Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back by Frank Schaeffer

From the Publisher

Frank Schaeffer grew up in Switzerland's L'Abri, an idealistic community founded by his parents, the American evangelicals Francis and Edith Schaeffer. By the time he was 19, his parents had achieved global fame as best-selling authors and speakers, l'Abri had become a mecca for spiritual seekers worldwide — from Barbara Bush to Timothy Leary — and Frank had joined his father on the evangelical circuit. By the age of 23, he had directed two multi-part religious documentaries and had helped instigate the marriage between the American evangelical community and the anti-abortion movement. But as he spoke before thousands in arenas around America, published his own evangelical bestseller, and worked with such figures as Pat Robertson, Jack Kemp, Jerry Falwell, and Dr. James Dobson, Schaeffer felt alienated, precipitating his own crisis of faith and eventually resulting in his departure. Schaeffer has since become a successful secular author. He was reduced to stealing pork chops from the grocery store in LA, rather than take on any more high-paying evangelical speaking gigs. With its up-close portraits of the leading figures of the American evangelical movement, Crazy for God is a uniquely revealing and powerful memoir, which tells its story with empathy, humor, and bite.

The Nation - Jane Smiley

It offers considerable insight into several issues that have bedeviled American life in the past thirty years, and while it isn't scholarly, when taken in conjunction with his other works.it gives us not only a handle on the mess we are in but also quite a few laughs.

Booklist

Sounding a refreshing variation on the I-was-lost-but-now-I'm-found theme, Schaeffer's apology rings true.

Boston Globe

Crazy for God isn't just another James Frey-style memoir of personal dysfunction.It's an alternately hilarious and excruciating look at Schaeffer's life with his Christian missionary parents and after he left their orbit.

Washington Times

A story about the dangers of inauthentic faith.An important book.A cautionary tale about the damaging effects on children whose parents have an excess of spiritual pride.

Christianity Today's Books & Culture

Memoir obviously demands introspection, and Schaeffer doesn't hold back.Schaeffer describes a life that was by turns happy, difficult, idyllic, and completely nuts.He's a world-class storyteller.He can make us laugh, make us wince, and make us really think about things, all at the same time.

Jeff Sharlet - New Statesman

A brilliant book, a portrait of fundamentalism painted in broad strokes with streaks of nuance, the twinned coming-of-age story of Frank and the Christian right. But this story moves in more than one direction: both coming-of-age narratives are pulled against the current by the tragedy of Francis Schaeffer, a man who let his children, biological and ideological, guide him down a path from which he'd spent his whole life struggling to get off.

George Westerlund - Library Journal

Schaeffer (Portofino) shares his personal responses and reactions to his mostly unsupervised upbringing in L'Abri, an idealistic, isolated, intellectual Christian community in Switzerland. This community initially hosted collegians, but with the Sixties and all that came with it, it grew to include people of international significance. Young Schaeffer mixed with them all, despite feeling trapped and rebellious. At times, he was haunted by the thought that he should have pursued his early career success in painting. Nevertheless, and despite his lack of education, Schaeffer became an able speaker and successfully produced Christian films and wrote numerous books. In a reaction that did not come as a surprise, he completely broke from all his avenues of evangelical Christian fame to struggle in the secular world, at one point shoplifting so that he could eat. His attempts in secular film (e.g., Baby on Board, with Judge Reinhold) failed, but he has found some success as a best-selling secular author. This is not just a book about rejecting Christian evangelicalism. It has parallels in secular culture and is an honest read about family life and its challenges. Suitable and recommended for large libraries.

Kirkus Reviews

Interesting glimpses into the burgeoning religious right folded into a deeply personal memoir. After World War II, Schaeffer's evangelical parents founded a mission in Switzerland called L'Abri, where he grew up. A large portion of the narrative is dedicated to those years and his conflicting memories of them. At times the author describes his father as a moody, even abusive man; at other points he speaks of him with great respect and love. He depicts his mother as a juggernaut who wore her piety on her sleeve and indoctrinated the children, yet his devotion to this "sexy saint" borders on oedipal. Likewise, he alternately paints his youth as an idyllic utopia and a period of boiling frustrations. At all times, however, Schaeffer is brutally honest. Pot-smoking, group masturbation, running away from boarding school, even the tricks he played on a mentally handicapped woman who lived at L'Abri-each unflattering incident is related in vivid detail. During the author's young-adult years, his parents became quite well known, and he was solicited to work with his father on the 1974 evangelical documentary series How Then Should We Live? Schaeffer encountered many figures in the increasingly public and political evangelical movement; he offers particularly eye-opening accounts of his personal encounters with the likes of Pat Robertson, James Dobson et al. He became convinced that he did not fit into the evangelical mold and in fact had simply been living and speaking about matters in which he had been steeped since birth but basically never truly believed. His break from the movement and what followed in his life comprise the final chapters. Candid, sometimes angry and clearly cathartic for theauthor. Agent: Jennifer Lyons/Writers House LLC

What People Are Saying

Andre Dubus III
"As a lifelong liberal democrat, it's a pleasure for me to see Frank Schaeffer turn his back on the extreme religious right here, but it is a far deeper pleasure to go where this painstakingly honest and courageous memoir really takes us, into a finely nuanced exploration of how easy it is to lose one's way and how difficult it is to find one's true direction home. We are fortunate that Frank Schaeffer's path has taken him from the rigid fundamentalist thinking of his youth to where he is now, working not in stark black and white, but in the blessed gray from which true art arises. Crazy for God is a brave and important book."--(Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog)

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