Crazy for God Read online

  Table of Contents

  Praise

  Title Page

  Dedication

  PROLOGUE

  PART I - CHILDHOOD

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  PART II - EDUCATION

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  PART III - TURMOIL

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Chapter 51

  Chapter 52

  Chapter 53

  Chapter 54

  Chapter 55

  Chapter 56

  Chapter 57

  Chapter 58

  Chapter 59

  Chapter 60

  PART IV - PEACE

  Chapter 61

  Chapter 62

  Chapter 63

  Chapter 64

  Chapter 65

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgements

  INDEX

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Copyright Page

  Praise for

  CRAZY FOR GOD

  “We are fortunate that Frank Schaeffer’s path has taken him from the rigid fundamentalist thinking of his youth to where he is now, working not in stark black and white, but in the blessed gray from which true art arises.”

  —Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog

  “That Crazy for God isn’t just another James Frey-style memoir of personal dysfunction becomes clear with the subtitle, it’s alternately hilarious and excruciating.”

  —Boston Globe

  “Part autobiography, part parental tribute, and part examination of how American evangelism got to where it is, versatile author Schaeffer tells a moving story of growing up and growing wise. . . . This story of faith, fame, and family in modern America is a worthy read.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “When Frank Schaeffer comments on the American religious landscape, the reader can rest assured they’re in the hands of someone who knows.”

  —Hartford Courant

  “A story about the dangers of inauthentic faith. . . . An important book.”

  —Washington Times

  “In this sometimes acerbic, sometimes hilarious autobiography, Frank Schaeffer takes us behind the scenes of a Christian upbringing like no other.”

  —Winston-Salem Journal

  “With its up-close portraits of many of the leading figures of the American evangelical movement . . . Schaeffer has written a powerful chronicle of his experiences as a man who found himself at the center of a crucial moment in our recent history.”

  —Tucson Citizen

  “This is not just a book about rejecting Christian evangelicalism. It has parallels in secular culture and is an honest read about family life and its challenges.”

  —Library Journal

  “Interesting glimpses into the burgeoning religious right folded into a deeply personal memoir . . . Schaeffer is brutally honest. . . . He offers particularly eye-opening accounts of his personal encounters with the likes of Pat Robertson, James Dobson et al.”

  —Kirkus

  “If [Schaeffer] spares anyone here, it’s not himself. And we forgive him . . . because he’s a world-class storyteller. . . . He can make us laugh, make us wince, and make us really think about things, all at the same time.”

  —Christianity Today

  Other Books by Frank Schaeffer

  FICTION

  (The Calvin Becker Trilogy)

  PORTOFINO

  ZERMATT

  SAVING GRANDMA

  BABY JACK

  NONFICTION

  KEEPING FAITH—A Father-Son Story about Love and the United

  States Marine Corps (Coauthored with Sgt. John Schaeffer USMC)

  FAITH OF OUR SONS—A Father’s Wartime Diary

  VOICES FROM THE FRONT—Letters Home from America’s

  Military Family

  AWOL—The Unexcused Absence of America’s Upper Classes from

  Military Service—And How It Hurts Our Country

  (Coauthored with Kathy Roth-Douquet)

  HOW FREE PEOPLE MOVE MOUNTAINS—A Male Christian

  Conservative and a Female Jewish Liberal on a Quest for Common

  Purpose and Meaning (Coauthored with Kathy Roth-Douquet)

  for my daughter Jessica

  PROLOGUE

  You can be the world’s biggest hypocrite and still feel good about yourself. You can believe and wish you didn’t. You can lose your faith and still pretend, because there are bills to be paid, because you are booked up for a year, because this is what you do.

  One morning in the early 1980s, I looked out over several acres of pale blue polyester and some twelve thousand Southern Baptist ministers. My evangelist father—Francis Schaeffer—was being treated for lymphoma at the Mayo Clinic, and in his place I’d been asked to deliver several keynote addresses on the evangelical/fundamentalist circuit. I was following in the proudly nepotistic American Protestant tradition, wherein the Holy Spirit always seems to lead the offspring and spouses of evangelical superstars to “follow the call.”

  A few weeks earlier, after being introduced by Pat Robertson, I had delivered a rousing take-back-America speech to thousands of cheering religious broadcasters. And not long afterward, I would appear at a huge pro-life rally in Denver. Cal Thomas—once the vice president of Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, later a Fox News commentator—would introduce me as “the best speaker in America.” The “anointing,” someone said, was “clearly on this young man!” They were saying that I was a better speaker than my famous father.

