Crazy for God

by Frank Schaeffer

  Billy Zeoli heard Dad’s lectures. And like many evangelicals who visited, he loved the fact that my father was arguing intelligently for biblical Christianity and pushing back against what seemed like an unstoppable secular tide. The evangelicals also loved the fact that Dad, somewhat like author C. S. Lewis, was a kind of proof that we evangelicals weren’t as dumb as the secularists said we were. (The irony was that Lewis and my father were not “evangelicals” in the American sense of the word. Lewis was an Anglo-Catholic; and Dad liked art better than theology and people better than rules and was most comfortable in a room full of hippies.)

  “Others must hear this message!” said Billy. “We’re losing our young people!” Nice kids from good Christian homes would go to college and pretty soon they were questioning everything. All their born-again parents could do was wring their hands and quote Bible verses at kids who came home from school no longer believing in the concept of absolute truth, let alone that the Bible was literally “the answer” and accurate in every detail.

  Confused evangelical parents confronted by this “generation gap” had no answers for the art student seduced by Pop Art or the philosophy student reading Camus. And what could be done for the biology student studying evolution, or, worse, the student of English literature whose politics was moving to the left as she marched in anti-Vietnam War demonstrations? Christ was being driven out of our young people’s lives by clever intellectuals bent on stripping faith away and replacing it with nothing at all!

  One man had the answers. And while American evangelical parents didn’t care to visit Florence, let alone listen to the music of Bob Dylan or subscribe to The BBC Listener, Francis Schaeffer did. And he was so sincere and so good at answering “the kids,” especially those who had been “turned off” by their bourgeois middle-class parents.

  Evangelical leaders came to L’Abri so Dad could teach them how to inoculate Johnny and Susie born-again against the hedonistic out-of-control culture that had Johnny’s older brother on drugs and Susie’s older sister marching on the capital. The evangelical elite didn’t stay in the dorms but rented big chalets, as did Billy Zeoli and many others, including Lane Dennis. Lane was the publisher and editor at Crossway Books. In the case of Lane Dennis, he also came to woo two of the hottest evangelical authors, and to inspire a third to begin to write: me.

  Lane was a kind and honest man. We all liked him, and soon Mom and Dad gave Lane their new books to publish. Actually, I did. I was acting as their agent. (Several years later, on the strength of the Schaeffer books sales, Crossway went from being an obscure mom-and-pop tract-printing company to one of the major evangelical publishers.)

  L’Abri had prided itself on doing the Lord’s work in the Lord’s way. Dad and Mom were very critical of the fund-raising methods of the Billy Grahams, Billy Zeolis, and other high-powered evangelicals who didn’t really “live by faith” but who used “slick worldly methods.” How could “these people” prove the existence of God when clearly their ministries were the product of clever fund-raising? “Those American Christians” were all just too commercial, too worldly.

  Until Billy Zeoli showed up, Dad, with his preference for the small-is-beautiful hippie ethos, with its love of all things organic and natural as opposed to planned and businesslike, had avoided the temptation to capitalize on his growing fame. He was to the evangelicals of the late sixties and early seventies what the Grateful Dead were to Deadheads, an eccentric all the more attractive because he was on the cusp of going big-time but refused to take that last step. His work, Dad felt, would lose its meaning if he “sold out.”

  But Dad and Billy Zeoli had a special bond that helped overcome Dad’s resistance to Billy’s idea that he take his message to a wider audience: Billy was the son of Anthony Zeoli, a first-generation Italian-American old-time evangelist who had happened to be holding a tent revival in Philadelphia half a century before Billy came to L’Abri. Dad had walked into Zeoli senior’s tent revival when he was seventeen. He heard Anthony Zeoli preach and discovered that there were other people out there also convinced that the Bible was the answer.

  So there was an unlikely yet special connection between Dad, the self-effacing hippie guru, and Billy Zeoli, the leisure-suited, luxury-car-renting big spender from Gospel Films. There was something else, too: Billy offered to help me.

