Byrd's Chicks

Crazy for God

Michele Chavez

Recently, I read a memoir called Crazy for God by Frank Schaeffer. Schaeffer's parents were evangelists who founded L'Abri, a Christian mission in Switzerland. He grew up in an environment where almost every conversation and interaction with others involved talking about God and/or trying to convert others to what his family considered true Christianity.

Schaeffer and his family became involved in the Religious Right and Pro-Life movements, which he ended up leaving, eventually finding a spiritual practice that he was comfortable with in the Greek Orthodox Church. Over the years, he has been a Christian documentary maker and a fiction author. Nowadays, he writes frequently on the Huffington Post, criticizing the Religious Right. His upcoming book is Patience with God, a book for people who don't like religion.

In an interview, Schaeffer gave his reasons for writing Crazy for God:

My memoir, Crazy for God, is an attempt to stop lying. I wanted to try and come clean. I wanted to admit my mistakes. I wanted to try to be the same person to everyone I met. You can be the world's biggest hypocrite and still feel good about yourself. You can believe and wish you didn't. 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 father -- Francis Schaeffer -- was being treated for lymphoma at the Mayo Clinic, and in his place I'd 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."

At that moment we Schaeffers were evangelical royalty. When I was growing up in the religious community of L'Abri (founded by my parents in 1954 in Switzerland) it was not unusual to find myself seated across the dining room table from Billy Graham's daughter or President Ford's son, even Timothy Leary. Only later did I realize that L'Abri attracted a weirdly eclectic group of people who otherwise would not be caught dead in the same room. My childhood was, to say the least, unusual.

Crazy for God charts my journey from being born the son of cultic religious leaders to the present, with detours into Hollywood and the movie business, art and (at last!) the lucky stumble into writing fiction and nonfiction -- in other words what I do for a living today.

It turns out it was easier to move beyond my parents' beliefs intellectually, than to abandon my gut responses. So who instilled those responses? In other words, who were we? It depends on what moment you choose to become a fly on my wall. People are not as one-dimensional as the stories about them. There is no way to write the absolute truth about any family, much less my family or me. The only answer to "Who are you?" is "When?"

I identified with Shaeffer, even though I didn't grow up Christian. The feelings he described felt similar to what I experienced being a member of and eventually leaving a large fundamentalist Buddhist organization. I could relate to how he found comfort in the traditional ritual of Greek Orthodoxy, as I now feel similarly at home with Nichiren Shu.

If you get a chance to read it, I'd highly recommend Crazy for God.

Posted by chicks at June 28, 2009 02:42 PM