by Bruce Bawer
This passage in Matthew is so strong, so stunning, that you might think that it would have made church people forever after think twice before setting themselves up as institutional dictators and merciless judges, before standing on the most trivial religious laws and hardhearted doctrines, before invoking the names of past saints in order to extinguish the flames of present saints. And yet from generation to generation, the spiritual descendants of those scribes and Pharisees have done precisely that.
But those of us who are not legalistic Christians must remember one thing: We don't believe that every word of the Bible is literally true. We don't delight in dividing humanity into the saved and the unsaved. If Jesus did speak of hell, we're inclined to see it as an outburst of his all-too-human frustration and not as a revelation of his divine judgment. We don't want to see legalists burn in hell and we don't believe in a God who wants that, either. What those of us who are nonlegalistic Christians can have little trouble believing in, however, is a Savior who, in the fullness of his humanity, responded with a compassion as perfect as his Father's to those who sought to cut him off from the children he loved.
* * *
13
THE DOCTOR AND THE COACH
In the typical legalistic church, it is not only one's own pastor who is seen as a fount of truth. A few celebrated figures are widely revered as authorities—prophets, even— whose word is nearly the equivalent of scripture. One such figure is Hal Lindsey. Another is James Dobson, founder of the Colorado Springs—based organization Focus on the Family and author of several best-selling books on marriage and child-rearing. Though he is a psychologist, not an M.D., the lean, bespectacled, and distinguished-looking Dr. Dobson (as he is universally known throughout the legalistic Christian community) is the very image of a family doctor out of a movie from the 1950s—kindly, all-knowing, thoroughly unflappable, unfailingly dependable. He brings to mind a time before health-insurance controversies and malpractice suits, a time when a doctor was almost by definition a •white male whose knowledge was seen as boundless and whose consummate expertise was beyond question.
Among legalistic Christians, Dobson has precisely that kind of aura. His books are read reverentially. If he tells his mostly female readership to do or not to do something—for example, to forbid their kids certain activities, or to discipline them in a particular way—millions comply. Indeed, while many Americans view the Christian Coalition as the public face of legalistic Christianity, most legalistic Christians feel more intimately allied to Dobson and Focus on the Family. Two generations of legalistic Protestant mothers have raised their children on Dobson's books, which bear such titles as Dare to Discipline, The Strong-Willed Child, Love Must Be Tough, Parenting Isn't for Cowards, and Children at Risk: The Battle for the Hearts and Minds of Our Kids (with Gary Bauer). For these women, Dobson is what Dr. Benjamin Spock was for mainstream mothers in the 1950s and '60s. Millions around the world listen to Dobson's daily radio program, purchase his videos, attend his "community impact seminars," subscribe to one or more of his dozen-odd magazines, and phone his Colorado Springs headquarters to ask members of the huge counseling staff questions about marriage and parenting.
The son of a Nazarene evangelist (the Nazarenes are a Holiness sect who believe that they are incapable of sin), Dobson is a child psychologist who, after earning a Ph.D. in psychology, taught pediatrics for many years at the University of Southern California School of Medicine and served on the attending staff at Children's Hospital of Los Angeles. In 1976, appalled by the "radical feminist agenda" of an international conference on women and families, he founded Focus on the Family. He has written that the organization's goal is "to help preserve the family and to spread the good news about Jesus Christ throughout the world. That's why we are here. . . . More than 1,300 dedicated staff members are working every day to defend the cause of righteousness and assist your family in surviving the pressures of the '90s."
In fact Dobson's real mission, and that of his huge staff, is to roll back the clock. In the letters he contributes to Focus on the Family's monthly newsletter, he offers up a 1950s-style vision of family life that makes Father Knows Best look like Mommie Dearest. Dobson's letters teem with sentimental anecdotes about happy weddings, about the joys of motherhood, and about high-school sweethearts marrying and living happily ever after. He also tells an occasional story that is intended to pull at the heartstrings. In one such story, a recently widowed, childless woman receives as her Christmas gift a puppy that her husband, before his death, had secretly arranged to be given to her. Dobson's comment: "Isn't that a touching story of love between a man and woman?" (If the couple were both men, Dobson wouldn't find it quite so touching.)
