Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics--And How I Learned to Love Women (31 page)

A few months after Jessica was born, they came to Switzerland, along with Genie’s little brother and sister, Jim and Molly. I was incredibly nervous. I had stolen their daughter away. I had gotten her pregnant. I had “ruined her life.” Anyway, that was how I was sure they saw the matter. Meeting my father-in-law seemed about the worst nightmare I could imagine. But I needn’t have worried.

Whatever they were really thinking, Stan and Betty Walsh could not have acted more loving. Genie’s mom was a trim, handsome, down-to-earth woman who never mentioned her distinguished blueblood family history. She was the opposite of my mother in almost every way. Betty wanted to avoid fuss, and the last person she ever wanted to talk about was herself. (One of Betty’s ancestors,
as I said before, had been a signatory to the United States Constitution, another was the first marshal of Arkansas. Betty steadfastly refused to join groups like the Daughters of the American Revolution. It was years before I could pry any family history out of her.) Stan Walsh was a tall, strong, second-generation Irish-American, self-made rags-to-riches lawyer.

Genie’s parents exuded down-to-earth common sense and calm. I was accepted into their family and began a friendship with Genie’s brothers Tom and Jim, and with Pam (who was already a friend ever since she had walked into the chalet with Genie). And, on that first visit, I met Molly, who was then twelve, and I became close with her even though she was forlorn because her big sister had suddenly disappeared. Remembering how sad I had been when my big sisters got married and were whisked away, I felt a stab of guilty empathy.

A year or two after we were married, my parents moved out of Chalet Les Mélèzes and we all decamped to Chésières, two miles up the road. Mom and Dad had bought Chalet Chardonnet, a big old rambling four-story chalet that had been the home and office of a doctor. (My parents didn’t own Chalet Les Mélèzes, L’Abri did, so Chalet Chardonnet was the first house they ever owned.)

There was plenty of room for them on the top three floors and a big apartment for Genie, Jessica, soon-to-be Francis, and me on the basement floor that had been the doctor’s offices. At about that time, L’Abri also bought the chalet next door to my parent’s new home, and Debby and Udo moved in with about twenty students.

Soon after that, Genie and I borrowed money from my father and bought a barn that sat between his chalet and the new L’Abri house. Over the next few years, Genie and I fixed it up into a wonderful little gem—“Chalet Regina.” We moved in after we had been married for about six years.

L’Abri was growing. And I was more and more aware that my life was being defined by my parents’ choices. I was very grateful for their kindness to Genie and me, but also conscious that I was like some asteroid caught in the orbit of a giant planet. I had several fights with my mother, accusing her of folding her children into her ministry by using us as an illustration in her talks and books and by “volunteering” us to be raised in a small weird community after inviting a horde to invade our home.

“Did you ever
ask
us if we wanted to be part of this?” I said more than once.

Mom never had an answer, other than to claim that the Lord had led Dad and her. That always seemed to excuse everything.

Genie and I took several trips to see her parents. It was such a relief to visit the Walsh family. They were blessedly ordinary, liberal-leaning Democrat-voting Roman Catholics.

Unlike my family, the Walsh children seemed to have lives independent of their father and mother. Genie’s mother seemed pleased when her children made their own ways. The frantic talk about the Lord’s leading, or the “direction of the work,” and the constant wrangling and positioning between family members over what amounted to the family business—L’Abri—was absent. And my admiration for Genie’s sensible family was one of the reasons that I began wondering if the ideas I’d grown up with were really the only good ideas to live by. The Walsh clan didn’t believe what we believed, and yet they seemed to be doing just fine.

W
hen Billy Zeoli, the president of Gospel Films, came to L’Abri in 1972 (or thereabouts), L’Abri was known for its defense of the “inerrancy of scripture” in a minor way, its appreciation of art in a major way, its ability to give answers to Big Questions, its penchant for connecting the dots of popular culture and explaining the failures of modernism and the triumph of the gospel. Dad was holding forth on issues such as the hippie movement’s inability to realize its promise or to provide an alternative social and moral model because “While their analysis of the problem of our plastic society was right, they had no answer.” Dad also spoke prophetically: “You wait,” he said; “the hippies are going to wind up more middle-class, bourgeois, and materialistic than their parents.”

