PERSON: Frank Schaeffer

Author, Filmmaker

Frank Schaeffer (born August 3, 1952) is an American author, film director, screenwriter, and public speaker. He is the son of theologian and author Francis Schaeffer. He became a Hollywood film director and author, writing several novels depicting life in a strict evangelical household including Portofino, Zermatt, and Saving Grandma.

While Schaeffer was a conservative, fundamentalist Christian in his youth, he has changed his views, becoming a liberal Democrat and a self-described Christian atheist. He lives north of Boston.

Schaeffer was born in Switzerland in 1952, the son of American missionaries Francis and Edith Schaeffer. He worked with his father and other members of the Religious Right in the 1970s making films, writing books, and speaking at churches and other venues. In the 1980s he continued to write on religious and political themes but also directed several Hollywood movies.

He converted from Presbyterian Calvinism to Eastern Orthodox Christianity in 1990 and gave lectures on his reasons for rejecting conservative evangelical Protestantism. He has criticized the traditional positions of the Orthodox churches on matters of sexual morality.

Schaeffer’s publishing house, Regina Orthodox Press, released Seraphim Rose: The True Story and Private Letters, a 2000 biography of hieromonk Seraphim Rose by Rose’s niece Cathy Scott that included Rose’s sexuality, which was a topic of controversy among some Eastern Orthodox faithful after the book was published.

In 2006, Schaeffer published Baby Jack, a novel about a US Marine killed in Iraq. He is also wrote non-fiction books related to the Marine Corps, including Keeping Faith: A Father-Son Story About Love and the United States Marine Corps, co-written with his son John Schaeffer, and AWOL: The Unexcused Absence of America’s Upper Classes from Military Service and How It Hurts Our Country, co-authored with former Bill Clinton presidential aide Kathy Roth-Douquet.

In 2007, Schaeffer published his autobiography, 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, in which he goes into detail about growing up in the Schaeffer family and around L’Abri. In 2011, he published another memoir, Sex, Mom, and God, in which he discusses growing up with his parents and their role in the rise of the American religious right and argues that the root of the “insanity and corruption” of this force in US politics, and specifically of the religious right’s position on abortion, is a fear of female sexuality.

The two memoirs form the first and third book of what Schaeffer calls his “God trilogy”. The second one, Patience with God: Faith for People Who Don’t Like Religion (or Atheism) (2010), describes his spirituality as it exists since abandoning conservative evangelicalism. The first half contains critiques of both the New Atheists and of Christian fundamentalism.

Starting with his 2014 book Why I Am an Atheist Who Believes in God, he has described himself as an atheist, saying that even though he attends church every weekend and prays, “I do not always believe, let alone know, if God exists. I do not always know he, she, or it does not exist either, though there are long patches in my life when it seems God never did exist.” Schaeffer has stated that one of his goals of his book is to “unhook from allegiance to the Bible”

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