Frank Schaeffer was a key player in the early days of the Religious Right. Along with his father, the evangelical apologist Francis Schaeffer (pictured), he successfully mobilized millions of American Christians to pursue an aggressive political agenda based on a handful of conservative causes – abortion and homosexuality being top priorities.
His memoir, 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, has polarized opinion. In the book, he is scathing about his parents’ fundamentalism, as well as their personal failings (although contrary to some of the fiercest criticism, he is as forthcoming in showing them genuine affection as he is in exposing their flaws), and even more scathing of the Christian Right he helped to create.
A major contour of the story is the Schaeffers’ journey from a simple faith and ministry to a world of politics and manipulation. It seems to me this journey reflects the unfortunate path of the ex-gay movement from a place of pastoral concern to the political lobbying all too familiar today. With this in mind, I’d like to share the following passages from the book. First, from Chapter 10, describing the Schaeffers early on in the days of their Swiss L’Abri Christian community:
My parents’ compassion was sincere and consistent. And they never allowed belief to make them into bigots. I grew up in a community where homosexuals (the term “gay” was not in use) were not only welcomed but where my parents didn’t do anything to make them feel uncomfortable and regarded their “problem” as no more serious (or sinful) than other problems, from spiritual pride – a “much more serious matter,” according to Dad – to gluttony. And I never heard any of the nonsense so typical of American evangelicals today about homosexuality being a “chosen lifestyle.”
My parents weren’t given to calling their friends liars. So when our friends who were homosexual – Mom was always open, as was Dad, about which students were or weren’t gay – told my parents they had been born that way, not only did they believe them, but Dad defended them against people who would judge or exclude them.
Dad thought it cruel and stupid to believe that a homosexual could change by “accepting Christ” – or, for that matter, that an alcoholic could be healed by the same magic. Dad often said “Salvation is not magic. We’re still in the fallen world.”
Dad always counseled gay men and women against getting married to a heterosexual if they were doing it in the expectation that it would change them, let alone to impress their parents. This was in the late 1950s and early 1960s, when few people in secular circles, let alone evangelical circles, would even admit that there were gay people.
Move forward 20 years, and Frank had led the family to the forefront of the burgeoning US Christian Right. How things had changed (from Chapter 54), as the Schaeffers found themselves in league with Reconstructionists such as Gary North and Rousas Rushdoony:
John Calvin, Oliver Cromwell, and the nastier Old Testament prophets were the Reconstructionists’ heroes. And according to the law in John Calvin’s Reformation Geneva, women pregnant out of wedlock were to be drowned along with their unborn babies, and of course homosexuals were to be killed and heretics burned at the stake.
Dad regarded Rushdoony as clinically insane. And Rushdoony’s program, if realized, would have included the execution of homosexuals and adulterers. … And we Schaeffers were helping them expand their national base, because they were showing up at our events and using some of our books to give their views a little more credibility. And I was on the [Reconstructionionist] Rutherford Institute board as a founding member, along with Gary North. … All I could do was to bitterly regret what I’d gotten [Dad] into. I still do.
I am reminded of Jim Bakker’s confession that he started out “loving people and using things,” and ended up “using people and loving things.” Frank Schaeffer’s experience is a timely reminder to those in the ex-gay movement who have lost sight of loving and ministering to people, and have instead become caught up in the mechanics of the right-wing political machine.
Thanks for reminding us Dave — this is one I did intend to read over Summer, but haven’t got around to it yet (and I won’t mind actually paying for this book, for once!).
For all we’ve seen, this is an honest effort: to not only present the lives of his parents (and himself) but — by extension — examine the whole recent explosion of American religious fundamentalism, and their dramatic turn about into national politics. There have always been religious blow-hards, but the organised efforts over the past 30+ years were a notable change in engagement.
(I’ll be looking not just for the parallels with sub-sets of themselves, such as Exodus as example, but for those similar movements we’ve seen in Islam and Hinduism in recent decades, as examples. One wonders if this similar lurch to the fundamental is caused by a similar reation to something in common — eg the modern society and its complexity — or if in fact they are reacting in competition with each other to see who can be the most stridently religious eg a vicious cycle of increasing fundamentalism. Or both, I suspect.)
The criticisms — if they can really be called that rather than a knee-jerk rejection of what’s been said by the son — largely appear to be from those who idolise Francis Schaeffer. Idolise to the point of creepy.
The flaws, as described, appear to be very human ones; and last time I heard… Francis Schaeffer was human. It will be interesting to see if humanising his father, recovering him from the cult of the fundamentalist, appears to one of Frank’s aims for the book.
It’s hard to read Schaeffer’s novels and see how he might be “recovering” his parent’s from fundamentalism.
In Schaeffer’s delightful Calvin Becker trilogy (Portofino, Zermatt, & Saving Grandma) – you’ll find his parent’s flaws as a bit more than the normal human failings. The father, Ralph, is physically abusive and mentally ill. The mother, Elsa, is a mentally abusive, self righteous monster who recognizes no limits in the use of her children to win spiritual points against their father.
Frank Schaeffer was working out some serious issues with those books.
Crazy for God is a good read, but I go back to re-read the triology every couple of years.
I grew up in home with parents in Christian ministry who were very human, but kind and loving. Frank grew up in an insane asylum.
Sorry that reads all wrong gordo, my fault. I don’t disagree with the “insane asylum” one bit. Thanks for the correction!
I was trying to draw the difference between the (perfect, god-like) person held up to everlasting glory by those who defend Francis Schaeffer even in that face of the evidence to the contrary, and what is the truth about the man. Plainly failed miserably at that, I did.
By “very human failings” etc I meant those 7 deadly ones, all of which it seems were in full operation. Far from creating paradise, it was more like hell on earth.
Which brings me back to pondering the mind of a fundamentalist and, ditto, hell on earth.
Or, as someone once said to me “You can over-reach, you know, for God — and grab the Devil instead. I see it everyday.”
But, of course, he’s a bishop and was both in the cups and playing pool at the time… 🙂
Yes, that’s definitely something he is trying to do in the book. He is well aware that many evangelicals idolized his father, and he wants to rescue him from that idealized image.
At the same time, I think he wants to disassociate his father from the fundamentalists who formed the Religious Right. As brutally honest as he is about Francis’s flaws, he also wants to show how at heart he began with a very different attitude, and was manipulated (not least by his son) into siding with the narrow-minded bigotry of the American evangelicals. By Frank’s account, his dad had nothing but contempt for the majority of the folks he ended up in bed with (figuratively).
The book is a mea culpa by Frank. It is a great read. The fun parts are his opinions about various religious right types. Frank thought James Dobson was power hungry and politically ambitious. He also said that Pat Robertson would have trouble finding a job that didn’t involve listeing to the voices in his head.
I highly reccomend it.
Scott
I am kinda torn about the rehab effort Frank tries on his dad’s rep.
I read his dad’s seminal works, How Shall We then Live and A Christian Manifesto, when I was young and today I find its explicit endorsement for the use of force and rebellion heretical, if not outright chilling. https://mainstreambaptist.blogspot.com/2006/02/on-francis-schaeffers-christian.html
How many McVeighs, Rudolphs, or Army of Godders would point to these works of Schaeffer as their “moral” justification?
I haven’t read Frank’s book, but from what I hear, it sounds like a real white-wash of the sepulchre.
Thanks for the link, SharonB. The excerpts are quite damning!