What began to bother me was that so many of our new “friends” on the religious right seemed to be rooting for one form of apocalypse or another. In the crudest form, this was part of the evangelical fascination with the so-called end times. The worse things got, the sooner Jesus would come back. But there was another component: the worse everything got, the more it proved that America needed saving, by
us
!
Long before Ralph Reed and his ilk came on the scene, Dad got sick of “these idiots,” as he often called people like Dobson in private. They were “plastic,” Dad said, and “power-hungry.” They were “Way too right-wing, really nuts!” and “They’re using our issue to build their empires.”
To our lasting discredit, Dad and I didn’t go public with our real opinions of the religious-right leaders we were in bed with. We believed there was too much at stake, both personally, as we caught the power-trip disease, and politically, as we got carried away by the needs of the pro-life movement. And however conflicted Dad and I were, like the other religious-right leaders, we were on an ego-stroking roll. We kept our mouths shut.
50
G
enie and I lived in Switzerland throughout the productions of
How Should We Then Live?
and
Whatever Happened to the Human Race?
We had traveled together with the children on the shoots and seminar tours. Then I became a sought-after speaker on the evangelical circuit. This put me on the road when the children could not travel: They were in school. I missed Jessica and Francis’s growing up in horrible chunks of time that left me feeling as if I was being hollowed out.
Genie and I wanted to be together. The only way we could was for me to quit what I was doing or to move to America.
The year before we moved, I was on the road for six months. By then, I was capitalizing on my connections by representing other evangelical authors as well as my parents. I had twenty or so authors I was representing, including John Whitehead (founder of the Rutherford Institute), Dr. Koop, Mary Pride (who more or less became the leading guru of the evangelical homeschool movement), and my sister Susan, who by then was writing books on education. And, of course, I was always meeting with Gospel Films and my partner Jim Buchfuehrer and our donors.
There were other reasons for our wanting to leave Switzerland and the L’Abri community. Genie and I were no longer
L’Abri workers, but we were very much still in the center of things. We lived only a mile away from L’Abri, and all my family was in the work. (We also had one L’Abri chalet next door, where Debby and Udo were.)
My sisters and brothers-in-law were dividing into enemy camps. John Sandri and Priscilla were easy-going libertarians with a more liberal view. Udo and Debby were stricter when it came to maintaining the traditions of L’Abri as established by my parents. Ranald was our hard-line Calvinist.
My sisters and brothers-in-law were lovely taken individually; but when the families mixed, they were increasingly toxic to each other. Ranald used to make remarks about Udo and his “Germanic attitude.” Udo would talk about Ranald’s “rigid sense of British superiority.” Ranald felt that the secular books and movies Debby and Udo loved, read, watched, and talked about were “dangerous.” To Udo and Debby, Susan and Ranald were “unbearably pietistic.” Everyone found Ranald’s Calvinism harsh. John Sandri never said much unpleasant about anyone, but he was not about to give up his biblical literary studies to suit the more conservative theology of his brothers-in-law.
“They just don’t like each other,” Genie would say. “Why
do
they have to drag God into it?”
At first, Genie and I talked about moving to California (in view of my movie ambitions), but Genie had had enough of that life, at least as she remembered it, and told me that she didn’t want to raise her family “in all the craziness and materialism.”
At our family reunion in 1979, and after a particularly bitter fight between Udo and Ranald, Genie and I happened to be reading the
International Herald Tribune
and saw an ad for a seven-acre farm in Plaistow, New Hampshire, about an hour from Boston. (We had liked the Boston area when we visited
during several of our seminars and during the movie shoot at the Museum of Fine Arts for
How Should We Then Live?
)
We had twelve family reunions before my dad died in 1984. The clan always checked into the Hotel Bonivard in Montreux, where Ranald, Sue, Priscilla, John, Debby, Udo, Mom, Dad, Genie, I, and all our children gathered for three days of walks, meals, train and boat rides, and loud discussions that turned into fights. The L’Abri workers and members resented these reunions, since it was clear that it was our family, not the other L’Abri workers and members, who were really calling the shots in L’Abri. The workers suspected (rightly) that they got talked about in our closed and exclusive get-together.
