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By Ron Dart
• Frank Schaeffer: Crazy for God, Carroll & Graf,
2007
IN 1973, I read Edith Schaeffer’s L’Abri.
I then wrote Francis Schaeffer and asked if I could
stay at the L’Abri community in Switzerland. I received a generous
welcome, and lived at L’Abri until 1974. I was, in fact, the
only person ever baptized in the Schaeffer bathtub.
However, as the 1970s moved ever onward,
I lost interest in the obvious shift to the populist political right that
L’Abri was taking.
Crazy for God, by the
Schaeffer’s son, Frank, tracks the reality of the Schaeffer clan and
life at L’Abri. The book pulls no punches, and tells an honest tale
well.
The conflicts and struggles, tensions and battles,
weaknesses and limitations of one and all (including Frank himself) are
unfolded and unpacked in dramatic detail. Those who have idealized and
romanticized the reality of L’Abri and the Schaeffer era will have
sight and senses refocused.
The book does linger on the shift that took place as
the abortion issue became frontstaged. Roe v. Wade (1973) moved Francis
Schaeffer from his status as a Christian apologist, cultural critic and
intellectual to a key figure of the republican right. The publication/film
series of How Should We Then Live? and Whatever Happened to the
Human Race? became bestsellers that
catapulted the ‘small is beautiful’ L’Abri world into the
larger culture wars of the 1970s-1980s.
Frank takes credit for his father’s turn to the
pro-life issue and republicanism. Frank makes it more than clear, though,
that although father and son hobnobbed with the political right –
including the unrefined conservative evangelical clan of Pat Robertson,
Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Ralph Reed, Gary North, John Whitehead and
Billy Graham, and the more sophisticated republican clan of McCain, Reagan,
Kemp and Bush – they were ill at ease with their shallow ways of
thinking, crude theology, puritanism and notions of culture.
There is no doubt, though, that it was Francis and
Edith Schaeffer who did much to hold high a rather idealized view of the
family, pro-life, home schooling and commitment to an inspired, infallible
and inerrant notion of the Bible.
Francis died in 1984, and The
Great Evangelical Disaster and Christian Manifesto were
published at this time – setting the agenda yet deeper for the
conservative evangelical tribe.
The final section of the autobiography traces Frank
Schaeffer’s break from the family and L’Abri’s worldview,
into the culture of film and fiction. The turmoil and emotionally
reactionary way of Frank’s early-middle years seem to have given way
to more peaceful and settled mature years.
Frank has finally, after much soul searching, left
behind his more rabid and confined religious vision and embraced a deeper
understanding of the religious journey.
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There are many mea culpas in this book, and it is a worthy read.
Frank’s turn to Orthodoxy, and the fact his son became a marine,
makes for some interesting plot development. The irony that Frank played a
role in bringing to power Bush Jr. – who sent Frank’s son and
friends to war in Iraq – is not lost on the author. There are many
other telling criticisms of Bush Jr.
There are a few flaws in this book, and they do need to
be noted.
First, the evangelical tent is a large one, and Frank
Schaeffer often confuses his rather narrow experience of a limited yet
vocal section within the tent with the much larger reality of it.
Many evangelicals would keep a cautious distance from
Robertson, Falwell, Dobson, North’s Dominion theology,
Whitehead’s Rutherford Institute and even Billy Graham. There is much
more to the evangelical family tree than is mentioned in Crazy for God.
Second, Francis Schaeffer did, to some degree, do his
theological, philosophical and cultural homework. It is quite possible to
differ with Schaeffer’s succinct summary of the rise and fall of
Western Civilization, yet still admire his limited synthesis and
interpretation of Western thinkers.
Frank Schaeffer is, unlike his father, even more the
journalist and popularizer. Crazy for God is an interesting sociological reflection on the
Schaeffer clan and rise to influence, but there is also a distinct thinness
about it. Frank, in short, lacks the minimal depth of his father,
even though he credits himself with moving his father to places he might
not have gone.
Third, Frank Schaeffer seems to think it was he
(primarily), his father and Everett Koop who truly launched and drew
together the evangelical right. Frank does regret this, but methinks he
inflates his role in too pretentious a manner. There were many other key
actors in the drama.
Do purchase and read Crazy
for God, if for no other reason than that it
offers the reader an insider look at the frenzy of the political right in
the U.S.A. The tome is also an interesting journey into the life and times
of the Schaeffer family, L’Abri and an aspect of the conservative
evangelical ethos as seen from a certain perspective.
Another Ron Dart article on Francis Schaeffer is
available at Clarionjournal.typepad.com
September 2008
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