Crazy for God (37 page)

John’s “crime” was his interest in how the Bible states things and how you draw meaning from the biblical text. John knew that if you push the so-called Sola Scriptura Calvinist approach and the “inerrancy” ideas to their absurd limit, all real study of the Bible stops. It becomes a magical text. It is no longer open to interpretation. Dogma replaces study, because scholarship can only be meaningful when you are allowed to ask real questions and let the chips fall where they may.

It was decided that John should no longer teach in L’Abri. Dad instigated this anti-John, purity-of-the-visible-church purge. In the case of John—who was
by far
all of our family’s favorite person and the picture of kindness and Christian love, as well as common sense—the absurdity of trying to demand one-note theological purity became clear.

If L’Abri produced one true saint, one self-effacing gentleman willing to help everyone do everything from clip their hedges to solve marital problems, to do their taxes, one real biblical scholar, it was John Sandri. If John—who spent a good part of his life selflessly nursing my sister Priscilla after her three massive nervous breakdowns—was no longer good enough for L’Abri, then who was?

But how could Dad be running all over America giving fiery speeches on the inerrancy of the Bible and the “purity of the visible church,” when his
own
son-in-law had quietly evolved into the type of Bible scholar that Dad was insisting the Southern Baptists, Lutherans, and others fire from their seminaries? So Dad did to John what he had refused to do to me when I got Genie pregnant: he made a public example of him.

Dad went so far as to come up with a statement that everyone in L’Abri had to sign if they wanted to remain in the work. It was a McCarthy-type loyalty oath to the “inerrancy of scripture” concept. And of course John, to his credit, didn’t sign. Everyone else, to their discredit, did.

The updated fundamentalism-versus-modernism battle that Dad let tear his family apart seemed to bow him down. He kept telling me how sorry he was about John. He also kept saying “But what choice do I have? I can’t take the public stand I take on the scriptures and not do anything about John!” And Dad unwittingly set the stage for the power struggle in L’Abri that
happened after he died. Once fundamentalists start to sniff out “impurities,” they don’t stop.

John was Dad’s favorite son-in-law. He had always told me that. How could Dad have been so cruel? Maybe there were just too many people treating Dad like a prophet. Maybe he had just gotten too used to always being in the spotlight, a hush falling on any gathering when he spoke.

When L’Abri banned John Sandri from teaching, they asked if he would stay on nevertheless and help run the work! The smallness of our village, with John living a few hundred yards from the other L’Abri chalets, made his banning doubly absurd. Since John had the best (in fact the only) day-to-day knowledge of everything from residency permits to taxes, from the tricky water heater in some chalet to who in the village could fix a rotting roof, and since he did
all
L’Abri’s complex international financial, tax, and insurance work, he was irreplaceable. And since John, unlike Dad at that point, didn’t take himself too seriously, he volunteered to help out, rather than let The Work collapse under the weight of an absurd theological fight.

It was a lesson I never forgot. To me, John’s selfless actions came to represent what faith looks like when lived, as opposed to what theological “purity” looks like. And one reason I still bother to struggle to have faith is because of John Sandri’s example. He truly returned good for evil.

My sister Priscilla remembers her husband’s mistreatment in a kinder, gentler light. I don’t think she can bear having to choose between her husband and our father’s memory, so she puts the rosiest spin on these events possible. And in a way, her lack of bitterness—even perhaps her state of denial—is as inspiring as John’s forgiveness of those who wronged him.

Priscilla writes:

Dad did change his emphasis in his later years. His books had been published and he spent more and more time in the United States lecturing and going back into the U.S. “church world.” His burden became caring for where the evangelical churches were heading. It was at this time that he got cancer, meaning even more absences from Huémoz. What I missed was the one-to-one involvement with our students, his discussions with nonreligious language. I was sad but it didn’t affect me personally, as working in Swiss L’Abri the workers here were going on in the old involvement of one-to-one discussions with the students, as we still do today. Of course when he would return for short stays in Huémoz, Dad would carry on Saturday night discussions in the chapel and preach on Sunday mornings, but it couldn’t be the same as before.

My husband John and Dad did have some theological differences about the wording of Christ’s place in the Trinity. They discussed for hours. Dad was distressed since he was so fond of John. But finally after tears over the situation, Dad realized that although John wasn’t heretical, the way he expressed himself was misleading. Actually, it took me longer to understand John’s position but over the years, as I’ve listened to John’s New Testament teaching I’ve become more and more excited by it and do understand what he is really saying.

I
was not getting rich off the film productions, let alone the seminars. I never paid myself more than $39,000 a year from my Gospel Films budget or, later, from Schaeffer V Productions and, for most of the time, earned less than that. (Even back then, that wasn’t much.) And I didn’t milk the “perks.” But soon I was earning a lot more, when I started to get book royalties from my evangelical books, several hundreds of thousands of dollars a year for a few years, that I invested very badly and more or less threw away. (My father and mother gave half their royalties to L’Abri and then gave away an additional ten percent of what they kept on top of that. Even so, they suddenly had plenty of money.)

But besides the pro-life cause—in which I sincerely believed—it was never about the money anyway. It was about self-righteousness, adrenaline, and power. Nevertheless, I was starting to get tired of the whole thing.

Jim Buchfuehrer writes:

The Francis Schaeffer of the Uffizi, who hiked with me and told me that he had doubts about many things, even God, gradually disappeared, and the absolutist defender-of-the-Bible and father-of-the-religious-right took his place. The young painter I had been was gone, too. And even the young idealistic pro-life activist was fading away, to be replaced by a pain-in-the-ass upstart earning great book royalties and speaking fees from hanging onto his father’s coattails and shrilly denouncing “secular America” and the evils of liberals.

