Crazy for God Quotes

“The problem with the evangelical homeschool movement was not their desire to educate their children at home, or in private religious schools, but the evangelical impulse to "protect" children from ideas that might lead them to "question" and to keep them cloistered in what amounted to a series of one-family gated communities.”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

“What's the point of quoting the Bible to people who don't believe it's true" Dad would say.”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

“...evangelicalism is not not so much a religion as a series of fast-moving personality cults.”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

“People are not as one-dimensional as the stories about them.”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

“Faith is certainly not theology to me. Church is just one of the places I look for answers to the only real question I have: Why do we long for meaning? For”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

“Perhaps Mom and Dad were right. In an infinite universe, everything must have happened at least once, someplace, sometime. So maybe there is a God who forgives, who loves, who knows. I hope so. Anything is possible in a world where a daughter forgives her father, for ignorance, for anger, for failure, and places her daughter in his arms.”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

“In the prologue, I said that the only answer to “Who are you?” is “When?” What was true for prologue is doubly true of epilogue. We never arrive. There are no final answers, only a series of snapshots taken along the path of “frenetic desperation.”   Movies”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

“John knew that if you push the so-called Sola Scriptura Calvinist approach and the “inerrancy” ideas to their absurd limit, all real study of the Bible stops. It becomes a magical text. It is no longer open to interpretation. Dogma replaces study, because scholarship can only be meaningful when you are allowed to ask real questions and let the chips fall where they may. It”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

“America still sees itself as essential and as destiny’s instrument. And each splinter group within our culture—left, right, conservative, liberal, religious, secular—sees itself as morally, even “theologically,” superior to its rivals. It is not just about politics. It is about being better than one’s evil opponent. We don’t just disagree, we demonize the “other.” And we don’t compromise.”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

“Most of the time, I was biting my tongue. If I wanted to be invited back, I couldn’t go on the 700 Club and tell people that the host was a lunatic. I couldn’t go on Dobson’s Focus on the Family and tell the truth: The host was a power-crazed political manipulator cynically abusing his followers. And I couldn’t tell my Hollywood producers that they were full of shit when they cast their girlfriends to star in their movie. I wanted the next job!”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

“Artists are like creatures who swallow themselves. We process our lives into what we make.”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

“I’d remember that if it came down to it, I’d rather be arrested for shoplifting than ever be an evangelical leader again. There was a certain basic and decent honesty about stealing pork chops that selling God had lacked.”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

“To most Americans—including me these days—it is gut-check self-evident that a fertilized egg is not a person, because personhood is a lot more than a collection of chromosomes in a Petri dish or in the womb. To most Americans—including me these days—it is also gut-check self-evident that an unborn baby is mighty like one of us, and that a lot of fast talking about reproductive rights and choice or a woman’s mental well-being doesn’t answer the horror of a three-pound child with her head deliberately caved in lying in a medical waste receptacle.”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

“It must have come as a shock to Dad to be plunged into the heart of the American evangelical scene in the 1970s and 1980s, and to suddenly see just who he was urging to take power in the name of returning America to our “Christian roots.” Who would be in charge? Pat Robertson? Jerry Falwell? Gary North? Dr. Dobson? Rousas Rushdoony? And what sort of fools would “our people” elect as president or for Congress, given that they had so easily been duped by the flakes, madmen, and charlatans they were hailing (and lavishly funding) as their spiritual leaders?”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

“Dad seemed lost in a depressed daze. He had recently been saying privately that the evangelical world was more or less being led by lunatics, psychopaths, and extremists, and agreeing with me that if “our side” ever won, America would be in deep trouble. But by then Dad was dying and knew he had very little time left. There was no time to change his life or his new “friends.” All I could do was to bitterly regret what I’d gotten him into. I still do. Dad was rudely shocked by the true state of American “mainstream” evangelicalism”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

“The public image of the leaders of the religious right I met with so many times also contrasted with who they really were. In public, they maintained an image that was usually quite smooth. In private, they ranged from unreconstructed bigot reactionaries like Jerry Falwell, to Dr. Dobson, the most power-hungry and ambitious person I have ever met, to Billy Graham, a very weird man indeed who lived an oddly sheltered life in a celebrity/ministry cocoon, to Pat Robertson, who would have a hard time finding work in any job where hearing voices is not a requirement.”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

“A church split builds self-righteousness into the fabric of every new splinter group, whose only reason for existence is that they decide they are more moral and pure than their brethren. This explains my childhood, and perhaps a lot about America, too. The United States is a country with the national character of a newly formed church splinter group. This is not surprising. Our country started as a church splinter group. The Puritans left England because they believed they were more enlightened than members of the Church of England, and they were eager to form a perfect earthly community following a pure theology.”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

