Crazy for God

by Frank Schaeffer

  Having become a born-again believer during freshman year of college, I was directed by Inter-Varsity leaders to read the works of C. S. Lewis and Francis Schaeffer. [Inter-Varsity was a leading college ministry.] These two writers shaped my emerging faith and changed the direction of my vocation and guided my career path.

  After opening my own animation studio in Chicago, I divided the focus of my workload between advertising agencies and Christian film distributors. I felt I could use my passion for animation to communicate Christian truths to children.

  I first heard the call of Frank’s message to creative Christians on the West Coast on a vacation drive with my in-laws to San Diego. They had a tape from the recent How Should We Then Live? seminar. It was a speech by Frank Schaeffer (then known as “Franky”), challenging Christians to use their talents to make a difference in the arts. My in-laws advised that “You’ve got to meet this guy!” “Yeah, right,” I thought.

  After offering my animations and design services to several Midwest-based Christian film distribution companies, I soon found each had severe quirks and major limitations in creativity and a general “tackiness.” Then, I remember getting a call from a film editor I’d met through my Christian contacts. He said he’d helped assemble the first Schaeffer series, saying that a second series was in preproduction. Due to the nature of the subject matter, he said that the director felt the series needed some animation, and that my name had been discussed. The director was Frank Schaeffer.

  I sent my show reel. A few weeks later I got a call from another associate of the Schaeffer series who said that Frank was coming to Chicago and that he wanted to meet me.

  The day I met Frank was full of anxious anticipation. I wanted so badly to impress him and his partner Jim Buchfuehrer. Though Frank’s stature was short like mine, the intensity of his gaze meant all business. He was prone to express strong opinions on any of a variety of subjects; music, movies, art, but when he locked onto a serious topic there was no stopping him.

  I spent that first day with Frank, listening to him describe the new project [Whatever Happened to the Human Race?] and experiencing Frank’s intensity and odd lapses of un-preacher-son behavior (including an affinity for premium pipe tobacco and a “lively” vocabulary).

  At the end of the day, I sat exhausted in the lobby of the Holiday Inn lobby. Frank had gone off to the washroom and I asked Jim, “Is Frank for real?” He told me that Frank was the most intense person he’d ever met; that his standards of excellence were unparalleled and that so far as Christian filmmakers go, there was no one else in the business with a greater sense of purpose, vision, or talent.

  This was an adventure I wanted to be part of!

  A few weeks later, I was in Frank’s chalet at L’Abri in Switzerland working on the script to Whatever Happened to the Human Race? I met Francis Schaeffer at a classy restaurant in Lausanne. After introductions he leaned over to me and softly asked, “How many of my books have you read?”

  Judging from the quantity of ideas I contributed that ended up in the final script, I knew how much my contribution was appreciated. I came to feel like a member of the Schaeffer family. I used to kid that I was Edith’s “other” son.

  Every time we met for creative brainstorming, I felt as if we had worked together all our lives. Frank’s wife Genie was always a gracious host, joining discussions and offering candid opinions. In the setting of their lovely home I felt gratified that our creative sessions yielded the best ideas on any given day.

  For the next seven years I devoted my best efforts and directed the talents of my studio to every project Frank Schaeffer drew me into. In addition to the film projects, this included promotional materials, a newsletter [The Christian Activist], as well as [covers for] a shelf-load of books by Schaeffer family members, as well as works of other authors supplemental to Frank’s “work.”

  46

  After Bishop Fulton J. Sheen saw the abortion-related episode of How Should We Then Live? and then heard from Dr. Koop that we were working on a pro-life series, he invited Jim Buchfuehrer and me to meet with him in his Park Avenue apartment. Sheen wanted to strategize on ways to advance the pro-life cause. The bishop was kind, tall, pale, gaunt, and quiet. His apartment smelled faintly of lavender with a touch of vegetable soup.

  “The problem is,” Sheen said, “that abortion is perceived as a Catholic issue. I want you to help me change that. The unborn need more friends.”