Mom paid for the reunions from her book royalties. At our reunions, we supposedly gathered to experience the family “togetherness” Mom wrote about in her best-selling books like
What Is a Family?
where she held up the Schaeffer clan as an example to evangelical mothers everywhere. She even used group pictures of our reunion on several book covers. (Anyone looking closely would have seen a lot of clenched jaws!)
By the second day of the reunion, my brothers-in-law would barely be speaking to each other. But the little cousins had a great time. Mom would buy the girls matching outfits, and we all got a T-shirt she designed each year with the date and family reunion number on it.
On the next trip to the States, I asked Jim Buchfuehrer to pick me up in a rental car in Boston. (We were on a fundraising tour.) We drove up to Plaistow. The farmhouse was too close to the road, and there were problems with the building. But as we were driving south, we happened on Newburyport, Massachusetts. On the way through town, we stopped at a realtor’s office. The realtor talked Jim and me into staying at a
local bed-and-breakfast for the night. Then she drove us out to the Plum Island nature reserve the next morning.
We walked on the little winding boardwalks over the rolling dunes and watched the waves crashing on the long wide empty beach. Later we strolled around the newly renovated eighteenth-century center of Newburyport. (It reminded me of Lindfield, the village near Great Walstead.) I felt at home. And Genie liked the pictures of a certain old house I brought back. . . .
In July 1980, when Genie, the children, and I moved, it was a shock. We left our perfectly renovated beautiful little “Chalet Regina” for a big old tumbledown brick house on the banks of the Merrimack River. We had left L’Abri; but now that we were actually on our own, we missed the family. And I felt very shaky. My self-confidence seemed to evaporate. Could I really make it on my own? We left cool summer nights for the heat of an East Coast summer, the freedom to lie in a hayfield looking at the moon rising over the Dents Du Midi for mosquitoes that had us running from the house to the car, from walk-anywhere-woods to a poison ivy-bordered marsh. I spent a lot of time muttering “What the fuck have I done?”
Genie grew up in San Mateo, but I’d never lived in America, applied for a driver’s license, shopped in a supermarket, gotten a building permit, or stopped for a school bus. (I had always been a privileged visitor, whisked by taxi or limo, planes, production managers, and hosts to one place after another. Hotels were “home” when in America.)
In Europe, children are expected to look both ways all by themselves before crossing a street. The first time I saw a school bus stopped, lights flashing, I just zoomed past, nearly ran down several children, and heard the driver honk furiously
and the shouts of the angry children: “You’re supposed to stop!” I asked Genie what the hell all that was about, and she explained that in America when a child gets off a bus, the world stops.
I liked being in a country where if you ordered a phone it was installed a day later, not three months after your name was put on the state-run phone company waiting list. But when we started renovating our 1835 home, began to turn it into a single-family house from one divided into two seedy apartments, I discovered that there is an advantage to having some things bureaucratically regulated.
In Switzerland a carpenter, electrician, mason, or plumber is actually a carpenter, electrician, mason, or plumber. They can’t work unless they have passed the
maîtrise fédérale
exam, following a lengthy apprenticeship. Carpenters in Switzerland were as skilled as the best American cabinetmakers. They used no prefabricated doors, windows, or kitchen cabinets. Everything was built to order. And the work was done perfectly. The building codes were enforced by the builders themselves. All the bids for a job were made by local men who had spent their youth training for that work and rightly regarded their trades as a high professions, right up there in respectability with being a lawyer or doctor.
Our first American “contractor” went bankrupt in the middle of renovating our attic into a new bedroom and bathroom. He failed to pay his subcontractors, who then came after me. I was running around showing them canceled checks to prove that I’d been paying all along. That was after the contractor got in his pickup and headed for Florida.
