30 million, 40,000-square-foot museum that mimics the farm outside of Charlotte where Billy grew up. Other family members—including (the always sensible) Ruth Graham—wanted to have a quieter final resting place. The Post called the family “debate” a struggle “worthy of the Old Testament, pitting brother against brother, son against mother.”4

  After Ruth’s death, Billy was trapped in the middle of the family feud and pondering what to do with her remains. The Post said Ruth had signed a notarized document with six witnesses, saying she wanted to be buried near her home. After her death her wishes were ignored, and Billy was talked into doing what Franklin wanted. Ruth was laid to “rest,” against her wishes, in what amounts to an amusement park for the greater glory of—what?

  Franklin’s consultants had worked with the Walt Disney Company to create a large “barn” and “silo” as a reminder of Billy Graham’s early childhood. Visitors wishing to visit Ruth’s tomb (and/ or who wish to become an atheist in just an hour or two) pass through a forty-foot-tall glass entry cut in the shape of a cross and are greeted by a mechanical talking cow. From there they walk on paths of “straw” through rooms of exhibits. At the end a stone walkway shaped like a cross takes them to a garden where Ruth lies (as will Billy Graham). The Post also reported that tourists have more than one chance to get their names on a mailing list and later be solicited for funds. Maybe Dad got off lightly. Come to think of it, Rochester isn’t that bad.

  Anyway, my mother lives in a beautiful seventeenth-century Swiss chalet just up th
e road from where I grew up. Last time I checked she was in no hurry to be shipped anywhere. The ceilings are low and rest on heavy beams. The walls are paneled in dark honeytoned pine. The rooms are comfortingly cluttered with a lifetime of memories. Mom is surrounded by her books, art, records, CDs, and old photographs. She eats off lovely china settings that I remember fondly from my early childhood. There are always fresh flowers on the table. My paintings (which I gave Mom years ago as a “thank-you” for her supplying art materials) almost fill her walls floor to ceiling. Every silver teaspoon in her collection is in a little rack on the wall by my mother’s kitchen table.

  This aesthetic bliss has been achieved by my sister Debby. My mother’s old age quality of life is made possible because of my attentive and generous sister and her equally kind husband (and professor of philosophy), Udo. Mom is fortunate to have a daughter like Debby. My sister has cared for our mother in a way that many older people might only dream about. And Debby is not wealthy. The care comes from love alone and is hands-on. For ten years or so Debby and Udo have provided our mother with this wonderful home across the street from their chalet. Debby has struggled to find live-in caregivers for Mom and has also provided her with a life replete with concerts, museum visits, lovely clothes, and reading out loud. Mom doesn’t look, smell (sorry, but you know what I mean), or live like “an old person.” Debby has made sure Mom has remained herself.

  Without Debby and Udo, I think that Mom would have died years ago. Actually, I’m sure of it. Debby has fiercely defended my mother against being “written off” by doctors, nurses, and other people who would not have bothered to care for her so well. Debby and Udo have attended to Mom as if they expected her to live—and live well—forever. And my sister Susan has pitched in long distance from England, too, with many long visits. My sister Priscilla (who lives less than three miles away) has had Mom stay with her for several days every week for many years, and her husband, John, helps Mom faithfully. (I live in America. I call and fly over and visit, but it’s my sisters and their husbands who “step up.”)

  During the same approximate period of his life when Dad was visiting Rochester for treatment, inclusive of morbidly interrupted lunches, he was also visiting the White House and talking to (or lunching with) Presidents Ford, Reagan, and Bush Sr. By then Dad had developed a distinctive craggy intellectual look. But when I was a child, he just looked tough.

  Dad’s voice had a metallic East Coast/Philly/New Jersey edge to it and went up an octave to a jarring screech when he preached. My father grew up helping his father clean out boilers and further contributed to his family’s meager budget by selling ice off a horse cart from the age of eleven while also regularly being beaten by his mother for the least offense. If whippings were Dad’s formative childhood experience, Dad’s formative idea of the Christian life—after he got “saved” in his late teens—was one of mortal combat for church turf via outdoing other Believers when it came to the one-upmanship of fundamentalist biblical correctness.

  At Westminster Theological Seminary my father studied with his hero, J. Gresham Machen. He was Dad’s “favorite theologian,” and years later Dad still kept a poster-sized sepia-tinted photograph of Machen pinned to the inside of his clothes cupboard. Machen had been kicked out of Princeton Seminary when it was “taken over by the Liberals,” as Dad called it. In 1937 Dad transferred to Faith Theological Seminary over another theological split among Presbyterians and graduated in 1938. This seminary formed after yet another split between the Presbyterian Church of America and the Bible Presbyterian Church. My father was the first student to graduate and the first to be ordained in a new superfundamentalist group, the Bible Presbyterian Church (BPC). Then Dad served in Pennsylvania Grove City and Chester and St. Louis, Missouri, as the pastor of various small churches. He soon left the BPC (another split over theological purity) and joined the Reformed Presbyterian Church, Evangelical Synod, a forerunner of the superfundamentalist Presbyterian Church in America, also formed by a—split.

