Book 15: Crazy for God by Frank Schaeffer

I didn't do a weekly report last week, and we've mostly taken this week off (other than a little catch  up work, plus outside class stuff) because DH has been on vacation, so not much blog action lately...but I do need to catch up on book reviews. So. There's actually a WTM discussion going on right now about Frank Schaeffer and this book specifically....largely about what a bratty, ungrateful, ass of a son he is.  Here's what I posted there:

I finished Crazy for God earlier this week...I'm still not entirely sure what I think about it. I guess my impression was that Frank Schaeffer is kind of a jerk (a view of him that the book itself suggests that most people who know him share or have shared at some point). He's very hard on his parents and his tone is often bitter and sarcastic, but he's also hard on himself (and prints letters from his daughter in which she exhibits the same lack of tact and mercy about him that he shows towards his parents). In many places, he's also very sympathetic to his parents and seems to value his relationships with them.

The things he actually says (as opposed to the way he says them) are not, by and large, all that scathing. His parents had a sometimes rocky marriage and parented him largely through benign neglect. There's a lot of posturing for money and political power among some of the leaders in the religious right, and some people are in it more for that than out of sincere religious conviction. Honestly, I didn't feel like any of these things were hard to believe or shockers, especially. But I don't think I'd much care for the guy if I met him, either. 

...of course, a lot of the views on that thread are from people who know (the work of) and love Frank's father, Francis Schaeffer, and who are considerably more politically and religiously conservative than I am. As someone who came into the book with a pretty low opinion of the religious right, I'm sure I'm looking at it quite differently. I actually wouldn't have minded a little MORE gossip about how creepy Billy Graham is, to be honest. The book was a little more...impressionistic, maybe?...than I was expecting. More than half of it is taken up with memories of childhood; all told, the bashing of the religious right doesn't take up as much space as I expected, nor is it as concrete or, umm, chronological. Impressionistic. Episodic. Schaeffer is utterly uninterested (at least in this book) in issues of theology, which kind of disappointed me, I have to say. He thinks the Calvinism espoused by his parents is silly and deeply flawed (he later converts and becomes Orthodox), but he never really spells out why; he's more interested in the effect Calvinism has on the people who believe in it than in unraveling it intellectually. And there. There's my impressionistic review.