  Billy saw me as a lost shadow on the edges of L’Abri, a dropout child who’d gotten some hippie princess from San Francisco pregnant—and who did “nothing more” than paint. After spotting several 16-mm and Super-8 cameras in my studio, Billy discovered that I wanted to realize a star-struck dream of making movies. And Dad wanted to help his son. And I was ambitious. I wanted to make films, real movies, movies like my idol Fellini was making. But how could I get from here to there? Billy offered me what seemed like a way.

  What is sad to me now (in a maudlin, self-pitying way) is that some of my paintings were good. And they were getting better. If I’d had the discipline to concentrate on my art and had found a way of distancing myself from the evangelical community (and the easy money it soon offered), I might have gotten somewhere. In fact, I was getting somewhere in New York, Geneva (Aubonne), and London.

  But I was also broke. And Genie was pregnant with our second child. I also happened to sincerely believe in my father’s message, though “believe” is perhaps the wrong word. Rather, I had not yet begun to question my indoctrination.

  But once we all swallowed hard and decided to work with Billy Zeoli, it was “clear” that with all those people being deluded by The World into falling away from Christ, that the “L’Abri way,” the small-is-beautiful way, had to be replaced so we could “reach out to this lost generation” before it was “too late.” And Billy with his multimillion dollar backing from the Amway Corporation and its far-right founder-capitalist-guru, Rich DeVos, was about as slick and worldly and far away from the L’Abri way as anyone could get.

  I didn’t know it then, but my life as an artist had just ended. As months turned into years, I never got back into my studio. I was sucked into a whirlpool of activity by making evangelical documentaries and, eventually, into becoming my father’s sidekick.

  The paint on my huge old palette dried hard as a rock. The smell of linseed oil was replaced by the hot-paper smell of the photocopy machine.

  After I quit painting, looking at my paintings depressed me. It was something like running into an old childhood friend I had abandoned for sexier better-connected new acquaintances, pretend “new old friends” of convenience. I knew I had betrayed something important.

  Dad seems to have been saddened by my choice to quit painting, too, even though I helped take his message to a vast audience because I did quit. He dedicated his book How Should We Then Live? to me. In the dedication, my father expressed deep regret that the book and film project took me away from my art.

  41

  Within six months of Billy Zeoli’s coming to L’Abri, Dad was writing and researching How Should We Then Live? At age twenty (or was it nineteen?), I had an office, three secretaries, two assistants, and a budget of a million and a half dollars. And this was back in the days when that was real money, especially for a thirteen-episode documentary on history, art, culture, and theology.

  How Should We Then Live? and the second series Dad and I made, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? are still standard works today in thousands of evangelical high schools, colleges, and seminaries around the world. For many evangelicals, Francis Schaeffer is their first, and perhaps only, introduction to what “we” think about art, history and culture, and politics—not to mention the “life issues.” More than thirty years after working on those films, I still get several thousand dollars a year in royalties, from the tiny percentage I’m due as the writer/director and producer. And the book companions to the films are in print, a mainstay of every evangelical library, having sold several million copies.

  In How Should We Then Live? (film series and book), the thesis was that the be
st of Western culture, art, freedom, and democracy could be traced to a Christian foundation. And that foundation was under attack from humanist and secular ideas and elites. In consequence, we were losing our freedoms because there were no longer absolutes that we could all agree on to guarantee them.

  The last two episodes of How Should We Then Live? concentrated on the legalization of abortion through the 1973 Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision. This was presented as the prime example of the erosion of the values that had once made the West great.

  Once the production got under way, we were no longer just praying that the Lord would meet our needs. I was running all over America talking to people like Mary C. Crowley (founder of Home Interiors and Gifts), Bunker Hunt (of the notorious Hunt brothers in Dallas, who were busy with their oil empire while trying to corner the world silver market), Amway’s founder and president Rich DeVos (based in Grand Rapids), Mrs. Nancy DeMoss (of the Arthur S. DeMoss Foundation), and every other evangelical philanthropist Billy had on his list, or we had on ours, or who had ever visited L’Abri. (We even got the Pew Charitable Trust and Kresgey Foundation to kick in.) And later, for other related film/book endeavors, we pitched young Howard Ahmanson (heir of the Home Savings bank fortune).

