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

Strange priorities rule the sensibilities of some Christians. Four-letter words used in film outrage the brethren, yet routine lies in church hardly cause any comment. Nudity on the stage, screen or canvas arouses fundamentalists to fury, yet a carnival atmosphere of debauched materialism reigns unchallenged in much of the church. pp1-2

What past leaders would meet our standards of piety? Luther? We would find him vulgar. Shakespeare? Filthy. Bach? Secular. Verdi? Catholic. Joan of Arc? Insane. Winston Churchill? A drunken warmonger. George Washington? A reactionary chauvinist. Jesus of Nazareth? Rude, sexist, offensive, and inscrutable. All of these would be too compolicated, too real, too human for the “nice”, the timid, the shallow, the ignorant – the church. p.2

… we are now, therefore, paying the dreadful price for a twentieth century brand of evangelical-fundamentalist Christianity that has regarded culture, history, worship, art, and learning as “unspiritual”, thus unimportant. … The blind are leading the blind. Ignorant pietistic teachers are passing on a-cultural learning to the children of ignorant parents. p.10

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 rtejection of life just as the manicheans rejected the “flesh”. Such narrowness does not reflect well upon Christianity … cut oiff from the real wporld, even real people, pietistic churches have little or no influence in the lives of the people who are creative. pp.130-131