Crazy for God

by Frank Schaeffer

  When Mom would talk about how wonderful her father was and how he could speak and teach Mandarin, Greek, Hebrew, and Latin, Dad never said much. But later he might quietly mention to me that his dad could fix anything. And sometimes there would be tears in his eyes when he would talk about how his “Pop” wired that old house while laboring to read the electrical manual he was learning from.

  “Pop never had the opportunities I had,” Dad would say, “but you would have liked him, boy.”

  When Dad turned in his first philosophy paper at Hampden-Sydney College, his professor invited him over to his house a few days later. Dad found him sitting in a rocking chair next to an old pot-bellied stove and smoking a pipe. For a while the man said nothing, just smoked and watched Dad and smiled inscrutably. Then at last the professor spoke.

  “Schaeffer,” he said, “I have a problem with you. I don’t know how to resolve it. This is the best philosophy paper from a first-year student that has ever been turned in since I’ve been teaching. It is also the worst spelling I’ve ever seen. What should I do with you?”

  “I have a suggestion,” said Dad; “I suggest you always grade my papers on the ideas and pay no attention to my spelling. I’ve never been able to spell. And I can’t fix that.”

  There was a long pause. Dad said he was nervous but tried not to move, or even take his eyes off that old professor’s face.

  “You know what, Schaeffer, I think I’ll do just that,” said the professor at last.

  This was a big break for my father. He spoke of the incident with such emotion that his voice would shake. It was an unusual thing for a professor to do, back in the days when spelling and grammar, even handwriting, still figured heavily into a college grade.

  Dad was very aware of each step in his journey to a “bigger world,” as he called it. There were the Boy Scouts and that symphony, and then there was one high school teacher who Dad recalled with tears. She had “opened all the doors” for him by encouraging him to start to read books for pleasure. She “opened my eyes,” Dad would say. And years later, my father tracked her down and wrote to her, and remarkably she was still alive, and in 1968 (or thereabouts) Dad sent her a signed copy of his first book, Escape From Reason, and a letter telling her that she was why he had “done anything” with his life.

  4

  Dad was pastor of several small churches in the Northeast and in St. Louis. Then he became a missionary in 1947. Sponsored by his mission board, Dad located in Switzerland because from there he could get anywhere in Europe to do his mission work with young people in war-torn cities. The next year, Mom and my three sisters joined Dad.

  The Swiss had sat out the Second World War as neutrals, trading security for the lives of the Jews they turned back to the Nazis, banking for all sides, selling weapons to everyone, and waiting for other countries to send their young men to die to make them safe from the Nazi empire. So in 1947 the Swiss infrastructure was intact. And Dad would travel almost every week to the cities all over Europe where he was helping to start youth ministries. And on those trips his quest for self-betterment continued, and he would visit the art museums, buy guidebooks, and study what he was seeing.

  At first my family lived in Lausanne and then moved to the small alpine village of Champéry, where I was born in 1952. Then we got kicked out of Champéry when I was three. My parents were expelled from the Roman Catholic canton (state) of Valais because they led a local man to Christ. In other words, Mom and Dad talked him into becoming a born-again Calvinist fundamentalist Protestant like us.

  The local priest was not amused. And the bishop of Sion (the capital of Valais, just a few miles from the border of “very Roman Catholic Italy”) was not amused. Swiss democracy notwithstanding, he arranged to have my parents’ residency permits canceled to get the “religious influence”—the official reason given for our family’s expulsion—away from his flock. That was when we moved to Huémoz, where I grew up.

  Huémoz is in the Protestant canton of Vaud and is a lot more open to the sky than Champéry. The mountains look friendlier, easy to see whole, not looming close as they do over Champéry. Our old village was “a lot darker,” Mom would say, “and I don’t mean just because there was so little sunlight compared to Huémoz. It was darker in every way!”

