By now Frank Schaeffer’s critique of crazy right-wing Christianity is sufficiently well-known that he didn’t need to write that book again. We are much the richer for the book he chose to write instead: a book that expresses a very wise person’s irreducible double-mindedness in relation to things of the spirit.
Schaeffer was once a shining star in the conservative Christian firmament—an iconic figure in part because of his late parents’ high standing in evangelical circles, and also because of his own contributions to the formation of “movement” Christianity in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Then he dropped out, turned his back on that kind of power and glory. He produced low-budget movies for a time, wrote some decent autobiographical fiction, and finally returned to writing about the thing he knows best: the damage wrought by hard, doctrinal religion.
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