  In 1947 my family moved to Switzerland as missionaries to the Europeans, whom they rarely converted since neither of my parents could speak anything but English. Dad never learned to speak any other language notwithstanding his forty-year sojourn in Europe. So my parents ministered to American tourists and other English-speaking visitors. Then in 1954—after yet more splits with the home mission board—Mom and Dad were “led” (another way of saying they had to figure something out when they were kicked out of their mission over a theological dispute) to start their own ministry. My sense is that they did this with the feeling of relief experienced by a longtime renter who—at last—moves into her own house.

  My parents theoretically acknowledged that there were other Real Believers, but (many church splits later) there seemed to be no one besides our family that they wholeheartedly approved of. We were different and (at least in the early fundamentalist incarnation of our family) sometimes smug in the rightness of our difference. Since our family and my parent’s ministry—the work of L’Abri—represented the only truly theologically “sound” configuration of believers this side of Heaven, my sisters stuck around L’Abri even after marriage. Priscilla and her husband, John, returned to us from seminary when I was ten years old, and none of my sisters left home for good until many years later after L’Abri split up along the lines of various personality clashes. My three sisters encouraged their husbands—who had wandered into L’Abri as young men, got “saved,” and married a Schaeffer daughter—to join “The Work.”

  Dad was the mere candle to Mom’s sun, the short, somewhat dourlooking James Cagney–type. He was the only child of working-class parents with a hardscrabble life story of modest success extruded from an unlikely beginning. Dad was a man who was “Led By God” to become a pastor but whose natural interests tended to art history, when he was not indulging his taste for full-contact “True Believers” versus “Liberals” theological blood sports. He was also a solitary person, thrust—by both his and Mom’s zeal—into a people-oriented ministry where he was swarmed day and night by strangers.

  Mom was also in the wrong profession. She should have been a dancer with a Broadway career. This isn’t a guess but reflects something she’s often told me. My mother had wanted to be a dancer until her missionary parents put a stop to all such “worldly” notions. The strange thing was that Mom told me this several times with a sigh, while at the very same time passing on the exact same guilt-induced pietism to me that she’d been indoctrinated with.

  As for me, I was outnumbered from the start. I was an American expatriate missionary kid wearing a leg brace (like some sort of ball and chain designed to invite curious stares) being raised in foreigner-hating Switzerland, an Evangelical fundamentalist in a world filled with The Lost, and I had three older sisters who were much closer to the Lord than me. On top of that, my sisters and mother shared a secret—Womanhood—that I’d never be able to fathom, though not for lack of trying.

  Mainly what I did was sacrifice along with my parents. We had no car, I had no real schooling (until age ten), we ate almost no meat, and this was all a sign of God’s Blessing. What we didn’t have or didn’t do loomed large and proved (to us anyway) that we were following God’s Plan for our lives.

  Sacrificing-For-The-Lord was a pride-filled way of life. No owner of a new home, car, or yacht was ever prouder of his or her venal material possessions than we Schaeffers were of not achieving our fondest dreams. Mom’s father spoke five languages and “could have taught in a secular college, even at Harvard,” Mom said. But he didn’t teach at Harvard; rather, my grandfather taught in a series of small impoverished Bible schools after he returned from China, just like Dad didn’t pastor a huge church, “even though Fran’s a far better preacher than most,” as Mom claimed.

  What we didn’t do suited us Schaeffers fine (even if some of us sighed from time to time over missed opportunities). We prided ourselves on how much our family had “given up for the Lord.” So Mom didn’t da
nce and instead had married a short man after the Lord showed her that together they could Save The Lost, even though “many tall handsome poetic men were interested in me,” Mom said. But as Mom also always added with (yet another sigh) when telling me what she’d given up for the Lord, “Worldly success is not what counts.”

  While we Schaeffers were sacrificing everything for the Lord, discipline nevertheless had to be maintained. Both of my parents were resourceful spankers. They used belts, wooden spoons, hairbrushes, and hands. Mom’s feeble “spankings” were a family joke, whereas Dad’s (mercifully infrequent) whippings raised welts. Susan was beaten more than the rest of us (mostly before my time) and even put in a sort of straightjacket Mom said she’d concocted out of a sheet in which Susan would be tightly wound until she was cocooned head to toe and then left on a bed—in the dark—for hours.

  Our “spankings”—a nice catchall term to cover what were actually passionless, “this-hurts-me-more-than-it-hurts-you” beatings—were done in the open and accepted by all of us as normal, as such “discipline” was also accepted as normal by most people during the 1950s. There was no shame in a “firm hand,” as my parents’ version of child-rearing was called. Mom and Dad often even used to tell “amusing” stories about how they had punished Susan (who was far and away our family’s most “difficult child,” as Mom always said) for misbehaving in church as a little girl of five, when Dad was still a pastor in the States. When Mom failed to stop Susan from talking during his sermons, Dad would stop preaching, march into the congregation, pick up Susan, and head to the church basement, where he’d thrash her with a wooden spoon and then return to the pulpit. Mom always said how pleased the congregation was to have such a fine disciplinarian leading them as their pastor, and she talked about the churchgoers’ amusement at the “cute” sound of Susan’s wailing during these little demonstrations.