  Mom and Dad relied on Billy and me to do most of the fundraising legwork, though they would sometimes get on the phone to “soften up” the prospective donor. Billy’s method was to send me.

  “They love young people,” Billy said. “The way you come off works better. You can speak for your parents, and you come off as really sincere.”

  At first I was nervous. But I soon got used to telling wealthy evangelicals that it was time to “take our country back,” to “answer the humanists,” to “defend our young people.” I was also watching Billy Zeoli operate and learning how to imitate him. He was the master of asking without asking.

  I would fly from Switzerland to Chicago, then to Muskegon. (I took so many trips, it seemed as if I was on a first-name basis with half the Swissair crew members.) I’d check into the local Holiday Inn (where I ate my weight in steaks, still a big treat given my meat-deprived L’Abri background). For a week or so, I’d go to the office of Gospel Films for meetings on the scripts and fundraising. Then I’d hit the road and crisscross the country, asking for money.

  Billy bought me a garish herringbone wide-lapelled seventies-style three-piece suit and an equally dreadful plaid overcoat and sent me out on a series of trips to see “the money.” (I had cut my hair and thought that my new clothes made me look very important!) Billy never seemed all that interested in the scripts. “Do whatever you all want. Just do it on budget!” was his usual reply to any question. But we would have long, intricate, and seemingly endless strategy sessions about how to approach donors.

  “Mary Crowley doesn’t like to be asked,” Billy would say. “You have to get her to take you to her private chapel and pray about the project with her. Make sure you kneel down next to her and hold her hand! Then let her ask you how to help.”

  With Rich DeVos, the tactic was different. “Talk to Rich about saving capitalism!” Billy would say. “Tell him your Dad is standing up to the socialists! Do not talk about art!”

  With the “Hunt boys,” as Billy called them, he advised “Don’t talk too fast! Do not mention the word ‘intellectual.’ Stick to the simple Gospel. We’re doing this for Jesus! Got it?”

  We would approach Nancy DeMoss as if she was a skittish runaway colt, sidle up with many friendly calls, never really ask, just tell her about the project. “Get Edith to call her again! Nancy needs to feel excited, and she loves your mother’s books! Let Edith do the talking on this one!”

  Billy knew what he was doing. We were raising money by the fistful. I was learning how to suck up to, stroke, and “handle” the super-rich. Approaching one was like trying to gain favor with the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland. Do it wrong, and it was off with your head! Stroke the target correctly and, for a few minutes, you might become a coddled favorite. Above all, as Billy said again and again, you had to pretend to be interested in them “as people.”

  My English boarding-school days paid off. I was polite, knew how to relate to grownups respectfully, stood when anyone entered a room, held out chairs for women, called men “sir,” and never talked about myself. Having been trained by my mother paid off, too. I had an inexhaustible reserve of useful spiritual platitudes at my fingertips, a databank of God-talk implanted through years of being around my mother. And my enthusiasm for our project was genuine. When it came to making the films and taking Dad’s message to the world, I was excited and sincere. I was also being taught by the best evangelical fund-raiser in America.

  “Look,” Billy would say, “They know you’re there for the money. That’s the only kind of person they ever meet. But you have to play the game that you’re there for them! Be interested in their ideas! Take Mary flowers! Ask the Hunt boys about their family. Remember, they know more than you do about money, so no bullshit, tell the truth if they ask for budget details!”

  I was starting to see that it paid handsomely to babble loudly about Christ and saving America and to present myself—and Mom and Dad and our new “ministry through film”—as the last best defense of truth against the enemies of the Lord. I also learned that I could turn my fund-raising “spirituality” on and off at will, something like a Swissair flight attendant’s smile.

