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The Schaeffers showed an extraordinary ability to identify with the issues that concerned the student generation of the 1960s and early 1970s. Francis scorned postwar materialism, insisting that most Americans had no higher philosophy of life than "personal peace and affluence." Though strongly opposed to communism, he refused to condone the arms race: "In the race of fission versus fission, fusion versus fusion, missile versus missile, what reason is there to think that those conceiving and engineering these things on 'our side' believe anything basically different … from those on the 'other side,' the Communists?" He urged respect for nature in a society that had fouled its own nest. He preached against racism, and at L'Abri he practiced what he preached. He sympathized with dropouts and drug users "because they are smart enough to know that they have been given no answers, and they are opting out. … The older generation hasn't given them anything to care about."

Francis also thundered against the middle-class sins of the evangelical churches. He challenged evangelicals to adopt a "revolutionary" mindset, to think about getting rid of the American flags in their sanctuaries: "Patriotic loyalty must not be identified with Christianity." He insisted that American evangelicalism was too individualistic: "Christianity is an individual thing, but it is not only an individual thing. There is to be true community, offering true spiritual and material help to each other." He therefore urged Christians to welcome intellectuals, hippies, drug addicts—whomever God should send: "I dare you. I dare you in the name of Jesus Christ. Do what I am going to suggest. Begin by opening your home for community." But he warned that real community would require that the churches "buck the evangelical establishment" and kick their habit of hypocrisy: "Don't talk about being against the affluent society unless you put that share of the affluent society which is your hoard on the line. And don't dare respond that these things I'm saying are not a part of the teaching of the Word of God."

Schaeffer's message was like fresh air to the emerging evangelical youth culture. Jack Sparks, founder of Berkeley's Christian World Liberation Front, visited L'Abri and hoped that his organization could have the same kind of intellectual impact. Schaeffer had a profound influence on Larry Norman, "poet laureate of the Jesus Revolution." (One Norman lyric places L'Abri on a par with Holy Land pilgrimage sites: "We'll honeymoon at Haifa and have lunch in Galilee / Then we'll hitchhike up to Switzerland and drop in at L'Abri.") In the late 1970s, Norman formed his own record company and performing arts society, which he intended as a "musical L'Abri." One of its musicians was Mark Heard, who studied at L'Abri himself because it was a place where people could honestly ask hard questions about Christianity.

Despite the countercultural rhetoric, in the early 1970s the Schaeffers began forming ties with Christians who were national political figures in the conservative wing of the Republican party. They were introduced to then-Congressman Jack Kemp in 1971, who in turn introduced the Schaeffers to a wider circle of Washington officials. For ten years Kemp's wife, Joanne, led a class for other congressional wives in which they read all the Schaeffers' books. One L'Abri student was Gerald Ford's son Michael, which led to a private dinner in the Ford White House.

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March 3 1997, Vol. 41, No. 3