Crazy for God (39 page)

After the song, the wife, still dressed in her Miss Piggy outfit, took off her foam rubber trotters and pulled out hand puppets and did a little routine where Miss Piggy (the hand-puppet version) met Cookie Monster hand puppet. The two Miss Piggys—puppet
and
costumed youth-pastor-wife—shared the gospel with Cookie Monster and told him that “love waits” and to
wait
until he was married before “making any li’l Muppets, cuz love isn’t a contact sport, sweetie!”

The full-size-Kermit-youth-minister (standing off to one side) was an accomplished ventriloquist and was doing Cookie Monster’s voice. Then Kermit accepted Jesus Christ as his very own personal Savior and put on a “chastity ring,” after which Kermit said how it was so wonderful that Cookie Monster was now “written up in the Muppet Book of Life.”

My children remember my life on the road a bit differently. They had more fun than I did. Jessica writes:

Every moment I spent with our “cobelligerents”—as Dad was now calling the mob of groupies, Muppets, and other evangelical leaders we were in bed with—was sinking me deeper into a mixture of self-loathing and despair. Genie bore the brunt, as did Jessica and Francis. (Soon after John was born, I made my jailbreak, so he had a better time.) I always came back off the road wound-up and angry. I started to despise the people thronging my meetings, and to despise myself for despising them.

I was also planning an escape. My plan was to jump from making evangelical documentaries to directing Hollywood features. From time to time, I would sneak off to Hollywood and have meetings with anyone who would talk to me.

The tension in my life between who I saw myself as, and who I
was
as others saw me—and what I was really doing, no matter how I tried to fool myself—was becoming unbearable. I was working in America, talking about America, living in America but was really a half-assed semi-European just beginning to learn about the real America.

Why anyone listened to me remains a mystery. Maybe it was testimony to the respect my father was held in, maybe something to do with the fact that I was a good speaker, and also perhaps to do with the desperation of the evangelical community, which will latch on to anyone remotely intelligent and follow them, at least for a while.

There were three kinds of evangelical leaders. The dumb or idealistic ones who really believed. The out-and-out charlatans. And the smart ones who still believed—sort of—but knew that the evangelical world was shit, but who couldn’t figure out any way to earn as good a living anywhere else. I was turning into one of those, having started out in the idealistic category.

I remember a day that my predicament become clearer. I was in the Southern California studios of the Trinity Broadcasting Network (TBN). I had just been on their annual telethon. Then I did Dobson’s program
Focus on the Family
(yet again) via a phone interview between setups for the TBN telethon. I’d suffered through several hours of on-air fundraising along with some sleazy gospel trio and the flagrantly flaky (and apparently embalmed) hosts. We’d been hanging around their set for what seemed like a lifetime. (It looked like something Donald Trump’s decorator might have rejected as too tastelessly garish.) The thrust of the TBN show (and also Dobson’s “phoner”) was that we needed to save America from
decadence, corruption, and evil. The examples of all this “evil” included sweeping generalizations about public schools, the media, movies, the arts in general, and the gays. I came home to raving.

“If we win, the first person they’ll put against the wall and shoot will be me!” I yelled at Genie.

“Then why are you doing this?” asked Genie.

“I’m fucking
stuck!
How are we supposed to earn our living if I quit? I’ve never even been to college! I don’t know how to do
anything!
”

“What about going back to painting?”

“How will we live?”

“You’ll have shows.”

“It isn’t that simple. I’ve let all my contacts go cold. And anyway, I wasn’t even making that much. We’re stuck!”

“We can live more simply.”

“I just don’t know how to get out!” I screamed.

Genie saved me. I didn’t know it, but what she said next was my door back to sanity.

“Why don’t you just quit and write a novel, you know, tell all those stories you tell the children about your vacations in Italy, something like that?”

I didn’t act on Genie’s advice right away.

W
here we had once had art festivals, the evangelicals we were “part of” wanted to ban books. Where we inhaled Altman and Bergman, they wanted to protect their children from “filthy movies” and stop their teens from seeing anything R-rated at all!

Where homeschooling had meant freedom for me—albeit chaotic, crazy freedom—homeschool leaders like Mary Pride (whose books I got published and who owed me her platform) were pushing homeschooling as a means to isolate and brain-wash a generation of children.

The evangelical homeschool movement was becoming profoundly anti-American. And Dad and I had done our part to empower them. The biggest laugh of all was that my home “school” experience was held up by some as proof that homeschooling was a great thing! Edith Schaeffer had homeschooled the great pro-life firebrand Franky, so this
must
work!

The Evangelical homeschool leaders were doing all they could to undermine the credibility of the public school system. The public schools taught sex education! The public schools taught evolution! The public schools had no values! In fact, you were a bad parent if you
didn’t
homeschool, or at least send your child to a “Christian school.”

The idea of public space, the ideas that led to the building of my father’s and my favorite places, for instance all those civic works in Florence and the piazzas we so happily strolled, was the very idea that the evangelical homeschool movement unwittingly wanted to destroy. They wanted no public spaces (physical or intellectual) to be shared by people of all beliefs. They wanted only
private spaces,
where they could indoctrinate their children free from “interference.”

Of course, many parents were also driven to find all sorts of solutions for educating their children in the face of a very broken public school system that in places was so minimal, unimaginative, and awful that putting a child in a public school amounted to abuse. (One only has to read the post- 1960s statistics on the drastic decline of classical music record sales in America to see that something has gone terribly wrong with public “education.”) The problem with the evangelical homeschool movement was not their desire to educate their children at home, or in private religious schools, but the evangelical impulse to “protect” children from ideas that might lead them to “question” and to keep them cloistered in what amounted to a series of one-family gated communities.

