Pat still had the paper makeup ruffle tucked around his neck. It made him look like a stripped-down Dutch seventeenth-century pastor in a Rembrandt, only under Pat’s neck ruffle he had on a cashmere tan jacket rather than black robes. And any sober Dutch Reformed pastor would have had Pat burned at the stake as soon as he heard him speaking in tongues, let alone the stream of gibberish he was about to unleash on us.
Pat’s makeup was more or less done. He was ready to share from his heart and dedicate that day’s show to the Lord. Ben was ready, too. His job, on and off the air, was to do his part for Jesus by hanging around and laughing at Pat’s jokes and saying “Yes, Lord” every time Pat said something wise and heartwarming, or even looked like he might.
The first wise and heartwarming thing Pat said to us—with plenty of his trademark goofy giggles and laughs, and his voice going up an octave for emphasis—was “Today the Lord showed me a special sign concerning the spirit of the age!”
“Yes, Jesus!” shouted Ben.
The rest of us nodded and thanked Jesus, too.
Then Pat said, “I went out to my garage this morning, and a
snake was curled up right next to the passenger-side door of my car. So I got a shovel and killed it. Then I go outside to throw its body into the woods, and there’s
another
snake sitting on the path! [Long goofy chuckle.] Well, folks, you need to know that I’ve lived in that house
ten years
and never seen a snake before! I knew the Lord was trying to tell me something!”
Pat chuckled and Ben laughed and we all chuckled, too, and said yes, Jesus. And I tried not to catch Dad’s eye.
Then Pat said, “Would you believe it, but
everywhere
I turned there were more and more snakes! My arms got tired smiting them! Finally God spoke to my heart and said ‘Pat, no matter
how
many serpents you smite, I’ll send more; so trust in me, Pat, not in your own strength!’ Then I fell down and wept before the Lord, and when I looked up all the snakes were gone,
even the bodies of the dozens I had killed!
I can’t tell if I was in my body or caught up in the Spirit.”
Ben: “Lord, You are so great, we just worship you.”
“Oh,
Jesus,
we just thank you for Pat!” whispered a makeup girl.
Pat cut her ass-kissing short. “You want to know what [long goofy chuckle] the serpents signify?” he asked.
We all said yes, yes we did. Ben moaned and shivered, as if what Pat might say next was probably more than regular folks could bear. Meanwhile, the makeup girl dabbed at Pat’s face with a foam wedge, smoothing out the makeup where she’d missed a spot. This was all business as usual to her. Pat could have claimed that Jesus was sitting on his knee eating an ice cream cone, and she would have just kept dabbing away.
“I’ll tell you what, ladies and gentlemen,” said Pat, swiveling the makeup chair to survey us all: “The snakes are the sins contaminating the Body of Christ! The Secular World’s not our
only problem, ladies and gentlemen; it’s
our own sin
that’s grieving the Lord’s heart and delaying His return!”
Ben: “That’s right!”
Now Dad was shifting his weight uncertainly back and forth from one foot to the other.
“The other day,” said Pat, “I was invited to speak to the Orlando chapter of the Full Gospel Business Men’s Association. At the end of my talk on how God will bless us if we plant a seed of faith and give richly to His work, by supporting the
700 Club
’s special fund, I said ‘Now bow your heads, open your hearts, and close your eyes so no one but God and me can see you. Now each one of you men’—they were all successful,
married
Christian men in their midforties to fifties—‘raise your hands if you still masturbate.’ And do you know, over half raised their hands!”
“O Lord, just forgive us!” Ben wailed.
On the
Club
that day there was an interesting moment. The floor director was doing what floor directors do everywhere, silently counting down on her fat fingers so Pat could wrap things up for the break. Pat was having a Word of Knowledge. That’s when God tells Pat things directly, as if he’s on the phone calling in information about, say, some woman in Milwaukee with a tumor in her left ovary.
Anyway, that day God gave Pat a “Word” for some lady with deafness in one ear. Pat squinted at the floor director through closed eyelids—he was deep in his healing, we-just-this-Lord-we-just-that, prayer. She was counting down the seconds on her fingers to the out. And Pat wrapped up the Word of Knowledge right on cue! Since a Word of Knowledge is as direct a message from God as you can get this side of the Last Judgment, it interested me to learn that God made sure his Word fit the time slot.
