Sex, Mom, and God

by Frank Schaeffer

  Life was not all spankings, however. Most of the time our family thrived on a somewhat hysterical diet of “miracles” that provided a constant high. In the 1950s, when my parents’ L’Abri Fellowship ministry was just being established, Mom and Dad never asked donors for money, and yet—miraculously—the Lord “moved people’s hearts” and we were sent gifts to “meet our needs.” So we knew that From Before The Creation Of The Universe God had planned that in 1954 the Schaeffer Family would found the American mission of L’Abri, located in Huémoz, Switzerland, conveniently near the ski slopes of Villars and the tearooms of Montreux (and only five hours by train from Portofino, Italy), with stunning views of the towering mountains in every direction, which He’d created expressly for our pleasure. Mom said that our job, and thus the reason for both L’Abri’s and our existence, was to “prove the existence of God to an unbelieving world.” We Schaeffers did this by praying for the gifts needed to run our mission. God provided the exhilarating life-affirming supernatural “proof” of His being out there somewhere by answering our prayers and sending us just enough money—no more and no less—so that His Work might go forth and so that I’d grow up eating cheese and various other ingredient-stretching casseroles to sustain my life while praying for red (or any) meat!

  Then, just as God chose me over my brother, not to mention had previously sent Jesus to save some prechosen Elect Sinners and sent Mr. Goodyear and C. Haase to reprieve Protestant Women, the Lord answered my prayers for protein. As a side effect of sending juicy quantities of porterhouse steaks my way, the Lord also changed the course of American history.

  You see, in the late 1960s Mom and Dad published the first of many best-selling books. My parents became famous Evangelical leaders, and they were unexpectedly awash in book royalties and speaking invitations. When they toured Evangelical colleges and churches all over North America, I often accompanied them and ate meat at last while Mom and Dad—unbeknown to them at the time—were being elevated to Evangelical Protestant sainthood. This meant that a few years later when Dad took a “stand” on the issue of abortion, a powerful movement formed almost instantly inspired by his leadership, and the Evangelical-led “pro-life” movement (and the Religious Right) was born.

  My father is still a hero to many Religious Right leaders, such as Dave Andrusko (editor of the National Right to Life News). In his review of two books on the history of the antiabortion movement, Andrusko notes that the antiabortion movement “attracted people by building on the foundation established by theologian Francis Schaeffer. . . . It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of [Schaeffer’s] book Whatever Happened to the Human Race? and [the 1970s] twenty-city film and lecture tour [undertaken] to awaken the evangelical community.”5 And this quote by Joel Belz, founder of World magazine, pretty much sums up the Evangelical establishment’s view of my father: “Go to any evangelical Christian gathering and ask twenty people the simple question: ‘What single person has most affected your thinking and your worldview?’ If Francis Schaeffer doesn’t lead the list of answers, and probably by a significant margin, I’d ask for a recount.”6

  Before fame, steak, and political influence came our way, my parents’ ministry grew. While we were still struggling to make ends meet, we nevertheless added several more chalets to the work of L’Abri. Mom decided that our family’s chalet would, from then on, house only the Girls’ dorms—the miniscule rooms we stuffed bunk beds into and filled with lovely, nubile, twenty-something females seeking Jesus and Godly Husbands and not necessarily in that order. The young men guests would thenceforth be housed across the road.

  By the time I was eight or nine, Dad and I were vastly outnumbered in our house. By then it amounted to a cloistered women’s retreat. Our officially male-dominated patriarchal theology (of the type that later had such sway over the Religious Right) seemed to have little influence over the four Schaeffer women when it came to actual daily life at L’Abri. Dad would prepare sermons while closeted in his bedroom, cowering behind a wall of sound as he played classical music full blast from dawn to dusk to shut out the noise made by the many young women we had living in our chalet.

