The other day I came across an interview of Frank Schaeffer and his new
book. I wrote about the interview here. The next day I picked up Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found
the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back and
have just finished reading it. Occasionally a book comes along that is
like opening up a window upon your life so that you can see familiar things in
a new way. This is one of those books.
Schaeffer's book is a memoir of his life as the son and youngest child of Francis and
Edith
Schaeffer. The Schaeffer's were missionaries to young people who were
trying to make sense of the world during the 1960's and 70's. They lived
in Switzerland, and young people came to their chalet to ask questions and
listen to Francis talk about art, music, philosophy and the Christian faith.
Their L'Abri community
became synonymous with an open, compassionate, intellectually alive engagement
with Jesus Christ.
I never went to L'Abri, but I read Francis Schaeffer's books, listened to his
lectures on tape, and heard him speak once at a conference in Atlanta. His
books Escape from Reason, The God Who is There, He is There and Is Not Silent and True Spirituality introduced me, as a college student, to a
way to think deeper and more concretely about the Christian faith. They weren't
the typical dense abstract theological monographs that fill seminary shelves.
Nor were they sweet spiritual tomes about a Christian spirituality that is more
fantasy than reality. They were about how to think in a world that was
not longer explicitly Christian.
Later I came to understand that Francis Schaeffer's philosophical and
cultural stance was one man's perspective. Yet, he established for me a
standard of judgment that has continued with me until today. That perspective
is both spiritual and rational and at its heart humanistic as can only be
understood from the perspective for what it means for us human beings to be
created in the image of God. In this respect, though I'd never thought of
myself as a Schaefferite, I can easily say that his writings were the most
formative for me as a college student in the early 1970's.
Frank Schaeffer's book is a glimpse behind the curtain of the family whose
writings influenced me so. It is a memoir about the family, not an intellectual
treatise about his parents' intellectual thought. His experience as a child and
later a young man is very different than mine. But his journey through the
evangelical sub-culture of his parents is very similar to mine. I loved
reading the book because there are so many moments in Frank's life where there
is a counterpart in mine. This is especially true as he became more involved
with his father's work as the filmmaker behind the How Shall We Then Live? and Whatever Happened to the Human Race? series.
While not intending to be an analytical critique of modern evangelicalism,
it is a serious critique of the movement from one who was at the center of its
ascendancy in the 1980's. Evangelicalism is rooted in early 20th century
Fundamentalism. Schaeffer writes:
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. ... A church split
builds self-righteousness into the fabric of every new splinter group, whose
holy reason for existence is that they decide that they are more moral and pure
than their brethren. This explains my childhood and perhaps a lot about
America, too.
This is not the Christianity that I
grew up with as a child in my home Presbyterian church. It wasn't the
Christianity that I discovered in college or for the two years, post-college,
as I did youth ministry. It was the battleground I found when I went to
Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in 1978. When I arrived there, The Battle for the Bible was in full force. The
divide was between the systematic theology department and the New Testament
department. The issue wasn't precisely inerrancy, but close. It was more
about the interpretation of the Bible, between an interpretation based on a
formula or system and interpretation based on tools that let the text speak for
itself, sort of. As a student, it was a great environment to be in because
we were experiencing the fault-line of American Christianity. That fault-line is between
Christianity as a program and doctrine to defend and Christianity that is
simply about how one lives as follower of Christ. This is easily seen in
Frank's description of his parent's way of ministering to the
"students" who came to L'Abri.
I saw
my parents' compassion was consistent. Their idea of ministry was to extend a
hand of kindness, and to truly practice the rule of treating others as you
would be treated. It was such a powerful demonstration that it gave me a
lifelong picture of what Christian behavior and love can and should be.
My
parents were not advocating compassion that someone else would carry out with
tax dollars, or at arm's length, but rather they opened their home. The result
was that those gathered around our table represented a cross-section of
humanity and intellectual ability, from mental patients to Oxford students and
all points of need in between. My mother and father marshaled arguments in
favor of God, the Bible, and the saving work of Jesus Christ. But no words were
as convincing as their willingness to lay material possessions, privacy, and
time on the line, sometimes at personal risk and always with the understanding
that if they were being taken advantage of, that was fine, too.
This is far different from the
evangelical world that Frank and his father would find themselves in the late
1970's and early1980's, as they became the leading advocates for the pro-life,
anti-abortion movement.
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 include 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 like rubbing up against (or quoting) my father, for the
same reason that popes like to have photos take 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 new
religious right was all about religiously motivated "morality," which
it used for nakedly political purposes. ...
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?"
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 American needed saving, by us!
