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Schaeffer's fame grew. He spent more and more time lecturing in America, published bestselling books, and—when he could get back to Switzerland—entertained a flood of fawning pilgrims. By the mid-1970s, the dynamic at L'Abri had changed radically.

"Students argued quite a bit with him in the early days," said John Sandri, who eventually married Prisca after a mutual friend invited him to visit the Schaeffers. "But later, you'd ask a question and get a 40-minute monologue. It was just not possible to argue." Laughery, who first visited L'Abri in 1980 after a misspent youth in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco, spent his time listening to reel-to-reel recordings of bygone days' lively debates. Most of his peers came to L'Abri not seeking healthy debate, he said, but "to get filled up with apologetic ammunition."

By this time, some of the young evangelicals whom Schaeffer had inspired to pursue the life of the mind had become respected scholars—and had developed a jaundiced view of their old intellectual hero. Those who knew Schaeffer agree that he considered himself an evangelist, not a scholar. "Schaeffer didn't read books," said Sandri. "He got his material from magazines. Newsweek, Time—he'd take them to the beach. He did go to seminary, too, so he had that. … [But] he was out to give broad strokes. It was not necessary to give you the details of Kierkegaard."

Many evangelical scholars distanced themselves from Schaeffer during the last years of his career—the time when he most fervently demanded their loyalty. Beginning in the early 1970s, Schaeffer began to make connections with conservative politicians. The 1973 Roe v. Wade decision pushed him further. In 1974, his son, Frank, persuaded him to collaborate on a documentary film series conceived as a Christian answer to Kenneth Clark's Civilisation—a series that would depict legalized abortion as the final act in the West's moral erosion.

Following the massive success of the series How Should We Then Live?, Schaeffer continued his pattern of cutting scholarly corners and reshaping history to support his own arguments. In the early 1980s, he hired John Whitehead, founder of the Christian libertarian Rutherford Institute, to research a book about the Christian foundation of America. The result was a historically dubious but highly influential volume entitled A Christian Manifesto (1981).

Schaeffer was outraged by evangelical historians' refusal to support the book's claim that the Founding Fathers had acted out of explicitly Christian motivations. "He had written Manifesto not as a dispassionate historical treatise," historian Barry Hankins wrote, "but as a tract in the culture wars."

Schaeffer continued lecturing and writing against abortion and Christian political apathy until his death in 1984. Workers and family members at L'Abri worried about the political turn that their leader's career had taken. "I talked to Schaeffer about his cobelligerency with the Moral Majority," said Laughery, who has a Ph.D. in theology from the University of Fribourg. "From my perspective, that was a mistake."

There was little trace of the open-minded, countercultural Schaeffer that had entertained flocks of skeptical hippies in decades past. By the 1980s, he had little tolerance for anyone who deviated from his notion of Christian orthodoxy. When John Sandri's studies in literature led him to reread the Bible through the lens of narrative theology, Schaeffer was appalled. "He wanted me to withdraw from a teaching role in the community," said Sandri, who is bronzed and wiry at 71, thanks to his hobby of long-distance Alpine running. Sandri had come to question everything from the Trinity to predestination, "but the one that broke the camel's back was [biblical] inerrancy. Schaeffer felt this was the issue of the day, where Christians have to dig into the trenches," Sandri said. "I'm not an inerrantist, but I'm not an 'errantist' either. Both are wrong. Man makes these opposing points of view. The modernist agenda is behind both."

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March 2008, Vol. 52, No. 3