Okay, I exaggerate. Even Frank Schaeffer himself doesn't claim that he is personally and singlehandedly responsible for the current election season. But the full title of his autobiography is, after all, 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. So he cannot be accused of underestimating his own importance -- or that of his parents, Francis and Edith Schaeffer, founders of L'Abri Fellowship.
The senior Schaeffers were vital to my experience of the Christian faith. In the late 60's, Francis Schaeffer, already a deep thinker, teacher and writer about the intersection of Christianity and culture, became very interested in the hippie movement that called into question "bourgeois" and "plastic" values. By the time I became a Christian in 1974, it was almost trite to say that authors like Samuel Beckett and musicians like Bob Dylan-- the artists who were the wallpaper of my secular upbringing-- were asking the right questions, maybe even doing God's work without knowing it. Everyone (except me; I could NOT get through it!) was talking about Francis Schaeffer's How Should We Then Live?The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture and its vision of the redemptive power of popular artistic expressions.
But Schaeffer also foresaw the limitations of this new peace culture. Frank quotes him as saying, "You wait; the hippies are going to wind up more middle-class, bourgeois and materialistic than their parents... If they are asked to make a choice between freedom and security, they'll choose security." Obviously it took 9/11 to bring this prediction to full flower, but by the time I was in college in 1978, it was already starting to happen. Hippies were long-gone, and the new fad was pink and green, Muffy and Biff, and "greed is good." My formerly radical church, that didn't even have a name and that taught a Christian version of "Turn on, tune in, drop out" that involved dropping out of college to evangelize the world ASAP (since Jesus could return at any moment, rendering your college degree pointless), suddenly adopted the "Church as Corporation" model and made us all Tom Peters disciples seeking to glorify God through the Search for Excellence.
Meanwhile, we had suddenly become aware of the abortion issue. This, too, was Francis Schaeffer's doing. He and Frank joined forces with C. Everett Koop, soon to become the Surgeon General of the United States, to put together Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, a critique of the "culture of death" they saw developing in America. Roe v. Wade was only a few years old when women-- and a few men-- began protesting it, and our campus movement was no exception. In 1980, we took a bus trip from Kansas to the Democratic National Convention in New York City (and, yes, that trip was exactly how you are imagining it) to ask for a pro-life plank in the platform. Frank feels that there was a critical moment where the Democrats could have owned life issues-- after all, they were already associated with the expansion of civil rights, so this was a logical extension for them. But that ship has sailed...
Also at this same time, Edith Schaeffer and her daughter, Frank's sister, Susan Schaeffer Macauley, were changing the daily domestic lives of evangelical wives. Edith wrote a book called The Hidden Art of Homemaking that explained how a woman could find a creative outlet and a ministry by making her home beautiful-- a practice that not even Frank can deny was extremely important to her at L'Abri. Macauley, who had been Frank's teacher for stretches of time when she was in her teens, had discovered that a homeschooling woman could find intellectual as well as artistic challenge even as she embraced a conservative definition of being a "keeper at home." Her exhortations to use the Great Books-- meaningful and beautiful literature that had withstood the test of time-- was the bedrock of all 11 years of my homeschooling career.
So whether Francis and Edith Schaeffer and their children, Frank and Susan, changed and/or ruined America, their activities certainly paralleled and possibly inspired all the themes of my youth. Even the way Frank resolved his spiritual struggles was almost stereotypical of my generation of evangelicals: he joined the Greek Orthodox church. Some of our fellow Boomers have also found that this ancient communion is the perfect antidote to the rapid change that can take place in newer movements.
Frank's account of these years is full of contradictions. Most spectacularly, there is Frank's obvious and deep ambivalence towards his parents. He can't quite seem to figure out whether he views them with deep affection and respect or considers himself to have been abused in some way. Os Guiness, a former L'Abri worker, strongly defends Francis from Frank's criticism-- if you can't get that article to open, some of the same thoughts are available from less personally involved sources that also address Frank's more general criticisms of the greater evangelical context of that period. Given that some of Frank's allegations just don't hold up to fact-checking, it does make one wonder whether Frank prioritized accuracy at any point in his writing.
Then there's Frank's attitude towards himself. He is by turns self-serving and self-flagellating, dropping names and painting himself as one of the key figures in the transformation of American politics in the 80's, yet also airing his own personal, political and spiritual dirty laundry throughout the book.
Finally, there's Frank's writing style. It's gripping. It's irresistible. It's like a big bag of potato chips-- you suspect it is bad for you, but you just can't stop -- until, all of a sudden, it's not, running aground on pages of name-checking or bizarre allegations or uncomfortably scatalogical reminiscences. All the reviewers agree that this is a (for the most part) fantastically well-written book that may or may not actually have anything worthwhile to say. What kept me turning pages through thick and thin, though, was this sense that I was getting a backstage tour to the backdrop of my life, and that was definitely worth the ride.
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