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 Frank Schaeffer

Having been introduced to Frank Schaeffer's writings and opinions in his post-evangelical phase of life, after he embraced Eastern Orthodoxy as the cure all for the social and theological blunders and missteps of modernity (which, he makes sure we know, is the result of Protestant individualism), I was curious to read a biography, especially after the reviews I read decried it as a patricide of sorts.

After putting it down just now I feel that the critics are in part correct. He certainly pulls no punches in his colorful treatment of his at times pious and at time abusive father, who rants and rages at Frank's mother's expense, who herself plays the role of martyr to the fullest extent. But to be fair, he pulls no punches when it comes to himself, either: a teen who sees through his father's duplicity, who is always looking for sexual outlet, who gets his teenage lover pregnant, who gets his father to sell out to the American televangelists and the pro-life movement (which he helped create), who shoplifts pork chops in his underpants to get by after he turns his back on what he sees as the misuse of Christianity by the `name it and claim it' Pat Robertson's of televangelism, etc. You get the picture. Yes, he is brutally honest about his family, but also about everything.

The value I find in this book is not only the honesty that one would find in any good memoir, but its honesty about a topic that is rarely criticized from someone on the `inside'. I have great reservations about the forms of modern American Christianity being pandered about and this book serves as a both a warning and, for some, a personal corrective to its destructive and idolatrous personality cult tendencies. It also reveals how odd and pandering the community is to fads, always seeking the zeitgeist in its own peculiar and curious reappropriation of cultural movements to take hold of it in their schemes to make the gospel relevant by cloaking it in cheesy rock music, bracelets, objects on cars and any of the other kitsch that only serves to belittle the reality of Christianity, offering its opponents so much straw for their arguments.

Lastly, I didn't care much for the ordering of the book, which seemed more like individual reminiscences at times than a chronological account; but that is just my taste. There remains a coherence to the well-written story.