Crazy for God

by Frank Schaeffer

  Even some people on the pro-choice side were shocked by the callousness of pro-choice supporters. For instance, in an article in the Village Voice, “Abortion Chic—The Attraction of Wanted-Unwanted Pregnancies” (February 4, 1981), Leslie Savan, a self-described pro-choice advocate, discussed how abortion had become “subliminally chic.” She quoted women who deliberately became pregnant, without any intention of carrying their babies to term. Some of the reasons Savan listed that the women had given her for getting pregnant, then aborting, were: “A desire to know if they were fertile, especially if they had postponed pregnancy until later life. . . . To test the commitment of the man. . . . Abortion as a rite of passage.”

  The debate became vicious. And Dad and I went from merely talking about providing compassionate alternatives to abortion, to actively working to drag evangelicals, often kicking and screaming, into politics. By the end of the Whatever Happened to the Human Race? tour, we were calling for civil disobedience, the takeover of the Republican Party, and even hinting at overthrowing our “unjust pro-abortion government.”

  48

  I began to write. My evangelical books—for instance, my hastily dictated A Time for Anger—became best sellers. Like Dad’s books, my evangelical screeds were ignored by the media. Although several decades later, author and comparative-religion historian Karen Armstrong, in The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam, quoted a passage from A Time for Anger as an example of the paranoid anti-status-quo spirit animating American fundamentalism.

  Dr. Dobson, founder of the Focus on the Family radio program, gave away tens of thousands of copies of A Time for Anger as a fund-raising fulfillment. And he interviewed me twice on his (then relatively new) show.

  Inspired by my father’s call for civil disobedience in his best-selling A Christian Manifesto (and also urged to action by A Time for Anger), the picketing of abortion clinics by evangelicals started on a large scale. Formerly passive evangelicals began talking about shutting the abortion clinics with a wall of protesters.

  The “other side” reacted to the picketing of clinics with sledgehammer tactics, invoking so-called RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization Act) laws, originally enacted to shut down organized crime. Pro-choice organizations used RICO to intimidate what, until then, was a peaceful grassroots movement. And groups like the ACLU began to work to stifle the type of free-speech and civil-disobedience activities that in any other context they would have defended.

  Dad’s and my books were doing the advance work for people like Ronald Reagan and helping to craft Republican victories out of our fellow travelers’ resentments. Dad and I were also beginning to advise friendly political leaders specifically on how best to woo the evangelical vote. For instance, encouraged by Dad and others, President Reagan contributed an article to a leading pro-life journal, the Human Life Review.

  The Human Life Review routinely included articles by Clare Boothe Luce, Prof. James Hitchcock, Dr. Jerome Lejeune, Ellen Wilson, William P. Murchison, Malcolm Muggeridge, Harold O. J. Brown, George Gilder, Nat Hentoff, and dozens of other American and European pro-life writers and intellectuals. The authors included evangelicals, Republicans and Democrats, as well as liberals, an editor at the Village Voice, a professor of educational psychology at Boston College, a professor of humanities at the City University of New York, the former editor of Britain’s Punch magazine, and a winner of the Medal of Freedom, as well as the chairman of the Department of Fundamental Genetics at the University of Paris.

  The Spring 1983 issue of the Human Life Review carried President Reagan’s article, “Abortion and the Conscience of the Nation.” I pitched a slightly expanded version of it to Thomas Nelson publishers as a book.

  We cranked the book out. The Times never reviewed it, of course, but it put a whole generation of pro-life evangelicals on notice that the Republican Party was “our” party.

  When Mom and Dad talked to Presidents Ford, Reagan, or Bush Sr., they would reiterate the pro-life position. Unlike Billy Graham, who made sure everyone knew he was the “chaplain to presidents,” Dad made sure his conversations were private. He used to often say “You can be seen to do something, or actually do it.”

  Dad’s strategy seemed to work. When I wanted to turn Reagan’s article into a book, I only had to call the White House once.

  49

  Dad and I were mixing with a new set of people who had not known much, if anything, about my father. If they had even heard of Dad before he came on the pro-life scene in the mid-to-late seventies, they probably hadn’t liked the sound of him. These people included Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson, James Kennedy, and all the rest of the televangelists, radio hosts, and other self-appointed “Christian leaders” who were bursting on the scene in the 1970s and early ’80s.

  Compared to Dad, these slick media figures were upstarts. They were “not our sort of people,” Dad often said. What people like Robertson and Falwell got from Dad was some respectability.

  Dad had a unique reputation for an intellectual approach to faith. And his well-deserved reputation for frugal ethical living, for not financially profiting from his ministry, for compassion, openness, and intellectual integrity, was the opposite of the reputations of the new breed of evangelical leadership, with their perks, planes, and corner offices in gleaming new buildings and superficial glib messages. Empire builders like Robertson, Dobson, and Falwell liked rubbing up against (or quoting) my father, for the same reason that popes liked to have photos taken with Mother Teresa.

  What I slowly realized was that the religious-right leaders we were helping to gain power were not “conservatives” at all, in the old sense of the word. They were anti-American religious revolutionaries.

