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If you happened to grow up as the conflicted child of evangelical missionaries (like my husband) or just the overlooked offspring of a zealous preacher (like me), then Frank Schaeffer's 1992 novel Portofino more than paid for itself in counseling fees. "Read this," you could say to your psychiatric other, "and you'll understand my whole childhood. Except I never had the Mediterranean, or the prosciutto."
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I loved Portofino. Almost against my will I loved it. It came from the imagination of a guy I'd disliked since high school, when I had to watch all of How Should We Then Live three—count them—three times (maybe it was two). Frank directed his father Francis in those Christian documentaries, and I sided with my big brother, who said that the Schaeffers oversimplified history. Mostly by then I was just sick of everything the evangelical world pushed toward me. When Francis and Edith Schaeffer visited Wheaton in my freshman year, the year before Francis died, I participated in an orgy of mock-clapping and stomping before they came out onstage. Maybe the Schaeffers thought the loud adulation was real, and maybe it was for some of the people who joined in. For me it was one more chance to be obnoxious and unkind. I had a lot of chances back then.
Which brings me back to Schaeffer the Younger—"Frankie" in those days—a firebrand writer and speaker who also tended to be obnoxious and unkind, though in a different way. Wheaton never hosted Frankie while I was there, maybe because he accused some well-liked professors of being wishy-washy on abortion.
I agreed with him about the personhood of the unborn, but I disliked his personal attacks on people who disagreed with him or his father. I thought if we ever stood in the same room, I'd probably chuck something at him, like a film projector, or a copy of Whatever Happened to the Human Race.
Years passed, Frankie Schaeffer faded from public view, and then one day some friend gave me Portofino and I zinged through it in a couple of sittings. I could relate to every bit of the evangelical zaniness, but beyond that, I loved the novel's sensuous descriptions of summer in the Gulf of Genoa: the turquoise Mediterranean, "blood-warm water," sun lighting up the tops of the Cypress trees, "buffalo milk mozarella cheese floating in a bath of whey." Have you ever put a book down because it made your salivary glands ache? Even unpleasant things—a pus-gorged toe, an octopus bite—jumped from the page to my nerve endings. I still can't think of that book without longing for ripe tomatoes.
Somehow I missed the sequels to Portofino; the next thing I read of Schaeffer's was Baby Jack, which I admired for its sympathetic portrait of an artist struggling to understand his son's decision to become a soldier (I squirmed my way through the God parts). At this point I liked Frank Schaeffer's writing so much that I was even willing to call him Frank Schaeffer. But I still didn't know how to feel about him as a human being.
So now, this year, comes Crazy for God, an autobiography that's very like Portofino in its tangible beauty and humor, but with more contrition and a little less fiendish lampooning. Memoir obviously demands introspection, and Schaeffer doesn't hold back. He begins by saying what he left behind—evangelicalism, conservative activism—and then admits that it's been easier to change his mind than to change his gut. What comes next is proof of this. Passing from his parents' history to his childhood in Switzerland (sledding in the Alps, skiing home from school, hanging out with the crazy and famous), Schaeffer describes a life that was by turns happy, difficult, idyllic, and completely nuts. Polio and dyslexia seemed like bumps on the road compared to the burden of growing up in a family that set out to save the world one intellectual at a time. He adored his beautiful mother, but characterizes her as a kind of spiritual megalomaniac; he was devoted to his brilliant father, but eventually found the Reformed/evangelical viewpoint unsatisfactory and set out to find his own way. Schaeffer has always been tough on the church, but by the end of this book, he accepts personal guilt for all kinds of sins and mistakes (including, by extension, the Bush Administration), and admits that he'll probably make more. If he spares anyone here, it's not himself.
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