L'Abri and community

Yesterday I received a galley copy of "Crazy for God: How I Helped Found the Religious Right and Ruin America," by Frank Schaeffer. It'll be published in October. I took it to bed last night to dip into it for a few minutes before turning my light out, and two hours later had to force myself to put it down so I could get some sleep. I can't blog about it in detail so early -- that wouldn't be fair to Frank or his publisher -- but I will say that it's far less a detailed analysis of the rise of the Religious Right, and far more a compelling memoir about being raised in a prominent fundamentalist Christian household.
This book is going to have lots of buzz around it, positive and negative. Again, I'm dying to blog about it in detail, the good and the bad, but that's going to have to wait till closer to publication time.

What I can say now, though, is that the reason Frank's story appeals to my interest is not because I have any special devotion to the work of his parents, Francis and Edith Schaeffer, because until fairly recently, I didn't know who they were. But since learning about the L'Abri fellowship they founded in Switzerland, and which proved to be extremely influential in Evangelical circles, I've been interested in the Schaeffers as proto-crunchy-cons. They were bohemians and conservative Christians who ran a kind of community there in the Alps. Here's a sample of Francis Schaeffer's worldview:

...the hippies of the 1960s did understand something. They were right in fighting the plastic culture, and the church should have been fighting it too... More than this, they were right in the fact that the plastic culture - modern man, the mechanistic worldview in university textbooks and in practice, the total threat of the machine, the establishment technology, the bourgeois upper middle class - is poor in its sensitivity to nature... As a utopian group, the counterculture understands something very real, both as to the culture as a culture, but also as to the poverty of modern man's concept of nature and the way the machine is eating up nature on every side.

In his memoir, Frank, who had a very unhappy childhood, shows a lot of respect for what his parents tried to accomplish, and for his father's ability to listen to strangers, and to be open to them. But there were a lot of problems with spiritual pride and self-deception going on in that family and in that community, according to Frank. What kept me reading the book last night, way past my bedtime, was not looking for "Mommie and Daddy Dearest"-style dirt on Francis and Edith Schaeffer, which doesn't concern me at all. I kept reading it because there's a lot of cautionary wisdom in this tale for someone like me, who is personally and professionally interested in living a counterculturally Christian life, and in looking for authentic community. When the cause becomes more important than your family, and when being an ideologue becomes more important than being human, that way lies trouble. I found it so moving that Frank says he never saw his parents happier than when they were on vacation, away from the eyes of their admirers, and were free to enjoy the world on its own terms instead of having to fit it inside a narrow religious ideology.