53
S
ome people literally worshipped my parents. They still do. A lady rushed up to me at one of our seminars and asked if she could shake Dad’s hand. I told her that he had already left, which he had, and she grabbed me and blurted “I just want to say I
touched
a Schaeffer!”
After Dad died, a stranger sent me an elaborate hand-carved, laboriously painted, three-foot-tall bas-relief “icon” of my father portrayed as a saint in heaven standing holding hands with Jesus. It must have taken the person months of work to make this curious kitsch monstrosity (somewhat in the style of the nineteenth-century “icons” of George Washington being received by the angels).
Even
Christianity Today
magazine—which, during Dad’s lifetime, treated him with suspicion—got into the act some fifteen years after Dad died, with a cover story titled “Our Very Own St. Francis” and a picture of my father dressed like Francis of Assisi. (They talked about his continuing influence and how he shaped the thinking of a whole generation of evangelical pastors.) And I have long since lost count of the number of women who launched into unstoppable gushing sessions when talking about Mom. On the other hand, I have
also met quite a few bitter young men and women who tell me that their evangelical mothers “raised me according to your mother’s books!”
My adventures in Schaeffer-worship bothered me even when I was profiting from them. A little goes a long way. And the groupie factor also drove my sisters nuts.
Priscilla has made it a mission to disabuse the students who still come to L’Abri of the Schaeffer mythology. She makes no secret of her nervous breakdowns, her dependence on Prozac, her depression and anxiety attacks, her alcohol-related struggles. She will tell anyone who asks that being a Schaeffer child—and the pressure from Mom to be part of the ministry and, above all, from strangers to live up to their “Schaeffer expectations”—didn’t help. When I called her to ask if she would allow me to write about her problems, and she gave me the okay, she also said “Mom drove me crazy, but in fairness I would have suffered from stress and depression anywhere. I would push too hard in L’Abri, then crash. If I had been doing something else just as intense, it would have happened, too.”
Susan burned out early in L’Abri, too, retired when she was in her fifties, and moved into an assisted-living home with Ranald. (They were both in reasonable health.) Susan told me that when she visits the English L’Abri (the one she founded in Hampshire) that she never goes to any of the meetings and doesn’t want to see anyone there except for some members of her immediate family who happen to live nearby.
Debby, who provides most of the day-to-day care for my aging and fragile mother, says that she struggles with a feeling of rage when she’s with Mom—which she realizes is “completely illogical,” given that Mother is old and helpless. But she also works hard to include Mom nevertheless. Debby says that
she doesn’t remember ever having “one real conversation” with my mother during a whole lifetime. “Mom always had her own agenda. She was interested in how we fit into that, not in us.”
As for me, if I see someone reading a Bible on an airplane, I’ll hurry past in case they look up and somehow recognize me as the “Franky” Schaeffer who they used to watch on the
700 Club.
I’ll cross a street when walking past an evangelical “bookstore” for the same reason. And my insecurities—and squirrelly Schaeffer baggage—can be measured by my name changes. I directed
Whatever Happened to the Human Race?
as “Franky Schaeffer,” one of my Hollywood features as “Francis,” wrote my evangelical books under “Franky,” and switched to “Frank” after I left the fold.
To one extent or another, my parents’ children have had serious problems that relate to Mom and Dad and their work. And even though everyone can say the same, perhaps there is a little added pressure on the children of venerated saints, saints that in private were far from saintly.
But the fact that I became my father’s sidekick was the self-perpetuation of a nightmare. Like most children, I wanted to be independent of my parents and then found myself exacerbating my dependence. Not only was I drawn into my parents’ ministry, I was the prime mover and shaker when it came to making sure that Dad got truly famous within the evangelical subculture. If it is tough having a famous father, more fool the son who made him so!
Dad wasn’t ever completely comfortable with his new (and very late-in-life) role as a big-time evangelical superstar. He felt out of place when hailed as the “father of the religious right.” Was this really what he wanted to be remembered as? And I felt as if I was having a series of out-of-body experiences when
I spoke in front of groups like the Southern Baptists at their huge annual convention. The success of what I was doing made me feel like I was sinking into a swamp.