  42

  The democratic Dutch apportioned their state TV budget between various production entities based on demo-graphics, so much for the Roman Catholics, so much for the liberal Protestants, so much for the communists, so much for the evangelicals, and so on. We hooked up with EO, the evangelical state-funded Dutch TV producers. They supplied the logistics that a state TV entity has and got us permission to film in museums all over the world, where Dad would stand in front of great artworks, from Michelangelo’s David to Marcel Duchamp’s Bride Descending a Staircase, and proclaim our answers to modern culture.

  When we started making How Should We Then Live? Dad had not wanted to even mention abortion in the series. We were already in production when the Supreme Court handed down the Roe v. Wade decision legalizing abortion.

  If it hadn’t been for me, Dad’s reputation as an evangelical scholar—a somewhat marginal but interesting intellectual figure—would have remained intact. As it was, my absolutist youthful commitment to the pro-life cause goaded my father into taking political positions far more extreme than came naturally to him.

  There was nothing intellectual, let alone religious, about my visceral opposition to abortion. My antiabortion fervor was strictly personal. It had a name, Jessica, my little girl, proof that conception is good, even an unexpected teen conception. I knew that “unwanted” can become very wanted indeed. I also think that my gut reaction against abortion originated back when I was a child pressing my ear against a series of fat lovely bellies of my sisters, various unwed mothers (who were guests), and several L’Abri workers and listening to all those unborn babies’ hearts beating. There was also another very personal motive: all the CP kids at Chalet Bellevue I had played with, and, in the case of Jean Pierre, merrily jacked off with. I didn’t want people just like my spastic friends to be eliminated. And perhaps my polio, being the only “Yank” in an English school, my dyslexia, and a weird childhood, all also gave me a natural empathy for outsiders, and the unwanted.

  I barged into Dad’s bedroom while he was eating his daily breakfast of two soft-boiled eggs with toast, and tea. I had just come home from yet another successful fundraising tour in the States. Dad and I had been arguing for several weeks before my trip. We picked up where we left off.

  “They’re Catholics!” Dad said, before I even opened my mouth.

  We instantly got into a screaming match.

  “How can you say you believe in the uniqueness of every human being if you won’t stand up on this?” I yelled.

  “I don’t want to be identified with some Catholic issue. I
’m not putting my reputation on the line for them!” Dad shouted back.

  “So you won’t speak out because it’s a ‘Catholic issue?’ ”

  “What does abortion have to do with art and culture? I’m known as an intellectual, not for this sort of political thing!” shouted Dad.

  “That’s what you always say about the Lutherans in Germany!” I yelled. “You say they’re responsible for the Holocaust because they wouldn’t speak up, and now you’re doing the same thing! Fucking coward! You’re always talking about the ‘dehumanization of man’; now, here is your best example!”

  “It isn’t in the script!”

  “We’re writing the script! We can change the fucking script!”

  “Don’t you dare say ‘fuck’ to me again!”

  “I didn’t say ‘fuck’ to you, I said ‘fucking script!’ ”

  Mom walked in as I yelled “fucking script.” She stood frozen by the door. Dad reclined on his mound of pillows, his spoon poised above the soft-boiled eggs. He glared at me. Then he glanced at Mom’s shocked face.

  Dad laughed. Then I laughed.

  No one has more power over a loving father (especially if that father feels a bit guilty for neglecting his children) than a beloved son. I would know! Years later, I practically followed my youngest son John into the Marine Corps and dedicated almost seven years to writing about military service out of solidarity with his choice to volunteer.

  My son had stood up for something. I wanted to back him. And when I issued my father a moral challenge, he didn’t want me thinking he was ducking the issue. Anyway, Dad agreed with me about abortion in principle. He had already noted in several lectures that Roe v. Wade was a “horrible decision.” We had only been arguing about how much of a public stand he wanted to take.

  Dad and Mom prayed over the matter. My father came to me a few days after our screaming match and said he had decided that, “rude and abrasive” as I had been, my call to him was nevertheless “prophetic.” We would change the last two episodes of How Should We Then Live? and talk about abortion.