by Bruce Bawer
Dobson's antagonism toward gays is so powerful that it leads him into self-contradiction. In a question-and-answer section of The New Dare to Discipline, the question is posed: "Is AIDS God's plague sent to punish homosexuals, lesbians and other promiscuous people?" Dob-son's answer begins: "I would think not, because little babies and others who bear no responsibility are suffering." Yet he finds the idea of AIDS as punishment too appealing to leave it at that, and goes on to affirm that when gay people get AIDS, it is indeed a consequence of moral violation. "Sickness and death," he writes, "befall those who play Russian roulette with God's moral law."
Dobson's antagonism toward homosexuals is plainly a symptom of his fixation on traditional sex roles. "When reduced to the basics," he wrote in 1995, "women need men to be romantic, caring and loving. Men need women to be respectful, supportive and loyal. These are not primarily cultural influences that are learned in childhood, as some would have us believe. They are deeply rooted forces in the human personality." (Presumably Dobson would insist that the desire of a homosexual to be with another person of the same sex is not "deeply rooted," but is rather a result of "cultural influences.") "The Creator," he continues, "observed Adam's loneliness in the Garden of Eden and said, 'It is not good for the man to be alone.'" So he gave Adam a wife, and thus "invented the family and gave it His blessing and ordination." Dobson's comment: "How redundant it would have been for the Creator to put Adam to sleep and then fashion another man from his rib! No, He brought forth a woman and gave her to Adam. He put greater toughness and aggressiveness in the man and more softness and nurtu-rance in the woman—and suited them to one another's needs. And in their relationship, He symbolized the mystical bond between the believer and Christ, Himself. What an incredible concept!" From the Adam and Eve story—which Dobson (a critic of Darwin) adverts to frequently, always as if it were a literal historical account—Dobson derives what he calls "the biblical concept of masculinity and femininity." He insists that "boys and girls should be taught that the sexes are equal in worth, but very different from one another. Girls should know they are girls, and boys should know they are boys." Indeed, "self-awareness begins with an understanding of our sexual identity. It must not be blurred by those who have an avant-garde agenda of their own."
Dobson's antique attitudes about sex roles are on display throughout his work. In Marriage and Sexuality: Dr. Dobson Answers Your Questions, he writes: "It is a woman's prerogative not to have a baby. . . . However, there's something ambiguous about insisting on a 'right' which would mean the end of the human race if universally applied!" He quotes with approval the passage from Ephesians beginning "Wives, be subject to your husbands." And he affirms "that a family must have a leader whose decisions prevail in times of differing opinions. If I understand the Scriptures, that role has been assigned to the man of the house."
In Christ, wrote Saint Paul, "there is no such thing as Jew and Greek, slave and free, male and female" (Gal. 3:28). This is the ultimate statement of what Jesus was really about—the eradication of alienating distinctions and a radical assertion of equal human worth. Yet Dob-son is fixated on what he describes as "the countless physiological and emotional differences between the sexes," and tells readers it is their obligation as Christians to heed these differences and to assign roles and establish hierarchies on the basis of them. In arguing for these differences' supreme importance, Dobson bounces back and forth oddly between biology ("the sexes differ in their basal metabolism") and the Bible ("Eve, being suited to his particular needs, was given to Adam as a 'help-meet'"). In the guise of learned discourse, Dobson recycles tired stereotypes: Women need love, men don't; "flowers and candy and cards are more meaningful to her than to him"; the woman has greater "emotional instability—she laughs and cries more easily"; "female physiology is a finely tuned instrument, being more complex and vulnerable than the masculine counterpart." Much of his "advice" in this area is amazingly banal, and often outrageously sexist:
Men need to understand that women tend to care more than they about the home and everything in it. Whether your wife or fiancee has a nest-building instinct or not, I don't know, but for years I have observed this feminine interest in the details of the family dwelling. Admittedly, not every woman keeps a neat house. I know some messy ladies whose mothers must have been frightened by garbage trucks when they were pregnant. But even in those cases, there is often a female concern for the house and what is in it.
