Review by Ron Dart
Frank Schaeffer, 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 (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2007).
I lived in Switzerland from 1972-1973, and while I was there my mother sent me a copy of Escape from Reason by Francis Schaeffer. I had not heard of L’Abri or Francis/Edith Schaeffer at the time, but as I read the slim missive in the Alps, I became quite interested in Schaeffer’s interpretation of the sweep of Western intellectual history. I was young, naïve and not grounded in much, so the argument in Escape from Reason seemed to make sense to me.
I returned to Canada in the spring of 1973, read Edith Schaeffer’s L’Abri (1969), wrote Francis Schaeffer and asked if I could stay at L’Abri. I received a generous welcome from him, and returned to live at L’Abri from 1973-1974. I was, in fact, the only person ever baptized in the Schaeffer bathtub in Villars. I lived in a chalet near Os Guinness and the southern belle, Jane Stuart Smith and Betty Carlson in Huemoz.
I returned to Canada in 1974, much influenced by my experience at L’Abri.
I followed the work of the Schaeffers and family at L’Abri for a couple of years, but as the 1970s moved ever onward, I lost interest in the obvious shift to the populist political right that L’Abri was taking and the civil wars within the Schaeffer family and community.
Crazy for God, by Frank Schaeffer (the son of Francis/Edith Schaeffer), tracks, in a journalistic and confessional manner, the behind the scenes 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) 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. It is never easy, at times, to discern how faithfully Frank is interpreting his family, but, when read with this caution, Crazy for God is a hasty tour de force of the origins of L’Abri and the religious right in the USA in the 1970s-1980s.
Crazy for God, the title being rather long-winded and Victorian, does linger on the shift that took place in the 1970s-1980s with the Schaeffers as the abortion issue became front-staged. Roe v. Wade (1973) moved Schaeffer from a more popular Christian apologist, art/film/music critic and intellectual to 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 to the larger culture wars of the 1970s-1980s. Frank takes credit for his father’s turn to the pro-life issue and republicanism. Frank does make it more than clear, though, that although father and son hobnobbed with the cruder 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 the shallow way of thinking, crude theology, puritanism and notions of culture of such a clan.
There is no doubt, though, that it was Francis/Edith Schaeffer that 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 Schaeffer died in 1984, and two of his books, The Great Evangelical Disaster and Christian Manifesto were published at this time and set the agenda yet deeper for the conservative evangelical tribe.
Crazy for God is divided into four parts: Childhood, Education, Turmoil and Peace. The final section of the autobiography tracks and traces Frank Schaeffer’s break from the family and L’Abri’s worldview into the culture of film and fiction. The turmoil and emotional reactionary way of Frank’s early-middle years seem to have given way to a more peaceful and settled mature years. The years of a more mellow peace have taken root. 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. There are many mea culpas in this 400 pages plus book, and it is a worthy read. Frank’s turn to Orthodoxy, and the fact his son has become a Marine, makes for some interesting plot development in Crazy for God. The ironic fact 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 Frank. In fact, there are many telling criticisms of Bush Jr. in Crazy for God.
There are a few flaws in this book, and they do need to be noted by way of conclusion.
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 those like Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, James 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 an ample thinness about it also. 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 that 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 USA. The tome is also an interesting walk and journey into the life and times of Francis/Edith Schaeffer and family, L’Abri and an aspect of the conservative evangelical ethos from a certain perspective.
I have, by way of conclusion, written a short article on Francis Schaeffer and L’Abri. ‘L’Abri, William Farel and Erasmus’ is posted on the www.Clarionjournal.typepad.com website here.
Ron Dart
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