practicing what the doctor preached
at home with focus on the family susan
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in- Publication Data
Names: Ridgely, Susan B. (Susan Bales), author.
Title: Practicing what the doctor preached : at home with focus on the family / Susan B. Ridgely.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016017251 | ISBN 9780199755073 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780190619091 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Parenting—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Child rearing—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Families—Religious life. | Families—Religious aspects—Christianity. | Dobson, James C., 1936– | Focus on the Family (Organization) | Focus on the family (Radio program)
Classification: LCC BV4529 .R54 2016 | DDC 261.8/35874—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016017251
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction: Focusing on Families 1
Chapter 1 Tuning In to Focus on the Family: A History of Dobson’s Message and Who Has Been Listening 20
Chapter 2 Father, Mother, Child: The Foundational Trinity 52
Chapter 3 Preparing Children to Be Husbands and Wives: Gender, Dating, and Sexuality 92
Chapter 4 “All Your Children Will Be Taught by the Lord”: How Families Focus on School Choice 135
Chapter 5 Bringing the Home to the World: Families’ and Focus’s Politics 175 Conclusion: Re-Tuning Focus on the Family 210
Notes 223 Bibliography 263 Index 287
I hardly know how to begin to express my deepest thanks to the many people and institutions that have helped to make this book a reality. This project has been with me in one form or another in my entire adult life. Like many of my interviewees, my interest in Focus on the Family stemmed from their intense attention to fatherhood. For me, however, my interest in conservative Christianity and fatherhood was strictly academic. It developed during a graduate class on American Evangelicalism with Grant Wacker in 1997. While I didn’t return to the topic for nearly ten years, I am extremely grateful for Grant’s incredible ability to convey the complexities of evangelicalism. Without even knowing it, he sparked a curiosity in me that pushed me to stay connected to the topic for two decades.
I finally returned to the project during a yearlong fellowship at the Center for the Study of Religion at Princeton University from 2005 to 2006. I am immensely thankful for the conversations I was able to have there with Marie Griffith about evangelicalism and ethnography and with Robert Wuthnow about method, broadly speaking, that helped to shape the project’s foundation. The participants in the Christian Thought and Practice Group at the Center pushed me to refine my early arguments in very helpful ways, particularly Melissa Proctor, who commented on a very early draft of what would become the book proposal. I have been lucky enough to have Leigh Schmidt, who led the Group, as a mentor and conversation partner since my undergraduate years. I am forever indebted to him for his continued encouragement and wisdom.
It was during that year at Princeton that I began doing fieldwork in Madison, Wisconsin. The many wonderful people I met at the non- denominational church soon celebrated my engagement, then marriage, and, not too long thereafter, the births of my children. My interviewees in both Wisconsin and Philadelphia have taught me more than they will ever know. I am deeply appreciative for the sacrifice of each of the men, women, and children who took time out of their very demanding days to spend time with me on this project. I hope they see themselves fairly represented here.
A sabbatical from teaching at University of Wisconsin- Oshkosh gave me the time I needed to conceptualize and write this book. I am grateful to the University’s faculty development program for supporting that extremely important year-long leave as well as for earlier summer funding that allowed me to delve into the Focus on the Family materials held at the Wisconsin Historical Society.
I am tremendously thankful for the help and support I received from colleagues and friends during the course of this project. Lynn Neal and Thomas Tweed have been a consistent source of encouragement and insight since this project began. Kathryn Lofton and Sean McCloud offered extremely helpful critiques of early versions of the chapters in this book. Talks with Stephanie Sphear, Jim Feldman, Rocio Cortez, Michelle Mouton, Nadia Louar, Douglas Haynes, and my other colleagues at University of Wisconsin- Oshkosh have enriched both this work and my life. I also appreciate the care with which my weekly writing group— Helen Kinsella, Christina Ewig, and Alex Huneeus— read various iterations of the manuscript.
I owe an immense debt of gratitude to Theo Calderara at Oxford University Press. This book has benefited greatly from his fine editorial eye and his thoughtful support, even when it seemed that I might never find my way through the mountains of letters, recordings, and articles by James Dobson. Ulrike Guthrie tightened my prose and helped me to sharpen my argument in ways that all future readers will appreciate. Finally, Hank Southgate’s contribution smoothed out the rough edges. Even with all the wonderful advice of all those listed above,
mistakes have surely found their way into the narrative. These mistakes are mine alone.