  I heard the word “dark” a lot while growing up, and most of the time it was other people’s spiritual darkness that was being spoken of. There was a lot of that around. People, places, history, villages, cantons, whole continents were filled with spiritual dark or spiritual light, depending on what they believed about what we believed. If they agreed completely with us, then they got the rarest of accolades: truly kindred spirits.

  Everything we did was to be a witness. (To “witness” was to “share Christ”; in other words, talk about your faith in hopes that you would convince the person listening to convert. To witness also meant to live in such a way that people would “see Christ” in you and want to convert because your life was so admirable.)

  People’s eternal destinies hinged on a word or tiny event, maybe on no more than an unfriendly look. Even an improperly served high tea on Sunday afternoon could send someone to hell. What if the sandwiches were prepared wrong and they went away with the impression that we were like all those so-called ministries where they didn’t even know how to butter thinly sliced bread out to the edges? What if the person visiting was given a plastic spoon and we were mistaken for uncouth Pentecostals? We had to be people that others wanted to join, attractive ambassadors for Christ in word and deed.

  “My dear mother,” Mom said, “used to say that every meal should be served as if the Queen of England might drop by.”

  “Really, Mom?”

  “Why, yes, darling. In Mother’s day, of course, that was Queen Victoria. But Queen Elizabeth is just a person, too, and she needs Christ as much as any of those terribly confused Anglicans do. And her family skis in Klosters and there are some English people we met on the last English trip who know one of her ladies-in-waiting, so you never know. I’ve been praying for her.”

  We often reviewed our family’s history to discern God’s hand on our lives, something like the people of Israel looking back in thanksgiving to discern God’s hand on them as they were brought out of Egypt. Just before our exodus from Champéry, I got polio. Mom always said “That year was the greatest testing we ever went through. Looking back, it’s not surprising Satan attacked us.”

  “Why?” I asked. “Because of what happened next,” Mom would say.

  “What was that?” I’d ask, knowing what the answer was, but compelled to ask by an unspoken rule that this sort of spiritual heart-to-heart was edifying.

  “L’Abri was about to start, and Satan knew that and was doing everything he could to stop us from founding The Work.”

  “Does Satan know the future?”

  “Yes, dear, he does.”

  “But I thought only God knows everything.”

  “That’s right, but foreknowledge isn’t the same thing as foreordaining.”

  “Oh?”

  “God chose you to be born, to accept The Finished Work Of His Son On The Cross, to be one of his Elect. Satan can’t do anything like that.”

  “I guess not.”

  “Satan knew that if we started L’Abri, the Lord was about to use us very powerfully.”

  “And he knew about all the people who’d get saved?” I asked.

  “That’s right, dear.”

  “But if it’s predestined, why did Satan bother to try and stop us?”

  “Because, dear, he’s always trying to fight God.”

  “But God always wins?”

  “Yes, and that is why Satan fell, he thought he could win.”

  “So he was stupid?”

  “No, dear, Satan is a wily adversary. Don’t ever underestimate him.”

  “And that’s why I got polio?”

  “Yes, dear. Your leg is part of the battle-in-the-heavenlies. You are like a soldier who
got wounded. It was during The Year Of Testing, but, by God’s Grace, we all came through, and your father did not lose his faith, though he certainly fell into the temptation of doubt. Poor Fran,” Mom said with the deep sigh that always accompanied her many versions of “poor Fran.”

  If Dad didn’t get a joke, it was “poor Fran.” When he couldn’t figure out what fork to use in a restaurant, it was “poor Fran.” Mom rarely said those words to Dad’s face. But we children could read her thoughts. A certain eye roll, a certain sigh, and I could hear “poor Fran” even if her mouth wasn’t moving.

  5

  Fundamentalists never can just disagree. The person they fall out with is not only on the wrong side of an issue; they are on the wrong side of God. In the 1940s, my parents had a big fight with a fundamentalist leader I never met, Carl McIntyre. Years later, the mention of his name was enough to put Dad in a Mood. They fell out in a way that got personal, and McIntyre lied about my father, or so Mom said. What the lies were, I never knew. My sister Susan says that McIntyre accused Dad of being a communist and that this was “All part of the McCarthy-era witch hunts.” Anyway, the upshot was that Dad left the mission that sent him to Europe in 1947. Then my parents founded the ministry of L’Abri in 1955.

