Jesus didn't stand a chance, nor did my mother.
In the 1970s and early 1980s my late father Francis Schaeffer wrote many books including A Christian Manifesto. It sold over one million copies. Dad called on evangelicals to "take back America" and overthrow the "secular humanists," if need be by force. As it turned out they didn't need to carry out his revolution. Inspired by him they took over the Republican Party instead. They also became part of the entertainment industry.
From my teen years to early twenties, I was Dad's sidekick. I even wrote a number of hastily dictated evangelical "books" that sold in the hundreds of thousands.
I quit evangelicalism cold turkey. I wrote Portofino and Zermatt and other novels exploring fundamentalist belief and family life from an insider's point of view. But these novels---while doing well by critical and commercial "worldly" publishing standards---don't sell nearly as many copies in any given year as my evangelical rants sold in a week. There's no business like God business!
I vividly remember the annual CBA (the Christian Booksellers Convention). Everything was copied from the secular world but made bizarrely religious. Take the Christian "Budweiser" towel, a rip-off of the then popular Budweiser commercial: "This Bud's For You!" There was a look-alike beer can on the towel with two crucified hands and the logo, "This Blood's For You!"
By the early 1970s the evangelicals had come up with a whole alternate America---"Christian" education, radio, rock, makeup, publishing, schools, weight loss, sex manuals, and politics. It wasn't about being something but about not being "secular," about not having nudity, sex, or four letter words. What it was for no one knew.
"Why does anybody buy this shit?" a friend asked, as we walked the Jesus-junk mounded convention halls of the CBA.
I forget what I answered. Today I might say:
"Because, you want to make sure your kids get caught up into the clouds with Jesus. But you've got a problem. How are you going to get them to believe right, when you're clearly insane? See you're going to have to come up with a way to sneak the gospel message to them since no one in their right mind would join you. But to get them raptured they have to believe right or God will leave them behind, and you'll be sitting in heaven while your kids are getting fried eternally for wrong theology and crying, 'Mommy! Mommy! Help me Mommy!' So you've got to make them believe right, without taking the time to teach them yourself, because you're so busy waiting for the Flying Savior take you to a far, far better theme park. So you negotiate. You let them go to the beach with their 'secular friends,' but they have to agree to take along a 'This Blood' towel to be a 'witness' to the 'lost,' and to remind them their body is the Temple of the Holy Spirit so they won't screw around."
What is so strange is how evangelicals learned to use all those worldly tools that I was once forbidden from even seeing. As a young child I was living in a strict "separated-from the-world" environment. By the time I was in my late teens my parent's rejection of the culture changed. My parents and other fundamentalists took to calling themselves "evangelicals" and began to use the culture's methods against the culture. We went from no, "jazzy music" (let alone rock!) to Christian rock, and from no "worldly politics," to taking over the Republican Party.
In effect we became Muslims. We went from preaching the Kingdom-Of-God as being in heaven, to proclaiming Christ as the King of this earth. It was our mirror image of a radical Islam that proclaims God's law as earthly law.
We had come a long way from my fundamentalist childhood and even farther from the environment my mother grew up in. Mom's missionary parents raised her in a universe of perpetual religious hysteria where, for instance, Mom got her mouth washed with soap if she said "darn" because it was a "minced oath," in other words sounded like "damn!" As for music, movies or theatre, Mom's parents might as well have been Puritans living in the Baby Sate of the 1600s.
Mom is ninety-three. Sometimes she talks wistfully about the time when a "real Broadway producer" saw her dance while she was at college. This producer asked her to come to New York. "I had talent. I think I could have made it," Mom says. "But my parents forbid it. In fact when I asked them if I could go they were so shocked that I had been dancing in a school production they threatened to take me out of college."
When I visit Mom during trips back to Switzerland---she lives with my sisters where we grew up in the mission of L'abri---I have to guide her as we walk. Macular degeneration has robbed Mom of sight. And a series of small strokes have put many of her memories beyond reach.
Mom's favorite destination is a certain hotel by Lake Geneva. We head for the piano bar, where Mom orders tea. But the main attraction is the piano.
When the pianist sees Mom he starts playing Cole Porter tunes. Mom---diminished and frail---stands by the baby grand and dances a freeform old lady version of the Charleston. Everyone in the bar watches and applauds. Breathless and happy, Mom doesn't talk about the music as something that might be "used for the Lord," let alone denounces it as "worldly," she just sings along, somehow remembering the words.
I wish Mom had danced when I was a child. During my early childhood she always said: "Real Christians don't dance. It isn't pleasing to the Lord." I never knew how sad that belief must have made her.
As she dances Mom's face lights up and she smiles at a world she can no longer see and that, despite her lifelong effort, she never saved. Mom has forgotten just about everything except the sweet memory of her moment of youthful rebellion and the music that almost set her free.