Dad would often say “The next generation will follow anyone who will promise personal peace and affluence. If they are asked to make a choice between freedom and security they’ll choose security. It will be the new fascism.”

Billy Zeoli was a heavyset, swarthy, handsome fast-talking man with a strong chin. He was charming and generous in a godfather-wanna-be way. And Billy paid top dollar (actually top franc) and didn’t seem to care what he bought, just as long
as I noticed how fat the wad of cash was that he pulled out when he came to my studio to buy a painting.

Billy and I got to talking. In a series of conversations over the next few weeks, we cooked up the idea that Dad should take his lectures about art and philosophy and make a documentary series to answer the BBC-produced series by Lord Kenneth Clark—
Civilization
—and another called
The Ascent of Man
narrated by Jacob Bronowski.

Lord Clark’s “secular humanist” series portrayed the Renaissance as a triumph of Reason over Christian medieval superstition. Bronowski’s was about evolution. Both were smooth, well-made BBC productions. From Dad’s point of view, they were belittling evangelical faith.

In a series of lectures, Dad strapped on his armor and defended Christ against the BBC and Christendom against modernism. Dad’s argument was something like this: The art of the Renaissance was beautiful, but gradually religious meaning had been stripped away. All that was left was the hubris of humanism shaking its fist in the face of God. Conversely, the golden age of Dutch seventeenth-century painting proved that you could produce a brilliantly lovely Protestant Reformed alternative to proud Renaissance humanism. Great art could be created but be about a Christ-centered worldview, where the simple and beautiful was exalted as a way of pointing back to the Creator who gave everything, even the smallest daily chores and activities—say, in a Dutch household as portrayed by Vermeer—transcendent meaning.

Dad said there was a “line of despair” that separated modern secular man from all who came before. Moreover, the fruits of Christianity created the rule of law and human rights as we now understood them. For all the talk about the so-called
Dark Ages and the evils of Christendom, from the Spanish Inquisition to the burning of witches in Salem, to the slave trade, the twentieth century—a virtual textbook experiment in godlessness—was the most inhuman and bloody of all centuries. So, Dad argued, before secularists glibly critiqued religious and especially Christian culture, perhaps they should take time to explain Marx, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, not to mention the Gulag and Auschwitz.

On a good day, the social and political results of secularism made the horrors of Christendom look like a Sunday-school picnic, Dad said. And, unlike secularism, Christian culture had a self-correcting impulse. For instance, it was Wilberforce (and other evangelicals like him) who had fought to free the slaves. And it was the Common Law of Christian England that was the basis of our Western, especially our American, freedoms we now took for granted.

My father taught that if the idea of biblical God-given absolutes was abandoned, there would be a real question as to where a new morality would come from. Since humankind did not like chaos, Dad warned, either we would turn to authoritarian systems (some sort of technocratic elite), or we would be ruled by the “tyranny of the majority, with no way to challenge the popular will, nothing higher to appeal to.”

Billy Zeoli heard Dad’s lectures. And like many evangelicals who visited, he loved the fact that my father was arguing intelligently for biblical Christianity and pushing back against what seemed like an unstoppable secular tide. The evangelicals also loved the fact that Dad, somewhat like author C. S. Lewis, was a kind of proof that we evangelicals weren’t as dumb as the secularists said we were. (The irony was that Lewis and my father were not “evangelicals” in the American sense of the word.
Lewis was an Anglo-Catholic; and Dad liked art better than theology and people better than rules and was most comfortable in a room full of hippies.)

“Others must hear this message!” said Billy. “We’re losing our young people!” Nice kids from good Christian homes would go to college and pretty soon they were questioning everything. All their born-again parents could do was wring their hands and quote Bible verses at kids who came home from school no longer believing in the concept of absolute truth, let alone that the Bible was literally “the answer” and accurate in every detail.

Confused evangelical parents confronted by this “generation gap” had no answers for the art student seduced by Pop Art or the philosophy student reading Camus. And what could be done for the biology student studying evolution, or, worse, the student of English literature whose politics was moving to the left as she marched in anti-Vietnam War demonstrations? Christ was being driven out of our young people’s lives by clever intellectuals bent on stripping faith away and replacing it with nothing at all!

