Crazy for God

by Frank Schaeffer

  It never occurred to me that perhaps it was somewhat strange that, by age seven or eight, I had been told by my mother that Dad wanted sex every night. (Dad never, ever talked about his private life, so I only have Mom’s version of this.) Nobody I know had a mother who shared this sort of Kinsey report on her bedroom activities with her children, although, when I saw the movies Running With Scissors and Almost Famous, I felt a great sense of solidarity with the protagonists who survived strange childhoods, nutty mothers, and in their youth lived as if on another planet.

  What Mom never explained was how her saying that she wanted to be at home with us, rather than on the road with Dad, fit in with her wildly enthusiastic reports about how the Lord used her so mightily when she gave her talks. She would blame Dad for forcing her to go with him yet seemed to relish life on the road nonetheless. As a matter of fact, after she hadn’t been on the road for a while, Mom got downright bored and would sometimes look up at airplanes flying high overhead and say “I really want to travel again!”

  Mom spoke to evangelical groups as much as Dad did and would often tell me that the women, or the organizing local missionary, or this or that lost person who had gotten saved at the meeting told her later that while they enjoyed Dad’s talks, it was Mom’s talk on marriage, or the Bible, or prayer, or Mom’s telling “The L’Abri Story” that had really moved them. “Fran’s talk just went right over their heads,” Mom would say; “fortunately, the Lord used me to really reach out to them!”

  It seemed that more was happening on my parents’ speaking trips than daily sex, or Mom typing up Dad’s letters and doing his laundry and helping him with his Mood. Mom loved becoming an evangelical star. And so the competition between Mom and Dad became intense.

  It was Mom who wrote the first book (L’Abri). She would always say that she was the “real writer,” whereas “your father just dictates his lectures and calls that writing!” Dad let it be known that her spiritual books served a “real purpose,” but that his books, like Escape from Reason and The God Who Is There, were in an altogether different category, “the foundation of our ideas.” Mom would sometimes say “Fran has written more books, but I’ve written more pages. Fran’s books are so very short!” (My parents’ twenty-plus books are mostly still in print, have been translated into more than forty languages, and have sold millions of copies worldwide.)

  My parents also would not brook much editing. I grew up hearing about the evils of editors, who just didn’t understand that Mom was a much better writer than them, so how dare they tamper with her inspired words? or Dad explaining that editors didn’t really understand his work, as they tried to make it conform to “all those stupid evangelical books that don’t reach anyone.”

  It was Dad who depended on Mom, though, not the other way around. After he died, Mom often said “I’m glad he went first. He never could have managed without me.” She was right. Dad could hardly boil water for tea, and he never booked a boat or plane ticket or planned a vacation. Mom was in charge of our finances. Dad got in Moods, became discouraged, suffered bouts of depression. Mom never showed any weakness. She could do everything, and she let us know it, including mentioning the fact, again and again, that although it might say “From Mom and Dad with Love” on a birthday or Christmas present, she had bought the present, wrapped it “at two AM,” and decorated the tree it was under and/or baked the cake, because “you know poor Fran can’t do anything.”

  Except when on vacation, my parents never paused to take a breath. My mother was a whirling dervish of activity, a perpetual-motion machine who was aware of her superhuman energy and very proud of it. And my father literally did nothing but work. (Dad only subscribed to magazines that he could quote from, and even on vacations he brought his “reading matter”: articles and periodicals he’d saved all year to “catch up on.”) He only took breaks in his normal routine to hike. Mom rarely hiked; in fact, she hated it. Mom’s idea of a good time was to sit in some lavish Swiss tearoom dressed exquisitely and being seen, while talking to some person she admired.

  Outside of our annual vacations, my parents never took a day off. And of course, Sundays were the busiest day of the week, from Dad preaching, to Sunday lunch and the interminable lunch discussion with the students and Sunday visitors, to Mom’s lavish high teas on Sunday nights for the students (and the day visitors who stayed all day after coming to church to hear Dad preach).

