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Francis also remained unfailingly suspicious of any theology that strayed from the propositional inerrancy that he learned at Westminster and Faith seminaries. He steered students away from Fuller Theological Seminary and from most Christian colleges. He addressed Billy Graham's international congresses on evangelism in 1966 and 1974, but he disliked Graham's style of evangelism. By Schaeffer's lights, it was too centered in experience and not vocal enough about inerrancy. However, at the time he refrained from publicly criticizing evangelical individuals and institutions by name.

Thus Schaeffer created for himself a highly independent place in the public world of evangelicalism. He had wide appeal to students with countercultural leanings, but also to conservative politicians. He remained in touch with but aloof from the other leading figures of American evangelicalism. And though he had wide international connections, he soon left behind the European context—so crucial to the formation of his thought—in exchange for increased involvement in the internal affairs of America and its evangelical subculture.

Turn to activism
In 1974 Franky, now 21, propelled Francis in a new ministry direction that would end up leading toward an old ministry style. Franky dreamed up a ten-part documentary film series with the working title "The Rise and Decline of Western Thought and Culture." It was to be a Christian response to Kenneth Clark's widely viewed Civilisation series. The project—How Should We Then Live? (1976-77)—was a resounding success in bringing to the general evangelical public Schaeffer's message about the rotting intellectual pilings of Western culture. The film series and book were both bestsellers, and an 18-city seminar tour drew tens of thousands of people.

Less happily, the project caused real dissension within L'Abri. The community had always discussed and prayed over major decisions before they were made, but in this case, the Schaeffers asked for prayer after making the decision to go ahead. They also broke precedent to solicit funds directly from their supporters in order partly to defray a budget that exceeded $1 million.

The project added voices to the chorus of Schaeffer's critics. During his first talk at Wheaton College, the faculty had been much more skeptical than the students. Philosophy professor Arthur Holmes had been put off by Schaeffer's summary dismissal of the entire field of analytic philosophy, and he was later quoted in Newsweek to the effect that he used Schaeffer's books in his classes as examples of how not to do philosophy. Even in his more careful early work, Schaeffer ranged so widely over disciplines and broad periods of time that specialists could not help noticing embarrassing errors of detail and facile oversimplifications. How Should We Then Live? brought even more criticism because it was essentially a reprise of the early Schaeffer material boiled down into an even simpler form.

The academic critics seldom, however, grappled with the role of what might be called "stepping stone" scholarship. Like the great popularizers H. G. Wells and Will Durant, Schaeffer placed accessible versions of academic subjects into a coherent, meaningful framework that highlighted broad connections through time and across disciplines. Durant wrote The Story of Philosophy "to pour warmth and blood into the fruits of scholarship"; this is what Schaeffer did for evangelicals. The result for innumerable high-school and college-age readers was a first awareness of the significance of ideas in history and culture and the intellectual richness of Christianity. As far away as Pakistan, secondary students in a boarding school for missionary kids eagerly read and reread a package of the Schaeffers' books brought in by Youth with a Mission outreach workers in 1971. Church youth leaders and campus ministers introduced their brighter students to Schaeffer's books, launching scores of evangelical scholars on their careers. Philosopher Jerry Walls of Asbury Theological Seminary recalls, "Reading Schaeffer transformed my understanding of Christianity. He helped me to think of my faith in a much more comprehensive fashion than I had done before. My faith was becoming a more or less complete world-view, which embraced all kinds of things I had never associated very clearly with spirituality."

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March 3 1997, Vol. 41, No. 3