Frank Schaeffer - Crazy for God

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Table of Contents

Praise for

CRAZY FOR GOD

We are fortunate that Frank Schaeffers path has taken him from the rigid fundamentalist thinking of his youth to where he is now, working not in stark black and white, but in the blessed gray from which true art arises.

Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog

That Crazy for God isnt just another James Frey-style memoir of personal dysfunction becomes clear with the subtitle, its alternately hilarious and excruciating.

Boston Globe

Part autobiography, part parental tribute, and part examination of how American evangelism got to where it is, versatile author Schaeffer tells a moving story of growing up and growing wise.... This story of faith, fame, and family in modern America is a worthy read.

Publishers Weekly

When Frank Schaeffer comments on the American religious landscape, the reader can rest assured theyre in the hands of someone who knows.

Hartford Courant

A story about the dangers of inauthentic faith.... An important book.

Washington Times

In this sometimes acerbic, sometimes hilarious autobiography, Frank Schaeffer takes us behind the scenes of a Christian upbringing like no other.

Winston-Salem Journal

With its up-close portraits of many of the leading figures of the American evangelical movement... Schaeffer has written a powerful chronicle of his experiences as a man who found himself at the center of a crucial moment in our recent history.

Tucson Citizen

This is not just a book about rejecting Christian evangelicalism. It has parallels in secular culture and is an honest read about family life and its challenges.

Library Journal

Interesting glimpses into the burgeoning religious right folded into a deeply personal memoir... Schaeffer is brutally honest.... He offers particularly eye-opening accounts of his personal encounters with the likes of Pat Robertson, James Dobson et al.

Kirkus

If [Schaeffer] spares anyone here, its not himself. And we forgive him... because hes a world-class storyteller.... He can make us laugh, make us wince, and make us really think about things, all at the same time.

Christianity Today

Other Books by Frank Schaeffer

FICTION
(The Calvin Becker Trilogy)
PORTOFINO
ZERMATT
SAVING GRANDMA

BABY JACK

NONFICTION

KEEPING FAITHA Father-Son Story about Love and the United
States Marine Corps (Coauthored with Sgt. John Schaeffer USMC)

FAITH OF OUR SONSA Fathers Wartime Diary

VOICES FROM THE FRONTLetters Home from Americas
Military Family

AWOLThe Unexcused Absence of Americas Upper Classes from
Military ServiceAnd How It Hurts Our Country
(Coauthored with Kathy Roth-Douquet)

HOW FREE PEOPLE MOVE MOUNTAINSA Male Christian
Conservative and a Female Jewish Liberal on a Quest for Common
Purpose and Meaning (Coauthored with Kathy Roth-Douquet)

for my daughter Jessica

PROLOGUE

You can be the worlds biggest hypocrite and still feel good about yourself. You can believe and wish you didnt. 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 fatherFrancis Schaefferwas being treated for lymphoma at the Mayo Clinic, and in his place Id 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 earlier, after being introduced by Pat Robertson, I had delivered a rousing take-back-America speech to thousands of cheering religious broadcasters. And not long afterward, I would appear at a huge pro-life rally in Denver. Cal Thomasonce the vice president of Jerry Falwells Moral Majority, later a Fox News commentatorwould introduce me as the best speaker in America. The anointing, someone said, was clearly on this young man! They were saying that I was a better speaker than my famous father.

At that moment, the Schaeffers were evangelical royalty. When I was growing up in LAbri, my parents religious community in Switzerland, it was not unusual to find myself seated across the dining room table from Billy Grahams daughter or President Fords 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 LAbri attracted a weirdly eclectic group of people who otherwise would not have been caught dead in the same room. My childhood was, to say the least, unusual.

When Gerald Ford died in January 2007, I recalled that on 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 LAbri, where Mike Ford, the presidents 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 Ediththen in her eightiesheard that George W. Bush might run for the presidency, she exclaimed, What? But Barbara asked me to pray especially for young George. She didnt think he had what it took to do anything.

Given the fact of my family connections to the Republican Party, it was somewhat ironic that when James Webb was elected to the Senate from Virginia by a razor-thin margin in 2006, giving the Democrats their first new majority in years, I was credited with helping Webb. Or, to put it another way, judging by the hate e-mail I got from my fathers fundamentalist followers and other assorted Republicans and conservatives, I deserved some of the blame.

I had long since left the evangelical subculture when I wrote an op-ed for the Dallas Morning News that was picked up by several hundred blogs and posted on the front page of James Webbs campaign Web site. I had defended Webb against a series of scabrous attacks wherein his novels were smeared and he was even labeled a pedophile because he had described a sexual tribal ritual. I noted that Webb is a serious novelist whose work has been widely praised by many, including Tom Wolfe, who called Webbs books the greatest of the Vietnam novels.

I also took the Republicans to task for doing to Webb what they had done to another war hero, Senator John McCain, back in the 2000 Republican primaries. I went so far as to say that, in disgust, my wife Genie and I were switching from being registered Republicans to independents.

A few days after this op-ed was published, I wrote another piece, this time for the Huffington Post, about the reaction to my departure from the Republican Party. This was picked up by dozens of Democrat-friendly blogs. As the congratulatory e-mails poured in, I was reminded of the welcome given new believers when they convert from some particularly hideous life of sin. Then the

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