Why I’m Glad Dr. Dobson Is Leaving

I’ve received an email asking basically the same thing reader Goodbye said in a comment on my James Dobson post:

If you're going to declare your dislike of Dobson at least give some reasons.

Fair enough.

First, the bona fides: I had a childhood that was steeped in Focus on the Family. I listened to “Adventures in Odyssey” incessantly. Every day of the summer, one could guarantee that Young Snowden would be lying in front of his cassette-player, doodling in a coloring book, his mind floating in the world of ‘Whit’s End’, Rathbone Electric Palace, and window washer Bernard Walton. E-v-e-r-y day, without fail. (If you have no idea what any of that just said, just trust me when I say I was waaaay deep into the flagship children’s radio show for Focus on the Family.)

I also read dozens of Focus-approved books (Cooper Kids, anybody? Door In the Dragon’s Throat, whatwhat?!). I was a subscriber to Breakaway magazine, Focus’s teen-culture-watch publication. I saw “The Pistol” probably 30 times. I could name you Christian “safe for the family” alternatives to every major music act, thanks to my knowledge of the Christian culture. Like Sheryl Crow? Try Jennifer Knapp! Like 311? Try Pax 217! How ‘bout Korn? Give Thousand Foot Krutch a try!*

The only two cities I really grew up in are Colorado Springs and north-suburbs Dallas. Christian culture is what we do in those parts.

*Whew* Okay, pop-Christian dork status VERIFIED.

Allow me to destroy that status right heeyah: James Dobson is a bitter asshole.

Now to the why: Dobson represents everything that is scared about the modern evangelical Christian. When he looks out upon the world, he sees a God Loving People besieged by an aggressive secularist relativist enemy. He sees a binary world, one where it’s God v. Everyone Else. He sees, in short, the world the way Richard Nixon saw the world: it’s about survival of culture and “ways of life”, and principles be damned if they get in the way. So if that means that I go back on my word and endorse a guy who loathes my personage AND I loathe his, so be it -- from Dobson’s perspective, no maneuver is too low when The Gays And Atheists are running the schools or Marilyn Manson is instructing kids in school shootings: it’s Armageddon every day.

Additionally, this Armageddon is one of the Good Doctor’s own fabric.  Dr. Dobson created the beast he claims to serve. What beast is that? For lack of a better term, I’m going to call it Evangelical Pride Movement. Dobson saw the rise of the ethnic-identity and gay-rights movements and sought to fight fire with fire. He created an organization that was based in the “We’re Here, We’re Queer” ethos of the Stonewall protest. He saw that there was a significantly sized group that was frightened by the changes wrought by the Baby Boomers, and he forged the catch phrases and buzz terms that would give his flock the confidence to survive the scawee scawee wuld.

The only catch: the fundamental faith upon which Christianity is built has nothing to do with identity in a socio-political sense. Contrary to what Dobson and Falwell and Robertson tell you, the Bible says nothing about how a Christian should vote. The Bible and one’s faith will surely inform one’s voting, but I challenge any one to find me the “The kingdom of God is like a 17% flat tax” verse I missed in the Gospels. Yet Dr. Dobson would have you believe that this world has decayed from its prior Christian Greatness because of the hippies, Derrida, and MTV, and that with the Bible as our voting guide, we can return unto God. This is a dangerous ideal that drives Christians out of the world rather than into it.

Furthermore, for a man who claims that “family values” can be empirically proven to be optimal for society, his position on several touchy issues is flatly anti-empirical. Peep Focus’s page on transgenderism:

Because "transgenderism" violates God's intentional design for sex and sexuality, we believe that this is a cultural and theological battle that we must engage and win. The modern "transgender" movement is systematically working to dismantle the concept of gender as the Bible and the world have always known it to be. If the transgender lobby succeeds, there will be striking consequences for marriage, family and society at large.

Lookit: I don’t know how God and Christ view transgendered people. There’s lots of good science out there that posits that transsexualism is a physical, not psychological condition. I don’t know what God intends for a person born with male sex organs but feminine hormones and chemicals in his (her?) brain. You get into some really heavy teleological stuff when you parse apart gender identity. What I do know is that positioning it as a “battle” over culture and theology is worse than wrong-headed: it’s either delusional or grossly cynical. I mean, my God, even Iran has a very liberal policy on sex-reassignment operations, okayed by the Ayatollah himself! I’m not a Christianists-are-the-Taliban like Andrew Sullivan is, but I do think it’s good to step back and make small comparisons from time to time.

So, in closing, any man who can claim majority credit for the creation/inspiration of execrable slime like Tangle (formerly GodTube) or “Christian Salt” (as an alternative to that damned ‘Kosher Salt’. Jews, they’re everywhere!)  deserves my scorn.

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*The really sad part is, I didn’t have to do one second of internet searching to remember any of those bands, and I haven’t listened to any of that stuff in 7 or 8 years.