  If someone mentioned taking a nap, Mom would invariably scoff, “I never take naps!” My sisters sometimes turned into quivering wrecks from trying to keep up with their mother, both as young women trying desperately to help bring people to the Lord in the early days of L’Abri, and then again once they officially joined the work as grownups.

  When we were children and someone “came to the Lord,” Mom always made a big point of telling us when that person had said something about this or that Schaeffer child having played a part in their journey to salvation, through us children having been kind and understanding or through the answers we offered to that “seeking person’s” spiritual questions. “You played a real part!” Mom would exclaim, and, at other times, “The Lord has called us all into this work, and Dad and I couldn’t do it without you!”

  I have a photo album Mom made of my childhood pictures. Mom wrote many odd captions that have a lot more to do with her spiritual ambition for her children than with reality. Almost every caption has a strange spiritual twist to it. For instance, next to a picture of me playing with a friend when I was seven or eight, Mom wrote: “Frankie sitting with his friend, explaining Christian Basics.” I’m positive I was doing no such thing: we were playing cowboys and Indians.

  Mom’s spiritual pride, mixed with fierce spiritual ambition for her children, mixed with a willingness to be a doormat to her overbearing husband—as a further example of her piety and her ability to be the perfect wife for the Lord’s sake, while Dad was so far from perfect—left my sisters and me with a lifetime of conflicted emotions. Whose side were we on? Whose side should we be on? How much Christian service was enough? Should we try to live up to Mom’s spiritual fantasies about us? How could we ever live up to Mom’s expectations on the one hand, and to her absurd claims about her children’s spirituality and zeal on the other?

  I was not a child when I was a child: I was Mom’s secret agent for the Lord. A lovely sunrise was an illustration of God’s love. A tragedy was a reminder that we depend on God. If someone died, say my Mom’s mom, the first thing we did was reassure ourselves that they were with the Lord, or not, as in the case of those people like my Dad’s mother, who passed away when we were not sure that she had accepted Christ. In that case, we could only hope that she “came to know the Lord before the end.”

  The superspiritual pietistic grid through which Mom saw life was a heavy load for her children to bear. Should I have been explaining “Christian Basics” to that friend? Was the only point of playing cowboys and Indians to get to the moment in a friendship where I could try to convert him? If he didn’t convert, was that my fault?

  The implication was that whatever you were doing for the Lord, more was required. Normal life was just a series of interludes between bouts of evangelical zeal. And the spiritual pride that underlay Mom’s zeal made her children grow up with the feeling that no matter what we did to serve the Lord, it was never enough. Mom had gotten there first, and the rest of us weren’t even in the race.

  18

  I think what drove my parents was their reaction to the theo logical battles in which their early faith was forged. Both Mom and Dad were traditional Protestants trying to come to terms with the theological liberalism that was sweeping through the seminaries and mainline denominations starting in the early 1900s. There had been doctrinal differences between Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians; but prior to this time, the denominations shared an orthodoxy that today would be called fundamentalism. All Protestants had believed in a literal Bible and the divinity of Christ, not to mention the virgin
birth and Christ’s resurrection. But Darwin’s theory of evolution challenged the Bible, and the academic discipline of “higher criticism” claimed mere human authorship for scripture.

  Traditional Protestants such as my mother’s missionary parents, or my newly born-again father, inherited the enthusiasms—and the paranoia—of the counterattack by fundamentalists against the so-called modernists. By the 1920s, the modernists were taking over the seminaries and the bureaucracies of the big denominations. New York’s most prominent Baptist minister, Harry Emerson Fosdick, converted to a new kind of orthodoxy—the belief in a liberal progressive vision of mankind. And he began to preach that the Bible was not literally true, but that God would save the world through human progress. (After the horrors of the World Wars, his ideas about utopian progress fell out of fashion, but the liberal deconstruction of the scriptures continued.)