  A church split builds self-righteousness into the fabric of every new splinter group, whose only reason for existence is that they decide they are more moral and pure than their brethren. This explains my childhood, and perhaps a lot about America, too.

  The United States is a country with the national character of a newly formed church splinter group. This is not surprising. Our country started as a church splinter group. The Puritans left England because they believed they were more enlightened than members of the Church of England, and they were eager to form a perfect earthly community following a pure theology. They also had every intention of some day returning to England, once they had proved that something close to heaven on earth could work, and reforming their “heretical” fellow citizens.

  America still sees itself as essential and as destiny’s instrument. And each splinter group within our culture—left, right, conservative, liberal, religious, secular—sees itself as morally, even “theologically,” superior to its rivals. It is not just about politics. It is about being better than one’s evil opponent. We don’t just disagree, we demonize the “other.” And we don’t compromise.

  We Schaeffers never compromised. At times it seemed that only God knew how important we were, how right, how pure. But isolation and rejection by “The World” only confirmed our self-importance. The sense of being like the tribes of Israel wandering the desert, with enemies on all sides, was the underlying reality of my childhood. I think it was shared by my three sisters—Priscilla, Susan, and Debby—too, though because I was so much younger I really didn’t get to know them until we all grew up. Before that, it was like having three extra mothers.

  My oldest sister Priscilla was kind, but my early memories of her are vague. She married when I was five and moved to St. Louis with her husband John Sandri. Later she and John came back and joined L’Abri. Susan, my next oldest sister, was dramatic, loud, and desperately trying to get me educated, something my parents had somehow absentmindedly forgotten to do. Susan went to study in Oxford and married Ranald Macaulay when I was nine. They moved in next door and also joined L’Abri. Debby, my youngest sister, was intensely sweet. She married when I was twelve, moved away for a few years, then moved back with her husband Udo Middelmann and joined L’Abri.

  We children fell somewhere between my pietistic, gorgeous mother and my dour, ordinary-looking father. We veered from extreme dramatic piety (Susan) to doubt (me), from energetic proselytism (Debby) to spiritual wrestling (Priscilla), from solid and self-assured (Susan) to gorgeous and nervous (Priscilla), from short and passionate (me) to even shorter and virtually quivering with a sincere desire to save humankind (Debby). However, we all shared a sense of being separated from the world.

  We were busy judging everyone’s spiritual state. We had a lot to do. Only God might be able to see their hearts and innermost thoughts, but we had a pretty good idea of how it was going to go for plenty of folks on the Judgment Day. Not so well.

  Susan took grim satisfaction at the looming damnation of just about everyone but us. Debby wept and redoubled her efforts. Priscilla got nervous and threw up. I hid.

  If my sisters ever had doubts about their faith, I never knew, at least when I was very young. And of course Mom had no doubts. Only Dad had doubts. We knew about those because Mom told us.

  Mom never said what they were about, just that “Fran questioned everything that year,” and “Your father’s faith is not as strong as mine,” long pause, a slight shake of the head, “Poor Fran.” Sigh.

  All Dad ever said about his doubts was “I wrestled before the Lord while walking back and forth in the hayloft of Chalet Bijou in Champéry, for many days and nights on end. I was ready to give it all up. I questioned everything!”

  Maybe my bad leg was God’s punishment of Dad. Mom never said this, but somehow I got that idea. This made sense to me when I was a young child. It is an idea that still makes sense to some evangelical readers who stumble on my novels like Zermatt or my “anti-Christian” op-eds. From time-to-time they write to me that they expect me to drop dead, literally, as soon as God catches up on his work.

  One thing they hate about Zermatt is that the missionary father loses his faith. They don’t like the sex either, but it is the threat of losing one’s faith that seems to infuriate them. If life can’t be tied up in a neat package, if you let those doubts begin to gnaw at your guts, where will it end?

