Frank Schaeffer Goes Crazy for God (Page 2)

By the late '60s, according to Frank, L'Abri had loosened up. Edith enjoyed her newfound social status, and Francis sympathized with the American youth movement and countercultural search for meaning. Timothy Leary stopped by, and so did one of Joan Baez's best friends. Mick and Keith planned to come but never made it. Francis was in favor of the environmental movement, and L'Abri welcomed gays and unwed mothers without prejudice. While often cruel to one another, the Schaeffers seem to have been kind to outsiders. At the point when I visited my friend, L'Abri was more or less harmless--the L'Abri of that time was keen on cultural critique and addressing the issues raised by French existentialism. Frank and Francis together made a film titled How Should We Then Live?, which came out in 1976 and was originally meant to reinterpret Western culture from the Renaissance as a human-based philosophical failure that had given rise to twentieth-century feelings of meaninglessness and anomie.

But Frank, who was no slacker in the sex department (masturbation and lust are the major themes of the Calvin Becker Trilogy), had gotten his teenage girlfriend pregnant while she was visiting L'Abri and had to get married. The birth of their daughter was so dramatic to Frank that he was instantly compelled to try to outlaw abortion for everyone. Francis was reluctant because he saw abortion as a Catholic issue, but Frank persuaded him, and the two of them changed the final two sections of How Should We Then Live? to be about abortion. The film (and accompanying book) set up Francis and Edith as evangelical saints. Fundraising boomed. The Schaeffers were longtime friends of C. Everett Koop, the chief surgeon at The Children's Hospital of Philadelphia and the author of The Right to Live: The Right to Die (1976); Koop and Frank pushed Francis to make a second film, more explicitly antiabortion, Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, which appeared in 1978. (The novelist in me can't refrain from seeing these titles as reflecting Francis's own doubts and uneasiness.) At first the new film was a bust, and the evangelicals stayed away from it--Frank's biggest fan was Bishop Fulton J. Sheen. According to Frank, it touched a popular chord, though, and when men like James Dobson and Jerry Falwell saw the crowds it was drawing, they recognized the possibilities. Frank, who had never lived in the United States and had only the haziest notion of American life, was soon on the road, sponsored by and empowering the new, powerful religious right of the 1980s, giving eloquent speeches on subjects he hardly knew anything about. He was in his early 30s and making a lot of money. He maintains in Crazy for God that Francis considered his new "cobelligerents" loonies but was soon fighting cancer and had neither the energy nor the ability to figure out a way to withdraw from them.

Frank Schaeffer quickly lost all respect for the religious leaders he was meeting, and for himself as the hard-driving, America-hating preacher's son that had become his public persona. As he points out, it's no good to be a member of the elect if the rest of the nation is doing just fine, so of course the religious right must root against America, must hope and pray for the End Times slaughter of most of their fellow citizens. The best title for a movie about the past twenty-five years in religious America would be Elmer Gantry Returns, and Frank is here to tell you its cast of holy rollers is worse than you think: "In private, they ranged from unreconstructed bigot reactionaries like Jerry Falwell, to Dr. Dobson, the most power-hungry and ambitious person I have ever met, to Billy Graham, a very weird man indeed who lived an oddly sheltered life in a celebrity/ministry cocoon, to Pat Robertson, who would have a hard time finding work in any job where hearing voices is not a requirement."

L'Abri, though intense and strange, had not prepared Frank for the open money-grubbing cynicism of Big Religion in America, for the outright contempt many of the big pastors felt toward their followers and the commercialization of everything Jesus. For Francis, possibly most shocking was the hatred felt by the Schaeffers' new allies toward everything he most loved. At one point, Pat Robertson bragged to Francis and Frank about "burning a reproduction of a nude by Modigliani that he used to have over his fireplace. He said that as soon as he got saved, he'd taken it down.... My father loved Modigliani." Schaeffer's chapters on the likes of Falwell and Dobson are eloquent but too short. Some of us would like more.

As any feminist might have informed the Schaeffers, the political is always personal, and vice versa. One lesson of all of Frank Schaeffer's work is that the inherent contradictions and terrors of Calvinist doctrine have been intolerable to the very family most famous in our day for spreading them. Another is that however the Schaeffers tried to mitigate those cruelties with personal kindness, their allies and associates have gone wholesale for the divisive, the inhumane and the mercenary. Francis Schaeffer's failure was that he didn't learn, from the very cultural history that he loved, the simple historical truth that tribalism and damnation are what organized religion does best.

But the real subject of Crazy for God is Frank--it is his memoir, after all. Frank has modified his position on abortion somewhat even as he has acted on his religious doubts and joined the Greek Orthodox Church, attracted, it seems, to the primacy of ritual over doctrine. Francis Schaeffer died in 1984, age 72. Edith is still alive, age 92. One of the last chilling things that Frank writes about his mother is that she is primarily in the care of his sister Debby, who is portrayed in the Calvin Becker Trilogy as the kindest of the sisters (and whom I remember also as being a remarkably generous and gentle person). Debby "struggles with a feeling of rage when she's with Mom." I can sympathize.

In 1973, when I was reading The White Goddess and my husband was reading The Making of the English Working Class, we recoiled from the cult of L'Abri, but we also laughed at it. Even while we were visiting, it felt as remote from modern life as Salem, Massachusetts, circa 1692. Little did we know.

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