I was turning our cause into a solid profession.
Roe v. Wade
turned out to be my personal lucky break.

Most absurd of all, I really knew
nothing
about the real America. I might as well have been raised on Mars. My ignorance went far beyond not knowing to stop for school buses! Once I moved to the States, I gradually came to realize that my version of “America” had come from others: first, from my parents’ jaundiced view of the country they left in 1947 (it was being “taken over by theological liberalism”); second, from the political battles we were plunged into. I had no context, no sense of proportion, no hands-on experience.

As I became a more and more successful “professional Christian,” I began to sense the depth of my ignorance about
the country I was talking about. On the road, I’d be parroting the party line, saying that America was godless and doomed. But the America I was
actually experiencing
(for the first time as a resident) was not doomed. It was more complicated and wonderful than I had ever imagined. I began to get the feeling that maybe I was on the wrong side.

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 a hard time finding work in any job where hearing voices is not a requirement.

Dad and I were sitting in Falwell’s study just after Dad spoke at Jerry’s church. (Later I preached there, too, endorsed Falwell, and also gave a talk to the whole student body at Falwell’s college.) Out of the blue, Jerry brought up the gay issue. Dad said something about it being complicated, and Jerry replied: “If I had a dog that did what they do, I’d shoot him!”

The offhand remark came from nowhere. Jerry wasn’t smiling. He was serious and just tossed his hatred out there the way gang members throw down hand signals. Dad looked nonplussed but didn’t say anything, though later he growled, “That man is really disgusting.” Later still, Dad commented: “You can be cobelligerents, but you don’t have to be allies.”

Dad, Jim Buchfuehrer, and I were with Pat Robertson in a secret meeting Pat called to help John Whitehead, Jim, and me set up the Rutherford Institute, a (then new) group that was
going to be the “Christian answer to the ACLU.” I was a founding board member, along with John Whitehead and Jim Buchfuehrer. It was a measure of our absurd paranoia that the meeting was “secret.” (John Whitehead was a lawyer who had the idea to start the new ministry, and he would lead it.)

While the ACLU was suing to keep Christians out of public life, the Rutherford Institute would sue to protect Christians’ rights, or at least the “last vestiges of rights that have not already been stripped away by the secular humanists in the courts.” And the ACLU made our lives easy. We thanked God every time the ACLU sued municipal governments to get crèche scenes off public property, or stopped some school district from allowing prayer before football games, or sued to take some dusty plaque with the Ten Commandments off some obscure statehouse or court building. Our fund-raising (and often the Republicans winning the next election in some locality) depended on the ACLU “outrage” of the day.

Since the ACLU was the Rutherford Institute’s mirror image, depending on us stupid fundamentalists doing stupid things, just as we depended on the stupid actions taken by the sort of lefties who lie awake at night worrying about the “In God We Trust” inscription on coins, life was good for all concerned.

“Standing up to the ACLU” was so popular that several dozen other Christian civil liberties groups were springing up at the same time as Rutherford was founded by John Whitehead, Jim, and myself. America-the-hysterical is a profitable place for shrill activists of all persuasions. In some back room, away from the TV cameras, the busybody do-gooders who ran the ACLU and like-minded organizations, and the busybody do-gooders who I was working with on the religious right, would have understood each other perfectly. We all claimed
that the
only thing
that could stop the loss of “all our rights” was
us!
Just send in your donation today! “
Urgent!
Open this time-sensitive material
right away!”
The sky always had to be falling, otherwise we all—of the paranoid left and delusional religious right—would have been out of a job.

While we were with Pat at those meetings, Dad and I were also going to be on the
700 Club
—again. So after the closed-door meeting ended, Dad, Jim, and I were standing in the green room before the show in a circle of prayer—in other words, squeezing some stranger’s sweaty hands with our heads bowed.

Dad looked about as comfortable as a cat being held over water. The man to my left, a preacher from Kansas City with bad dandruff who claimed that his church had just been “closed down by the IRS for preaching the Word,” called out “Thus sayeth the Lord! We must repent!” And Pat’s producer bellowed, “Yes, Jesus and Amen! And
Aaaamen!”

The preacher from Kansas City had just “interpreted” someone’s “tongues” utterance that had been shouted moments before, something like “
Nagaz, shagaz, spiffy-biffy blabooo!
” In other words, he translated the godly gibberish of the “heavenly language” into English.

We all held hands while people shouted out this and that to God, or whispered heartfelt prayers, until a very cute girl in a tight pink dress opened the door, quiet and prayerful and oozy as Liquid Plumber, and the producer murmured a last “Amen
and Aaaamen!
” and the oozy cute girl whispered, “Pat’s ready, praise the Lord!”

Then we started to shuffle for the door. But we tried to act polite because even though we all wanted to get down the hall first to see Pat, so we could get a couple of seconds of his undivided attention and make sure he put in a good plug for
whatever we were hawking that day—the point is, you want Pat to tell the director to cut to a close-up of your book when he holds it up—we didn’t want to look like we were
too
pushy, because of all that stuff in scripture about being meek that we were still supposed to believe.

Pat had a private makeup suite that he shared with the
700 Club
’s other star, old Ben Kinchlow, the friendly sidekick. They liked frozen air. You could see your breath in Pat and Ben’s makeup suite. Pat was sitting in a big old-fashioned barber chair with his makeup and hair girls fussing around him, doing last-minute touch-ups.