| You can focus on my family
By Perry Trolard
Guest Writer
It’s natural that when fundamentalist kids turn intellectual they found their new identity on the exclusion of the naive faith of their youthgroup: we lose The Message or our Teen Study Bible in a trashy corner and heft the hard-bound Oxford NRSV onto the shelf; we trade biblical futurology in for solid NPR analysis, trying hard to forget those passages that could make unconditional Jewish nationalism sacred; and, in a more intimate maneuver, we ever so carefully place a piece of paper over our parents’ inscription to us in the front of Dr. James Dobson’s “Life on the Edge.”
On the far end of this trajectory myself, I recently happened upon this book of Dr. Dobson’s and was surprisingly ready to review it. It’s his “lifework,” he says, his “effort to help our next generation [that’s us--the book was published in 1995] bridge the chasm between adolescence and adulthood.” My parents gave me a copy when I was about 15, and it didn’t go over well: I wasn’t thrilled to get down to business making preparations for the responsibility of adulthood. Mainly I remember being annoyed with the guiding life=road image. “Typical!” I sneered.
But this time around I dove into the section on emotions, and my housemates and I proclaimed aloud the 17 checkpoints for a good marriage relationship, which included much material from his famous “tough love” discourse. And much to my surprise, he (predictably) had good things to say. He offered simple, practical advice about how to stay stable in an emotionally topsy-turvy body, and he encouraged the use of very deliberate strategizing in romantic relationships. I found the latter point to be a countervailing measure vis-ࣀ-vis the pop-cultural mythology of a True Love which needs only to be found, not hammered out. More generally, the man’s heart was in the right place, so to speak. He was faithfully doing the grunt work of providing self-help-style solutions to his brothers and sisters, and for this I admire his devotion to doing God’s work for God’s people (including the possibility that non-Christians read his stuff, which I’m sure he welcomes).
Why didn’t I know this all along? Why was I surprised to see his service? For one, because here at Calvin and I’m sure many other institutions, Dobson is used (with Falwell and Robertson among others) as an emblem of everything wrong and unthinking about American popular Christianity. But it was also because—and I think this is a generalized reaction to fundamentalism—after leaving the fundamentalist scene, we have to drop it like a bad habit, erase its traces like they’re poison. Consequently, Dobson or any other fundamentalist icon simply has to have the evidence of their wrongheadedness writ large on their foreheads. This insistence can’t help but produce distortion, and forces us into the awkward position of finding flaws in each one of their statements.
What’s uncomfortable to me about this position is that for the sake of our own identity we trash our well-intentioned brothers and sisters. We’re fine with picking and choosing the good from the bad, the valid from the invalid in, say, Foucault, but can’t bear to do the same with Dobson. Why is this? It’s because Dobson and us are fighting for the same tradition, the Christian tradition broadly speaking. And because Dobson and his likes are the most vocal in the public sphere, they lay claim most prominently to that tradition, thus forcing us to define ourselves on their terms. We end up doing so in a thoroughly negative fashion: Who are we? Not them.
Instead of continuing to take this path, I encourage us to see God’s work being done in their work, as we attempt to discern likewise in the rest of human activity. Let’s give them their due by recognizing the vital role they play, and, in an act of overdue humility, recognize the part they can play in edifying us. Let’s not demonize our brothers and sisters for the sake of our own self-presentation.
On the other hand, of course we don’t want, patronizingly, to make them into angels. Thus to avoid the condescension that may go hand in hand with re-valuing Dobson or any part of our fundamentalist history, it’s necessary to submit it to rigorous critical appraisal. And there is certainly much which we can and will criticize. But let us not forget the appreciative phase of the critical task, and let us not use our critiques as instruments of contempt. In our world, in which God quickens his people through bracelets and monographs alike, anywhere we find the Spirit let us identify with it.
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