To see ourselves as others see us...

I've just been reading Frank Schaeffer's memoir, 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 (Carrol and Graf, 2007).

Notwithstanding the fact that I appeared after the Schaeffer/L'Abri generation, Francis Schaeffer's writings had a measure of influence on me as a young Christian. Having read Colin Duriez's new biography of Schaeffer, with its reference to this memoir of his son, Franky, I decided to read that too.

Franky Schaeffer grew up under the shadow of Protestant's Pope, as he refers to his father on one page. I was hooked on this memoir from the outset. The story of the influences both of family and of fundamentalism is not just an interesting yarn, but an exercise in self-assessment. Young Schaeffer tells some home truths about Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, James Dobson - and Schaeffer senior, men whose views we can readily absolutise, but who, like the best of men, were only men at best.

I was struck by this observation, which arose out of the (non) arrangements for Francis Schaeffer's funeral in 1984:

There is a good reason we humans take refuge in the collective wisdom accumulated over time as expressed in liturgies and cultural habits of long practice. And the arrogance of the Protestant notion that one's individual whims are equal to all occasions manifests itself in innumerable bad hair moments and in dreadful church services, let alone at innumerable do-it-yourself weddings. But funerals are supposed to be serious. Creativity isn't always good.

I think that is a rebuke to much of our religious individualism. We are saved individually, but not individualistically - we are saved personally in order to belong to the church corporately. We don't absolutise tradition, but we do respect it, and usually our novelties are cases of reinventing wheels that won't work as good as the old ones.

Of course there is a poignancy about a son of Francis Schaeffer rejecting the conservative evangelicalism of his roots, but I think I benefitted from reading his story nonetheless.

And he is an excellent wordsmith. Anyone who can use few words to devastating effect, as when he describes George W. Bush as 'a towering mediocrity', has a way with language that makes him eminently interesting!