American Presbyterian pastor, apologist, and cultural critic (1912-1984). Educated at Hampden-Sydney and Westminster Theological Seminary under Cornelius Van Til and J. Gresham Machen. In 1948 he and his wife Edith moved to Switzerland where they eventually founded L'Abri ("the shelter") — a study community in the Alps where Christians and skeptics alike came to discuss worldview, philosophy, and the faith over the kitchen table and on hiking trails. From 1968 onward Schaeffer's books and films (How Should We Then Live?, Whatever Happened to the Human Race?) reshaped American evangelicalism's engagement with culture, politics, and the arts.
Schaeffer's lasting gift was teaching evangelicals to think about worldview. His claim: every act of human life proceeds from presuppositions; the person who wants to understand their culture must learn to trace visible actions and artifacts back to the underlying worldview. He traced Western culture's collapse as a progressive drift from biblical presuppositions through Renaissance humanism, Enlightenment rationalism, modernist despair (Nietzsche, Sartre), and post-modern relativism — warning that a society abandoning its Christian foundations would devolve morally and philosophically. His "line of despair" diagram showed this drift graphically. Three contributions. (1) Apologetic method — a presuppositional approach, informed by Van Til, engaged with actual skeptics not in abstract debate but in conversation across worldviews. L'Abri conversations could go for days. (2) Cultural engagement — Schaeffer gave evangelicals permission to engage art, film, philosophy, and politics from a Christian frame rather than retreating from them. (3) Prophetic warnings — his Whatever Happened to the Human Race? (1979, with C. Everett Koop) sounded the alarm on abortion and euthanasia with striking prescience. Schaeffer mobilized the evangelical pro-life movement. Weaknesses: his historical survey sometimes oversimplified; his late writings grew more polemically political. But his influence — shaping figures from Nancy Pearcey to Tim Keller — is immense.