There were many parents I knew (including many evangelicals) who were homeschooling who used their daily contact with their children to expand, not diminish, their children’s exposure to the bigger world. That said, by the 1970s the evangelicals as a whole had come up with an alternate “gated” America: “Christian” education, radio, rock, makeup, publishing, schools, home-schools, weight loss, sex manuals, and politics. It wasn’t about
being
something but about
not
being secular, about
not
having nudity, sex, or four-letter words. What it was
for,
no one knew.

What was so strange was how evangelicals learned to use all
those worldly tools that their fundamentalist grandparents stood against and that, as a child, I was forbidden from even knowing about. They were now using rock, TV, and movies to construct an alternate reality. But they were using these “worldly tools” in a way that was odd: it was not to involve themselves with their culture and learn from it, but to hide from other Americans and create private space.

Mom may have banned “jazzy music” when I was little, but our bookshelves were full of real books. I was never warned away from reading anything I wanted (except from schmaltzy Disney crap). A good book was a good book, and so what if Mark Twain didn’t like Jesus? Twain was still a good writer. I was never protected from the wrong people either. L’Abri
welcomed
the wrong people. Mom and Dad’s idea of the Christian life was
not
to retreat behind high walls.

I was getting queasy. I had gone from wanting to be an artist and movie director, to helping empower the types of people who would burn my paintings if they ever saw them. Some of them were even planning to stone some of my friends to death—
literally.

At a second secret strategy meeting (also related to founding the Rutherford Institute), Pat Robertson told us proudly about burning a reproduction of a nude by Modigliani that he used to have over his fireplace. He said that as soon as he got saved, he’d taken it down.

As Pat told us his art-burning story with many a shiver, as if he was confessing to have once been a mass murderer before he “met Jesus,” Dad squirmed. I stared in his direction, but he wouldn’t meet my eyes. My father loved Modigliani, and sometimes talked about how Modigliani “retained the human” in his art, in contrast to Marcel Duchamp. (I had often seen Dad’s Modigliani art book open on his chaise longue.)

At that meeting there was also a character named Gary North in attendance, one of the twilight-zone religious-right strategists I’d run into once in a while on the road, someone Dad felt was a nutty gold-standard fruitcake. North was a leading Theonomist in the so-called Reconstruction Movement, led by Rousas Rushdoony, who happened to be North’s father-in-law.

The Theonomists—otherwise known as Dominionists; in other words, people who believed in taking “dominion” over society and the world in the name of Jesus—believed in restoring American law to its strictest Puritan origins. They wanted to make America into a modern-day Calvin’s Reformation Geneva. They were our version of the Taliban. They were antitax, antigovernment libertarians (when it came to economics), but on social issues were working to replace secular law with Old Testament biblical law.

The Reconstructionists were releasing a steady stream of position papers, books, and magazines and holding conferences all over the country. They had a national following that included Howard Ahmanson (heir of the Home Savings bank fortune) who would later help bankroll the “Intelligent Design” movement.

John Calvin, Oliver Cromwell, and the nastier Old Testament prophets were the Reconstructionists’ heroes. And according to the law in John Calvin’s Reformation Geneva, women pregnant out of wedlock were to be drowned along with their unborn babies, and of course homosexuals were to be killed and heretics burned at the stake.

Dad regarded Rushdoony as clinically insane. And Rushdoony’s program, if realized, would have included the execution of homosexuals and adulterers.

Dad never had liked John Calvin. In fact when L’Abri
became more formal and added a study center where students could listen to taped lectures, Dad named it “Farel House” after the French/Swiss Reformer Guillaume Farel, who was principally responsible for bringing the Reformation to the French-speaking part of Switzerland. As Dad always said, “Some people wanted to call it ‘Calvin House,’ but Calvin was too harsh. I like Farel better. He was gentler and less reformed than Calvin theologically.”

The Theonomists, Reconstructionists, and Dominionists were the theocratic/authoritarian-party-in-waiting of American Christendom. And we Schaeffers were helping them expand their national base, because they were showing up at our events and using some of our books to give their views a little more credibility. And
I
was on the Rutherford Institute board as a founding member, along with Gary North.

We were supposed to be strategizing on how to fund the Rutherford Institute. But that day all North wanted to talk about was buying and hoarding gold as a hedge against the inevitable “complete collapse” that was about to engulf the world economy, that and patterns of radiation distribution from our major cities that would soon—and inevitably—be bombed by the Soviets. (North wrote a book—
Fighting Chance
—advocating the building of backyard bomb shelters, and later he predicted a worldwide catastrophe at the so-called Y2K.)

John Whitehead, who in private life wasn’t such a bad guy—he was a closet Beatles and Who fan and kept posters of works by Edvard Munch in his office—was looking slightly crazed and trying to keep the meeting on track. But Gary North kept quoting his latest study about which Western states we should all buy land in, given the prevailing wind direction from the big cities.

Dad seemed lost in a depressed daze. He had recently been saying privately that the evangelical world was more or less being led by lunatics, psychopaths, and extremists, and agreeing with me that if “our side” ever won, America would be in deep trouble. But by then Dad was dying and knew he had very little time left. There was no time to change his life or his new “friends.”

All I could do was to bitterly regret what I’d gotten him into. I still do.

Dad was rudely shocked by the true state of American “mainstream” evangelicalism. Before Dad got famous in the early 1970s, those evangelicals who came to L’Abri were usually not so typical. They were self-selecting, often the cream of the crop of more open-minded believers. That was also true of schools and churches that had invited Dad and Mom to speak, before my parents became so powerful and before evangelicals got so politicized. For instance, Dad used to speak at the relatively moderate Wheaton College but was never invited to far-right and racist Bob Jones University and would not have gone if he had been invited.