Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right…

The title of writer and filmmaker Frank Schaeffer’s memoir clearly signifies what is and will be the book’s primary selling point: a confession of his past political involvement with what he terms the “right-wing/ evangelical/ Republican morass.” This angle is certainly understandable when we consider his role in the development of the evangelical pro-life movement (more on that shortly), as well as his split from the Republican Party last year in support of Jim Webb’s Senate campaign in Virginia, which he has written about for the Dallas Morning News. Additionally, as some of his readers have discovered through his Huffington Post blog and other writings, Schaeffer’s familial and cultural background makes for a personal narrative that is often quite fascinating.

Schaeffer spent his childhood at L’Abri, a Swiss evangelical mission that his parents, Francis and Edith Schaeffer, founded in the mid-’50s. At its peak in the late ’60s and early ’70s, L’Abri (French for “shelter”) served as a popular commune for believers and nonbelievers to study questions of faith in a remote environment. Over 20 years after his death, Francis Schaeffer remains among the foremost thinkers in modern evangelical history. By combining his love of classical culture and history with a belief in Biblical inerrancy, his signature work, How Should We Then Live? (1974), forwarded a unique apologetics (defense), arguing that specific periods of Western cultural development — particularly Reformation-era art — provide a rational basis for Christianity.

His efforts are largely responsible for encouraging evangelicals to engage with “worldly” culture, and are reflected throughout the subculture’s critical output, from evangelical flagship magazine Christianity Today’s well-respected sister publication Books and Culture (which resembles the New York Times Book Review in its approach) to the ongoing growth of L’Abri study centers and conferences in Europe and North America. Edith Schaeffer also developed a large evangelical following through conference presentations and several books, including L’Abri (1970), her personal account of the mission’s development.

As Frank Schaffer narrates in Crazy for God, his mother’s religious idealism and his father’s “love of the Real” had a profound personal impact, inspiring him to develop as a young painter and amateur filmmaker while wrestling with a faith that, in his words, he had “caught like a disease.” His political involvement began in 1972 as a fundraiser, producer, and eventual director of the 10-part film series for How Should We Then Live? (released the same year as the book).

While the series, like the book, primarily centered on the Christian origins of classical art and history, the younger Schaeffer — buoyed by the Supreme Court’s legalization of abortion in Roe v. Wade, as well as the birth of his daughter Jessica — pushed for the last two installments to focus on abortion. The positive evangelical response to How Should We Then Live? allowed Schaeffer to collaborate with his father and future Surgeon General C. Everett Koop on creating the pro-life series and companion book Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (1978), which he contends, ultimately “raised grassroots consciousness in evangelical circles” and made abortion a signature political issue for the burgeoning religious conservative movement.

Schaeffer’s subsequent political activity in the late ’70s and early ’80s — giving lectures that called for civil disobedience against abortion clinics, writing books denouncing pro-choice sympathies and secular culture — brought him and his father into collaboration with conservative Christian leaders such as James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, and Pat Robertson. Unsurprisingly and understandably, his characterizations of those leaders today are less than charitable. I found myself nodding in sympathy when he calls Dr. Dobson “the most power-hungry and ambitious person I have ever met,” and his story about hearing Pat Robertson receiving a “special sign from the Lord” involving several snakes is both a hilarious and sobering example of hubris. These recollections, as well as Schaeffer’s descriptions of the discomfort that he and his father often felt around their fellow “co-belligerents,” help demonstrate how religion can both corrupt and become corrupted when misapplied in public politics.

Yet despite its various positive elements, this section of Crazy for God also falls a little flat in execution. Schaeffer is correct to assert the impact that How Should We Then Live? and Whatever Happened to the Human Race? had upon the formation of the pro-life movement, but his argument strays too close to asserting that they were a singular motivating force in the movement’s consciousness-raising, which is an oversimplification. Another problem is that Schaeffer’s recounting of his political activity feels rushed and somewhat incomplete; aside from the above-mentioned story about Robertson, personal descriptions of the evangelical power brokers with whom he collaborated rarely stray beyond short dismissals.

Finally, Schaeffer largely eschews discussing his substantial body of religious writings, which could have provided us with more personal insight from this period. Instead, he dedicates several pages to discussing his current views on abortion, which raises a few valid points (such as how pro-life and pro-choice advocates spend too much time dehumanizing each other) but doesn’t add much of value to the overall section.

Given the above, I would suggest that slightly deemphasizing Crazy for God’s section on politics allows us a better view of the memoir’s true strengths elsewhere. Schaeffer’s account of his formative years at L’Abri and at two private schools in England particularly shines, as he creatively describes his interactions with his family, friends and geographical background in a manner that reads like good fiction. (Although I haven’t read his “Calvin Becker trilogy”—Portofino (1992), Saving Grandma (1997), and Zermatt (2003), which offers a novelized version of his childhood, it’s safe to say that his experience writing the trilogy pays off here.) He also offers us a clearer way of understanding how his parents’ Christian faith, which he describes as a type of fundamentalism, framed his daily existence so deeply that even as an adult, “everything points to my relationship with God, real or imagined.”

In one of the book’s most compelling passages, Schaeffer details how his family’s annual trips to Portofino, Italy allowed him a respite from the faith that conditioned his life at L’Abri. Taking their cue from the concept of “being in the world but not of the world”, Christians who embrace a fundamentalist approach often encourage what amounts to a type of disembodiment; while one may be physically and temporally present “in the world”, the mind/ spirit remains focused on being “not of the world” and its secular implications. As he writes, vacationing at Portofino allowed him to “just BE”, to truly appreciate and revel in his embodied experience without having to make such a separation. The sights and smells of the Riviera left him with a persistent “unnamable longing” that his parents could have tried to repressed but didn’t: “It was as if they wanted me to somehow grow past the constricted world they have fallen into.”

What Schaeffer leaves us with, then, is a memoir that slightly lacks its advertised impact in terms of discussing evangelical politics, but remains an engaging and instructive self-portrayal throughout. Moreover, his current position as an established secular author and as a member of the Greek Orthodox Church (which he describes towards the book’s end) exemplifies finding a sense of purpose that attempts to avoid being saddled with the weight of inherited expectations, but is authentically his own.