Crazy for God by Frank Schaeffer

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
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I absolutely loved this book.

Full disclosure, “Portofino” is one of my all-time favorite books, and I was more than a little excited to get a behind-the-scenes look at the real family that inspired Schaeffer to create the Becker family.

But this book turned out to be so much more than just a glimpse into the real life Beckers. There’s real, honest, serious critique of the evangelical-Calvinist view of scripture:

“John’s crime was his interest in how the Bible states things and how you draw meaning from the biblical text. John knew that if you push the so-called Sola Scriptura Calvinist approach and the ‘inerrancy’ ideas to their absurd limit, all real study of the Bible stops. It becomes a magical text. It is no longer open to interpretation. Dogma replaces study, because scholarship can only be meaningful when you are allowed to ask real questions and let the chips fall where they may.”

And crazy-hilarious rants against the evangelical culture:

“And I learned that if you talk ‘too fast,’ all those huntin’, fishin’, shootin’, lifetime-NRA-member types, the ones that worry about the United Nations, have their eyes too close together and have wives caked with abuot forty pounds of makeup per square inch, start to look at you funny. And if they can’t understand what you’re saying, pretty soon you feel this suspicious wave of squinty-eyed, do-you-think-you’re-better-than-us fucked-upness rolling toward you over the banquet tables and the flower arrangements somebody stuck tinsel and balloons in, and up around the head table and past the lime Jell-O topped with some kind of nameless sweet shit and sprinkled with nuts.”

“Crazy for God” also reads like a tell-all history of the political religious-right from a (biased) insider. And yeah, of course Schaeffer is biased, but he never pretends to be otherwise.

I loved this book. And I learned that Pat Robertson would literally shoot his dog dead if he found out it was gay. Bonus.

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