My parents and my sisters have always been my greatest champions. I could never have done any of this without them. My parents— John and Jane Bales— modeled a form of parenting for me based on unwavering support and mutual interests. Rather than attempting to bind our family based on the interests that drew them to each other, my parents encouraged my sisters and me to seek out new adventures, and then they eagerly followed along with us. In this case, that has meant they spent years listening to countless discussions of this material and sending me newspaper articles they discovered. Eventually, they read every chapter of this book in various stages. I only hope that Dobson is correct and I will enact this form of parenting with my own children.
In these early years of parenting, I have struggled with the multiple roles I have fulfilled at home and at my university. I am very grateful to all of those friends who have stepped in to help along the way to care for my children so that I could find the time to write, especially my husband, Steve, Lindsay Wicktor, the families of the Hillington Green, and the Keimei mommies.
Most of all, I am grateful for my own little family— Steve, Amelia, and Andersen. Watching the three of them encounter the world has allowed the fears, loves, anxieties, and moments of pride expressed in this book’s interviews to resonate deeply with me. I am lucky for every day I get to spend with them. There is no other family I would rather focus on. This book is for them.
Focusing on Families
“All over this country little children are reaching for fathers who are not there.”1 That was Dr. James Dobson’s diagnosis of America’s ills. He offered it in a 1981 television special called “Where’s Dad?,” which was intended to be his introduction to the American mainstream. Among certain segments of the population, however, he was already a household name.
Dobson made that name with a bestselling childrearing book, Dare to Discipline, originally published in 1970. It was the first building block in a multimedia empire. In 1977 he founded an organization, Focus on the Family, to handle questions from readers and attendees at his weekend seminars. By the time “Where’s Dad?” was broadcast, Dobson had a daily thirty-minute radio show. Twenty- five years later, the show commanded a listener base of 7.3 million a day. The aim of Focus’s multimedia ministry— home to a radio broadcast, multiple magazines, and children’s products—was, in Dobson’s words, to “cooperate with the Holy Spirit in disseminating the Gospel of Jesus Christ to as many people as possible, and specifically, to accomplish this objective by helping to preserve traditional values and the institution of the family.”2 By the organization’s thirtieth anniversary, it had a mailing list of 250 million families in 155 countries. 3
These millions of listeners knew Dobson first as a standard bearer of their evangelical tradition who could help them navigate the secular world— a kind of avuncular Christian counselor to whom they could turn for advice. Later, he became a national spokesperson for increasingly conservative political views, and was well known to the press as
a conservative political operative. To the secular left, this made him a menace. Chris Hedges, author of the New York Times-bestselling American Fascists, described Dobson and other leaders of Conservative Christian groups as being “very distant from the masses. They assume a higher intelligence and understanding that gives them divine rule. These men are—writ large— the powerful, all-knowing father. Those they direct become as powerless and submissive as children.”4
But the many pronouncements about who Dobson was, his influence, and his power ignored the very people he was supposed to command. Focus on the Family’s multimedia empire reached millions of people. Yet the particular ways in which those millions of people listened to its radio program, read its magazines, bought its books, nurtured their children, interacted with their neighbors, and reacted to various political issues largely remained a mystery.
It is a mystery I sought to solve by actually talking to those who are on the receiving end of Focus’s carefully crafted rhetoric. How do people actually use Focus materials in their everyday lives? Do they adopt Dobson’s childrearing prescriptions wholesale? What about his political views? How do they use these materials to inform their relationships and choices in the home, the school, the workplace, and the political sphere?
In this book I explore the mutual relationship between Dobson and the actual values and practices of Focus’s users. I ask to what extent Focus shaped the practices of their listeners to its own ends and to what extent Focus’s understanding of its members’ practices and needs shaped the organization. I follow that interaction by looking at Focus’s audience and their changing needs over the organization’s first thirty years, years that saw the organization expand from one centered on childrearing to one deeply engaged in public debates over sexuality, education, and national politics. Dobson sought to combine parenting theories from developmental psychology with a conservative Christian theology of sinfulness, salvation, and a living relationship with Jesus. By doing so, he placed the family— rather than the individual with a personal relationship with Jesus— at the center of Christian life.
While evangelical Christians have often placed great importance on their familial responsibilities, Dobson made salvation contingent
on properly playing one’s role in the family. Your relationship with your spouse was essential to your relationship with Jesus. Women, for instance, could come to know God fully only by submitting to their husbands and nurturing their children to know God, as they believed the Bible instructed. Such uniting of family life and religion drew Focus users to the organization, just as it forced them to wrestle with what it meant to be a Christian wife, husband, mother, father, son, or daughter.
