Greetings, readers. As we near the end of 2023, the seventh year of Undertow’s journey into the world, I’m pleased to honor one of the people who endorsed my memoir, Undertow. This post is the behind-the-scenes story of how a former founder of The Religious Right, Frank Schaeffer, graciously read and endorsed the memoir of a former leader in The Way International—me. If you have a copy of Undertow, you’ll see part of that endorsement on the front cover and the long version inside.
In brief, Frank Schaeffer is a New York Times bestselling author, an artist, and the son of Francis and Edith Schaeffer, Christian evangelicals who in the 1960s helped found what’s known as the Religious Right. Keep reading to learn more. But first, the endorsement.
Frank Schaeffer endorses Undertow
“In Undertow, Charlene Edge has written a brilliant and engrossing warning to the future by dissecting the past. There are really two books here: one is on a cult called The Way (one of the largest fundamentalist cults in America with about 40,000 followers [in its heyday]).
The second book is an examination of the dynamics of all personality, religious, and political cults. By looking (from a heart-wrenching insider’s point of view) at a misuse of power in one specific group, Edge has written a book that unpacks a far greater truth. What she exposes to bright liberating daylight is just how our political and religious worlds actually function based on the mesmerizing enticement of belonging to an in-group. This is a brilliantly written and timely warning against falling into the trap of thinking we’re the self-proclaimed ‘chosen’ (be that religious or secular, left or right) as we exclude the feared ‘Other.’” —Frank Schaeffer, author of 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 and New York Times best-selling author of Keeping Faith
How did this endorsement come about?
While I was writing my memoir, I read many published memoirs to learn how they are structured and how authors composed their very personal true stories.
One memoir I read was Frank Schaeffer’s 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.
Why that book? I have an indirect connection with Mr. Schaeffer. If you’ve read Undertow, you may recall that when I was in high school I attended Christian fellowships sponsored by Young Life, an evangelical group that focuses on teenagers. The adult leaders of my fellowship in Salisbury, Maryland, encouraged me to participate in a commune-style Christian fellowship over in Switzerland called L’Abri. That’s French for “shelter.” Years later, I learned that the couple who founded it and ran the programs there were Frank Schaeffer’s parents. In his memoir, Crazy for God, readers learn all about this.
Although I didn’t have a chance to go to L’Abri, I never forgot about it.
When I finished reading Frank Schaeffer’s memoir, I felt he would surely understand my story. His experience of breaking away from his parent’s compelling Evangelical Christian world-view and lifestyle seemed to echo my own. He would also understand, better than most readers, the hazards of fundamentalism. Fundamentalism, as well as evangelicalism, was the nature of The Way International founded by Victor Paul Wierwille. The Way was the Bible-based group I was in for seventeen years.
So, I promised myself that when I finished my manuscript, I would take a bold step and ask Mr. Schaeffer to consider reading it and writing what’s called a “blurb” to endorse it.
He did. Gladly. I found his email online and wrote him a message with my request. As it happened, he said he was in-between projects and would love to read my story. I sent it to him. Within a week, I not only heard back from him saying he finished reading it, but he included the wonderful “blurb” above!
I gained his permission to use part of that endorsement on the front cover of my book, too.
It’s an honor to have Frank Schaeffer’s good wishes for Undertow!
For more about Mr. Schaeffer, visit here.
Thanks for reading!
Your writer on the wing,
Charlene
Candy Dawson
Charlene, thank you for sharing this. We will always need truth-tellers like you. Wishing you and Hoyt a wonderful year ahead.
Kathleen Brandt
An impressive and well-deserved endorsement from someone who knows what he’s talking about when it comes to cult-thinking. And more timely now than ever.
Charlene Edge
Thanks, ladies, for sharing your thoughts and good wishes here.
The issues of Christian nationalism and fundamentalism are relevant today and very serious.
I hope readers of Undertow “get” these themes in the story. Many readers only focus on the “cult” aspect of The Way, yet the ideology promoted by the cult is what, these days, makes it especially problematic and challenging to democracy.