Why Dobson is a Fascist

Since I wrote about my loathing for George W. Bush last time, it seems only fitting for me to write about my other, more long-standing arch-nemesis, Dr. James Dobson of Focus on the Family. I will not enter into a tedious analysis of his works, which I have not read for many years -- he is not worth that kind of effort. Rather, I will simply confront his central teaching, which is that the "traditional family" is central to Christian practice and doctrine. The contention of this essay is that Dr. Dobson's teachings on the family are contrary to the gospel, un-biblical, and ultimately pagan in origin and in implication, and that all Christians should shun this wolf in sheep's clothing, who comes only to rob and kill and destroy.

Christ's teaching on the value of the family is clear: "Whoever comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, yes, and even life itself, cannot be my disciple. Whoever does not carry the cross and follow me cannot be my disciple" (Luke 14:26-27). The Oxford annotators are quick to say that "Hate is used in vigorous, vivid hyperbole," but as Kierkegaard points out in Fear and Trembling, all attempts to explain away that passage end up seeming pathetic: certainly, we can say that "hate" actually means "love less," but that ends up with Jesus demanding that we be lax in our duty to our parents, maybe complain a little bit about it, slack off on our chores, or in other words, just be good American teenagers. We must be good fundamentalists and take this passage at its word -- clearly, one's devotion to family and the values pertaining thereto is not a part of one's call as a follower of Christ. In fact, since one is to "hate" the people to whom one normally has a strong, if not absolute, duty, then it must be the case that devotion to one's family is a primary obstacle to the practice of Christianity.

In another place, Christ says, in the presence of his own natural family, "My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it" (Luke 8:21). Here he is using the idea of family analogically -- he empties it of its traditional, natural content of blood relation, and he fills it instead with the content of the new community that he came to found. In this community, according to Paul, "there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3:28).

The traditional family is an economic arrangement, and indeed, our word "economy" comes from the Greek for "home." Christ's message, which dislodges its obedient hearers from their natural relations of blood, power, and gender, is first and foremost an anti-economic, and thus anti-family message. It is first and foremost an "unrealistic" message, because "reality" is always defined by the economic relations that persist in the world -- in the capitalistic United States, for instance, it is "unrealistic" to nationalize our health care system, because the contingent operations of power obstruct it, whereas elsewhere they do not. Christ announces that God does not underwrite the reality constructed out of human greed and lust for domination, and first on his list of what must be submitted to judgment is that "basic building block of society," the family.

In order to understand just how radical Christ's judgment of the family is, though, we need to understand exactly how necessary the family truly is in a realistic perspective. As Peter Brown notes in Body and Society, the low life expectancies of the ancient world required reproduction as soon as possible and as often as possible (this is still true in underdeveloped portions of the modern world). The world as the Romans knew it, their very way of life, was constantly on the verge of destruction, not due to an outside military threat, but due only to the simple fact of death. The family structure of Rome, still with us today, was developed in order to give people a reason to perpetuate the Roman system. Legitimate families, established through the rule of the father, granted immortality to those who passed on their name, and the pressure of past generations weighed heavily on each successive generation -- the chain, the bond that we have maintained, must not be broken!

A society that did not think of itself in something like these terms must certainly become extinct. Similarly, a society that did not defend itself against invaders would become extinct. These are simple facts, but they both assume that something like "society" is that which must be preserved. The preservation of "society," which is at the heart of both family and economics, is a pushing off the past, a desperate attempt to ground oneself in the past, with the certainty that if that link with the past is severed, all is lost. In our liberal tolerant democracies, we are seldom exposed to such thoughts, but we have seen in recent years that all the transactions that take place under the heading of "America" take for granted the fact that "America" must be preserved. The nation is supposed to represent high ideals, but that is little more than a front for the fact that the nation, even America, is nothing other than the continued physical chain of people who are identified by that nation as its subjects. Individuals may die, but the nation itself lives on, and even those who die for the nation are dying precisely so that a sufficient number of those identified by the nation as its subjects will survive to perpetuate the nation.

The driving force under all of this is the family, and it is no wonder that those who are most obnoxiously patriotic in our time of manufactured national crisis are also those who are most devoted to the idea of the traditional family. Few come out and say it in as many words, but we are blessed with commentators such as Pat Buchanan who note the reasoning behind this emphasis on the family and on the sexual morality that directs all lusts toward procreation. The traditional family must be preserved, against birth control, against abortion, perhaps even against miscegenation, because if it isn't, then our race (always the subtext of a nation, even a liberal tolerant nation such as our own) will die out. Buchanan notes that the rampant birthrates in the global south far outpace the birthrates in the educated, highly civilized (white) United States, and that we are committing a kind of auto-genocide through abortion and birth control. The barbarians are at the gates, and we are decadent, forgetting the relentless pull of death, and we have perhaps not left behind sufficient numbers of our seed to perpetuate the great American/Athenian project.

We can see how useful people like Dobson are in such a belief system. His championing of the traditional family is a championing of the American system of power. His championing of the unborn child is a championing of the perpetuation of our glorious project. Sex is, as Senator Santorum has so astutely observed, the primary thing a society interested in its survival should be regulating. In America, due to our high life expectancy, we can afford our sexual revolution, our dalliance with legitimating homosexuality, our quick-and-easy disposal of inadvertantly produced potential members of the next generation, but the handwriting is on the wall. Already Italy is losing population, as is Russia -- the white nations are all headed in that direction, and those whose populations are still growing are reliant on immigrant populations, which undermine the coherence of the nation and cloud the assessment of whether the same nation is in fact being perpetuated. The fascist projects of the early twentieth century are responses to this crisis; the purging of those who do not share or help to perpetuate the great project of the race is an extreme, but natural, outgrowth of the nationalism that promotes family values.

The right wing is the pagan wing. The right wing is the "realistic" wing, the wing of the necessary evil. The gospel is not and never can be right wing. Christianity is not about preserving a link to the past through human effort. Certainly the church Christ founded is a human society, but it is not meant to be perpetuated primarily by sexual reproduction -- the celibacy required of the highest church officials for much of Christian history illustrates this perhaps better than anything else. The church is to live in faith that God will provide new members, some of whom, to be sure, will also be related to other members according to the flesh, but all of whom are related through their participation in the divine sonship of Christ.

The church does not perpetuate itself, and it is here that it is forever qualitatively different from all previous societies and all societies to come. It is an unfounded community, living not according to the exigencies of the present and the preservation of a link to the past, but according to the future that is God's coming rule and reign. For that very reason, one is to hate one's family, one is to leave behind one's necessary economic relations to others, because if one does not do that, one is unable to follow Christ. "Let the dead bury their own dead."

Of course, the sad fact of the matter is that the majority of those who identify themselves as Christian are objectively right wing, objectively pagan. Dr. Dobson would not have an audience if Christians all over our great nation did not believe their relationship to their family to be central to their calling in Christ and who believe morality to be sexual morality first and foremost. In this respect, the pope himself is objectively pagan, and as John Milbank has said, "incipiently fascistic." Christ has no interest in helping us perpetuate our own feeble structures; God has no interest in revealing himself in our petty games of power. Anyone who tells you that they do is lying, even if they believe deep in their heart that they are telling the truth.

Christ is on the side of the perverts, on the side of the useless outcasts who contribute nothing to the nation, and he stands in unqualified judgment over "the family." Therefore, Dr. Dobson does not speak for Christ. Dr. Dobson speaks for the natural order of things, for the nation, for the perpetuation of the race. Those who are led astray by him are not wise.