Crazy for God
Some reflections on the book. I'm glad to have read it, if nothing for the fact that Franky found what I am looking for and came to despise it. Greatness. Fame. Influence. Popularity. He had it all. He came to realize that mainstream evangelicalism is not a faithful body, but a fruitful business. He found that politics drove the "evangelical engine" more than sincere life-in-in-your-face faith. He points out some significant sweeping generalizations. Evangelicals are money driven. Evangelicals are independence driven. Evangelicals are activist driven. Evangelicals are make-me-feel-good-about-myself driven. If these are true (and I am sure they are to an extent) does he not need to face them? Do I not need to face them? Am I not "socially engineered" to a degree by the communities that I have run in?
His story of his life is stunning. He finds freedom to share, with unashamed honesty, the brokenness of his family. How his father Francis beat his mother. How his mother paraded her "attainment" of true spiritual goddess-likeness and threw it in your face. He shares his own fiasco's with drugs, sex, masturbation, and worldliness. He cusses.
The point is made that personality as an influence in the evangelical community is cult-like. It does not even escape the most fundamentalistic separatists of the bunch (as I was raised in). People still worship my father and will continue to do so until he either fades out or until he recants his faith (which wont happen). Christians worship John Piper. We get the scent of blood, we chase like a pack of wolves, to hear him spout his rigid take-over-the-world kind of calvanism. Christians worship Benny Hinn for his monopoly on supernatural healing powers. His signs and wonders attract millions while he doops them into emptying their savings account so "his ministry" (i.e. his multi-million dollar mansion) will continue.
Franky ultimately left Evangelicalism in search of a deeper, more human faith. A faith connected to the past, connected to the roots of what became his superficial experience with Americanized Christianity. The questions of faith are raised, but he remains one of the body of Christ as found in the Orthodox expression of faith.
Franky Schaeffer:
"...It also confirmed what I already knew: that evangelicalism is not so much a religion as a series of fast-moving personality cults.
As soon as a leader steps aside, or is shoved aside, or stumbles, the crowd looks for the next man or woman to briefly follow. There is always a bigger show down the street, another even better Bible-study leader or congregation to try, another hot author/guru to read, another trend, from speaking in tongues to giving homeschooling a try. And most evangelicals spend a good portion of their time wandering from chuch to church, from leader to leader, even from one radio and TV personality to another, in the same way that when I was a teen I'd switch my loyalty from on rock band to another. It's all about who is "hot."
"I think my problem with remaining an evangelical centered on what the evangelical community became. It was the merging of the entertainment business with faith, the flippant lightweight kitsch ugliness of American Christianity, the sheer stupidity, the paranoia of the American right-wing enterprise, the platitudes married to pop culture, all of it... that made me crazy. It was just too stupid for words.
The Greek Orthodox Church is the least-changed continuous body of Christian worship and tradition. So what? The average pebble in my driveway predates human existence by a hundred million years or so. On the other hand, if you want to try to live as a Christian, maybe it makes sense to attach yourself to a body of faith that bears at least a passing resemblance to what Christians everywhere, from the beginning of the Christian era, believed and, more importantly, did."
"Being part of the military family changed me. I found myself connected to a community that believes in service and sacrifice and that lives by what they believe. They contrasted sharply with the leaders of the big-time evangelical world. We evangelical "leaders" had talked about saving America but never made any sacrifices for our country. We left the sacrificing to our 'ordinary' followers."