Monday, October 22, 2007

Frank Schaeffer: Jane Smiley Smiled Upon Me And So Did This Those Nutty Creationists







I'm sorry for my long absence from the Huffington Post. I was writing my memoir: Crazy For God (in bookstores Oct 26). My new book made a little history last week. Jane Smiley wrote a lovely long piece about it in The Nation and the right wing fundamentalist magazine World also reviewed it. That has to be a first. Since when does anything The Nation cares about also interest the editors of World magazine? Even if it was really all about politics, it was flattering to have rival armed camps paying attention to my personal obsessions.

Whatever my friend's obsessions are they're not telling. Mine begin and end with God and guilt. Spastics wish they could stop twitching. Missionary kids (especially former Calvinists) wish we could stop seeing the world as a morality play in which we are supposed to star as saviors.

My parents were American missionaries. I had a strange and almost-happy early childhood running around in the Swiss Alps as the shapes of "my" mountains imprinted on my mind. When I was 11 I was sent to two English boarding schools, loved the first one but ran away from the second. I married young (after I got my girlfriend pregnant), had some early successes as an artist then foolishly (and greedily) became my famous evangelist father's sidekick, was briefly famous/infamous in evangelical circles, helped found the Religious Right and ruin America, left the evangelical fold and slammed the door hard. That was then...

Now... I am a "respectable" novelist, just another self-reinvented author. These days I also understand how destructive it is to be possessed by any message you just have to impose on people even when you know it might ruin friendships.

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 Mao 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 before, after being introduced by Pat Robertson, I had delivered a rousing take-back-America speech to thousands of cheering religious broadcasters. And not long after, I would appear at a huge pro-life rally in Denver. Cal Thomas -- once the vice president of Jerry Falwell's Moral Majority, who later became a Fox News Commentator -- would introduce me as "the best speaker in America."

At that moment we 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 be caught dead in the same room. My childhood was, to say the least, unusual.

When Gerald Ford died in January of 2007, I recalled that 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 presidency, 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."

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 consumed 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, if 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 something 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 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?"

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Comments (6)
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Thank you for the post about your mom dancing.During the years that I raised five children I read her books. The ones that touched me the most were about beauty, creativity and simple things. She made me look at my home with different eyes.I am a Christian. But, I did not preach at my kids. Today, they are grown. They are free thinking and productive. And, whenever I grace the table with flowers, I think of your mom. And hope, my children remember the little things.

posted 11:09 am on 10/18/2007


This is completely amazing and wonderful to read. Many thanks, Frank, for being so...frank about such an incredible but important perspective as the one your life has imposed upon you. You've seen a very important element of our world's inner workings from the top of those Alps. To those of us who know about your father's influence among the evangelicals of America these revelations are serious stunners. I especially appreciate your evident respect for the power, if certainly not the veracity, of your parents' religious drives. I grew up on a mainline seminary campus with people like Martin Niemoller, Martin Marty, Harvey Cox, Bill Coffin and Helmut Thielicke dropping by. We lived in battle with your people's influence, and I got the same inescapable set of gut issues as you describe.Thank you for your courage and honesty. The God you can't shake is the advocate of just such a spirit.
posted 03:11 am on 10/17/2007


So how long does it take comments to be approved??
posted 02:43 am on 10/15/2007


"When Gerald Ford died in January of 2007, I recalled that 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."I think your recollections are possibly mixed-up. Mike and Gayle were married on July 9, 1974 and Ford assumed the presidency on August 9, 1974. Did they spend their honeymoon at L'Abri? Why do I think that you are not remembering correctly? Well, I was at L'Abri the day that Nixon resigned and Ford became president. It was your father who announced it to us at the conclusion of one of his well-known discussions in the chapel.
posted 02:11 am on 10/12/2007


When, like back somewhere in the Old Testament?

posted 04:49 pm on 10/09/2007


"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 consumed by."

Diagnosis: PK's disease. When I was growing up we called ourselves priest's kids. But, that had some weird connotations for most people since they don't get that the Episocopal church ordains priests just as the Roman Catholics do. So, we became what the Southern Baptist's kids called themselves, preacher's kids. But, in the world of the progeny of the ordained it gets shorthanded to PK.

Most all the PK's I know suffer the same problems of the gut as Shaeffer. We all wonder is it our faith or our parents faith. Our gut reaction to much of the moral and ethical dilemmas we encounter make us question ourselves. "Is it real, or is it memorex."

Thanks Frank for voicing what so many of us feel.

posted 04:47 pm on 10/09/2007
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