Frank(y) went off the deep end IMO when his "evangelical filmmaker" career failed in 1988/89, costing his financial backers millions. Out of the several commercial vehicles he directed, the only "evangelical" film he managed to make was the apocalypic anarchy tale Wired To Kill. I suspect that Franky took his backers' wrath as a lack of forgiveness. (You want irony? He authored the book Addicted to Mediocrity, before he directed Wired To Kill.) I strongly suspect he converted to Orthodoxy as a form of protest against the very Evangelicals whose money he lost in his filmmaking career.
Inbetween then and now, he promoted the Greek Orthodox Church and it's then-Archbishop Spyridon. When the latter was sent packing by the Greek Orthodox Church, Schaeffer lost his soapbox. But promoting Orthodoxy doesn't pay the bills quite like trashing his father's legacy and shilling for liberals and Democrats. Franky always liked attention.
With such a son, who needs enemies? To be sure, Frank tries to nuance the conclusion: "I once thought Dad's ability to present two very different faces to the world—one to his family and one to the public—was gross hypocrisy. I think very differently now. I believe Dad was a very brave man," one who simply had to "carry on"—the victim, presumably, of his own unresolved but inadmissible inner tensions. Yet there is no way round it. Francis Schaeffer, in his son's portrait, lacked intellectual integrity. There was a lie at the very heart of the work of L'Abri, and the thousands of people who over the decades came to L'Abri and came to faith or deepened in faith, were obviously conned too.I challenge this central charge of Frank's with everything in me. I and many of my closest friends, who knew the Schaeffers well, are certain beyond a shadow of doubt that they would challenge it too. Defenders of truth to others, Francis and Edith Schaeffer were people of truth themselves.
For six years I was as close to Frank as anyone outside his own family, and probably closer than many in his family. I was his best man at his wedding. Life has taken us in different directions over the past thirty years, but I counted him my dear friend and went through many of the escapades he recounts and many more that would not bear rehearsing in print. It pains me to say, then, that his portrait is cruel, distorted, and self-serving, but I cannot let it pass unchallenged without a strong insistence on a different way of seeing the story. There is all the difference in the world between flaws and hypocrisy. Francis and Edith Schaeffer were lions for truth. No one could be further from con artists, even unwitting con artists, than the Francis and Edith Schaeffer I knew, lived with, and loved....
- Os Guinness, "Fathers and Sons", a review of Frank Schaeffer's book Crazy for God.
Thanks for that response.
But today, reality is only in Frank’s mind. I wonder if he had a break down and lost himself. It is hard to be objective about who our parents were but as I age, and age, I see my parents through the eyes of an adult. I still react with fear when confronted by unbending, unempathetic women.