  The secular pre-Roe v. Wade right had been led by people like James Buckley and the old-fashioned Republican anti-socialist conservatives left over from the Hoover era, or people like Senator Barry Goldwater who stood for the separation of church and state. The “lunatic fringe” old right was represented by groups like the John Birch Society. But even their sometimes paranoid activism had been directed at secular issues such as stopping communism.

  The new religious right was all about religiously motivated “morality,” which it used for nakedly political purposes. This was a throwback to an earlier and uglier time, for instance to the 1930s pro-fascist “Catholic” xenophobic hatemongers like Father Charles Coughlin and his vicious anti-Roosevelt radio programs.

  Father Coughlin would have understood Dobson, Falwell, and Robertson perfectly: Begin a radio ministry, move steadily to the populist right, then identify the “enemy”—in Coughlin’s case, socialism and Roosevelt; in the new religious right’s case, the secular humanists and the Democrats. Then rip off your priest’s collar—something Coughlin literally did—and talk about politics pure and simple, maybe even form an independent party if you can’t sufficiently manipulate the levers of established power.

  The leaders of the new religious right were different from the older secular right in another way. They were gleefully betting on American failure. If secular, democratic, diverse, and pluralistic America survived, then wouldn’t that prove that we evangelicals were wrong about God only wanting to bless a “Christian America?” If, for instance, crime went down dramatically in New York City, for any other reason than a reformation and revival, wouldn’t that make the prophets of doom look silly when they said that only Jesus was the answer to all our social problems? And likewise, if the economy was booming without anyone repenting, what did that mean?

  Falwell, Robertson, Dobson, and others would later use their power in ways that would have made my father throw up. Dad could hardly have imagined how they would help facilitate the instantly corrupted power-crazy new generation of evangelical public figures like Ralph Reed, who took money from the casino industry while allegedly playing both sides against the middle in events related to the Abramoff Washington lobbyist scandal. And after 9/11, the public got a g
limpse of the anti-American self-righteous venom that was always just under the surface of the evangelical right. Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and others declared that the attack on America was a punishment from God. And after the war in Iraq began, some loony group of fundamentalists started picketing the funerals of killed soldiers and screaming at bereaved fathers and mothers that God was punishing “faggot America.” What they shouted openly was what the leaders of the religious right were usually too smart to state so bluntly, but it is what they had often said in private.

  What began to bother me was that so many of our new “friends” on the religious right seemed to be rooting for one form of apocalypse or another. In the crudest form, this was part of the evangelical fascination with the so-called end times. The worse things got, the sooner Jesus would come back. But there was another component: the worse everything got, the more it proved that America needed saving, by us!

  Long before Ralph Reed and his ilk came on the scene, Dad got sick of “these idiots,” as he often called people like Dobson in private. They were “plastic,” Dad said, and “power-hungry.” They were “Way too right-wing, really nuts!” and “They’re using our issue to build their empires.”

  To our lasting discredit, Dad and I didn’t go public with our real opinions of the religious-right leaders we were in bed with. We believed there was too much at stake, both personally, as we caught the power-trip disease, and politically, as we got carried away by the needs of the pro-life movement. And however conflicted Dad and I were, like the other religious-right leaders, we were on an ego-stroking roll. We kept our mouths shut.

  50

  Genie and I lived in Switzerland throughout the productions of How Should We Then Live? and Whatever Happened to the Human Race? We had traveled together with the children on the shoots and seminar tours. Then I became a sought-after speaker on the evangelical circuit. This put me on the road when the children could not travel: They were in school. I missed Jessica and Francis’s growing up in horrible chunks of time that left me feeling as if I was being hollowed out.

  Genie and I wanted to be together. The only way we could was for me to quit what I was doing or to move to America.

  The year before we moved, I was on the road for six months. By then, I was capitalizing on my connections by representing other evangelical authors as well as my parents. I had twenty or so authors I was representing, including John Whitehead (founder of the Rutherford Institute), Dr. Koop, Mary Pride (who more or less became the leading guru of the evangelical homeschool movement), and my sister Susan, who by then was writing books on education. And, of course, I was always meeting with Gospel Films and my partner Jim Buchfuehrer and our donors.

  There were other reasons for our wanting to leave Switzerland and the L’Abri community. Genie and I were no longer L’Abri workers, but we were very much still in the center of things. We lived only a mile away from L’Abri, and all my family was in the work. (We also had one L’Abri chalet next door, where Debby and Udo were.)

  My sisters and brothers-in-law were dividing into enemy camps. John Sandri and Priscilla were easy-going libertarians with a more liberal view. Udo and Debby were stricter when it came to maintaining the traditions of L’Abri as established by my parents. Ranald was our hard-line Calvinist.

  My sisters and brothers-in-law were lovely taken individually; but when the families mixed, they were increasingly toxic to each other. Ranald used to make remarks about Udo and his “Germanic attitude.” Udo would talk about Ranald’s “rigid sense of British superiority.” Ranald felt that the secular books and movies Debby and Udo loved, read, watched, and talked about were “dangerous.” To Udo and Debby, Susan and Ranald were “unbearably pietistic.” Everyone found Ranald’s Calvinism harsh. John Sandri never said much unpleasant about anyone, but he was not about to give up his biblical literary studies to suit the more conservative theology of his brothers-in-law.