  After talking for about an hour, Sheen invited us into his private red-velvet-draped chapel across from his bedroom. It felt strange to be kneeling in front of a big “very Catholic” crucifix, as Mom would have called it.

  I didn’t mention to the bishop that as a three-year-old I had been kicked out of our village (along with my family) by his brother bishops because we were Protestants having a “religious influence” on his co-religionists. Nor did I mention that for years, Dad had been denouncing Billy Graham for compromising by inviting a Roman Catholic bishop to join him on the platform of his 1957 New York crusade, nor that I grew up on Dad’s stories about the extreme cruelty of the Spanish Roman Catholic Church and how the bishops were in league with Franco and the fascists.

  Before I left, Sheen blessed me by making the sign of the cross over me. From that time on, we had the full cooperation of the Roman Catholic Church in America. The Knights of Columbus helped raise money for the making of Whatever Happened to the Human Race? And when we wanted to shoot a scene in the huge Catholic cemetery in Brooklyn and were denied permission (because Francis Ford Coppola had shot a scene there for The Godfather of the funeral of Don Corleone, and people had complained), we called Sheen. We got permission ten minutes later.

  About two years after I first met Sheen, and after Whatever Happened to the Human Race? was out, I was being interviewed by Newsweek religion editor Kenneth Woodward at his offices for an article he wrote on Dad. Ken was one of the few reporters who seemed to “get” what was happening with the emergence of the evangelical pro-life movement, Dad’s leadership of that movement, and the scale it was happening on.

  He was lamenting the fact that Newsweek had just dropped its religion section as “irrelevant.” Ken spoke ruefully about the fact that religion stories were getting rare and that all he could do was “Pick up the scraps once in a while, get a papal cover every few years or something.”A few months before I talked to Ken, I had met with Jack and Joanne Kemp. Jack was a congressman and would soon be the Secretary at HUD under Reagan, and later a vice presidential candidate with Bob Dole. I had been introduced to the Kemps several years before, after Joanne Kemp started a book club called the “Schaeffer Group,” made up of about twenty born-again senators’ and congressmen’s wives who came together weekly to study my parents’ books. Mom and Dad had been guests in the Kemps’ home.

  Jack and Joanne were very attractive people and their house was lovely, crammed with silver-framed family pictures of their handsome family. I was nervous. I was also very impressed with myself. I had “arrived.” The Little Shit from Switzerland was showing his movie series to a leading congressman!

  Jim Buchfuehrer and I set up the 16-mm projector in Jack’s living room, and we gave Jack and Joanne a private five-hour screening of Whatever Happened to the Human Race? Jack liked the movies and was, I think, genuinely moved. He also immediately saw the possibilities for the Republican Party. By the end of that evening (actually, it was nearer dawn), the pro-life cause had a new champion. From then on, Jack would give Koop, Dad, and myself access to everyone in the Republican Party.

  For the next several years, I often saw Jack. And whenever Dad wanted something done in Washington, he would say “Call Jack!”

  As the years passed, Dad used to be somewhat dismissive of Jack in private. “I like Jack, but he has a bee in his bonnet,” Dad said. This was what Dad called Jack’s supply-side economic theories. “It’s hard to get Jack to concentrate on the important issues,” Dad would grumble.

  Jack would tell me: �
�I like talking to you better than your father. You seem to understand the real political picture. There are other things besides all his ‘biblical absolutes theology’ talk. He’s too narrowly focused.”

  Soon after we showed the film series in his home, Jack hosted a meeting at the Republican Club in Washington, DC. We screened three episodes cut into a ninety-minute special. (It had also just been shown on Dutch National TV.) There were more than fifty congressmen and about twenty senators there, from Henry Hyde to Bob Dole. Dad and I spoke to those assembled and took questions. We were there for over four hours, and no one left early. Media were invited but didn’t choose to cover this unimportant “Christian event.”

  The National Right To Life Committee purchased time to show the ninety-minute special cut from our series on ABC’s Channel 7 in Washington, DC. Judy Mann of the Washington Post took notice. The headline of her article was “No Matter How Moving, Show Is Still Propaganda” (January 2, 1981). Her article basically repeated word for word a press release that had been sent out by Planned Parenthood denouncing our series. The article began: “Score a resounding 10 points on the emotional Richter scale for the antiabortion forces that have produced a film, Whatever Happened to the Human Race?”

