Interview

Crazy for God

An Interview with Frank Schaeffer

By John W. Whitehead

The public image of the leaders of the religious right I met with so many times also contrasted with who they really were. In public, they maintained an image that was usually quite smooth. In private, they ranged from unreconstructed bigot reactionaries like Jerry Falwell, to Dr. Dobson, the most power-hungry and ambitious person I have ever met, to Billy Graham, a very weird man indeed who lived an oddly sheltered life in a celebrity/ministry cocoon, to Pat Robertson, who would have had a hard time finding work in any job where hearing voices is not a requirement.-Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God

…..

JW: In the book, you portray your mother as speaking down to her husband, the renowned Francis Schaeffer.

FS: Right.

JW: You also indicate that your father abused your mother.

FS: Right.

JW: Explain all that. I think it is important.

FS: Dad had a very strong temper. He and mother had a good marriage, in the sense that it lasted. They had a lot of affection for one another, and they were very dynamic. But there was also, as there are in a lot of human relationships, a very dark side. One of those dark sides came out when they were fighting. My father would yell and scream and throw things. Sometimes, it went beyond that. Basically what I talk about in the book is as much as I want to say about that. People can draw their own conclusions.

JW: You write in the book that your father, for example, threw plants at your mother.

FS: That was no secret. I’m sure other L’Abri workers knew that. Their relationship at times turned violent. There is no question about that, and I am not the only person who would know. The book in that sense is not an expose of that part of my father’s character. Living in the community of L’Abri with people in our house and other workers coming and going, there are plenty of people walking around the world today who either heard or saw things that would make them draw that conclusion. That was actually not much of a secret.

…

JW: But when people read that he was an abuser and was hen-pecked by his wife and that Edith and Francis competed with one another, how do you think it will affect their view of him and his work?

FS: I say some pretty unflattering things about myself in the book, too. If you read biographies that try to be honest about human life, you have to realize that we are all flawed. My parents were no better and no worse than anybody else. Essentially, there is nothing more or less valid about what Dad wrote because he was a human being. I think the only people who would look at his work otherwise are those who have a false impression of what Christian leadership is. In other words, they’re looking to someone’s life as an example of perfection, rather than what the person was saying, to see if it is true or false. They should know full well that everybody has that measure of hypocrisy in their lives; everybody has a measure of being flawed. My parents were no better or no worse. Thus, if someone who looked to my dad as a kind of a guru or someone who walked on water is disillusioned, they probably should be. But they shouldn’t only be disillusioned about him, they should be disillusioned about any idea of perfection in any human being because no one is like that.

…

JW: In your book, you said your father could be screaming at your mother one minute and then muttering “I’m going to kill myself” the next. In fact, you write that your father contemplated suicide and spoke about hanging himself. Was Francis Schaeffer suicidal?

FS: I don’t know if he was really suicidal, but he was certainly depressive. My father spent big chunks of his life in very deep depressions, and, again, that is no secret. He talked about that in the context of L’Abri. He would also talk about it in the context of counseling people. He would say “I suffer from the same thing.” In fact, one of the reasons he was such a good counselor to individuals was that, unlike his public image that other people have fostered, he never held himself up to be that image. And in that sense, my father wasn’t hypocritical at all. He would tell people about his problems and say “I am in the same boat.” And that level of empathy is one reason that, on a one-on-one basis, he was one of the best counselors I’ve ever heard about or seen in terms of results of helping people turn their lives around. His empathy was real, and it came through, for example, when he would tell someone who had tried to commit suicide that he often contemplated it. That was a help to people precisely because he wasn’t holding himself up to something special. As I write in the book, I think my dad was a remarkably courageous man because he definitely suffered from chronic depression. He definitely had periods of time when he was thinking about killing himself or quitting or abandoning his faith. He talks about that very freely in the context of some of his L’Abri discussions with people. There were no secrets there, certainly in the context of individual counseling. That is not much of a revelation to people who knew him well, certainly not to his own children who saw him wrestling with very real problems.

JW: In the book, you discuss an incident at L’Abri when your father walked in on you having sex in the nude with the woman who later became your wife. He just kind of walks away from it. Some evangelicals are going to wonder, didn’t Francis Schaeffer lecture his son on premarital sex?

FS: They may shake their heads in disbelief. But my dad didn’t take a moralistic judgmental angle. If it had been a L’Abri student, he wouldn’t have said anything. It’s not that he wouldn’t express opinions on sexuality, but Dad was just not that kind of judgmental person. He had a very strong moral chord but not in terms of a church-lady kind of response to that sort of situation with a teenager. This is one reason he was so effective in terms of the cross-section of people who came to L’Abri and would listen to him. He was different. He was not your typical evangelical pastor who was trying to protect his image. He was not ready to throw the first stone to maintain a public idea of sanctity or holiness. By the time you had been at L’Abri for a while and seen Francis Schaeffer, especially in the mid-to-late sixties, you were not seeing your typical evangelical.