I would pace around behind the stage before an event, literally praying for escape and cursing myself for having quit painting. I was with people who looked at me squiffy-eyed if I slipped up and said “damn,” or “shit,” the sorts of people to whom I had to make sure I never mentioned that I loved this or that “godless” movie.
I became lax. I told one homeschool mother (the wife of a pastor whose church I was speaking at) that I had loved
All That Jazz.
“That’s R-rated, isn’t it?” she asked, eyeing me suspiciously.
“I guess so,” I mumbled.
“Well,
please
don’t
ever
say that in front of my children!” she said. “You are responsible for not becoming a stumbling block, and I’m having enough trouble with them already!”
When I later met her “children,” I was expecting little kids. They were two pale boys, ages fifteen and seventeen. Having met their mother, I understood why they looked hunted and seemed to be twitching.
Our new breed of Schaeffer followers were the sorts of people who said they adored everything about Dad’s book
How Should We Then Live?
“except that naked picture”—Michelangelo’s
David
. (I had prevailed in the photograph selections for the book, having lost in the fight over
David
’s nudity in the movie version of our project.)
These were the sorts of people I had to make sure were nowhere around if I ordered a bottle of wine, or talked about my gay friends, or lit up a cigar. And whatever they
thought
Mom and Dad were about, the actual Swiss L’Abri of the 1960s
and early ’70s would have struck them as shockingly free, a place they never would have let their children visit.
I knew “The Speech” so well, I could think about other things while I delivered it; for instance, about how I wished God had never made any men or women with a “ministry in music.” I wished he’d strike them all down so I’d never have to spend another minute listening to another fat lady (even the men were “fat ladies” to me) sing another Jesus-is-my-boyfriend song to synthesized violin playback.
I must have done The Speech over a hundred times in the year or two after
Whatever Happened to the Human Race?
came out, including the time I gave it from Dr. Kennedy’s pulpit at his famous Corral Ridge Presbyterian Church in Florida, to over two thousand people who gave me a near-hysterical five-minute standing ovation. (I was also on his TV show several times.)
Shorthand version: Abortion is murder; secular humanism is destroying us; turn back to our Christian foundation; vote Republican.
I learned that the worst audiences, like talking to a roomful of pickled fish wearing down parkas, were in Minnesota. I learned that the best audiences were in California, where people want to have fun twenty-four hours a day, so they laugh at all your jokes and buy a cartload of books and tapes. I learned to leave out fancy French words south of Washington, DC (not counting Miami and New Orleans). And I learned that if you talk “too fast,” all those huntin’, fishin’, shootin’, lifetime-NRAMEMBER types, the ones that worry about the United Nations, have their eyes too close together, and have wives caked with about forty pounds of makeup per square inch, start to look at you funny. And if they can’t understand what you’re saying, pretty soon you feel this suspicious wave of squinty-eyed,
do-you-think-you’re-better-than-us fucked-upness rolling toward you over the banquet tables and the flower arrangements somebody stuck tinsel and balloons in, and up around the head table and past the lime Jell-O topped with some kind of nameless sweet shit and sprinkled with nuts.
How I hated the trips to and from all those airports! The pastor picking me up always seemed anxious to “share.” It was usually about his church and his problems with his congregation or his own “rebellious” teenagers that invariably were “far from the Lord.”
“I’ll pray for you,” I’d mutter, or “The Lord’s going to use these times of testing to bring you to a wonderful new place in your walk with him.”
What I really wanted to say is that shit happens and that just because I was a Schaeffer didn’t make me an expert on his life.
Then there was Miss Piggy at the fund-raiser I did for a chastity-anti-sex-education ministry in Fargo, North Dakota: “We
Can
Wait.”
“We
Can
Wait” hired a husband-and-wife “youth minister” team to open my act. They showed up in homemade costumes dressed as Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy. They sang “Jesus Loves Me,” in Kermit and Miss Piggy’s voices. They had obviously spent a lot of time on their song-and-dance routine.