“Dr. Dobson Answers Your Questions.” Focus on the Family, October 1992.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
Fundamentalist psychologist James C. Dobson’s high tech version of mid-century mid-American nostalgia reaches many millions of people every day. His Focus on the Family produces several radio programs carried throughout the U.S. and to 24 other countries. His 15-year-old organization also publishes magazines for children, teens and adults and produces books, films, videos and audiotapes as well as his syndicated column – all with a view well illustrated by this issue’s cover: a man points the way, with his well-dressed wife and daughter in tow, as they stroll along an air-brushed amber lane literally line with white picket fences. Inside, though, the magazine is not so tranquil. There’s a “Prayer Alert” against sex ed in local schools and warnings about Satanism, the ERA, the Democrats and that ever-reliable bugaboo: “the homosexual lifestyle”.
Here’s the first of two questions in the syndicated column: “I read recently that the definition of the family needed to be revised in light of cultural changes. The writer said a family should be thought of as ‘a circle of love’, including any individuals who are deeply attached to each other. Somehow, I know this is wrong but can’t articulate why. How do you see it?” Perhaps the questioner feels uneasy because of too much Dobson and not enough Bible. And when it comes to the welfare of homosexuals, not to mention others, biblical illiteracy is a menace. But Dobson capitalizes on biblical illiteracy. Asserting that “the effort to redefine the family” is the work of “homosexual activists”, he gives his own “traditional definition” of the family: “a group of individuals who are related to one another by marriage, birth or adoption – nothing more, nothing else”. He tries to claim that this is the biblical definition of family. Here’s where biblical illiteracy does wonders for him and his cause while doing much damage to homosexuals and their families.
To begin with, the matter of “cultural changes” to which Dobson’s inquirer refers is merely the latest in a long tradition of changes in the place and structure of family life, traceable throughout the Bible. And, of course, since biblical times, there have been even more cultural changes. Dobson chides: “Under such a [new] definition, one man and six women could be regarded as a legal entity”. Did he never hear of Old Testament polygamy and the commanded levirate marriages or of Martin Luther’s recommendation the Henry VIII follow the patriarchs and take an additional wife? Dobson’s limiting the “traditional definition” of family to the nuclear model and “nothing more, nothing else” ignores basic biblical witness. In the whole Hebrew Bible there is not one word that means what “family” means in our modern American sense. The biblical term most frequently rendered “family” could include hundreds of people, a clan or all humanity. Most often it was, as a Bible scholar puts it, “a protected association of extended families” (Gottwald), a socioeconomic, military and judicial entity. In the New Testament period, a family was a household, as another Bible scholar notes, “including not only blood relatives of the head of the house, but also other dependents – slaves, employees, and … ‘clients’ (i.e., freedmen, friends and others who looked to the head of the house for patronage, protection or advancement”. (Wright) That’s why Ephesians and Colossians included relationships with slaves, for example, in the family or household codes.
Dobson says that “the term ceases to have meaning” if a family is defined as “any circle of people who love each other”. But isn’t that exactly how Jesus and the early Christians used the term? Did Dobson never hear of the day Jesus’ mother and brothers were outside his circle looking for him and he asked” “Who are my mother and my brothers?” The Gospels tell us that Jesus, “looking round at those who were sitting in the circle about him, … said, ‘here are my mother and my brothers. Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother’.” (Mark 3:31ff REB) Jesus said that God’s will was that we love God with all we are and have and love our neighbors — especially ther outcasts – as ourselves. (Mt 22:40) As a biblical scholar states: “The way in which the Gospels take up Micah’s prophecy of the end-time (Mic 7:6 = Mt 10:35ff; Lk 12:53) indicates that the primitive community had to reckon with the disruption of the family for the sake of the Gospel. Those who take this upon themselves are promised ‘now in this time’ new ‘houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children’ (Mk 10:29; Mt 19:29; Lk 18:29f). The place of the disrupted family is taken by the family of God, the Christian community”. (Goetzmann) Says another: “The emphasis on sharing, meeting needs, equality and generosity strongly recalls the economic ethic of the OT and has roots in its household ethos”. (Wright)
To Dobson, though, even hateful heterosexual couples and their relatives deserve the “family” imprimatur that he withholds from others, no matter how caring. Of course there are selfish homosexuals. But in living out self-giving love, how would a covenantal gay or lesbian couple be a more “unstable social structure rife with potential for disaster” than a heterosexual couple qua heterosexual?