Like Ralph Reed, Dobson claims to believe in pluralism. "Our vision," he has written, "is for a just and righteous society that protects religious liberties for people of all faiths. We believe in the concept of pluralism, which acknowledges the widely differing values and beliefs among our citizens." Yet Dobson is more convincing when, in the familiar tradition of American legalistic Christianity, he is using military imagery. The difference is that instead of seeming to glory (as Robertson and others do) in the Sturm und Drang of battle and in the destruction of the foe, Dobson concentrates on the valor and self-discipline of the warrior hero. "How long has it been," he writes,
since we've thought of ourselves as highly disciplined soldiers in the army of the Lord? That was a familiar theme in years past. "Onward Christian Soldiers" was one of the favorite songs of the church. Christians, it proclaimed, were "marching as to war, with the cross of Jesus going on before." We also sang, "Stand up! Stand up for Jesus, ye soldiers of the cross." Then there was "Dare to be a Daniel, dare to stand alone. Dare to have a purpose firm, dare to make it known." That was the way Christians saw their responsibility in days past. Well, we've come a long way, baby.
Dobson may calculatedly not emphasize the idea of the foe (perhaps because he feels that violent language would turn off his female readership), but his attraction to war imagery is still offensive, for a foe is certainly implied. And we know who the foe is: anyone who violates the idealized image of the family that Dobson and his admirers cherish.
Every now and then, to be sure, a sentence or two in a Focus on the Family publication will surprise. A 1997 Focus on the Family article called "When HIV Hits Home" quoted an HIV-positive man who said that his church had "turned its back" on him after his diagnosis and that "the only ones who reached out were those in the gay community"; another HIV-positive man quoted in the article described the heartlessness of a pastor and a "Christian doctor" who had rejected him. The article concluded with one interviewee's hope that "fear and judgment" in churches would be replaced by compassion. One has the impression that in Focus on the Family there are at least some people who may, after Dobson's retirement or death, seek to turn it into an organization that helps families live with integrity in the real world of the present rather than feed them false images of the past and unrealistic dreams of the future.
For two decades, legalistic Christian women have had "Dr. Dobson" to turn to with their problems. Now legalistic men have "Coach McCartney." In 1990 Bill McCartney, who until 1994 was the head football coach at the University of Colorado, came up with the idea of establishing a men's Christian movement. With the help of his connections in the legalistic Christian community—including Dobson—McCartney founded Promise Keepers and installed as its president a man named Randy Phillips, who, like the coach, was an ex-Catholic who had converted to a charismatic denomination called the Vineyard Fellowship. Together these men came up with the "Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper." The promises are these: to honor Jesus Christ; to pursue "vital relationships with a few other men" (because a man "needs brothers to help him keep his promises"); to maintain moral and physical purity; to build "strong marriages and families through love, protection and biblical values"; to support one's church and pastor; to reach "beyond any racial and denominational barriers to demonstrate the power of biblical unity"; and to live out the Great Commandment and the Great Commission. The movement's basic text, Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper, contains essays by Dobson, McCartney, Phillips, Campus Crusade for Christ founder Bill Bright, and others, and was published i
n 1994 by Focus on the Family Press.
In 1991, Promise Keepers held its first rally in the football stadium at the University of Colorado. Featuring addresses by several evangelists and closing with a pep talk by McCartney, it drew 4,200 men; similar events at the same site in 1992 and 1993 drew 22,000 and 53,000 men respectively. In 1994, Promise Keepers went national, holding seven rallies with a total attendance figure of 280,000. The next year, 750,000 men attended thirteen rallies; in 1996, over a million men packed twenty-two stadiums from Seattle to Jacksonville. Included in the 1996 total was a "conference" in Atlanta's Georgia Dome that drew 39,000 pastors and that probably represented the largest assemblage of clergy in world history.
