FATHER OF THE THEOCONS:

Francis Schaeffer's political legacy (Marvin Olasky, March 3, 2005, Townhall)

Who's the major figure behind the election and re-election of George W. Bush? On one level, the visionary Karl Rove. At a deeper level, a theologian most Americans have never heard of: Francis Schaeffer, who 50 years ago this month founded an evangelistic haven in Switzerland, L'Abri.

Over the next quarter-century, Schaeffer changed the lives of many disaffected young people who stopped at L'Abri and found an intellectual pastor who dealt with their hardest questions. He summarized his answers in notable books like "The God Who is There" and "Escape from Reason," and then turned to political matters in his book "How Should We Then Live."

Published in 1976 and then turned into a film series, that book -- along with the impetus of the Supreme Court's 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision -- pushed many evangelicals into political and cultural involvement. Schaeffer brilliantly summarized the history of Western civilization and explained problems in philosophy, science and culture. He concluded that if Christians stayed aloof from political and cultural debates, Western civilization would go down the drain.

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-Francis Schaeffer Celebrated (Keith Peters, 3/14/05, Citizen Link)

The life of a great evangelical theologian is remembered in St. Louis.

More than 1,000 people gathered in St. Louis over the weekend to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the life and work of Christian theologian Francis Schaeffer, a major motivating force behind today's evangelical political movement.

Schaeffer and his wife, Edith, founded L'Abri Fellowship in Lausanne, Switzerland, in March 1955, opening their home to students who were steeped in modernist existential thought. The students heard the other side from the Schaeffers—basic Christian doctrine. [...]

Schaeffer's message had a profound effect not only on Christian outreach to intellectuals, but it also helped bring an evangelical perspective to the pro-life movement. Schaeffer's commitments started with a basic premise—people are made in God's image, and each one counts.

"With the Roe v. Wade shift," Hurley said, "Schaeffer stood at the very front of saying this is a decision that says vulnerable people who don't meet our criteria for quality lives don't count."

Francis Schaeffer: An Evangelical Russell Kirk? (Dr. Darryl Hart, Nov. 17, 2004, Family Research Council)

Although Kirk was younger, his influence was more immediate than Schaeffer's. A favorable review in the New York Times for The Conservative Mind surely helped vault Kirk onto the national stage. This came at a time when people like historian Louis Hartz, author of The Liberal Tradition in America, and literary critic Lionel Trilling were claiming that liberalism was "the sole intellectual tradition" in America. Kirk followed with Prospects for Conservatism, published a year after his first book. These books, along with various essays and talks, made him the font of conservatism in the United States--an entity that began to look like a movement once conservatives in 1964 became the dominant force in the Republican Party with Barry Goldwater's nomination for president and Ronald Reagan's eventual victory sixteen years later.[5]

To link Kirk closely to party politics, however, is to miss the importance of his arguments for creating a conservative tradition. As the Heritage Foundation's Lee Edwards told the Chronicle of Higher Education, "Russell gave the conservative movement its name. If you look at what people in our movement were calling themselves before 1953," Edwards explained, "you find words like 'individualist,' 'classical liberal,' 'libertarian,' and so on." Two examples establish Edwards' point. When William F. Buckley published God and Man at Yale in 1951, he identified himself as an individualist, not a conservative. A year later, when Barry Goldwater was first elected to the Senate, he used the label "progressive Republican" or "Jeffersonian Republican" but not "conservative." But by the middle of the decade the conservative label began to stick. Kirk was the person to put it into circulation. "It was the force of Kirk's ideas," Edwards explained, "and the power of [The Conservative Mind], bringing it all together."[6] When Kirk eventually wrote a column for syndication and another for Buckley's National Review, his influence grew. It grew still more through his speaking engagements at colleges and universities before young, eager students searching for stability and tools to make sense of their lives and society. And if it sounds odd to credit Kirk with creating a conservative mind, it helps to remember that conservatism has generally been characterized by a reaction against something new in hopes of preserving important matters under siege. In this sense, Kirk was no more unusual than his favorite political philosopher, Edmund Burke, who also hatched a conservative outlook in reaction to the novelties and terrors of the French Revolution.

