Francis Schaeffer in 1982

The cultural assumptions of the religious right

I was eleven or twelve years old when I first saw this speech delivered by Francis Schaeffer at Thomas Road Baptist Church in 1982.

My grandpa had recorded Jerry Falwell’s broadcast of Schaeffer on a VCR, the miraculous invention that freed us from having to be at the TV when a program aired—so long as someone remembered to pop in a tape. This was the sort of gizmo that Grandpa was always one of the first to buy. We would sit in his family room, he and Grandma in La-Z-Boys with their feet up, and watch their treasure-trove of recordings: concerts from PBS, Bedtime for Bonzo, The Adventures of Robin Hood (filmed in Chico, CA where we lived), and old episodes of Firing Line with William F. Buckley.

With a VCR, you could curate your own little world, even if it was weird.

When I first saw Schaeffer’s speech, I was stunned—an experience many people had when they first heard him or read his books. Evangelicals didn’t talk this way, didn’t refer to philosophy, or art, or even books that weren’t by Chuck Swindoll or Tim LaHaye. In fact, the whole situation of Schaeffer being on Falwell’s show was absurd in a way that only TV could pull off. Old Time Gospel Hour presents … an intellectual! Even Time agrees! This Schaeffer guy’s really out-there! Let’s sing him happy birthday, everybody! Cue pipe-organ and choir. And then Schaeffer, without so much as nodding at the down-home flim-flam that just happened, starts to talk.

I probably wore out this tape watching Schaeffer’s declarations over and over. It played in my head when I wasn’t watching it. I went on to read each of his books several times in junior high and high school. It’s not too much to say that I memorized his argument about the degradation of Western culture. Even though I no longer agree with Schaeffer’s argument, the introduction to a world of ideas I got from him was revolutionary in itself.

What was most compelling to me about this speech was his fury.

He was angry at evangelicals. He was saying that we had no excuse for being ignorant of Western culture. “Where have the Christians been?” he asked. His fury seemed to leave him inarticulate at some points in this speech. He repeated lines word for word from his prepared text, his pitch rising as if in sputtering exasperation. He interrogated the good people of Thomas Road: “Don’t you understand?”

At length, it became unclear whether he was talking about evangelicals or Americans in general. “We’re not only immoral. We’re stupid.”

Schaeffer had terminal cancer—as Falwell said after the speech. You can hear the cancer stalk him in his breathing. The anger of this speech was real, the bluntness of a man who had nothing to lose. He meant every word, every repeated line, every yell. He had spent his life giving understanding and love to people seeking a way out of despair, but the Western church at large had not taken in his message. This seems now like a kind of last lecture, delivered not as summation but as denunciation.

Watching it again after many decades, two things stand out to me.

He was right in key diagnoses and prophecies. Schaeffer said that the new humanistic thinking about the nature of reality was a world away from the American founders. He was not summoning a gauzy image of a nonexistent past. He was stating a plain fact of intellectual history, one that any thinker from John Dewey to Michel Foucault would have acknowledged happily. Schaeffer also said that abortion, acceptance of suicide, and the increasing tyranny of the state were all inevitable outcomes of that intellectual change. This point was not slippery slope reductionism, but another statement of fact. With Friedrich Nietzsche, the reason for seeking to displace Christian thought changed. Previous philosophers sought to give Christian morals a basis in culture and reason, which they argued were stronger than traditional authority. Nietzsche and many others sought to demolish Christian ethics entirely.

It has become fashionable among some evangelicals to dismiss Schaeffer as simplistic or even demagogic on these issues. On important matters, to be sure, his historical claims were too glib. But not these. I don’t think it’s simplistic, when battalions of philosophers tell you they want to destroy Christianity, to take them at their word.

Evangelicals in the main do not think philosophy matters. Schaeffer was right to call them out.

The other thing that stands out to me is Schaeffer’s description of how this change took over American life. He said materialistic humanism was imposed on Americans through the public schools and media. It was forced on the population by the courts. He cited Roe v. Wade as the preeminent example.

In describing the change in American culture with this top-down political story, Schaeffer was saying what most evangelicals believed. (The camera shows a man nodding in agreement during this part of the speech: Cal Thomas, one of the early conservative culture warriors.) If it hadn’t been for the Supreme Court, the Christian consensus in America would have remained dominant. Elite people held humanistic ideas, while the rest of the populace believed broadly in Christianity. The elite took control of spending tax dollars, regulating school curricula, and delivering court rulings on the meaning of our Constitution. We were robbed.

It is precisely at this point that I have never agreed with the evangelical right.

Government did not impose humanism on an unwilling Christian populace. American culture became more secular and its Christian faith less vital far earlier than evangelicals want to admit. Government, courts, and media were often reflecting the change, not forcing it. To be sure, many Christians hated the change. But the reality is that committed evangelicals have been an American minority for a very long time.

Schaeffer was conflicted and unclear on this point in his speech. Though he insisted that humanism was imposed on Americans, much of his point—indeed, much of the premise of his public ministry—was that evangelicals did not really know what they believed. If evangelicals were so ignorant, how would they have known what to resist? How did that ignorance come about?

“Where have the Christians been?” he asked. Maybe they were floating in the currents of culture unaware of any need to distinguish themselves from their neighbors.