Dobson constantly harkens back to the 1950s and to his own youth during that decade. He is full of homespun personal anecdotes about such matters as "the day I nearly destroyed my dad's new Ford" and the wholesome fun he and his pals had at the beach a week before his high-school graduation. On various occasions Dobson has told readers how safe his neighborhood was when he was growing up, how good and loving his dad and mom were, and what a devoted lady he ., is married to. (Her high-school homecoming queen picture was featured alongside Dobson's monthly letter in his June 1994 newsletter.) Back in the 1950s, he remembers fondly, "Grandfatherly Dwight Eisenhower was president of the United States . . . and most of our congressmen, even those who professed no particular faith, understood and defended the Judeo-Christian system of values."
The emphasis here on image—"Grandfatherly" Ike, atheistic congressmen who made Christian noises—is typical of Dobson, whose anecdotes consistently conjure up a picture of the 1950s in which everyone is white and middle-class and without serious problems. He doesn't acknowledge the poverty and racial prejudice that existed then, and ridicules the "liberal historians" who paint a more nuanced picture of 1950s life than he does. "Let me offer an eyewitness account from a teenager who was there in 1954," he says in one letter. "It was a very good year." To be sure, he acknowledges that there were snakes in the garden: "Every now and then, a girl came up pregnant (it was called being 'in trouble'), and she was immediately packed off to some secret location. I never knew where she went." Far from criticizing this way of handling pregnancy—shaming a girl, ruining her life—Dobson implicitly signals his approval. Teen pregnancy doesn't belong in his Norman Rockwell picture, and for him that's the important thing— the integrity of the picture.
Indeed, one reason why Dobson appeals so strongly to legalistic Christians is that he is as fixated as they are on projecting an image of wholesome, happy family life. Deep down, they know that certain things will always be with us—there will always be unmarried teenage girls getting pregnant, and there will always be young men who discover that they are attracted to other young men—but legalistic Christians want these things out of the picture. Sweep pregnancy under the rug; keep gays in the closet. Dobson is one psychologist who doesn't ask legalistic Christians to face and deal with the reality of their lives and other people's lives; he approves of their desire to embrace ideal images and to pretend, not only to other people but to themselves as well, that they're living in an Andy Hardy movie. What is remarkable about his anecdotes and images of wholesome, happy family life is how cliched and generic they are. They evoke a life without texture or individuality—a life not only free of problems but free of any surprises whatsoever. Dads are always strong and hard-working, moms always loving and deferential, boys always absorbed in cars and sports, girls always sweet and quiet and on their way to becoming perfect homemakers.
A more positive way of putting this is to say that ordinary women who view their lives as empty, difficult, and meaningless can read Dobson and, however briefly, feel that their lives are in fact rich and full, and that they are heroic in their devotion to the thankless task of raising children and putting food on the table. In his monthly newsletter, Dobson frequently reminds these women that he's there for them: "To every parent who feels alone in this day of hig
h-tech wickedness and gross immorality, we at Focus on the Family are pulling for you. . . . Your stresses are of great concern to us. Your needs are our needs. . . . We will do everything we can to support families. We are here because we care." Indeed, one great reason for Dobson's popularity is that he makes middle-class wives and mothers feel that he personally does care about them.
In order to retain his appeal for these women, however, Dobson must play a careful game: He must acknowledge their frustrations over the ways in which their lives have fallen short of their dreams, yet at the same time must feed their desire to believe that their lives are, in fact, crowded with joys and rewards. Even as he exalts 1950s America as a lost paradise of family values and condemns 1990s America as a moral cesspit, he affirms that "committed, loving, dedicated families are not disappearing from the face of earth." He concludes one of his wistful tributes to 1950s life by saying that "the scenario I have described, with all its nostalgia and warmth, is highly controversial in some circles within our culture. 'That's not the real world,' some would say. 'Sounds like Ozzie and Harriet to me.'" Dobson's whole point is that it is real, or can be. Yet if his idealized family images appeal to readers, it is precisely because those images aren't real; they reflect not the behind-the-scenes reality of those readers' lives, but an ideal of which they dream and a model for the facade they strive to construct.