  Dad did assert himself occasionally. He yelled at Mom, and once in a while he socked her on the arm or slapped her. Oddly, this abuse—I’d place it (morally speaking) somewhere between inexcusable wife-beating and a type of involuntary outburst—left Mom even more in control. Dad would grovel in abject repentance for several weeks after the delivery of a sock to her upper arm or a swift slap to her face. The rest of the time he pretty much did as instructed by my mother: preached, gave weekly lectures, and led discussions with the students. Mom directed everything else, from interpreting the “Lord’s Will” for our family (code for when to buy a new chalet and expand The Work), to raising me (endless Talks on Sex and how to be a “Christlike” young man, combined with sporadic ineffectual attempts to teach me to read), to running L’Abri day to day (who stayed where and for how long), to planning and financing our wonderful annual summer and winter vacations, respectively, in Portofino and Zermatt.

  Being a missionary in the Swiss Alps is good work if you can get it. The view is wonderful, and the drinking water is clean. And we didn’t talk much about our lovely vacations lest, as Mom said, “people get the wrong idea and stop giving.” But in one regard we were typical American Evangelicals: The Evangelical ghetto is a network of personality cults operating, as far as nepotistic leadership and succession goes, something like North Korea. We were all “in The Work.” And that’s even before (as a young man of twenty) I became my dad’s sidekick.

  Since the children of professional Christians are raised in what amounts to cocoons and echo chambers, they are often—literally—unequipped to do anything except carry on the family business. And since Protestantism is built on one big church split (the Reformation) and then another one and so on, there’s always room for yet another “prophetic voice” to be “raised up” to finally do some “new improved” version of Christianity correctly—at last! And so going into the L’Abri-and-beyond ministry with my father and then starting my own offshoot “ministry”—Schaeffer V Productions, through which I produced, wrote, and directed Dad’s two major film series, which was the last step in making him famous in the Evangelical world—were par for the professional-Christianfamily course.

  I wasted ten years or so of my life chasing “success” in Evangelical and other right-wing circles. Other than collecting material for future novels (and memoirs), I regret every moment I spent selling myths to the deluded, or I should say that I regret selling myths to myself and then passing them on to people as deluded as I was. Then I escaped, or maybe not. I’m still writing about those experiences.

  As for Mom, she radiated the dynamic presence of ten powerful women and the fierce energy of one hundred Amazons. This, too, is not unusual in many Evangelical groups where officially the pulpit may be closed to women but unofficially many a church, Bible study, and congregation are actually run by wonderfully powerful “Prayer-Warrior” women. The male pastor is just a necessary figurehead kept there by smart, sincere women whose only creative outlet is their religion because religion is all they were ever allowed to “do” with a clear conscience, other than have babies.

  Anyway, for all those reasons or none, Mom acted as Dad’s equal (or even as his spiritual superior) in ways that didn’t explicitly contradict Bible-based beliefs about the limited role of women—she’d never preach on Sunday in church—but nevertheless left her in more or less the position of our most senior “bishop” to Dad’s “pope.” Thus, Mom practiced her brand of Godly Womanhood, even feminism.

  Mom was the queen bee of our chalet, bruised arms notwithstanding. She presided over our household by glowing brightly for Jesus and exuding kindness for everyone she met, whoever they were. This kindness was genuine. Mom loved people the way hummingbirds are drawn to flowers. She fed them—both literally and spiritually—and in turn was fed.

  My mother also was not
a “respecter of persons” (to use the biblical catchphrase for not kowtowing to the high and mighty), and she paid warm attention to hotel maids, cab drivers, porters, and the dispossessed, including the many gay visitors to L’Abri, and to pregnant unmarried young women who might have been ostracized by other religiously zealous folks. And in consequence of Mom’s genuine compassion and decency, by the early 1960s L’Abri was teeming with young men and women from all races and backgrounds. The women (who usually outnumbered the men about two to one) were looking to Mom to show them how to become “Godly Women,” how to eat the royal jelly of insider biblical knowledge, and (besides learning how to be Christlike) how to cajole God into fulfilling their dreams for a mate by helping them snare a “Christ-centered” husband.