One man had the answers. And while American evangelical parents didn’t care to visit Florence, let alone listen to the music of Bob Dylan or subscribe to
The BBC Listener,
Francis Schaeffer did. And he was so sincere and so good at answering “the kids,” especially those who had been “turned off” by their bourgeois middle-class parents.

Evangelical leaders came to L’Abri so Dad could teach them how to inoculate Johnny and Susie born-again against the hedonistic out-of-control culture that had Johnny’s older brother on drugs and Susie’s older sister marching on the capital. The evangelical elite didn’t stay in the dorms but rented
big chalets, as did Billy Zeoli and many others, including Lane Dennis. Lane was the publisher and editor at Crossway Books. In the case of Lane Dennis, he also came to woo two of the hottest evangelical authors, and to inspire a third to begin to write: me.

Lane was a kind and honest man. We all liked him, and soon Mom and Dad gave Lane their new books to publish. Actually, I did. I was acting as their agent. (Several years later, on the strength of the Schaeffer books sales, Crossway went from being an obscure mom-and-pop tract-printing company to one of the major evangelical publishers.)

L’Abri had prided itself on doing the Lord’s work in the Lord’s way. Dad and Mom were very critical of the fund-raising methods of the Billy Grahams, Billy Zeolis, and other high-powered evangelicals who didn’t really “live by faith” but who used “slick worldly methods.” How could “these people” prove the existence of God when clearly their ministries were the product of clever fund-raising? “Those American Christians” were all just too commercial, too worldly.

Until Billy Zeoli showed up, Dad, with his preference for the small-is-beautiful hippie ethos, with its love of all things organic and natural as opposed to planned and businesslike, had avoided the temptation to capitalize on his growing fame. He was to the evangelicals of the late sixties and early seventies what the Grateful Dead were to Deadheads, an eccentric all the more attractive because he was on the cusp of going big-time but refused to take that last step. His work, Dad felt, would lose its meaning if he “sold out.”

But Dad and Billy Zeoli had a special bond that helped overcome Dad’s resistance to Billy’s idea that he take his message to a wider audience: Billy was the son of Anthony Zeoli,
a first-generation Italian-American old-time evangelist who had happened to be holding a tent revival in Philadelphia half a century before Billy came to L’Abri. Dad had walked into Zeoli senior’s tent revival when he was seventeen. He heard Anthony Zeoli preach and discovered that there were other people out there also convinced that the Bible was the answer.

So there was an unlikely yet special connection between Dad, the self-effacing hippie guru, and Billy Zeoli, the leisure-suited, luxury-car-renting big spender from Gospel Films. There was something else, too: Billy offered to help me.

Billy saw me as a lost shadow on the edges of L’Abri, a dropout child who’d gotten some hippie princess from San Francisco pregnant—and who did “nothing more” than paint. After spotting several 16-mm and Super-8 cameras in my studio, Billy discovered that I wanted to realize a star-struck dream of making movies. And Dad wanted to help his son. And I was ambitious. I wanted to make films, real movies, movies like my idol Fellini was making. But how could I get from here to there? Billy offered me what seemed like a way.

What is sad to me now (in a maudlin, self-pitying way) is that some of my paintings were good. And they were getting better. If I’d had the discipline to concentrate on my art and had found a way of distancing myself from the evangelical community (and the easy money it soon offered), I might have gotten somewhere. In fact, I
was
getting somewhere in New York, Geneva (Aubonne), and London.

But I was also broke. And Genie was pregnant with our second child. I also happened to sincerely believe in my father’s message, though “believe” is perhaps the wrong word. Rather, I had not yet begun to question my indoctrination.

But once we all swallowed hard and decided to work with
Billy Zeoli, it was “clear” that with all those people being deluded by The World into falling away from Christ, that the “L’Abri way,” the small-is-beautiful way, had to be replaced so we could “reach out to this lost generation” before it was “too late.” And Billy with his multimillion dollar backing from the Amway Corporation and its far-right founder-capitalist-guru, Rich DeVos, was about as slick and worldly and far away from the L’Abri way as anyone could get.