What currents were they floating in? Consider, in the same vein as my previous post, how vast the cultural forces were in post-war America. Here are just three.

One was a great silence.

The majority of men who returned from victory in World War II never spoke about what they had seen, heard, and done. Think of it: the men who hopped from one bloody Pacific island to the next, who flew in bombers over Europe and Japan, who heard screams in battle, who smelled burning flesh, who liberated concentration camps did not speak of it to their loved ones.

My great uncle Wilburn, Grandpa’s brother-in-law, had been a tail-gunner in a B-17 over Europe. He was the most nervous man you ever saw. Fidgeting, pacing, sweeping, chattering, and as I always remember, smiling. For years he never described his experiences in that high-altitude bubble shooting at the Luftwaffe, though we knew from his wife Lois that he woke up screaming from his nightmares. One day late in his life, he took my dad and brother into his den, pulled out photos and medals, and talked about the war—a bit.

Men have told me about living with this silence as small children when their fathers came home. They say this silence was generational. It divided fathers and sons. Sons couldn’t get into the minds of their fathers, couldn’t understand the anger, and couldn’t escape reproach. This formative current in American life has not been examined with the care it warrants. It flowed through every young family, sundering the continuity of life experience and values without making a sound.

Every war is followed by a crisis of values. Such crises inevitably change politics. We’re in such a crisis right now.

A second current was TV.

Dad would come home to find that Skip was not reading comic books or listening to the radio or going to the movies or even getting into trouble. He was watching something called Howdy Doody. We fought the war so Skip can watch a bunch of clowns? How will he learn to do anything serious wasting his time on this?

Another current was flowing through American households, eroding connections between parents and children. But this one made a lot more noise.

Maybe you’re irritated by Neil Postman, as I often am. Maybe you question how rational and literate Americans were when Lincoln debated Douglas for hours. But you have to admit that the most irritating thing about Amusing Ourselves to Death is that Postman was largely right. We don’t want the drudgery of self-government if the tyrants are entertaining enough. If you want a cooler version of the same idea, read My Pilgrim’s Progress by George W. S. Trow. In fact, just read it regardless of what you want. Artifact by artifact he dramatizes how media degraded from the real face-to-face communities reflected by newspapers into the fraudulent world of celebrity and irony that was television. Trow will irritate you for different reasons, but you’ll still be hard-pressed to prove him wrong.

TV flattened information, decontextualized it, ripped it up into factoids and scattered it in the wind. Yes, for a while, the verbal and visual logic of print drove the news divisions of the three networks because, yes, the reporters had been in newspapers first. But the visual logic of video was not the same as the visual logic of the printed page. A news article reporting that a congregation sang happy birthday to an intellectual, who ignored them and gave them a withering lecture on humanism, would be describing a crisis. But on camera the moment just sort of goes away. (Paging Marshall McLuhan.)

Video’s logic won and we are several generations into its reign. Not only is information decontextualized, but we are much more sophisticated at curating our private worlds compared to the VCR days. The government didn’t impose this. It can barely keep pace with it.

A third current was a medical and cultural phenomenon: the Pill.

Many pixels have already been posted about the impact of contraception and I have little to add. Only consider this: in one generation people went from Sex Equals Babies to Just Sex. A single generation seemed to reverse the entire history of the human race. No wonder many of the boomer youth felt so empowered, as if they could dictate terms to the world by chanting slogans at the Moratorium. And no wonder they were so easily duped by the otherwise normal illusions of adolescent sexuality. Illegitimate births skyrocketed, along with STDs and poverty for single mothers. Sex won the sexual revolution, but people lost.

There are permanent forces in the world that will never be controlled with pills. Sex is one of them. But that’s a contextual reality, the sort of truth passed on through families that have continuity of life experience and values. It’s also the sort of truth that TV rendered incomprehensible to many by the sheer power of droning away in the corner.

By the way, I have no memory of a time when Sex Equaled Babies. To say the same thing in different words, I don’t remember when social policy was concerned with biological realities. And I’m getting old. The government was never powerful enough to concoct the most precious delusion of the 20th century, the fairy tale of Just Sex. And the government wasn’t powerful enough to resist it either.

These cultural currents have been reshaping American politics for almost eighty years. Family came to be divided by silence, media, and sexuality. Those divisions were entrenched long before family was decimated by no-fault divorce or redefined by court decisions. Christians were never going to dispel the demoralizing impact of war, the stupefying drone of TV, or the fantasy world of the Pill. And the notion that there was a majority of Americans who wanted those things dispelled, really wanted them all to go away—that was just another precious delusion.

Schaeffer understood something crucial.

Christians always form a minority counterculture in this world. Those who accept this alien status gain asymmetrical victories. That’s why Schaeffer devoted most of his life to building relationships through faithful dialogue. I do wish he had sharpened this clarity at the end of his life. He might have made a different valedictory contribution, showing that each of us can befriend others and urge them to know Christ, the final reality. It occurs to me that the broad legacy of his ministry can still teach us this one crucial form of resistance.

“Where have the Christians been?”

Most were floating along with the times, oars supplied by humanism, not moored to any particular doctrine, only vaguely and fitfully alarmed that the Kingdom of Jesus Christ was receding in the distance. The whole way, they were singing Christian songs and watching Jerry Falwell on TV.