“Mom could not ignore the sorts of people who were most certainly not fundamentalist: the artists, composers, and choreographers she so admired, or the sorts of secular people she might bump into at concerts and in museums. So I think my mother spent a lifetime trying to change the image of Bible-believing Christians.”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

“was surprised by how quickly I was forgotten, how calm the waters were, as soon as I paddled out of the center of the evangelical right-wing whitewater. From one day to the next, I went from daily calls to be on some TV show, or be on the radio, or to be a participant in this or that symposium, march, seminar, or publishing venture, to blessed silence. It was a relief. 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 church 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 one rock band to another. It’s all about who is “hot.” In”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

“We will never find a “good” solution to the question of abortion. What we need to do is to back away from the idea that there is an ideological “fix” to every problem. Then again, that’s just one opinion. And I could be wrong. I often am.”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

“But what if absolute consistency on any issue from the left or the right, religious or secular, is an indication of mediocre intelligence and a lack of intellectual honesty? What if the world is a complex place? What if leadership requires flexibility? What if ideology is a bad substitute for common sense? What if ideological consistency, let alone “purity,” is a sign of small-mindedness, maybe even stupidity? Logically”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

“By then, Dad and I were both saying that evangelicals who would not take a stand on abortion had denied their faith. By the early ’80s, most evangelical leaders (who wanted to keep their jobs) came over to our side on “the issue” or were intimidated into silence if they still had doubts. But the spiritual-versus-political debate was over. Billy Graham might be maintaining his nonpolitical stance, but we activists had won. Evangelical Christianity was now more about winning elections than about winning souls. After”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

“Dad seemed lost in a depressed daze. He had recently been saying privately that the evangelical world was more or less being led by lunatics, psychopaths, and extremists, and agreeing with me that if “our side” ever won, America would be in deep trouble. But by then Dad was dying and knew he had very little time left. There was no time to change his life or his new “friends.” All”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

“The Theonomists—otherwise known as Dominionists; in other words, people who believed in taking “dominion” over society and the world in the name of Jesus—believed in restoring American law to its strictest Puritan origins. They wanted to make America into a modern-day Calvin’s Reformation Geneva. They were our version of the Taliban. They were antitax, antigovernment libertarians (when it came to economics), but on social issues were working to replace secular law with Old Testament biblical law. The”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

“Priscilla has made it a mission to disabuse the students who still come to L’Abri of the Schaeffer mythology. She makes no secret of her nervous breakdowns, her dependence on Prozac, her depression and anxiety attacks, her alcohol-related struggles. She will tell anyone who asks that being a Schaeffer child—and the pressure from Mom to be part of the ministry and, above all, from strangers to live up to their “Schaeffer expectations”—didn’t help. When I called her to ask if she would allow me to write about her problems, and she gave me the okay, she also said “Mom drove me crazy, but in fairness I would have suffered from stress and depression anywhere. I would push too hard in L’Abri, then crash. If I had been doing something else just as intense, it would have happened, too.” Susan”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

“Dad and I were sitting in Falwell’s study just after Dad spoke at Jerry’s church. (Later I preached there, too, endorsed Falwell, and also gave a talk to the whole student body at Falwell’s college.) Out of the blue, Jerry brought up the gay issue. Dad said something about it being complicated, and Jerry replied: “If I had a dog that did what they do, I’d shoot him!” The”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

“The public image of the leaders of the religious right I met with so many times also contrasted with who they really were. In public, they maintained an image that was usually quite smooth. In private, they ranged from unreconstructed bigot reactionaries like Jerry Falwell, to Dr. Dobson, the most power-hungry and ambitious person I have ever met, to Billy Graham, a very weird man indeed who lived an oddly sheltered life in a celebrity/ministry cocoon, to Pat Robertson, who would have a hard time finding work in any job where hearing voices is not a requirement. Dad”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

“As I became a more and more successful “professional Christian,” I began to sense the depth of my ignorance about the country I was talking about. On the road, I’d be parroting the party line, saying that America was godless and doomed. But the America I was actually experiencing (for the first time as a resident) was not doomed. It was more complicated and wonderful than I had ever imagined. I began to get the feeling that maybe I was on the wrong side. The”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

“The Francis Schaeffer of the Uffizi, who hiked with me and told me that he had doubts about many things, even God, gradually disappeared, and the absolutist defender-of-the-Bible and father-of-the-religious-right took his place. The young painter I had been was gone, too. And even the young idealistic pro-life activist was fading away, to be replaced by a pain-in-the-ass upstart earning great book royalties and speaking fees from hanging onto his father’s coattails and shrilly denouncing “secular America” and the evils of liberals. I”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back

“But besides the pro-life cause—in which I sincerely believed—it was never about the money anyway. It was about self-righteousness, adrenaline, and power. Nevertheless, I was starting to get tired of the whole thing. Jim”
― Frank Schaeffer, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of It Back