  “Mom’s Girls” (as I thought of the mostly university studentaged females staying in our chalet) watched my mother closely and when not observing her every move—from cooking to teaching Bible studies—asked my mother many questions and attended her extraordinarily long and unusually sexually explicit Talks For Girls. Mom would let me attend these (otherwise) female-only Talks, at least when I was a young, “harmless” child. The parts in the Talks on marriage resonated! Maybe my mother thought that I was too young to “get” the import of her detailed descriptions of the right kind of lingerie to wear on one’s Wedding Night, and the wonders of euphemistically described foreplay, but if so, Mom had underestimated her abilities as a spellbinding speaker and also my precocious interest in All Things Sexual. By eight or nine I was thinking like a somewhat horny twelve-year-old, and by ten I could have taken a premed exam on reproductive female anatomy, and if verbal answers were accepted (I could barely read or write given the “success” of my homeschool experience combined with a case of undiagnosed dyslexia), I would have passed the test.

  Mom’s advice to women turned out mostly to be about how to become like Edith Schaeffer. Mom passed on these tips: (1) Pack a sheer black negligee when you go to “wherever God calls you” to be a missionary in order to keep your husband happy; (2) prepare wonderful high teas the better to entice people to come to Jesus; (3) pray a lot for guidance that “the Lord might show you His Will for your life, especially who to marry”; (4) wait for the Wedding Night; and (5) “always remember that there’s no reason that Real Christians can’t look like Vogue models!”

  Reading between the lines, Mom’s brand of Godly (well-dressed) feminism boiled down to using and then teaching other women to use techniques for manipulating The Man In Your Life into doing what you wanted him to do, “as God leads you.” She advocated “The Wife’s Method,” a kind of shaped charge of subversive subservience. He’d think he was the Patriarch In Charge, but through stealthprayer and guilt-inducing piety, “The Wife” could direct “The Husband” to be all he could be (for God, of course) in ways that he had never envisioned, but in ways that you (The Wife) understood because women are closer to God than men are.

  So far, so typical. What was unusual about the Schaeffer family was Mom’s extroverted sexuality. I think that Mom indulged her Facts Of Life “frankness” when giving her Talks For Girls (let alone when she spoke to her children in private) as a way to prove—at least to herself—that she was sophisticated despite being a fundamentalist missionary. I also think that Mom—bless her—LIKED Sex. For Mom, telling her Female Followers about What To Wear On Your Wedding Night (and thereafter to “keep him interested”) and even speaking about Dad’s sexual appetite, not to mention the merits of black see-through negligees “even if you are called to serve Christ in Africa and that’s all you pack besides antibiotics and a mosquito net,” were a sort of necessary self-revelation. Mom needed to prove that she wasn’t your average fuddy-duddy.

  Mom was not alone in struggling to make sure people knew that just because she believed in Jesus and was a fundamentalist (in the sense that she held to a literal six-day creation, a universal flood, and so forth) didn’t make her crazy. Believing in invisible things breeds an inferiority complex among people competing with science for hearts and minds. Many religious fundamentalists feel under siege by the secular world and harbor a deeply paranoid sense of victimhood. I think of those who turn their sense of victimhood into material and political success and their claims of persecution into strategies of achieving power as Jesus Victims. I don’t mean they are victims of Jesus; rather, they claim to be victims for the sake of Jesus, accruing power through the rhetoric of sacrifice and persecution and grasping at conspiracy theories about how the nefarious “World” and all “Those Liberals” are out to do them in. It is this Jesus Victim note of self-pity that ties together “These People,” as some smug secularists might label all conservative religious believers.

  CHAPTER 2

  Magic Menstrual Mummies

  PHOTO: Mom (center) with her sisters on her wedding day in 1935

  I’d never heard of pheromones when I was ten. All I knew was that each month the large wicker basket in the bathroom on the middle floor of our chalet filled with softball-sized, tightly wound wads of toilet paper. These tissue bundles were evidence that—in biblical terms—the time of Our Girls’ Monthly Uncleanness was once again upon them. This was back in the days when a sanitary napkin was a fluffy and formidable thing—about the size and shape of a canoe. I knew God didn’t like the Menstrual Mummies because I’d heard Mom read Leviticus 15:19 in a Bible study: “When a woman has a discharge, and the discharge in her body is blood, she shall be in her menstrual impurity for seven days, and whoever touches her shall be unclean until the evening. And everything on which she lies during her menstrual impurity shall be unclean. Everything also on which she sits shall be unclean. And whoever touches her bed shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. And whoever touches anything on which she sits shall wash his clothes and bathe himself in water and be unclean until the evening. Whether it is the bed or anything on which she sits, when he touches it he shall be unclean until the evening.”