  The Post’s coverage was unusual. In the 1970s and early ’80s, what we did was largely ignored by the cultural gatekeepers. This only added to our martyr luster within the evangelical ghetto. We thrived on the perception of persecution. “Never reviewed by the New York Times” was a proud banner for us.

  When, several years earlier, in connection with the book sales of How Should We Then Live? I had run a full-page ad in the Times, about the paper’s ignoring Dad’s huge book sales, the headline was: “This Story Should Have Been on Page One.” Actually, it should have been.

  The Times “best-seller” list was misleading. Evangelical books were often outselling the Times’ best-sellers. But the paper did not bother to count sales in religious bookstores. The people hurt most weren’t evangelical authors (our books sold anyway); rather, the losers were Democratic Party leaders and other liberal readers of the “paper of record” who were blindsided by subsequent events. The Times’ readers were not given a heads-up about what was going on “out there.”

  The media generally ignored our seminars and the political impact they were having. If some major paper or network had sent a reporter to follow Dad, Dr. Koop, and myself on our coast-to-coast seminar tours, he or she would have seen a cross section of Americans of all races, denominations, and economic backgrounds at our events. And had the Democratic Party leaders read about or watched reports on these events—often filled with people who still identified themselves as Democrats in those days—they might not have been so sanguine about allowing their party to become so exclusionary on the abortion issue.

  The reality of who was at our meetings—thousands of working-class and middle-class churchgoing women and the men they dragged with them—was very different than the image of loony “misogynistic” pro-lifers propagated by Planned Parenthood and parroted by the media. We didn’t fit that image and so were ignored.

  In 1982, Koop was nominated as Surgeon General by Reagan. Both the pro-life and pro-choice camps interpreted this as Reagan giving the pro-life community a reward for our support. During Koop’s confirmation hearings, I went on the 700 Club, twice, to raise support for Koop while he was being attacked in a pre-Bork “Borking” by the Democrats, led by Edward Kennedy. Koop would call me every day and beg me to redouble my efforts and to “Get the calls pouring in to the Senate!”

  My last conversation with Jack Kemp was in 2000. We hadn’t been in touch for about twenty years (other than his yearly Christmas card), and I called him to ask why the Republican Party establishment wasn’t backing Senator McCain, and why the Bush people were spreading lies about McCain. I told Jack that I thought that Bush Jr. was obviously terribly wrong for the job.

  Jack got angry with me after I said I was planning to “use the Schaeffer name again” (for the first time in twenty years) to do a series of radio interviews on conservative stations endorsing McCain. Jack snapped: “McCain is a warmonger! Bush is a peacemaker, just as I am!” When I kept arguing, he hung up.

  47

  Americans have experienced many cycles of religiously inspired political fervor, from the Bay State Puritans’ mix of religion and law, to the various so-called Great Awakenings, to the evangelical-inspired and led antislavery movement, to Prohibition and the church-based antiwar movements advocating isolationism in the 1930s and early ’40s, to the religiously motivated parts of the anti-Vietnam War movement. But in terms of the political involvement of evangelicals, as it has carried forward into the twenty-first century, it was my father and I who were amongst the first to start telling American evangelicals that God wanted them involved in the political process. And it was the Roe v. Wade decision that gave Dad, Koop, and me our platform.

  Abortion became the evangelical issue. Everything else in our “culture wars” pales by comparison. The anger we stirred up at the grass roots was not feigned but heartfelt. And at first it was not about partisan politics. It had everything to do with genuine horror at the procedure of abortion. The reaction was emotional, humane, and sincere. It also was deliberately co-opted by the Republican Party and, at first, ignored by the Democratic Party.

  Our Whatever Happened to the Human Race? seminars helped launch the crisis pregnancy-center movement (directly and indirectly). The centers offered a practical alternative to abortion. They also became bastions of pro-life political protest and activism.