My own experience was at the far
periphery of these evangelical leaders. I knew many people involved with their
ministries. But my immediate evangelical environment was not apocalyptic, but
missional. It was much more in tuned with the message that Francis and Edith
Schaeffer had been presenting to guests at L'Abri for a generation. I
graduated from seminary in 1981, spent a summer doing refugee ministry in
Pakistan, and then became a community minister for a large Presbyterian church
with strong evangelical roots in Atlanta. When I left that church four years
later, my immediate, day-to-day contact with the evangelical culture
ended. Twenty plus years later, and now having read Schaeffer's memoir, I
now have a better understanding of my own reticence towards
evangelicalism.
A few years into this journey into
the American evangelical subculture, Frank Schaeffer quit it. He closed
the film production company and gave up the money, the fame and the constant
contact with these mega-stars of the evangelical world.
I was
surprised by how quickly I was forgotten, how calm the waters were, as soon as
I paddled out of the center of the evangelical right-wing whitewater.
From one day to the next, I went from daily calls to be on some TV show, or be
on the radio, or to be a participant in this or that symposium, march, seminar,
or publishing venture, to blessed silence. It was a relief. It also
confirmed what I already knew; that evangelicalism is not so much a religion as
a series of fast-moving personality cults.
There is an element of truth in all
segments of American society. We raise up the celebrity personality
because it relieves us from having to be responsible. As long as I follow
Reverend So-N-So, I don't have to deal with my inner demons. I just close off
my inner life and live in the glow of celebrity.
I've seen this clearly throughout
my adult life. My perspective has always been relationship first. In that
sense, I've never been a fundamentalist, and most likely not even an
evangelical. What I am is anyone's guess because I don't find liberal
Christianity any more appealing. Schaeffer articulates something I have
have seen, but didn't have a broad enough context to understand in the way he
does. In commenting on his own childhood as a homeschooled child, he
points to a difference that he sees in the approach that many homeschool
families have taken. As a homeschool family, our values are much closer
to the Schaeffers' than to those he criticizes.
Where
homeschooling had meant freedom for me - albeit chaotic, crazy freedom -
homeschool leaders ... were pushing homeschooling as a means to isolate and
brainwash a generation of children.
The evangelical homeschooling movement was becoming profoundly anti-American.
And Dad and I had done our part to empower them.
At the heart of this mindset is
something quite troubling to anyone who has spent time studying the early
Greeks, traveled through the great cities of Europe or has spent anytime in an
art museum. Schaeffer writes,
The
idea of public space, the ideas that led to the building of my father's and my
favorite places, for instance all those civic works in Florence and the piazzas
we so happily strolled, was the very idea that the evangelical homeschool movement
unwittingly wanted to destroy. They wanted no public spaces (physical or
intellectual) to be shared by people of all beliefs. They wanted only private
spaces, where they could indoctrinate their children from
"interference."
What is ironic about his critique
of evangelicalism, about it being anti-American and a destroyer of public
spaces, is that this is a critique that can also be placed at the feet of their
arch rival, the liberal church and political class. If he is correct, then our
society is under a greater threat from within than from any terrorist bomb. It
means that our strength as a nation is not longer a shared strength, a common
strength, a universal strength. It means that we each have rationalized our way
to a belief in the supremacy of the individual over society. When this
happens, we no longer have the moral will to join together to do the right
thing for the right reasons at the right time.
Following his departure from the
evangelical sub-culture, Schaeffer directed four films, wrote some novels,
write several non-fiction books about being the parent of a Marine, and joined
a Greek Orthodox church.
Perhaps
I converted to the Greek Orthodox Church (rather than simply abandoning
religious faith) because spirituality is a way to connect with people and might
even be a part of a journey toward God. (If there is a God.) According to
Jesus, community is spirituality: "Love one another."
To
me, the Greek Orthodox Church is not the community but a community. Community
is an antidote to the poisonous American consumerist "me" and "I
want" life that leads to isolation and unhappiness. ...
When
I left evangelicalism, it certainly was not because I was disillusioned with
the faith of my early childhood. ... I think my problem with remaining an evangelical
centered on what he evangelical became. It was the merging of the
entertainment business with faith, the flippant lightweight kitsch ugliness of
American Christianity, the sheer stupidity, the paranoia of the American
right-wing enterprise, the platitudes married to pop culture, all of it ...
that made me crazy. It was just too stupid for words.
Crazy for God is a book that anyone
who today wants to understand the continued wars of theology, politics and
culture in the church. It is one man's perspective. However, it is a man
whose journey has much to teach us about how the truth of the Gospel is
something lived out in one's relationships.
My own journey through
evangelicalism is now better understood because of Frank Schaeffer's memoir. My
theology, my faith, my understanding of my call is basically the same as they
were over thirty-five years ago when I discovered Christ's reality in this
world. I realize better why I've eschewed the attachment of labels to my
faith. Apart from being a Presbyterian, all I can say is that I am just a guy
who daily discovers God's grace and love for me. I think Frank would understand
that as well.
UPDATE: Here's Frank Schaeffer's CSPAN BookTV presentation.
UPDATE 2: A review from the Boston Globe.
UPDATE 3: Books and Culture Review
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