The Promise Keepers movement has taken many observers by surprise. Why do so many men—mostly white, middle-aged, and middle-class—attend these rallies? "Many men come to Promise Keepers feeling despair about their lives—their inability to communicate with their wives and children, their suburban rootlessness, their emotional aridity, their professional immobility," notes Michael Joseph Gross, a journalist and former theology student. "Midway on life's journey (the average Promise Keeper is 38), they come to the stadiums searching for new ways to make their lives make sense." In a 1996 Village Voice article about Promise Keepers' first rally in New York City, James Hannahan described the oratory of one speaker, the evangelist Luis Palau, as having been "designed to pierce straight guys in the Achilles heel—their relationship with their fathers." Indeed, the Promise Keepers Web site contains an essay entitled "Man to Man about Being a Son of God" that explains Christian faith as a father-son thing. The essay begins by noting that "a man's relationship with his father is basic," and that the first such relationship on earth was bungled when Adam "willingly joined his wife in doubting their Father's word and ignoring his instructions." As a consequence, Adam and Eve were "expelled from God's presence."
The essay goes on to describe Adam's post-Eden life in terms designed to make it meaningful to the average middle-American man. Adam "failed his wife... . [he] lost his job and was kicked off the family farm. He found some temporary jobs until he could get back with his Father. But this work was cursed from the start and resulted in pain and difficulty. His family relationships went from bad to worse. One of his sons even killed another!" From Adam, accordingly, "we have inherited a diseased spiritual DNA" that has brought sin and problems into our lives. In order to turn things around, we need "the bonds of communion with our Father that all of us are meant to have." How can these bonds be restored? Through Jesus, of course. "Pray this prayer to accept or reaffirm your acceptance of Christ: 'Father, I've come home. Please make me your son. I turn from my sin. . . . Let today be the beginning of my new journey as your son and a member of your family. You have always kept your promises. Help me to keep my promises, too. In Jesus' name. Amen.'" It is not difficult to imagine millions of middle-class American men—men with dead-end jobs, tired marriages, and no sense of what to do or where to go—responding emotionally to such charged rhetoric, which taps into their feelings about their own fathers and uses these feelings to win their commitment to Christ.
The mainstream media were slow to pick up on the importance of Promise Keepers. When they did, they focused almost exclusively on three sociopolitical aspects of the movement, one of which was seen as positive—its emphasis on overcoming racial divisions—and two as negative: the group's attitudes toward gays and women. As to the gay issue, McCartney (a prominent supporter of the 1992 antigay amendment to Colorado's constitution) has made antagonism toward homosexuality a hallmark of the movement and has allowed so-called "ex-gay ministries" to proselytize at his rallies; as to the issue of women, Promise Keepers, which doesn't allow women to attend its rallies, feeds men the standard legalistic Protestant line that God wants the husband to be the family boss. In Seven Promises of a Promise Keeper, Tony Evans writes that a husband who wishes "to be a spiritually pure man" should begin as follows. "Sit down with your wife and say something like this: 'Honey, I've made a terrible mistake. I've given you my role. I gave up leading this family, and I forced you to take my place. Now I must reclaim that role.'" Evans goes on, "Don't misunderstand what I'm saying here. I'm not suggesting that you ask for your role back. I'm urging you to take it back. If you simply ask for it, your wife is likely to say, 'Look, for the last ten years, I've had to raise these kids, look after the house, and pay the bills. I've had to get a job and still keep up my duties at home. I've had to do my job and yours. You think I'm just going to turn everything back over to you?'" Evans says, "Your wife's concerns may be justified. Unfortunately, however, there can be no compromise here. If you're going to lead, you must lead. Be sensitive. Listen. Treat the lady gently and lovingly. But lead!"