Focus’s constituents all use the same vocabulary of salvation and conviction and vocally support corporal punishment, abstinence, and other key elements of Focus’s ideology. But they put these ideas into practice in vastly different ways. To those outside the movement, they may sound like puppets being moved by their masters, but in their daily lives they actively negotiate the organization’s pronouncements, dismiss them, and quite often use them to support actions that others would see as contrary to Focus’s agenda. Across all my conversations— about quieting infants, wrangling toddlers, educating youth, creating rules for dating and marriage, and engaging in politics— the only thing everyone shared was the desire to bond their families with each other and with God, so that they might be saved from both earthly and eternal suffering. Focus has helped to make the family the central social institution of conservative Christianity in the modern period. Having a personal relationship with Jesus and knowing the Bible is not enough to make you a true Christian. You must also shape your family along biblical lines in order to survive in and transform this un- Christian world. By placing family at the heart of what it means to be a Christian, Focus essentially positions itself as the arbiter of true faith.
From the moment I began talking to the families who used Focus’s childrearing materials, the organization’s enormous reach became
apparent. I found that I was speaking to a wide array of Christians— Catholics, Lutherans, Presbyterians, and nondenominational folks, to name a few. To account for this diversity, I call my interviewees conservative Christians. 5 I have been careful in my choice of words, for some interviewees would embrace the term evangelical, while others would not. Some would say they were simply Christian, others, Roman Catholic. Although they might differ in religious background or in their definitions of Christianity, they all shared a belief that Christians must have a living relationship with God and must turn frequently to the Bible and prayer for guidance and succor. They might all share the core recipe for faith, but they did not all have the same understanding of each ingredient. For instance, although everyone agreed on the centrality of the Bible, for some it was inerrant and should be read literally, while others insisted on reinterpreting it for the twenty-first century.
Finally, for the Catholic families with whom I talked, there was a missing fourth ingredient: Roman Catholic tradition. They knew they could go to their priests to enrich their understanding of tradition. Charismatic Catholic groups—who emphasize having a personal relationship with Jesus and receiving the gifts of the Holy Spirit— could nurture their relationship with God. But like many Christians who came of age before the Internet boom, Catholics wondered where they could go to learn how to build a godly home that would remain strong and unified when it seemed that so many families were fracturing under modern economic and social pressures.
Each of my interviewees to some extent turned to Focus on the Family materials to help them achieve that goal. For those who described themselves as Christian or their home as Christian, they meant that in the way that evangelicals commonly did. To be Christian in this context, as Religious Studies scholar Randall Balmer explains, is “an exclusive, elitist term reserved for someone who had ‘prayed the prayer,’ had acknowledged personal sinfulness and the need for salvation, and ‘accepted Jesus into his heart.’ ”6 For these families, celebrating Christmas, going to church, even reading the Bible had little to do with being Christian if one was just “going
through the motions.” Being Christian meant being in constant relationship with Jesus. Focus taught these parents and children how to maintain this essential relationship as they engaged in daily activities by living out the roles God gave them and by assisting others in doing the same.
Focus on the Family’s approach to interpreting the Bible is one shared by most evangelicals. The approach is grounded in “Common Sense Realism,” a nineteenth- century philosophy, in which the “plainest, most evident reading of the text is the proper one.”7 While not all Focus users were evangelicals who viewed the Bible as the only source of God’s truth, Dobson took for granted a common sense approach: that “Truth” was located in the Bible in plain sight for anyone with the eyes to see it, eyes that had been opened by a relationship with Jesus. Common sense, however, as famed anthropologist Clifford Geertz cautioned, is “not what the mind cleared of cant spontaneously apprehends; it is what the mind filled with presuppositions … concludes.”8 So what seems obvious is only obvious to someone who has been reared in a particular way: pancakes make a great breakfast in America— not so in Japan. Thus, while Focus claims that there is a universally shared truth that is evident from the Bible, that is only true if one shares Focus’s foundational assumptions. Common sense must in fact be taught.
As Focus personalities instructed their adult readers and listeners how to lead their children to submit themselves to God, they simultaneously taught these parents the fundamentals of the Focus worldview. Submission to God, as media studies scholar Heather Hendershot has described, requires “plac[ing] religion at the center of daily life, believing that one can serve the Lord through the most mundane acts.”9 While Hendershot seems to think it is easy to make Jesus the center of your home by doing things like “being on time to class, playing ball with your son, even picking up your husband’s dirty socks,” for Focus users correctly cultivating a Christian home in the contemporary world takes more than a Bible and common sense.10
Parents struggle to make the inerrant Truth of the Bible real to their children in the temptingly secular twenty- first- century world. This
struggle drew many parents to Dobson’s radio broadcasts and other materials, which offered families step-by- step instructions to create strong Christian families.
