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Thursday, January 10,2008
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Surviving a fundamentalist childhood
I once crossed
a protest line manned by Protestant fundamentalists to hear Frank
Schaeffer. A novelist, essayist and movie director, Schaeffer had also
been a luminary in the rise of the Christian right. By the time of his
speaking engagement, he had renounced the faith in which he had been
raised, embracing Eastern Orthodoxy and cautiously tacking leftward
politically. No wonder the fundamentalists were mad.
Crazy for God (Carrol
& Graf) will turn those same people red with rage. It’s largely an
account of his 1960s childhood in Switzerland where his parents, the
Calvinist theologians Francis and Edith Schaeffer, ran a community
based on their interpretation of Christian ideals. L’Abri was an odd
place. Timothy Leary popped by for a visit and Jimmy Page told the
author that he found his father’s signature book, Escape From Reason, “very
cool.” The Schaeffers were cultured and widely read in art, literature
and music. By itself, this made them colorful fish in the gray sea of
the evangelicals.
According to Schaeffer, the conflict between their cultural interests and religious beliefs sometimes made them neurotic
as fruit bats. The portrait Schaeffer paints of his parents, who
eventually provided intellectual comfort to the religious right and
positioned him as a poster boy for engaged youth, is drawn with many
nuances and much shading. The Schaeffers were actually
rather liberal in contrast to most of their brethren. They were not
homophobic and spoke against racism, listened to Bob Dylan and
generally tried to work out the gospel of unselfish love in the running
of L’Abri. On the other hand his parents were infected with the
self-righteousness endemic to fundamentalism. The line between saved
and unsaved was sharply drawn. The author’s parents proudly displayed
their self-professed salvation like a shiny merit badge and were
willing to condemn all those who didn’t wear the same medal.
That
Schaeffer eventually broke with his parents’ faith is less remarkable
than the sense of humor he sharpened against the hard stone of their
theology. Crazy for God is a funny book, plainspoken and lively
as a barroom debate. Schaeffer’s conversational, humorous tone conveys
the hope for an expansion of the middle ground between shallow
materialism and shallow religiosity.
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