Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible's Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics--And How I Learned to Love Women (2 page)

My life has been one of all-consuming faith—not
my
faith, but the faith of others that I seem to have caught like a disease and been almost obliterated by. What does God want? I am still trying to find out. And having once been a “professional Christian,” my vision is muddied by the baggage I carry. Every action, every thought, every moment I stumble into is judged by an inner voice. Everything seems to have a moral component: eating—because there are hungry people; sex—don’t even start. What I write, don’t write, who I talk to, don’t talk to, and how I raised my children, their characters, accomplishments, failures, whether they “love the Lord” or not, everything points to my relationship with God, real or imagined.

The habit of fundamentalist faith persists in my gut, even long after I rejected it. I’m meeting my agent Jennifer on the Upper West Side. She thinks I’m sane. I pretend I am. But somewhere in the back of my mind is a vague unease. She isn’t saved. She’s some sort of lapsed something. Should I be doing anything about that? Will God bless my next book deal if I deny him before men, or in this case before my agent? When Jen asks me to tell her about my new book, shouldn’t I ask her if she wouldn’t like to accept Jesus first?

It turns out that it was easier to move beyond my parents’ beliefs intellectually than to abandon my gut responses. So who instilled those responses? In other words, who were we? It depends on what moment you choose to become a fly on the Schaeffer wall. People are not as one-dimensional as the stories about them. There is no way to write the absolute truth about any family, much less my family.

The only answer to “Who are you?” is “When?”

Author’s Note:
I’m sure I have placed some events in the wrong years or have written that something happened in one place when it happened in another. This is a
memoir,
not a biography. (I have also changed some people’s names to protect the more-or-less innocent.) To footnote this story or to have done research into dates and places and to correct the chronology would have been to indulge the conceit that my book is an objective history. It is not. What I’ve written comes from a memory deformed by time, prejudice, flawed recall, and emotion.

B
eing raised inside a miracle tends to make you feel singled out. I wanted to fit into the world. I still do. And yet the darkly weird moments of my childhood did not cancel out the light.

When I walked down the back road from our chalet to the village of Huémoz it was impossible to get anywhere without stopping to look at the view. I don’t think I once left Chalet Les Mélèzes, charged up the back steps, then ran down the back road without at least one view-absorbing pause. Sometimes I’d stop and stare at the mountains so long, I’d forget what I’d been planning to do. The view of the Alps always seemed like a special reward to our family for doing God’s will. “If we had stayed in America, we’d never have a view like this,” Mom would say.

Fifty years later, when I fly back to Switzerland I sit on the left-hand side of the connecting flight from Zurich to Geneva. That way I can see our valley, pick out my mountains.

Before I moved to America, there was never any doubt about which way I was facing; down to the Rhône Valley with its patchwork of fields, orchards, roads, and villages miles below, up to the flower-studded hayfields and steep forest-clad hills behind our village, or across the valley to the peaks towering
over everything. We were
Les Américains
on the edge of a tiny village, fundamentalist Christians running a mission called L’Abri, surrounded by Swiss peasants who hated the fact we’d invaded their farming community. Our theology taught us that we were mere sojourners in an alien land, temporary subjects of earth, citizens only of heaven. We were separated from the world, even from all those other born-again American Christians back home who, to outsiders, must have looked very much like us. But to we Schaeffers, most Protestants were the “other.” Perhaps they were part of ministries that asked for money rather than really trusting the Lord to meet their needs. Perhaps they had compromised on some point of theology. We did the Lord’s work in the Lord’s way.

Living with a mother and father who defended their theological ideas all day, in a household where lunch and dinner were often two or three hours long as the discussions continued—“discussions” is not really the right word, since what happened was that a guest would ask a question and then Dad, Fidel Castro-like, would hold forth for several hours—I grew up with a gift for verbal communication. By the time I was nine or ten, I could mimic my parents and compose an articulate answer to almost any theological question. And I had a flair for vocabulary that maybe only a dyslexic raised with no TV, and who had a mother who read out loud, could acquire. Adults who talked to me told my parents that I was the most well-spoken child they had ever met. What they didn’t know was that my verbal abilities were like a circus trick. Professional proselytizers were raising me: sweet, sincere—but preoccupied—proselytizers.