If they haven't really achieved the ideal of a wholesome, happy family, Dobson constantly tells his readers, it's not through any fault of their own. It's through the fault of others. And he tells them who those others are, giving them enemies on whom they can blame the imperfections of their lives. Among these enemies are university professors who fill kids' heads with stuff like evolution and liberal politicians who favor government support for poor people. And at the top of the enemies list are feminists and homosexuals. If not for these people, Dobson suggests, American life would still be the heaven it was in the 1950s. In one newsletter, he describes these groups as "those influential people who hate families" and who are "out there working to undermine them." He strikes this paranoid note constantly: "Thousands of social engineers are out there today, many of them working for the government, who would like to get their hands on your home. Heaven forbid!" Among those "social engineers" are supporters of the Children's Rights Movement, which he despises. (For all his rhetoric about the need to protect middle-class American children from Hollywood values and humanistic education, Dobson expresses virtually no interest in the millions of Third World children who die every year of disease and starvation.)
At times Dobson implicitly identifies these enemies with Satan himself: "we must defend the family from the assault of hell. It must not be allowed to wither and die. On the shoulders of this divinely inspired institution rests the welfare of our entire civilization and the hopes of future generations." One reason why Dobson is so popular among legalistic Christians is that he affirms their black-and-white vision of morality: For him, as for them, the world comes down to a clear-cut battle between the evil, destructive gays, feminists, and other "social engineers" who march behind Satan's banner and the wholesome American families who comprise the army of God.
It's not just the 1950s that Dobson depicts as heaven in contrast with the hell of today. In a 1997 article in Focus on the Family magazine, he imagines at length a man from the 1870s cross-examining a man from our own time about contemporary pornography, violence, and such, and eventually accusing him of failing to take care of "your women and children." Dobson's 1990s man, predictably, fails to say anything in reply about nineteenth-century suffrage laws, lynchings, or child labor; the implication throughout the exchange is that the 1870s were a golden time when men took care of women: "We've read about your commitment [to family] in our history books," the 1990s man acknowledges.
"You've come a long way, baby!" Dobson comments ironically toward the end of the piece. The phrase (which he seems not to understand is no longer a potent feminist slogan ripe for sarcasm but a quaint twenty-something-year-old scrap of pop culture) crops up as an ironic refrain throughout Dobson's writings: He finds it ludicrous that any woman today could think she's better off than her counterparts were a century or more ago. To him, God, happiness, and family are all synonymous with perfect order, with "conforming to an eternal standard of behavior" and cleaving to "the divine plan" (of which strict male and female roles form an integral part), and all he can see in women's freedom today is rebellion, selfishness, and rejection of "absolute truth."
One of the elements of contemporary culture that Dobson has branded as an instrument of corruption is MTV, "with its fixation on sex and violence." In this context I might mention that not long ago, when I attended a high-school event in a small Southern town whose residents are overwhelmingly white legalistic Protestants, I was surprised at the students' easy acceptance of an openly gay classmate. One of the students told me that while most of the kids' parents were extremely racist and homophobic, the kids were the opposite. I asked why. His answer: "MTV" Dobson—and his readers—prefer not to recognize that while legalistic churches in such communities have supported prejudice for generations, it has—scandalously—taken such MTV programs as The Real World to expose younger people to a world in which race, gender, and sexual orientation are matters of indifference. For Dobson, the mainstream culture's emphasis on diversity serves only to pit group against group: "Now it's blacks against whites. It's haves against have-nots. It's men against women. It's the abused against abusers. It's liberals against 'right-wing extremists.' It's Jews against Muslims. It's homosexual activists against Christians. It's children against parents. It's Caucasian men against minorities. It's everybody against everybody." His is the voice of every middle-class white heterosexual male who feels that everything was just fine in the old days, when blacks didn't dare cry out against their oppression, gays huddled voicelessly in the closet, and women were meek, pliant housewives.