  J. Gresham Machen, a theologian at Princeton Theological Seminary, opposed Fosdick. Machen published a book called Christianity and Liberalism and argued that any theology that denied Christ’s divinity or doubted the Bible was not Christianity. But Machen lost the battle. Princeton Theological Seminary was taken over by the liberals. And Machen was fired for being too conservative, a last hold out for the old literalist view of the Bible.

  Machen was my father’s hero, mentor, and friend. Dad kept a big black-and-white picture of him taped inside his bedroom cupboard. When I was very young, I heard Machen’s name a lot. As I got older, Dad talked about him less.

  I think my father lived with a tremendous tension that pitted his growing interest in art, culture, music, and history against a stunted theology frozen in the modernist-fundamentalist battles of his youthful Christian experience. Dad took Machen’s firing from Princeton personally. My father’s theology was formed in a particularly bitter moment and never evolved along with the rest of his thinking. The theological battles of the 1920s and 1930s shaped Dad in the same way that political battles would shape the Vietnam generation in the 1960s. Passions forged in those battles became part of a personal identity that was difficult for people who did not share the passionate and polarizing experiences to understand.

  When Machen was kicked out of Princeton, he founded Westminster Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, where Dad went. But once fundamentalists left or were kicked out of the “mainstream” denominations, their habit of searching for theological error turned inward. Groups separated one from another even over such issues as whether the King James translation of the Bible was the only translation that contained God’s pure word. And within months of Machen’s founding a new denomination, even his new church suffered a schism. And Dad was part of a split from Westminster and helped form the new Faith Seminary. (The disagreement was over the timetable and order of events regarding the “return of Christ.”) Dad and Mom then became part of several more Presbyterian splinter sects and the founding of ever more “pure” groups.

  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 (out of loyalty to Machen and others) than for any intellectual reason. On the other hand even in the early days of his ministry my father had cultural interests far beyond those of the usual fundamentalist leaders.

  Even though Dad often denounced what he termed the harsh side of fundamentalism, old habits die hard, and for the rest of his life Dad was critical of all “compromise” on interpretations of the Bible. Who had “compromised” and who had not remained a big topic, just as what side you were on during the Vietnam War still divides and embitters aging former hippies and aging former soldiers.

  During my childhood, I was very aware of who had compromised and who hadn’t. Machen had not compromised. Billy Graham had, when he invited liberal theologians, even a Roman Catholic, to participate in his New York 1957 crusades.

  (Dad had little good to say about Billy until they became rather close in the 1960s, after Billy’s family began to visit L’Abri.)

  Mom and Dad were in an awkward place. Theologically, they were fundamentalists, but they were also compassionate and wanted fundamentalism to have a more humane and less embarrassing face. Other people were struggling with the same problem. One was an acquaintance of my father’s, Dr. Harold Ockenga (the pastor of the famous Congregationalist Park Street Church in Boston). In later years, Harold sent his son John to L’Abri in a last-ditch effort to get John “back on track” spiritually. It worked for a while, before John left the faith, but not before he introduced me to smoking pot.

  Dr. Ockenga had been a student of Machen’s at Princeton University and followed him out. But then Ockenga, like Dad, became a critic of the fundamentalist’s endless civil wars and started looking for a new way to present a friendlier evangelical faith (and face). He helped invent a movement called the New Evangelicals. Their mascot was Billy Graham.

  Other figures like Carl Henry, founder of Christianity Today magazine (and a man who became bitterly jealous of my father in later years), criticized fundamentalism’s failure to address the world’s intellectual and social needs. A movement was born—modern evangelicalism, a fundamentalism-lite where everyone could more or less do their own theological thing, as long as they “named the name of Christ” and paid lip service to the “inerrancy” of the Bible.

