I’ve told you already that I found this book utterly gripping and compelling. I might add that it also made me feel as if I were being beaten repeatedly with a rubber hose.

I shall explain in due course.

Warning: I will say some hard things about Charles Schulz in the course of this review. Please understand that this doesn’t spring from malice. In fact, it rises from a scary level of personal identification. As I shall explain, etc.

Back in those days I’ve been reminiscing about in my last couple posts (the early ’70s), when I was working with a Christian musical group and we were in the midst of the “Jesus Movement,” there was no celebrity Christian about whom we were more smug than Charles M. Schulz. Everybody loved “Sparky” Schulz. He was the most successful cartoonist, not only in the world, but in history. Art galleries displayed his original panels. He said things in his wonderful little strip that made us feel as if this guy really understood us, shared our fears and insecurities, and sympathized.



Christianity Today, the voice of Evangelicalism back then, profiled him (in 1965) in an article that called him “a devoted Christian and dedicated churchman… a model Christian professional artist, a loving family man, an unabashed witness to Christ as his Lord and Savior.”

Sadly, that assessment was, as the saying goes, no longer operative. What we did not know (and what Schulz kept from his fans for a long time) was that when he moved from Minneapolis to Sonoma County, California in 1958, leaving his Church of God (Anderson, Indiana) congregation behind, he essentially gave up on church. There was no COG congregation where he lived. He did teach a Sunday School class in a local Methodist church, but he didn’t join and didn’t attend services. He gave his children next to no religious instruction at all. Before the Jesus Decade was over, he would stand by while his wife took their daughter to Japan for an abortion, have an extramarital affair, steal another man’s wife (a harsh but, I think, accurate statement), and then divorce his own wife to marry the other woman.

He read his Bible faithfully but, beginning in the mid-’60s, slid from Fundamentalism into Universalism. By the end of his life he was describing himself as a secular humanist.

Why this happened isn’t a question author David Michaelis concerns himself with in Schulz and Peanuts. He’s not writing for a Christian audience. But he paints a picture that seems, to me, to give some hints.

Charles M. “Sparky” Schulz was born in 1922 in St. Paul, Minnesota. His father was a German immigrant barber, his mother a Wisconsin native of Norwegian descent.

(And if you think I’m not going to make a big deal about that, you sure don’t know me. In fact, his mother’s family seems to have been highly similar to my own mother’s Norwegian forebears—not the polite, respectable Norwegians we like to talk about, but marginal, moonshine-making, lawbreaking Norwegians. There is much plain weirdness in such a background, as I can myself testify with full authority. Schulz himself said, “I always regarded myself as being Norwegian and not German.” Michaelis writes of one of Schulz’ Art Instruction Schools colleagues, “Letness noticed that… Schulz was, like him, reserved and hampered by the Scandinavian impulse to deflate oneself before another could do it before him.”)

Self-effacement. Self-deprecation. “Minnesota nice” (as we call it). The belief that, whatever your ambitions and drive, you have to present yourself as essentially innocuous, not particularly bright or accomplished—as Schulz himself put it frequently, “nobody.” That’s essentially Scandinavian.

Michaelis places a lot of blame for Schulz’ insecurity on his mother. Schulz adored his mother, and was devastated by her early death from cancer. But Michaelis thinks he sees evidence that she never made him feel unconditionally loved; that he always felt he had to accomplish something to earn her love, and (by extension) anyone else’s.

I thought the evidence for Dena Schulz’ culpability in this regard was a little thin. On the other hand, I have to admit that if any kind of mother can do that kind of job on her kid, it’s a hardscrabble Norwegian mother.

The continuing theme of Schulz and Peanuts is Sparky’s lifelong, reverse-psychology, passive-aggressive struggle to be great enough to deserve love (through accomplishment, not through loving actions or receiving grace). No matter how many papers “Peanuts” appeared in, no matter how many collections were published and sold, no matter how many TV specials there were, and licensed merchandise deals, and awards, and newspaper and magazine and television interviews, he always felt like he hadn’t made it. When someone told him they loved him, his usual response was, “You do?”

That’s not entirely innocent, either. “Since Sparky did not believe that people really loved him, he felt no need to reciprocate,” writes Michaelis.

Schulz’ first wife Joyce, well known to be the inspiration for Lucy, could be shrill and demanding. But (at least as Michaelis presents the situation) she was trying—desperately—to get some kind of response out of this man. In her own way, she strove again and again to engage his interest in her big building projects (first on their California estate, then when she honchoed the construction and management of a huge ice skating/entertainment complex nearby), but he refused to enter her world. His world was his drawing board. The one thing that really mattered to him was producing the strip. Lonely as he may have felt, he’d decided long ago that all he really needed was his work.

Behind the drawing board he was in control. There was no rejection there, no disorder, no loss or hurt feelings. Charles M. Schulz (it would appear) lived for safety.

And that, I suspect (I know I’m judging. Very likely wrong) accounts for his loss of faith. Faith is essentially an adventure, an expedition into a far country. Schulz abandoned Biblical Christianity at least in part (I suspect) because it took too much courage. It was so much easier to go with the flow, to believe things that were socially acceptable, things you’d never have to defend. Also to keep your Christian fans in the dark about it—no point upsetting them, either. Let’s not have a scene.

There comes a day, though, when the Master returns to demand an accounting.

Charles Schulz, according to this book, died terrified of death.

I speak somewhat harshly of him because, in reading this book, I often felt I was reading my own story. (There are numerous differences, of course, notably the worldwide success, the marriage and family, and the apostasy.) But what happened to Schulz’ soul is a constant danger to me as well, one I’ve not always overcome.

Oh, the book? Fascinating. Brilliant. I recommend it. Weighs about ten pounds.