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In the December 2006 issue of Harper's there's an article by Jeff Sharlet called "Through a Glass, Darkly," which purports to explain fundamentalism to the readership of that august periodical. Sharlet shares the bizarre but increasingly common belief that the late R. J. Rushdoony is the eminence grise of contemporary anti–democratic would–be–despotic fundamentalism. Having introduced his readers to that Dark Armenian–American Lord on his dark Californian throne, Sharlet continues:
I read the works of Rushdoony's most influential student, the late Francis Schaeffer, an American whose Swiss mountain retreat, L'Abri ("The Shelter"), served as a Christian madrasah at which a generation of fundamentalist intellectuals studied an American past "Christian in memory." And I read Schaeffer's disciples: Tim LaHaye…
And here I pause. Well, it's true that Schaeffer read Rushdoony and cited him approvingly—but only in the latter stages of his career, and long after he had established L'Abri as a center for Christian reflection on culture. Schaeffer and Rushdoony were educated at opposite ends of the country (Schaeffer at Hampden–Sydney College in Virginia and then Westminster Seminary in Philadelphia, Rushdoony at Berkeley and then the Pacific School of Religion); moreover, Schaeffer was four years older than Rushdoony. When Schaeffer got the idea to found L'Abri, Rushdoony was just emerging from a decade as an utterly unknown missionary to Native Americans in Nevada. There is no conceivable sense in which Schaeffer could be called Rushdoony's student; their careers developed completely independently.
Well, then, how about the claim that Tim LaHaye is a "disciple" of Schaeffer's? Certainly LaHaye has expressed a debt to Schaeffer, but I'd like Sharlet (or anyone) to show me something in LaHaye's writing that indicates that influence. I must admit that I have not been able to discern, in my readings of the Left Behind books, much evidence that they were shaped by long evenings before L'Abri's roaring fireplace, immersed in endless discussions of Western art's passage from Giotto to Leonardo to Picasso, or of the varieties of existentialism from Kierkegaard and Dostoevsky to Sartre and Beckett—discussions punctuated by long sessions spent intently listening to Mozart and Beethoven… . Kinda hard to imagine LaHaye digging that party. But maybe I've missed something.
This could go on and on. L'Abri a "madrasah" for fundamentalists? Schaeffer's decades–long emphasis on the value, as well as the influence, of European high culture set him at odds with fundamentalism. L'Abri a place to study some imaginary early Christian America? Again, Schaeffer's lifelong primary focus was on European culture, though he had a few things to say about American history. Most absurd of all, a straight line of influence from Rushdoony through Schaeffer to LaHaye? How then to account for the obvious fact that, as I have tried to explain elsewhere, Rushdoony and LaHaye hold utterly opposing views about the Second Coming and its meaning for political life?
Note this: all those errors are in two sentences of Sharlet's essay. And, further, note this: Sharlet's job (on the website he edits, The Revealer) is to report on religion in the press.
One of the pleasures of reading the current crop of books and articles against fundamentalism, or against religion in general, is collecting howlers—wildly inaccurate, fanciful statements about the objects of critique. In an editorial I link to above, John Wilson mentions Lee Silver's claim, in his book Challenging Nature, that "American Christian evangelicals … believe that God in the form of Jesus Christ will grant them an eternal afterlife only if they work sufficiently hard to persuade non–Christians to become evangelicals themselves." This is sadly typical of the depth of research these critics of religion have undertaken. Thus the opening line of Terry Eagleton's response, in the London Review of Books, to Richard Dawkins's The God Delusion: "Imagine someone holding forth on biology whose only knowledge of the subject is the Book of British Birds, and you have a rough idea of what it feels like to read Richard Dawkins on theology."
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