On any given day from the time I was about seven on, you could have asked my parents where I was and they would have
had no idea. They literally lost track of me, more or less forgot I existed, except at one specific time of the day. At bedtime, Mom read me nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novels by people like Louisa May Alcott and Jean Stratton Porter. Mom also read Dickens, C. S. Lewis, Sherlock Holmes stories, and everything by P. G. Wodehouse and all of Mark Twain (with the exception of his ramblings about why he was an atheist and his speculation about how many tens of thousands of years an angel’s orgasm lasts). And Mom read every book of the Bible to me so many times that I still know more about ancient Israel than modern America.

D
ad was born in 1912 to “working-class ignorant pagan parents in Philadelphia” (according to Mom). Mom was born in China in 1914 to “dear and sensitive highly educated missionary parents.” (Mom again.) Mom lived in China at a China Inland Mission compound until she was five, as a privileged colonial in a walled compound with a Chinese nanny and other servants whose job it was to care for and amuse the little foreign girl. Then her parents sailed back to America, where her father taught Greek and Hebrew.

When Mom’s parents had come back to America in 1919, it was meant to just be for a one-year furlough. But my Mom’s mother had a heart condition that prevented her from returning to China. Mom’s parents lamented this and argued with the China Inland Mission board, who made that decision.

When Mom got to America, she says that she felt like a displaced person, certainly not Chinese but not American either. My mother’s memories of her early childhood are remarkably vivid, even at ninety-two when she has forgotten so much else. Mom remembers arguing with children who knew she had lived in China, and who would taunt her with the ditty “Chinkychinky Chinaman sitting on a fence, trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents!” Mom would counter: “And he could, too!”

Mom pined for the life in the Chinese compound, at least as she thought she remembered it. Perhaps that longing shaped her fierce desire to found her own mission to recreate something her family had lost—that golden childhood time just beyond reach. In Mother’s nostalgic memories, life in China became a sacred time for her. Mom recalled life in a compound filled with friendly Chinese converts, the “needy” Chinese who came to her parents. Her memories were so vivid that at age eighty-three, Mom even wrote a lovely children’s book about her life in the compound,
Mei Fuh—Memories from China.

Mom’s older sisters Janet and Elsa had been dumped in mission boarding schools and hardly saw their parents until they moved back to America as young teens. A few years after returning home, Aunt Janet joined the Communist Party. Later, Aunt Elsa married a mental patient who tried to murder her. Janet left the Communists and hooked up with the Closed Plymouth Brethren, a sect so “separated” from the world that she stopped sleeping with her husband. And as the sect got crazier, she went right along with them, stopped “fellowshipping” with her two sons, wouldn’t eat in the same room, and finally moved out, because she couldn’t even be under the same roof as her family of “unbelievers.” Meanwhile, Aunt Elsa’s husband Ralph mistook her for a vulture and shot at her. (He missed.)

Jessie, my mother’s mother, had been married and widowed. Mom told me that her mother said her first marriage was the only time she was in love, that she was fond of my mother’s father, my grandfather George Seville, but nothing more. I think my mother’s tremendous passion for life, for anything she did, came from a rebellion against her genteel parents’ lukewarm relationship. Perhaps Mom was determined to be hot where her parents were cool.

Compared to Aunt Janet, my mother was sane. Compared to Aunt Elsa, she was lucky.

When she was a teen Mom used to sneak out to dance. Mom’s professor father and blueblood mother were genteel to a fault and easily fooled by their daughter, whom they spoiled. Her dad made a point of always serving her as if she was an honored guest. Pictures of Mom when she was little show her exquisitely dressed and always posing, dramatically and with a secure sense of her own extrovert charm.