  At that moment, the Schaeffers were evangelical royalty. When I was growing up in L’Abri, my parents’ religious community in Switzerland, it was not unusual to find myself seated across the dining room table from Billy Graham’s daughter or President Ford’s son, even Timothy Leary. The English actress Glynis Johns used to come for Sunday high tea. I figured it was normal. They were just a few of the thousands who made it through our doors. Only later did I realize that L’Abri attracted a weirdly eclectic group of people who otherwise would not have been caught dead in the same room. My childhood was, to say the least, unusual.

  When Gerald Ford died in January 2007, I recalled that on the day he had assumed the presidency, his daughter-in-law Gayle was babysitting my daughter Jessica as her job in the work-study program at L’Abri, where Mike Ford, the president’s son, was a student.

  Mom and Dad met with presidents Ford, Reagan, and Bush Sr. and stayed in the White House several times. In the 1990s when my mother Edith—then in her eighties—heard that George W. Bush might run for the preside
ncy, she exclaimed, “What? But Barbara asked me to pray especially for young George. She didn’t think he had what it took to do anything.”

  Given the fact of my family connections to the Republican Party, it was somewhat ironic that when James Webb was elected to the Senate from Virginia by a razor-thin margin in 2006, giving the Democrats their first new majority in years, I was credited with helping Webb. Or, to put it another way, judging by the hate e-mail I got from my father’s fundamentalist followers and other assorted Republicans and conservatives, I deserved some of the blame.

  I had long since left the evangelical subculture when I wrote an op-ed for the Dallas Morning News that was picked up by several hundred blogs and posted on the front page of James Webb’s campaign Web site. I had defended Webb against a series of scabrous attacks wherein his novels were smeared and he was even labeled a “pedophile” because he had described a sexual tribal ritual. I noted that Webb is a serious novelist whose work has been widely praised by many, including Tom Wolfe, who called Webb’s books “the greatest of the Vietnam novels.”

  I also took the Republicans to task for doing to Webb what they had done to another war hero, Senator John McCain, back in the 2000 Republican primaries. I went so far as to say that, in disgust, my wife Genie and I were switching from being registered Republicans to independents.

  A few days after this op-ed was published, I wrote another piece, this time for the Huffington Post, about the reaction to my departure from the Republican Party. This was picked up by dozens of Democrat-friendly blogs. As the congratulatory e-mails poured in, I was reminded of the welcome given new believers when they convert from some particularly hideous life of sin. Then the Drudge Report and dozens of other right-wing and/or evangelical outlets alerted their faithful to my treason.

  Furious e-mails flooded in. They fell into two categories: The evangelical “Church Ladies” said they hadn’t read Webb’s novels but were shocked by his immorality nonetheless and went to three- and four-page single-spaced quivering lengths to justify the Republicans’ tactics; the second group were simply profanity-spewing thugs. The Church Lady e-mails contrasted markedly with the insults. It was as if I’d stumbled into a Sunday school picnic at a Tourette syndrome convention.

  “As a Christian the best question you could ask is what would Jesus do? He wouldn’t give Webb’s books a pass just because he’s a veteran. . . .”

  “Mr. Schaeffer: Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out you FUCK!”

  “Mr. Webb has no excuse for using profanity. . . .”

  “Good fucking riddance—you fucking cry baby!”

  “I have never read any of Mr. Webb’s novels. However, the excerpts [in the Drudge Report] are very disturbing. . . . As for the Bible, yes it has all the things you mentioned: rape, murder, adultery, masturbation, etc. However, the Lord did not give us graphic details. . . . And I hope as Christians we can remember that and be a voice crying out against ALL the ugly things. . . .”

  “We don’t need your lame ass motherfucking comments or your support. . . .”

  When combined, the hundreds of e-mails seemed to boil down to: “Do what we say Jesus says—and if you don’t, we’ll kick your head in!” The reaction confirmed why any sane person would run, and keep on running from the right-wing/evangelical /Republican morass as far as their legs would carry them, something I’d been doing for more than twenty years. But I had brought this upon myself. The truth is that, with my father, I had once contributed mightily to the creation of the right-wing/evangelical /Republican subculture that was attacking me.

  My life has been one of all-consuming faith—not my faith, but the faith of others that I seem to have caught like a disease and been almost obliterated by. What does God want? I am still trying to find out. And having once been a “professional Christian,” my vision is muddied by the baggage I carry. Every action, every thought, every moment I stumble into is judged by an inner voice. Everything seems to have a moral component: eating—because there are hungry people; sex—don’t even start. What I write, don’t write, who I talk to, don’t talk to, and how I raised my children, their characters, accomplishments, failures, whether they “love the Lord” or not, everything points to my relationship with God, real or imagined.