JW: His views of homosexuality were quite different from those of today’s Christian Right, which is stridently anti-gay. But Francis Schaeffer didn’t see it that way. As you say in the book, he saw homosexuality as a serious matter. But he didn’t think they would stop being homosexuals if they became Christians. And he didn’t condemn them. Is that right?

FS: That is absolutely correct. A lot of people in the evangelical and fundamentalist communities speak theoretically about homosexuality being no worse than adultery or divorce. However, in practice, they are not undertaking national campaigns to single out evangelical people who were married to somebody else at one time and got divorced. So actually there is a tremendous moral hypocrisy there because the whole gay issue has been singled out for special treatment. My dad literally practiced what he preached. He said that homosexual sex was on the same level as adultery, premarital sex and spiritual pride. He didn’t differentiate between all this and write people off on the basis of it. He actually believed and acted on what a lot of people in the Religious Right say theoretically. But he literally was that way. My dad didn’t see it as a special problem to be singled out from everything else. He didn’t see it as threatening. We had quite a few gay people come through L’Abri. As a child, I knew who they were and why. But my dad did not push them into programs where they were going to try to become straight based on special counseling. He didn’t see it that way. He just saw this as one amongst all kinds of challenges that face people humanly and was very compassionate about it. We had a number of people who came to L’Abri who were not Christians or were Christians who were gay who never changed their orientation, and they didn’t become less friendly with my dad as a result. He didn’t make a big point of it one way or another. That is how his attitude manifested itself to other people.

…

JW: Are you saying that Francis Schaeffer wouldn’t be part of the Christian Right?

FS: Yes. He has been used by people like James Dobson, Jerry Falwell and others to give some respectability to points of view that really were not his. What made my dad’s heart beat fastest was talking about people’s philosophical presuppositions and how they lived. He wanted to put people’s lives back together again, people who had problems. The politicized view of him is illegitimate.

…

JW: You say in your book that your father thought these people were plastic and the people of the Christian Right were right-wing nuts.

FS: Yes. He would come out of meetings with some of these people, shaking his head. I have some very vivid memories about this. But he essentially justified his work with them as being co-belligerents on projects that were of enough importance to tolerate them.

JW: Would he be happy with the way they use his name today?

FS: Absolutely not. The idea of watching himself on The 700 Club or a replay of him preaching from Jerry Falwell’s pulpit would not please Dad, given the direction all this has gone.

JW: When your father was on The 700 Club once, he called me right after the show. He was so upset. He said, “Do you know what they did to me? I was on that show talking about all these important things such as abortion and other issues, and they followed me with Christian jugglers.” It blew his mind. He saw it as a crazy world, but he would see it as even crazier today.

FS: Yes. He saw it as a crazy world. He would say things like he thought Pat Robertson was out of his mind or that Jerry Falwell was harsh and inhuman. But he realized there were larger issues. Sometimes you work with people you disagree with because the issues are so important. You’re simply hoping to help. But the Francis Schaeffer I grew up with loved the arts. He was a philosopher. The idea that he was somehow a creature of the Religious Right is ridiculous.

…

JW: You paint your family at the end of the day as dysfunctional. You say your sister Susan and her husband lived in an assisted living facility. Priscilla was on Prozac. You were in therapy. You had a problem with name identification-you kept changing your name.

FS: Right. The name change thing is somewhat trivial, but it is symptomatic of something.

JW: I didn’t know what to call you for awhile-Frank, Franky, whatever.

FS: The funny thing is that my sister Priscilla did the same thing. All of a sudden, we had to call her Prisca. We all had our own little rule.

JW: You write that Priscilla suffered from depression and anxiety attacks. She burned out early. What causes families to break down like that?

FS: First of all, I wouldn’t describe her as having broken down. I would just say that she is very straightforward about the fact that she was on Prozac. When I was writing this book, she didn’t care if I told everybody. I would tell anybody who came to L’Abri about my problems. And she actually thought it was a good thing to put it in the book.

JW: People, no matter who they are, have problems. James Dobson or Billy Graham, in other words, are not like Jesus.

FS: No, and neither was Francis Schaeffer. And Frank Schaeffer is not. If you peel back the lid of any household and really look at it, the question is: do any of us have the ability to really look at ourselves honestly? Obviously not, because you can’t spend your whole day on introspection. You have to go forward. But the fact of the matter is that I don’t think the Schaeffer household is better or worse than any other. I think it was different than a lot of other households in one sense. You could call it abnormal in that it wasn’t the normal “American upbringing.” But then you read a lot of memoirs and talk to a lot of people who have been in “normal households,” and they turn out to have their own problems as well. So I don’t think the Schaeffer children wound up worse or better than anybody else. The fact of the matter is that we certainly did not leave an inheritance in terms of psychological well-being that is better than anyone else’s or particularly great. In other words, we all have our problems, and that is the reality of it.

….

from http://www.rutherford.org/oldspeak/Articles/Interviews/oldspeak- frankschaeffer.html