Francis Schaeffer and C. Everett Koop's Invaluable Impact on Pro-Life Evangelicalism.

It is difficult to overestimate the incredible impact that Francis Schaeffer and Dr. C. Everett Koop made on evangelical Christians in the latter third of the 20th century. First Schaeffer, and then Dr. Koop, helped inform and energize a whole generation of evangelical Christians to engagement with a culture that had veered dangerously off course from its Judeo-Christian foundations. The pro-life movement owes them an enormous debt.

This culture's collective loss of its moral compass was nowhere more dramatically revealed than in the rapid implosion of its historic pro-life consensus in the late 1960s culminating in the infamous Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision in January 1973, and the pro-death culture of moral relativism it both symbolized and facilitated.

Francis Schaeffer exploded on the evangelical world in the 1960s. Having interacted from an evangelical theological foundation with the European world of modern philosophy through his and his wife's ministry at their L'Abri home and retreat center in Switzerland, Schaeffer was well-prepared to lead evangelicals to a new and deeper understanding of the titanic clash of differing world views swirling around them.

Returning to the United States in the mid-1960s, Schaeffer electrified evangelical students with his lectures and books (largely based on the lectures) such as The God Who Is There (1968), Escape From Reason (1968), He is There and He is Not Silent (1972) and Back to Freedom and Dignity (1973), which was a stirring refutation of behavioral psychologist B.F. Skinner's Beyond Freedom and Dignity.

As an evangelical Princeton University undergraduate in the late 1960s, I, like so many in my generation, was electrified and galvanized by Schaeffer's challenge to rejoin the contemporary cultural and philosophical debate armed with what he called "true truth" that was true not only in our personal and church lives, but in every area of our existence 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Armed with Schaeffer's guide and atlas of the intellectual terrain, tens of thousands of evangelical students felt called to a life of ministry in the intellectual world of scholarship and cultural discourse. Schaeffer gave us a cultural grid for both understanding and interacting with a culture increasingly hostile to Christian presuppositions of truth and moral absolutes.

Francis Schaeffer has often been criticized in recent years for "oversimplifying" and for "simplistic generalizations." These criticisms miss the point of Schaeffer's significance.