Schaeffer would not emerge as a figure of influence until the 1960s, and his path was almost the reverse of Kirk's. The turning point for the man who would emerge as one of the most popular apologists in the English-speaking world during the 1960s and 1970s by most accounts came during a series of speaking engagements he conducted at evangelical liberal arts colleges during the mid-1960s. By that point Schaeffer had left his associations with McIntire, experienced his own crisis of faith and vocation, and established L'Abri in Switzerland--then almost a decade old--as a study center and Christian community primarily for young men and women with questions and reservations about the Christian religion. His first book, Escape from Reason, did not appear until 1968 and was based on lectures given at Wheaton and Gordon colleges in 1965. In rapid succession came a flurry of short books in which Schaeffer drew upon his own education in apologetics at Westminster, his friendship with the Dutch Reformed art historian, Hans Rookmaker, and his own reading in modern theology and philosophy: The God Who is There in 1968; The Mark of a Christian, Pollution and the Death of Man, and The Church at the End of the Twentieth Century in 1970; True Spirituality in 1971; He is There and He is Not Silent, Back To Freedom and Dignity, and Genesis in Space and Time in 1972; Art and the Bible in 1973; No Little People and Two Contents, Two Realities in 1974; and Joshua and the Flow of Biblical History in 1975. The tally for this flurry of literary activity was twelve titles published between his first brush with popularity on Christian liberal arts college campuses during the mid-1960s and 1975, the eve of his emergence as a central figure in the brain trust of the Religious Right. 1976 was the year Schaeffer made his first appearance on Pat Robertson's television show, The 700 Club.

The year 1976 (anointed by Newsweek as the Year of the Evangelical) was another decisive time in Schaeffer's career. Before that season of the contest between Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford, Schaeffer was the lone evangelical apologist whom college students like myself, with interests in philosophy, a smattering of art and music, and foreign movies, could read and find someone who was willing to consider the religious significance of artistic expressions and intellectual arguments that our parents and pastors generally assigned to the capacious category of "worldly." Here is how Michael S. Hamilton, who has written an important study of twentieth-century intellectual life at Wheaton College, described the effect of Schaeffer upon evangelical young adults:
This small, intense man from the Swiss mountains delivered a message unlike any heard in evangelical circles in the mid-1960s. At Wheaton College, students were fighting to show films like Bambi, while Francis was talking about the films of Bergman and Fellini. Administrators were censoring existential themes out of student publications, while Francis was discussing Camus, Sartre, and Heidegger. He quoted Dylan Thomas, knew the artwork of Salvador Dali, listened to the music of the Beatles and John Cage.

The effect of this tour de force on evangelical students was electrifying. Schaeffer's Boston lectures, Ronald Wells later wrote, commenced "my excitement about the task of Christian scholarship." Historian Mark Noll remembers the Wheaton talks as the most stimulating campus intellectual event of his student years. Francis Schaeffer tore down the gospel curtain that had separated evangelicals from contemporary cultural expression, giving Christians object lessons in how to interpret sculpture, music, painting, and literature as philosophical statements of the modern mind. Future historian Arlin Migliazzo was thrilled: "Schaeffer showed me that Christians didn't have to be dumb."[7]

After 1976, Schaeffer's preoccupation with American politics proved a distraction from his earlier efforts to articulate a Christian response to the sense of despair and meaninglessness that pervaded artistic and philosophical expressions as different as Woody Allen's movies and best-selling novels like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Schaeffer would continue to write; he also starred in two films that his son Frank helped to make. Arguably, Schaeffer's most important books in this post-1976 period were How Should We Then Live? in 1976, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? in 1979, and A Christian Manifesto in 1981. But here his insights into philosophy and art shifted from a posture of dialogue to one of accusation in a series of withering critiques of the West, particularly of the cultural decadence of the United States. Unlike Kirk, who began his writing career as the father of modern American conservatism, Schaeffer ended his as the intellectual sire of the Christian Right. This, at least, is the verdict of Garry Wills who, in his 1990 book, Under God: Religion and American Politics, wrote that although non-evangelicals "would consider Schaeffer's art criticism philistine," the apologist "deserves more credit than anyone else" for galvanizing evangelicals, specifically through pro-life activism and generally through an effort to recover America's Christian roots.[8] In his two-part series for Christianity Today, Hamilton also could not help noticing inconsistencies in Schaeffer's career but still concluded that the missionary-turned-cultural-apologist-turned-social-critic was evangelical Protestantism's "most important public intellectual in the 20 years before his death" in 1984.

Posted by Orrin Judd at March 3, 2005 1:24 AM