Genie was pregnant with John when we moved. We thought electric fans would be enough to keep us cool in one of the
hottest, most humid summers on record. We went looking for a pro-life doctor to take care of Genie and deliver the baby. We couldn’t find food we liked in the supermarket, and the bread was horrible. Humidity-sodden hunks of plaster were falling from the old cracked ceilings in the heat. There was no screen porch—we added one later—and we huddled inside around the fans. Jessica, age ten, Francis, seven, and I worked outside slathered in Off, clearing sumac and poison ivy from enough of the front yard so we could start to get the garden back to where it had been in 1960, when the owners had moved out and began renting the property.
John was born. Gradually our new house became home. We learned that if we cut the grass short, cleaned up our yard, and avoided being outside at dawn and dusk, the garden was lovely. We discovered that if you looked around, there were very good builders and tradesmen in our area, like Gerry the plumber; Rick, our carpenter; and Don, our electrician, who were skilled and conscientious and became our friends. Then, much to our joy, Bill and Jane opened Annarosa’s Bakery in Newburyport, the best bakery in America, maybe in the world. And we bought air conditioners. And the tours that used to take me away from Switzerland for weeks could be broken down into mostly overnight trips now.
The children had a hard time adjusting from the excellent Swiss school system to the small inept private school we put them in. And a year later, when we enrolled Jessica in a swanky local private middle school, she still had a tough time. The Swiss children were just that, children, unconcerned by fashion. Jessica didn’t have the “right” shoes; she had the “wrong” slacks and tops.
We still traveled back to Switzerland once a year for our
ritualistic family reunions. The fights got worse each year. At the last reunion, Dad yelled at Mom because it was our twelfth reunion and her T-shirt design that year was a clock with the hands pointing to two minutes to midnight. Dad was dying of cancer and hated that image.
“Why did you make this fool thing?” he yelled. “That’s nice, two minutes to midnight!
Just
what I want, some omen that I’m dying and won’t make next year’s reunion!”
Dad didn’t make it.
51
T
he influence of the right-wing fundamentalists we were working with rubbed off on us. I wrote several more liberal-bashing books about American “decline.” Dad also moved to the right, or should I say back to his fundamentalist roots. His new, harsher persona even bled back into L’Abri and the heart of our family.
From the mid-1970s until he died, Dad was drafted (from time to time) by the Missouri Synod Lutherans, Southern Baptists, and other conservative denominations as a kind of intellectual heavy gun-for-hire. They were fighting their own updated versions of the 1920s antimodernist battles. The fight was against a new crop of “liberal” theologians who were “infiltrating” heretofore solidly conservative denominations and seminaries. These theologians were not fundamentalist enough. They were not strong enough on the issue of the inerrancy of the Bible or were “weak” on our social issues, like abortion—or, even worse, were prepared to
compromise
with people even more liberal than themselves. (“Inerrancy” was the belief that the Bible is literally true with no errors of fact in it, even when it seems to be contradicted by science or history or within the text itself.)
Dad, like some old warhorse long absent from battle, jumped into the fight over the inerrancy of scripture. He spent the last
years of his life intermittently shuttling between secret and public meetings where he was used by hard-liners to stiffen the spines of various seminary and denominational boards so they would make the necessary break with their own people and fire “untrustworthy” professors. Dad was telling people to “take back” their denominations before it was “too late.”
Priscilla was aghast that Dad was turning back to his former passion for doctrinal purity and away from his more enlightened views. She told me that the denominational fights that Dad got involved in in the late 1970s reminded her of her traumatic youth in the 1940s and early ’50s, when our family was deeply embroiled in the bitter splits between various fundamentalist groups. Priscilla mourned this return to the “ugly days.” She was very upset and accused me of being “part of this,” because it was my movies and book deals that “got Daddy back into this mess.”
John Sandri, Priscilla’s husband, paid a heavy price for Dad’s rekindled fundamentalist enthusiasms. John had been giving well-attended Bible studies in L’Abri that some of the more strictly Calvinistic L’Abri workers (including Ranald and Udo, who for once agreed on something) said were bordering on “heresy.” John was reading the Bible as a literary work, and not giving it the “correct” theological spin. John was a liberal! The sky was falling! John had compromised!