  The habit of fundamentalist faith persists in my gut, even long after I rejected it. I’m meeting my agent Jennifer on the Upper West Side. She thinks I’m sane. I pretend I am. But somewhere in the back of my mind is a vague unease. She isn’t saved. She’s some sort of lapsed something. Should I be doing anything about that? Will God bless my next book deal if I deny him before men, or in this case before my agent? When Jen asks me to tell her about my new book, shouldn’t I ask her if she wouldn’t like to accept Jesus first?

  It turns out that it was easier to move beyond my parents’ beliefs intellectually than to abandon my gut responses. So who instilled those responses? In other words, who were we? It depends on what moment you choose to become a fly on the Schaeffer wall. People are not as one-dimensional as the stories about them. There is no way to write the absolute truth about any family, much less my family.

  The only answer to “Who are you?” is “When?”

  Author’s Note: I’m sure I have placed some events in the wrong years or have written that something happened in one place when it happened in another. This is a memoir, not a biography. (I have also changed some people’s names to protect the more-or-less innocent.) To footnote this story or to have done research into dates and places and to correct the chronology would have been to indulge the conceit that my book is an objective history. It is not. What I’ve written comes from a memory deformed by time, prejudice, flawed recall, and emotion.

  PART I

  CHILDHOOD

  1

  Being raised inside a miracle tends to make you feel singled out. I wanted to fit into the world. I still do. And yet the darkly weird moments of my childhood did not cancel out the light.

  When I walked down the back road from our chalet to the village of Huémoz it was impossible to get anywhere without stopping to look at the view. I don’t think I once left Chalet Les Mélèzes, charged up the back steps, then ran down the back road without at least one view-absorbing pause. Sometimes I’d stop and stare at the mountains so long, I’d forget what I’d been planning to do. The view of the Alps always seemed like a special reward to our family for doing God’s will. “If we had stayed in America, we’d never have a view like this,” Mom would say.

  Fifty years later, when I fly back to Switzerland I sit on the left-hand side of the connecting flight from Zurich to Geneva. That way I can see our valley, pick out my mountains.

  Before I moved to America, there was never any doubt about which way I was facing; down to the Rhône Valley with its patchwork of fields, orchards, roads, and villages miles below, up to the flower-studded hayfields and steep forest-clad hills behind our village, or across the valley to the peaks towering over everything. We were Les Américains on the edge of a tiny village, fundamentalist Christians running a mission called L’Abri, surrounded by Swiss peasants who hated the fact we’d invaded their farming community. Our theology taught us that we were mere sojourners in an alien land, temporary subjects of earth, citizens only of heaven. We were separated from the world, even from all those other born-again American Christians back home who, to outsiders, must have looked very much like us. But to we Schaeffers, most Protestants were the “other.” Perhaps they were part of ministries that asked for money rather than really trusting the Lord to meet their needs. Perhaps they had compromised on some point of theology. We did the Lord’s work in the Lord’s way.

  Living with a mother and father who defended their theological ideas all day, in a household where lunch and dinner were often two or three hours long as the discussions continued—“discussions” is not really the right word, since what happened was that a guest would ask a question and then Dad, Fidel Castro-like, would hold forth for several hours—I grew up wi
th a gift for verbal communication. By the time I was nine or ten, I could mimic my parents and compose an articulate answer to almost any theological question. And I had a flair for vocabulary that maybe only a dyslexic raised with no TV, and who had a mother who read out loud, could acquire. Adults who talked to me told my parents that I was the most well-spoken child they had ever met. What they didn’t know was that my verbal abilities were like a circus trick. Professional proselytizers were raising me: sweet, sincere—but preoccupied—proselytizers.

  On any given day from the time I was about seven on, you could have asked my parents where I was and they would have had no idea. They literally lost track of me, more or less forgot I existed, except at one specific time of the day. At bedtime, Mom read me nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels by people like Louisa May Alcott and Jean Stratton Porter. Mom also read Dickens, C. S. Lewis, Sherlock Holmes stories, and everything by P. G. Wodehouse and all of Mark Twain (with the exception of his ramblings about why he was an atheist and his speculation about how many tens of thousands of years an angel’s orgasm lasts). And Mom read every book of the Bible to me so many times that I still know more about ancient Israel than modern America.

  2

  Dad was born in 1912 to “working-class ignorant pagan parents in Philadelphia” (according to Mom). Mom was born in China in 1914 to “dear and sensitive highly educated missionary parents.” (Mom again.) Mom lived in China at a China Inland Mission compound until she was five, as a privileged colonial in a walled compound with a Chinese nanny and other servants whose job it was to care for and amuse the little foreign girl. Then her parents sailed back to America, where her father taught Greek and Hebrew.