  It is no coincidence that about 99 percent of evangelical books are written to help people order their lives according to an invisible world when everything in the visible world is challenging faith. The title of almost every evangelical book could be “How to Keep Your Faith in Spite of . . .” fill in the blank, college, art, science, philosophy, sex, temptation, literature, media, TV, movies, your homosexual tendencies, your heterosexual tendencies . . . in other words, every breath you take.

  Each night, Mom read me Bible stories. Lots of the ones I liked best—the juicy killing, adultery, death, and revenge ones—were filled with people suddenly getting leprosy, being plagued by worms that ate them from the inside out, and other usually fatal problems under the general heading of being “struck down by God” and/or “chastised.” This happened for reasons related to not believing right, especially not having enough faith, or the right kind of faith, or maybe they had lots of faith but it was in bad theology, or led to worshipping various false gods, or they married people who worshipped false gods, or sinned by worshipping our God, the One True Reformed Calvinist God, but did it wrong the way Cain did when he came to God with unclean hands bearing vegetables and fruit when a lamb was required. Or maybe they forgot to do what God said to do and didn’t kill every man, woman, and child of some wicked peoples he had expressly told them to exterminate, including the cattle and household pets.

  God would sometimes punish the sinner by striking down an innocent bystander—though since all people are fallen under Adam’s curse, no one is really innocent—for instance, King David, whose lust-child was killed by God as a way to send David a stern warning. David mourned for a while, and then he took a bath and wrote a psalm about it. So maybe I was lucky because Dad questioned God and I only lost the use of one leg. Anyway, the paralysis felled me when I was two, either as a warning to Dad, a preemptive punishment, or a test of my parent’s faith.

  I was incredibly fortunate that the Swiss doctor Mom took me to in Monthey—the town at the base of the mountain below Champéry—didn’t kill me. This “polio specialist” talked Mom into allowing him to replace some of my spinal fluid with a “special serum” he made from tapping the spinal fluid of chimpanzees. The doctor had the chimps locked in a lab in the local hospital and was working on an idea that injecting their spinal fluid into a human spine could arrest
, or reverse, paralysis.

  Dad’s respect for my mother’s expertise on all things to do with “raising the children” was complete. Dad left all medical decisions “up to Edith” as well as letting her decide anything to do with our education, prayer life, and introduction to the facts of life. When it came to treatment for my polio, the rule of “Edith will decide” was followed.

  Mom knew this doctor was crazy, and she prayed for guidance. Apparently she got told by God to proceed, and I was wheeled off by the nuns who were nurses in this “very Roman Catholic hospital.” Mom said she waited on her knees, crying, in the ward.

  They administered one treatment and brought me back to Mom. The next day, I was to have a second treatment, but at the last moment the doctor told my mother that he didn’t think it was necessary. Later, Mom told me that it was “such a wonderful answer to prayer that God moved his heart and that doctor spared you.”

  I always wondered why she had to pray that the doctor would change his mind and “spare” me. Couldn’t she just have said no, with or without God? Twenty-five years later when I told this story to Dr. Koop, a family friend who was about to be appointed by President Reagan as Surgeon General, he said that you couldn’t design a better method to murder a small child.

  Throughout my childhood, Mom often repeated the story and said it was the hardest decision of her life, but “Who knows, perhaps that old doctor’s ideas really did save your other leg because you walked again and they all said you wouldn’t.”

  “I have monkey blood in me?” I asked, feeling strangely delighted.

  “Not monkey blood, darling: chimpanzee spinal fluid. Thank God the doctor relented!”

  When I arrived at the stage of life, around eleven years old, when teasing Mom became one of my favorite pastimes, I would bring up the “monkey story.” A good time to wind Mom up was at bedtime when she came up to read to me and then we’d pray together, and moments later she would be about to close my bedroom door, having tucked me in. I didn’t want to go to sleep.