  The centers became places where ordinary Americans reached out with compassionate care to literally millions of women and babies of all races and economic conditions. (As of 2007, there were more than three thousand centers across America.) They also brought a growing number of Hispanic Pentecostals and former Democratic Party Roman Catholics into the Republican Party. And the crisis centers galvanized hitherto apolitical evangelicals into political action. The centers also brought black churches (which were often liberal on other issues) into close contact with culturally conservative white evangelicals and became places where local Republican action committees informally organized.

  If things had fallen out slightly differently, the crisis centers just as easily could have been bastions of the Democratic Party, or at least nonpolitical. Abortion had been mostly a “Catholic issue,” just as Bishop Sheen had said. And at first, most evangelical leaders, following Billy Graham’s lead, weren’t interested in “going political.” When Dad asked Billy why he wasn’t taking a stand on abortion, Billy answered that he had been burned by getting too close to Nixon and was never going to poke his head over the ramparts of the “I-only-preach-thegospel” trench again. He said he didn’t want to be “political.”

  Other evangelical leaders were similarly nervous when our films first came out, just as Dad had been nervous when I fought with him while urging him to add an anti-Supreme Court pro-life message to the end of our first film series.

  Our second seminar tour to launch Whatever Happened to the Human Race? lost almost one million dollars. (The first tour had made twice that on book sales, tapes, and film rentals.) We had raised around one and a half million to make Whatever Happened to the Human Race? and another million to promote it through the tour. We lost the money because we had moved from the comfortable subjects of art, culture, and theology (with abortion only tacked on in the last episodes of How Should We Then Live?) to the uncomfortable “life issues.”

  At first the evangelical media leaders, like the editors of Christianity Today, met Whatever Happened to the Human Race? with stony silence. And where, several years before, we had looked out over crowds of thousands, early on in the second tour we could barely fill the first row of seats in the same venues. Then things began to change.

  They changed for two reasons. First, we raised grassroots consciousness in evangelical circles. Second, the pro-choice forces were so hubristically aggressive w
hen belittling their opponents that they alienated everyone who even mildly questioned their position. They drove people to us.

  If Planned Parenthood, NOW, and NARAL had sat down to figure out the best way to energize the evangelical subculture, they couldn’t have done a better job. With their absolutist stand, they might as well have been working to help the Republicans take Congress and the White House. They branded all who even questioned Roe as backward women-hating rubes. Roe was the law! There was no need for further debate! There could be no compromise! Shut up! Go away! All that was at stake was “fetal tissue”! People who didn’t agree could just be ignored, mocked, or sued into silence. Besides, the “progressives” had history on their side. We were entering a new secular and enlightened age!

  This dismissive attitude backfired. For instance, after Planned Parenthood and NOW sent people to a few of our seminar venues to challenge us, the latter part of the tour began to pull a bigger evangelical crowd in an “us against them” spirit. Our small audiences listened to Dad, Koop, and myself try to debate in-your-face (and often off-the-wall) NOW and Planned Parenthood plants sent by those pro-choice organizations to protest the fact that we even wanted to discuss “their” issue. And our audiences were also sometimes treated to an exhibition of pro-choice self-righteousness that made our fundamentalism seem nuanced. We could not have scripted it better. A screamed chant of “My body! My choice!” isn’t much of an argument.

  Sometimes our events were picketed. Our rather quiet and timid evangelical audiences had to run a gauntlet of angry “Keep Your Hands Off My Body!” sign-waving pro-choice protesters.

  Leading up to Roe, abortion had been pitched as a sad but inevitable solution to rare and agonizing dilemmas, like pregnancy resulting from rape and incest. But in the context of the post-Roe firestorm, pro-choice people seemed to also be defending abortion not only as a way to end a pregnancy but as an in-your-face triumphant political statement. They even seemed to be goading anyone who had doubts about Roe v. Wade. For instance, in the mid-1970s, the Washington, DC chapter of the ACLU auctioned off free abortions at a fundraising raffle held at a dance, and they made sure their action was publicized.