  So I never touched the Menstrual Mummies—except once. I unwrapped the tissue-tethered Unclean Thing and took a smear of blood from it to study with a small microscope that a kindly L’Abri student had given me. I wanted to see the egg that Mom said was “washed out each month unless it gets fertilized by the marvelous seed.” I didn’t see an egg, but I did observe several doughnutshaped red blood cells after I dabbed a little blood on a handy glass slide and stained it, as per the student’s instructions.

  About forty years after investigating the Menstrual Mummies in the wastepaper basket, I read an article in the New York Times science section about how humans’ sense of smell triggers physical responses. The article cited the example that women who live together—for instance, in college dorms, convents, and girls’ boarding schools—tend to menstruate at the same time. I don’t know if the theory of menstrual synchrony (based on sensitivity to pheromones through smell) will stand up to the rigors of scientific inquiry, but I do know that our middle-floor chalet bathroom wastepaper basket seemed to fill and empty like some sort of metronome, keeping time with a cosmic rhythm as sure as the tides. Maybe Mom and my sisters reset the hormone “clock” of the female helpers (i.e., the cheerful, though virtual slave laborers working in return for room, board, and spiritual help), who lived in our chalet for several years at a time, as well as setting the clock for the students who stayed with us for six to ten months or so.

  The nubile, yet torturously unavailable young women filled our chalet with their pheromone-perfumed presence. And, as I learned from Mom’s Bible study on Leviticus, they were monstrously defiled as they plunged into their monthly menstrual freshet. I imagined that God was right there with me, in our middle-floor chalet bathroom, brooding over the evidence of His Big Mistake: Women.

  The God-Of-The-Bible is appalled by women. According to the prophet Isaiah, God will mightily punish women who overstep their divinely ordained bounds: “Moreover the Lord saith: Because the daughters of Zion are haughty, the Lord will smite with
a scab the crown of the head of the daughters of Zion, and the Lord will lay bare their secret parts” (Isaiah 3:16–17). It seems The-God-Of-The-Bible regretted the female human He created—as an afterthought, after squirrels, sheep, whales, and everything else, according to the Bible’s most familiar story: “Now the LORD God had formed out of the ground all the beasts of the field and all the birds of the air.... But for Adam no suitable helper was found. So the LORD God caused the man to fall into a deep sleep; and while he was sleeping, he took one of the man’s ribs and closed up the place with flesh. Then the LORD God made a woman from the rib he had taken out of the man, and he brought her to the man” (Genesis 2:22).

  I’m using this The-God-Of-The-Bible “handle” as a way to differentiate between whatever actual deity might be out there and the biblical version and caricature of that Person, Force, or Persons. That said, when The-God-Of-The-Bible hastily made the first woman as a sort of garden-warming present for Adam, He must have carelessly botched her plumbing design. Soon after Creation, the Female Plumbing Problem began to weigh heavily on The-God-Of-The-Bible’s Mind. Women’s brimming bodily fluids—like shellfish, Canaanites, and the wearing of both wool and cotton at the same time—are among the many things that got out of hand soon after The-God-Of-The-Bible completed Creation, thus inciting His Divine Regret. So The-God-Of-The-Bible expelled the first man and woman from the Garden; He sent a Great Flood; He killed at least as many unruly beings as the numberless descendants He promised Abraham. The-God-Of-The-Bible issued countless factory recalls (my dead brother multiplied) and complex revised owner’s manual updates, replete with regulations and strict rules about how to deal with women, fix women, repair women, curb women, keep women in line, and, if need be, kill women if they didn’t keep The-God-Of-The-Bible’s many Women-Managing Rules.