My mother was raised as a devout fundamentalist Christian. But her parents’ version of fundamentalism was an educated and cultured fundamentalism. They read the Bible and believed it was literally true in every detail. But they also spoke several languages, and Bible reading was accompanied by plenty of P. G. Wodehouse, chunks of recited Shakespeare, funny limericks, amusing puns, and a deep interest in classical music and art.

Mom was a “Mediterranean” beauty with dark eyes, a softly rounded nose, high cheekbones, and long waist-length black hair that she wore up in a bun. She was not tall, but her figure was perfect. She may have been partly Jewish.

There was a family theory about her maiden name Seville. Mom’s father’s people came to America from England in the early nineteenth century. (Her mother’s people came over on the second voyage of the Mayflower.) It was thought that George Seville’s family may have been Jewish. There was a Seville family connection to Scotland. When the Spanish Roman Catholics were persecuting Jews, they made them take last names, and the Jews took the names of their cities. Then Spaniards were wrecked on the Scottish coast after the defeat of the Armada. And so—as our family theory went—maybe one of Mom’s ancestors was one of those Spanish/Scottish
Jews. That would have suited Mom perfectly. She loved all things Jewish and in the 1970s wrote a book—
Christianity Is Jewish.

Once, when my mother was in her late sixties, I saw a man come up to her on an airplane and ask her if she was Audrey Hepburn. My mother didn’t really look like Ms. Hepburn, but she was so beautiful, and exuded such energy, that people assumed she had to be somebody.

Mom was very aware that she was special. She would, from time to time, talk about what
could
have been, what she
could
have done if she had had less-strict parents, what she
might
have been if she hadn’t married Dad. What
if
she had finished college instead of dropping out to marry my father to work and put him through seminary? What
if
she had married money? “There were
lots
of wealthy and cultured young men, and not so young too, who wanted to have me.”

Mom lived her life in tension between her unrealized ambition to be recognized for something important, refined, and cultured and her belief that God had called her to do Christian work that required her to sacrifice herself, not least her image of who she really felt she was when the cultural elites she admired, or at least envied, mocked fundamentalism.

Mom sometimes stamped her foot (literally) if H. L. Mencken’s name was mentioned. And she would say of his anti-fundamentalist satires: “But
we’re
not like that! He would
never
have written those horrible things if he had ever met
me!”

My mother loved culture. I don’t know if this was because she loved books, art, and music for their own sake, or if this was part of her desire to not be mistaken for “just some fundamentalist” or “one of those American Christians,” as she sometimes called other believers.

When we went on our vacations to Italy, Mom brought books and read out loud to us on the beach, in our rooms, even at dinner. Bertie Wooster, Huck Finn, Shylock, Aslan, Peter, Susan, and Lucy, not to mention Odysseus, Prince Caspian, or the Little Prince, got tangled up in many a Mediterranean sunset, accompanied us up to Mom and Dad’s bedroom, then lurked in the shadows as we sprawled on my parents’ bed for “just one more chapter,
please,
Mom!” before sleep.

My mother was a great and expressive actress and read better out loud than anyone I’ve heard since. Every book she read lived. And Mom never said so specifically, but it was clear that reading was a necessity, not a luxury.

When Mom and Dad traveled to England, Mom would visit Blackwell’s Children’s Book Shop and come home laden with Penguin and Puffin paperbacks. And since those included everything written by such luminary children’s authors as E. Nesbitt, who set her stories in Victorian England, I grew up knowing more about the monarchy, the difference between a scullery and parlor maid, hackney cabs, and how to make and serve tea properly than about American daily life, unless you count life on the prairie with Ma and Pa or life on the Mississippi as observed from a raft.

Mom
loved
books. And my mother never read down to her children. She always was reading books “meant for slightly older children.” By the time I was nine or ten, Mom was reading me classics, from
Wuthering Heights
to
Pride and Prejudice.

Once I started to read for myself, I discovered that Mom had given me a flying start. The world was literally an open book. As I turned the pages, I met many familiar friends.