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

by Frank Schaeffer.

New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007
417 pp, $26.00.

This review is the first section of a three-part discussion on the book Crazy for God by Frank Schaeffer. The discussion continues with Sharon Gallagher's A Personal Response to a Provocative Memoir and concludes with Crazy about Abortion by Anne Eggebroten.

Reviewed by Anne Eggebroten

Anyone who lived in the evangelical world of the 1960s and 70s has heard of Francis Schaeffer and his mythical retreat in Switzerland—L’Abri.

Evangelical was a respectable term then, not yet soiled by collaboration with a still-to-be-invented “Religious Right.”  As a junior in college, I heard Schaeffer lecture, impressed by his critique of modern culture and the sweep of history he commanded.  I was proud to be his kind of Christian.

How fascinating now to go backstage with his son Frank and see the personal struggles of Francis and his wife Edith, to learn that Francis suffered from fierce rages and debilitating depression, that she was the spiritual Superwoman who kept him going.

Parts 1 and 2 of this book are delightful and hard to put down: one crazy anecdote after another, filled with humor and irony: the family trying to catch a local bus to leave for a week’s ski vacation, young Franky delighting in the freedom of neglect as his busy parents tend to the needs of visiting students, his sister Susan trying to provide haphazard homeschooling.

Most compelling, however, is Frank’s honesty in analyzing the family dynamics, as this passage shows:

“Mom's spiritual pride, mixed with fierce spiritual ambition for her children, mixed with a willingness to be a doormat to her overbearing husband—as a further example of her piety and her ability to be the perfect wife for the Lord’s sake, while Dad was so far from perfect—left my sisters and me with a life-time of conflicted emotions” (p. 112).

In the same chapter (17), he reports resentment of his father after hearing his mother's explanation for her repeated absences to travel with him on his lecture circuit: “…Dad wanted sex every night.”

Frank reflects on his father's “temper and violent rage at my mother,” noting that L'Abri workers “must have heard the screaming, and some must have known there was abuse” (p. 101).  Also surprising is the revelation of his father's “year of doubt,” when he considered giving up the Christian faith.

Sections written by Frank's sisters and others add to the family drama.  In chapter 6, Debby writes of her mother, “She pursued her [Christian] objectives with determination, though bits of bodies all around her were lost to frostbite.  The havoc she caused to all around her, as they were dragged in to help her meet self-imposed deadlines and goals, was phenomenal and scarring to me as a child” (p. 43).

Handed an eccentric childhood full of unusual experiences, Frank has plenty to write about and he does it well.  There's his struggle with polio, including attempts to receive faith healing from a young friend, and his mother's theological analysis: “…Satan attacked us” in an attempt to prevent the founding of L’Abri (p. 28).

There are scenes of dazzling beauty: Frank sledding by starlight with friends down a snowy mountain near L’Abri (p. 221), the family walking by the sea on summer trips to Portofino, Italy (p. 81).  Of his parents’continuing love for each other, Frank says, “They were happiest when farthest away from their missionary work…” (p. 99).

We meet other characters like Jane and Betty, “as much a couple as any of the married workers in L’Abri,” who welcome Franky into their home and nurture him in his parents' absence (p. 56).   Finally sent off to boarding school in England, Frank describes happy years there with a kind and progressive headmaster.

Francis Sr.’s insistence on interracial tolerance in the late 1950s and early 1960s is interesting; he told his children he would bless an interracial marriage if they chose that.  Edith and Francis also accepted testimony from homosexual friends “that they had been born that way,” reports Frank: “not only did they believe them, but Dad defended them against people who would judge or exclude them” (p. 77).

Unmarried pregnant young women were also accepted into the L’Abri community without censure, including the visitor from California with whom a teenage Franky conceived a child. He now considers “our mistake” to have been one of the most significant and positive change points in his life (p. 404).   

I was intrigued by the first half of Crazy for God, comparing the Schaeffers to my own dysfunctional family, but Part 3, titled “Turmoil” was troubling.  Francis Sr. becomes famous with the film series How Should We Then Live? (1976), directed by Frank, and at his son's insistence speaks against the recent legalization of abortion in the U.S. in the last two episodes of that series.

“My antiabortion fervor was strictly personal,” writes Frank.  “It had a name, Jessica, my little girl, proof that conception is good, even an unexpected teen conception” (p. 265).

Those two episodes attract the interest of Dr. C. Everett Koop, who enlists father and son to write another film series focusing on abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (1979).  The Schaeffers increasingly sell their souls to men they don't respect: Jerry Falwell, James Dobson, Pat Robertson.  Frank summarizes the speeches they gave: “Abortion is murder; secular humanism is destroying us; turn back to our Christian foundation; vote Republican.”

Frank describes sinking “deeper into a mixture of self-loathing and despair,” but at this point his livelihood depends on the evangelical speaking circuit; he and his wife have three children.  The self-deprecation of this part of the book is mixed with a remnant of pride for his part in the emergence of the “Religious Right” and for working with national leaders like President Ronald Reagan, who sends a warm personal note on the death of Francis Sr.

My sympathies were engaged again in Part 4 when Frank leaves the evangelical world and becomes penniless in Los Angeles, trying to get work in directing films.  His journey back to normalcy begins with writing a loosely fictionalized story of his own life, the first of the Calvin Becker series.

All in all, I gained valuable insights into the evangelical world as well as into my own life by reading this book.

The discussion continues with Sharon Gallagher's A Personal Response to a Provocative Memoir.

Table of Contents

Portrait: Becky Bender

Anne Eggebroten is a founding member of EEWC and teaches Women & Religion at California State University, Northridge.