Like many megachurches, Promise Keepers presents itself as nondenominational, ecumenical, and unencumbered by exclusionary doctrines; in theory, it welcomes all Christian men—Catholics included—regardless of the official doctrines of the churches they belong to. Yet Promise Keepers is in fact a strongly legalistic movement. To decree that a "spiritually pure" man must assert his authority as head of his family, after all, is to insist on a legalistic Protestant conception of family structure that, like Dobson's teachings on the family, is radically at odds with mainline Protestant thinking as well as with Saint Paul's statement that in Christ there is no male or female. In Christ as reimagined by Focus on the Family and Promise Keepers, the difference between male and female is of primary importance. Promise Keepers also teaches biblical inerrancy; like Focus on the Family, it represents its understanding of marriage as being based, in part, on the experiences of Adam and Eve, which it purports to regard as historical.
Coach McCartney has often tried to soften the sound of Evans's directive about the husband's authority. "For the guy to be the leader," McCartney has said, "means he out-serves his wife." But this remark only draws attention to another problem with Promise Keepers: its appeal to male competitiveness. At a Promise Keepers rally in Portland, Oregon, according to one observer, a group of men began to chant, "We love Jesus, how 'bout you?" More men joined in, and soon men on the opposite side of the stadium were shouting back. Plainly, it had become a competition to see which side could shout the loudest. This sort of competitiveness would appear to be ubiquitous. "Promise Keepers," comments Michael Gross, "replaces a secular pathology of achievement with a spiritual one. Conversion is an achievement and devotion is competitive, in a faith uniquely suited to men who grew from Little League into Regional Sales. The very name—Promise Keeper—defines a man by what he does. There is no time for a man to be held by God, to rest in God, to imagine that God delights in him for anything that he is. There is, in short, no time for grace." Promise Keepers, adds Gross, "work furiously to prove themselves. From the day they are re-born, they are told they can do better."
Like Focus on the Family, Promise Keepers identifies Christianity with "the family" and right-wing politics. At the organization's rallies, men can find literature advocating, among much else, the teaching of creationism and the prohibition of nontraditional families. Liberals have raised concerns about the political motives of Promise Keepers' founders. Hannahan writes that "the goal of PK seems clear: By pandering to religious people of color, while maintaining a pretense of nonpartisanship, they're beginning the process of winning over the souls—and votes—of black folk, many of whom are culturally conservative but vote Democrat because they perceive Republicans as racist. Smart plan." Michael Gross points out that Wellington Boone, a black minister in the Promise Keepers leadership, "does not seriously challenge white people to notice, let alone rectify, the injustices they benefit from."
Promise Keepers also identifies Christianity with manliness. It is not the first movement to attempt to draw men to Christianity in this way. The Christian Socialist movement in mid-nineteenth-century England, a forerunner of Rauschenbusch's Social Gospel, was popularly known as Muscular Christianity; one of its founders, Thomas Hughes, wrote a book entitled Th
e Manliness of Christ. Billy Sunday, the early-twentieth-century American evangelist, was a former baseball player who preached a gospel containing heavy doses of machismo and patriotism. "The manliest man," he exhorted, "is the man who will acknowledge Jesus Christ." It is true that many American men need to deepen their relationships with other men. But is such deepening really going on under the auspices of Promise Keepers? Like Focus on the Family, the movement identifies Christianity with prefeminist conceptions about the family and sex roles; as a rule, the men who are drawn to Promise Keepers bring those conceptions with them, and also bring notions of manliness gleaned from a lifetime of observing athletes. Instead of challenging those conceptions, Promise Keepers reinforces them; instead of helping men to grow beyond the macho concept of being a "real man," the organization sells T-shirts that read "Real men love Jesus." The leaders of Promise Keepers recognize that millions of men need to be reminded that in Christ there is no black and white; what they have failed to see is that most of those men must also learn that in Christ there is also no male and female. Instead of being taught to identify love with assertion of authority over women, those men must learn some humility and respect for women. And they must learn that the notion of God as male, on which the entire emotional structure of Promise Keepers is based, is only a metaphor—that God is neither man nor woman, and that all human beings, male and female, are equally precious to him.