from Franky Schaeffer “Sham Pearls For Real Swine” ( Wolgemuth & Hyatt; Brentwood:1990) [Francis Schaeffer’s son]

What my wife and I have pursued for our children is good teaching and a love of learning and culture, not ideological or theological purity on the part of our children’s teachers. p.13

… our reaction to disturbing trends of secularization has led to defensive Christian ghettos in education, the church and the mind. p. 34

In our times, various ideologically dedicated groups increasingly use censorship, coercion, or propaganda to limit access to ideas, literature, and the arts that they consider threatening. p.74

Censoprship, the twin brother of propaganda, is the tool of despots, of idealogues, of ayatollahs, of fantics. p.96

To the extent that churches are pietistic, they will reject, or at least be uncomfortable with, art, science, not to mention real people! Art and science ask hard questions; real people are not all respectable. Art and science address complex problems; genuine people behave in unrespectable ways that often raise perplexing questions. Pietists, like all tribalists, long for cultic simplicity and easy solutions: lists of dos and don’ts. … The original, true, odd, creative person in such a context is a nuisance regarded with suspicion. Pietism invents far more rules for itself than God ever mandated. Because freedom is sometimes frightening., the pietists make their circle of life smaller, not bigger, with every successive generation. Thus life becomes narrow, ugly, strange, and cultic and ends in rejection of life just as the manicheans rejected the “flesh”. Such narrowness does not reflect well upon Christianity … cut off from the real world, even real people, pietistic churches have little or no influence in the lives of the people who are creative. pp.130-131

The first freedom is the freedom to be normal. The follower of the Truth need not be a guilt-ridden weirdo, part of some small, seperated band of desperate Christian flagellants seeking personal holiness and spirituality by abandoning life. p133

The follower of Truth is free to apply one standard to all things, to all reality: that is, to simply ask, “Is it true?” “Is it false?” “Is it good?” “Is it bad?” “Does it work?” “Is it excellent?” “Is it mediocre?” … The follower of Truth need not be a strange, mystic oddity. He is a flesh-and-blood person – a real person who may curse when he hits his thumb while adding an extension to his kitchen, but does not blaspheme by saying “Praise the Lord,” unless he means it. pp.134-135