  “They just don’t like each other,” Genie would say. “Why do they have to drag God into it?”

  At first, Genie and I talked about moving to California (in view of my movie ambitions), but Genie had had enough of that life, at least as she remembered it, and told me that she didn’t want to raise her family “in all the craziness and materialism.”

  At our family reunion in 1979, and after a particularly bitter fight between Udo and Ranald, Genie and I happened to be reading the International Herald Tribune and saw an ad for a seven-acre farm in Plaistow, New Hampshire, about an hour from Boston. (We had liked the Boston area when we visited during several of our seminars and during the movie shoot at the Museum of Fine Arts for How Should We Then Live? )

  We had twelve family reunions before my dad died in 1984. The clan always checked into the Hotel Bonivard in Montreux, where Ranald, Sue, Priscilla, John, Debby, Udo, Mom, Dad, Genie, I, and all our children gathered for three days of walks, meals, train and boat rides, and loud discussions that turned into fights. The L’Abri workers and members resented these reunions, since it was clear that it was our family, not the other L’Abri workers and members, who were really calling the shots in L’Abri. The workers suspected (rightly) that they got talked about in our closed and exclusive get-together.

  Mom paid for the reunions from her book royalties. At our reunions, we supposedly gathered to experience the family “togetherness” Mom wrote about in her best-selling books like What Is a Family? where she held up the Schaeffer clan as an example to evangelical mothers everywhere. She even used group pictures of our reunion on several book covers. (Anyone looking closely would have seen a lot of clenched jaws!)

  By the second day of the reunion, my brothers-in-law would barely be speaking to each other. But the little cousins had a great time. Mom would buy the girls matching outfits, and we all got a T-shirt she designed each year with the date and family reunion number on it.

  On the next trip to the States, I asked Jim Buchfuehrer to pick me up in a rental car in Boston. (We were on a fundraising tour.) We drove up to Plaistow. The farmhouse was too close to the road, and there were problems with the building. But as we were driving south, we happened on Newburyport, Massachusetts. On the way through town, we stopped at a realtor’s office. The realtor talked Jim and me into staying at a local bed-and-breakfast for the night. Then she drove us out to the Plum Island nature reserve the next morning.

  We walked on the little winding boardwalks over the rolling dunes and watched the waves crashing on the long wide empty beach. Later we strolled around the newly renovated eighteenth-century center of Newburyport. (It reminded me of Lindfield, the village near Great Walstead.) I felt at home. And Genie liked the pictures of a certain old house I brought back. . . .

  In July 1980, when Genie, the children, and I moved, it was a shock. We left our perfectly renovated beautiful little “Chalet Regina” for a big old tumbledown brick house on the banks of the Merrimack River. We had left L’Abri; but now that we were actually on our own, we missed the family. And I felt very shaky. My self-confidence seemed to evaporate. Could I really make it on my own? We left cool summer nights for the heat of an East Coast summer, the freedom to lie in a hayfield looking at the moon rising over the Dents Du Midi for mosquitoes that had us running from the house to the car, from walk-anywhere-woods to a poison ivy-bordered marsh. I spent a lot of time muttering “What the fuck have I done?”

  Genie grew up in San Mateo, but I’d never lived in America, applied for a driver’s license, shopped in a supermarket, gotten a building permit, or stopped for a school bus. (I had always been a privileged visitor, whisked by taxi or limo, planes, production managers, and hosts to one place after another. Hotels were “home” when in America.)

  In Europe, children are expected to look both ways all by themselves before crossing a street. The first time I saw a school bus stopped, lights flashing, I just zoomed past, nearly ran down several children, and heard the driver honk furiously and the shouts of the angry children: “You’re supposed to stop!” I asked Genie
what the hell all that was about, and she explained that in America when a child gets off a bus, the world stops.

  I liked being in a country where if you ordered a phone it was installed a day later, not three months after your name was put on the state-run phone company waiting list. But when we started renovating our 1835 home, began to turn it into a single-family house from one divided into two seedy apartments, I discovered that there is an advantage to having some things bureaucratically regulated.

  In Switzerland a carpenter, electrician, mason, or plumber is actually a carpenter, electrician, mason, or plumber. They can’t work unless they have passed the maîtrise fédérale exam, following a lengthy apprenticeship. Carpenters in Switzerland were as skilled as the best American cabinetmakers. They used no prefabricated doors, windows, or kitchen cabinets. Everything was built to order. And the work was done perfectly. The building codes were enforced by the builders themselves. All the bids for a job were made by local men who had spent their youth training for that work and rightly regarded their trades as a high professions, right up there in respectability with being a lawyer or doctor.

  Our first American “contractor” went bankrupt in the middle of renovating our attic into a new bedroom and bathroom. He failed to pay his subcontractors, who then came after me. I was running around showing them canceled checks to prove that I’d been paying all along. That was after the contractor got in his pickup and headed for Florida.