Crazy for God

"Crazy for God" is an expression that has been used in the American religious community, sometimes in a favorable and sometimes in an unfavorable way.

Sun Myung Moon, the founder of the Unification Church, said, "We leaders should leave the tradition that we have become crazy for God." This was recorded in the book The Way of God's Will, which is popular among church members. In 1979 Christopher Edwards, who spent six months in the church, used the expression "Crazy for God" as the title of a book he wrote about his experiences.

In 1992, the magazine Hinduism Today titled an article about the Hindu mystic Valli, "Tamil Songstress 'Crazy for God'". In 2006, New York Times art critic Holland Cotter wrote about Indian and Tibetan Tantric ascetics and yogis, "They were purposefully crazy: crazy for God, truth, reality, enlightenment, salvation. For them, craziness wasn't a curse; it was a choice, an achievement."

In 2006, Will McGinniss, a member of the Christian band Audio Adrenaline, told Beliefnet.com, "We have never been afraid of being loud and bold and crazy for God." While in 2007, the European Christian organization Christian Revolution referred to their evangelical activities, which included dancing on public streets, as being crazy for God.

In October 2007, author Frank Schaeffer titled his autobiography: 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. The book told of his upbringing as the son of a prominent evangelical minister and his later conversion to the Eastern Orthodox Church.

In November 2007, Stephen Prothero, the chairman of Boston University's Department of Religion and the author of American Jesus: How the Son of God Became a National Icon, wrote in the Harvard Divinity Bulletin, "I am crazy for people who are crazy for God: people nearly as inscrutable to me as divinity, who leave wives and children to become forest-dwelling monks in Thailand, who wander naked across the belly of India in search of self-realization, who speak in tongues and take up serpents in Appalachia because the Bible says they can."

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