I have quoted Pat Robertson's and Ralph Reed's litanies of contemporary problems; here is Dobson's: "The cultural revolution . .. was brought about by many influences working together, including the secularization of society, value-neutral schools, homosexual activism, easy-out divorce laws, pornography, crime and violence on television and in the movies, 'safe-sex' ideology, socialistic and humanistic colleges and universities, governmental bureaucracies with destructive purposes, oppressive tax laws, radical feminism, abortion on demand, the drug culture, and overworked and exhausted parents." Few Americans would disagree with Dobson about the lamentable effects of at least some of these developments; part of the reason for the strength of his movement, in fact, is that he has some valid things to say about the effect on children of the more sordid aspects of today's culture, and says them in a tone perfectly pitched to his audience. On paper at least, he comes off as far more pastoral than Robertson and as far less political than Reed; he often can seem more a disciple of a God of love than of a God of wrath.
Yet for all his occasional gentleness of rhetoric, Dobson's chief allies—and those he quotes most often in his newsletters—tend to be among the most mean-spirited political bullies of our time, such as Pat Buchanan, Cal Thomas, Bill Dannemeyer, and Bob Dornan. And when Dobson starts discussing the family-negative elements of American life today, he almost invariably zeroes in on gays, and he does a far more vigorous—and vicious—-job of this than the Christian Coalition ever has. While Reed appears to engage in the minimal amount of gay-bashing necessary to placate his constituency and even occasionally goes out on a limb to urge tolerance, Dobson exploits his readers' homophobia to the hilt. Though Dobson has never demonstrated any way in which homosexuality threatens families, he focuses much more energy on this putative threat than he does on any other. Children, he writes, must be shielded "from homosexual and lesbian propaganda and from wickedness and evil of every stripe."
There is a deep irony in this statement, because when it comes to wicked propaganda about homosexuality, Dobson takes a backseat to few. One of
the things in which Focus on the Family specializes is personal narratives by people who claim to have been delivered out of homosexuality. These testimonies appear in Dobson's own publications and are syndicated to other legalistic periodicals. These narratives all have the same "happy ending": marriage and family. Usually there is a picture of the happy "ex-homosexual" with his or her spouse and children. Invariably the agent for conversion to heterosexuality is Jesus Christ: If you accept Jesus as your savior, he will help you change. One such account is entitled "The Transforming Power of God." The title perfectly illuminates the invaluable role that gay people play for legalistic Christians: Having been taught to connect evil with the Other and to identify themselves as good, legalists find in gay people—who seem to legalists to be as different from themselves as possible—the perfect Other, and thus the perfect embodiment of evil. For Dobson, it is a fixed and guiding idea that gay people (however decent and virtuous) are by definition creatures of the Devil, and members of "traditional families" (however odious) are holy.
Of course almost all psychologists and psychiatrists nowadays recognize that "therapy" designed to make gay people straight doesn't do any such thing. To be homosexual is not just to experience sexual attraction to another person of the same sex; it is to feel the same sense of comfort, rightness, and wholeness in a same-sex relationship that a straight person feels in an opposite-sex relationship. What "ex-gay therapy" does is to build up precisely those unhealthy elements of a gay person's psyche—his or her self-hatred and willingness to live a lie—that psychotherapy should seek to dissolve. To encourage such "transformation," and to celebrate such a person's marriage to a person of the opposite sex, is to embrace a lie about that person and to do something that is cruel to both parties in the marriage. It is not surprising that Dobson, with his fixation on ideal but phony family images, should so emphatically embrace such deceptions. In a 1993 Focus on the Family newsletter, Dobson writes about "the worth of the child, especially the handicapped and needy. . . . Each of them is precious." Yet his organization's propaganda about homosexuality shows that Dobson is more willing to sacrifice the lives of gay youth— who, devastated by hatred, commit suicide at an alarming rate—than to change the societal attitudes that cause them to take their lives. He needs gay people—including gay youth—as scapegoats, in the literal ancient sense of the word: people who are sacrificed to keep society together. We look back at other cultures, such as the Egyptians and Romans, and are appalled at the brutality that made possible, say, the sacrifices of virgins to the gods, the working of slaves to death to build the pyramids, and gladiators' deaths as a form of public entertainment. Yet the way in which legalistic Christians have been encouraged to victimize gay people is no less horrific. The only difference is that the worst abuse takes place behind closed doors, where parents, affirmed by the likes of Dobson in their antigay hatred, put their own children through unimaginable psychological torment that often leads to self-slaughter.