  On the fringe of all this activity, almost forgotten and buried in his little mission in Switzerland doing the “Lord’s work in the Lord’s way” during the 1950s and 1960s, my father developed his apologetic wherein he reversed the priorities of fundamentalist dogma. Instead of spouting Bible verses, Dad talked about philosophy, art, and culture. Only when he had gained his listener’s interest would he slip in a more traditional “Jesus saves” message. In a way, Dad became the answer to one of the questions Carl Henry asked over and over again in his early writings: “When will evangelicals get involved with their culture?”

  Dad went one step further. He got interested in the secular culture, not as a means to an end but for its own sake. In the early to mid-1960s, my father’s focus slowly changed. He slipped into a second career as an art historian, pop culture analyst, and futurist.

  I sometimes wonder what would have happened to my parents if, at that point, they had followed what were obviously their most heartfelt interests instead of continuing to try to bridge the widening gap between their aesthetic appreciation and their former theological passions, forged in the fundamentalist-versus-modernist controversy of the 1920s and ’30s. What began as Dad’s attempt to find a way to preach the gospel to modern young people turned into a lifelong interest in culture.

  In evangelical circles, if you wanted to know what Bob Dylan’s songs meant, Francis Schaeffer was the man to ask. In the early ’60s, he was probably the only fundamentalist who had even heard of Bob Dylan.

  19

  How much faith was enough? The answer was that you didn’t need much faith, only as much as a mustard seed. We didn’t have any mustard seeds, but Mom said they were very small. So how much faith was that? It was a tough equation, like trying to measure love by the pound or fear by the yard.

  Well, judging by how hard we had to pray just to get some Swiss peasant on the Ollon communal town council to stamp a piece of paper approving a building or residency permit, we didn’t have much faith. If you can’t even get a perpetually drunken farmer to sign his name, how far are you from saying, to a cripple, “Take up your bed and walk!” with any expectation that they will?

  I tried this a few times with my bad leg. I commanded it to grow, and it didn’t. So then I tried it on Jean Pierre over at Chalet Bellevue, the home for cerebral palsy sufferers next door. I was twelve at the time and home from English boarding school during the summer holidays. Jean Pierre was tall, angular, and a year or two older than me. He had short hair, a big long nose, and big hands tha
t sometimes were clenched when he had spasms. He had been rescued from an abusive home and sent by the Swiss authorities to Chalet Bellevue. There were lumps on his face from scars where his mother had beaten him with a stick.

  Jean Pierre liked it when I visited, because most of the other CP kids next door were girls. (The home was started as a sister mission to L’Abri, by some like-minded American evangelical women—“The Ladies”—who were fans of my dad.) I was the only boy Jean Pierre knew who could walk well enough so we could play army.

  After fighting our wars all over the Bellevue property, sometimes we shared an underwear ad and masturbated under the Les Mélèzes hedge. (In Saving Grandma, I put in a story about a spastic who needs help with masturbation. In real life, Jean Pierre managed just fine.)

  Jean Pierre had accepted Christ after being led to the foot of the cross by Rosemary Sperry, one of the American ladies who ran the home. So he was ready to try out the healing idea. In the scriptures, various methods were used. We decided we’d try the anointing of oil that the apostles were said to have used in the New Testament church. So I went into Chalet Les Mélèzes.

  “Mom, can I have some oil?”

  “What for, darling?”

  “I just need some.”

  “How much oil, and what for?”

  “Just regular oil, just enough for some anointing.”

  “What?”

  “I’m going to play King David, and I want to do some anointing.”

  “I suppose that’s all right. Here,” said Mom, taking an empty yogurt cup out of the cupboard; “you can pour in a little of that sunflower-seed oil, but don’t spill any on the floor.”

  We had our oil, though I’d lied to get it since playing King David sounded less strange than saying I was planning to heal Jean Pierre. Dad said that we did believe in healing, so I knew I would not be struck down or anything. But Dad said we did not believe in healing like those confused Pentecostals who didn’t seem to realize that in the New Testament, the point of all those miracles wasn’t the miracles themselves but to prove who Jesus was so that people would believe and the church could get started. It was started now, so healing was rare and usually unnecessary.