The Bible offers mostly vague statements about the importance of parenting, such as Proverbs 22:6: “Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” Dobson, however, delineated exactly what this training entailed. And it was just what American parents in the 1970s wanted. By Focus’s own count, for instance, millions of parents watched the original Focus on the Family video series to hear Dobson’s call to stop being so hurried with the demands of daily living and “ ‘focus’ on your families”11 in the way God demanded. In a seminar, bookended by prayers in which Dobson asked for God’s guidance in his teachings, he asked moms and dads to pledge to adopt action plans that included engaging in activities like having a “picnic at the park” or “cook[ing] a meal together, with everyone having a part in the preparation of the food,” or “hold[ing] a ‘topic night’ including after- dinner discussion of any subject, general or specific.”12 Although it might seem as if these suggestions could be found in Parents Magazine and other secular formats, Dobson reminded his audience that his goal was to help them make the shift from the typical, distant modern American family to a united family in which “God alone guide[d] [their] understanding of his will and our understanding of [themselves].”13 A Christian family, Dobson taught, spends time together.
While these instructions cannot be found in the Bible, to my interviewees they took on a sacred valance. They were common sense ways to enact the Bible in everyday life. Dobson’s books sought to normalize Christian life, not to take people out of the world, but to help them navigate it. The stories he told were not of people at the margins of society but rather the popular and the powerful: Candice and Kirk Cameron, Col. Oliver North, and Christian musicians such as Amy Grant, Steven Green, and Michael W. Smith. These high-profile guests reinforced Focus’s image of Christians as people who were part of the mainstream, ready for fun and adventure. Focus families did not sit piously on the sidelines; they were key players in the game.
Dobson showed that Christian families could both fit in socially and remain close to one another and God. Dobson pushed parents not only to model their values for their children, but also to talk to their kids about how and why they should embrace Christian values such as chastity. Because of children’s innate inclination to sin, Dobson argued, parents could be sure that children would not naturally arrive at a moral life. They needed active parenting to help them get there. Such active parenting, my adult interviewees believed, meant that Christian families were closer and more communicative than their secular counterparts.
Yet even with increased communications, many parents felt insecure about their ability to rear children whom they would see again in heaven. While all parents feel a great deal of pressure to rear successful children, for Focus families this pressure extends into eternity.
childrearing: the practical as political
Although my focus is on the practical, I am not erasing the political, even polemical, aspects of Focus. Rather, as political scientist Paul Apostolidis put it, “The cultural realm of everyday life is a terrain where political struggle is inevitably waged, rather than being merely auxiliary to politics.”14 Thus, through this study of religion in the home, the school, and beyond, I seek to give readers a better sense of how believers in any ideology attempt to adapt that ideology to their daily lives. Like many politicians and child-rearing experts, Dobson often seems more concerned with “the child”— an abstract idea of a vulnerable young person who needs protection from the secular world’s evils— than he is with actual children and their particular lives. Emphasizing the realities of actual children tends to complicate the image of the wide- eyed, easily influenced imaginary child who plays a key role in many of Dobson’s pronouncements of how the lives of men and women must be changed— if not by choice, then by legislation. In advocating for this rhetorical or theoretical
child, these experts attempt to shape the future by controlling the present.
At the turn of the twentieth century, when adults outnumbered children for the first time in American history, modern childrearing experts like G. Stanley Hall and Dr. L. Emmett Holt began to gain popularity.15 With fertility rates dropping and mechanization freeing some women from household labor, women had more time to devote to nurturing and bringing up baby— and childrearing experts were there with the instructions. During the1890s, Americans wrestled with questions of evolution and industrialization, and there were childrearing methods to meet each concern. Dr. Holt’s Care and Feeding of Children taught a parent- centered brand of childrearing built around the belief that the child was like a little machine, which only needed the correct fuel to perform at its best.16 Hall’s Child Studies espoused the recapitulation theory— that children need to go through all evolutionary stages beginning with savagery so they could learn the skills of the ancestors and move from wild savages to adults who controlled their emotions.17
Although the idea of the “little savage” remained, it seemed that Holt won the day: John B. Watson and other behaviorists extended Holt’s emphasis on strict routines.18 Children, Watson taught, needed to be disciplined and taught to stick unquestioningly to a schedule set down by their parents. Furthermore, parents, particularly mothers, should not kiss or hug their children too much.19 This purportedly objective approach gave childrearing the feeling of “science,” a science through which Watson hoped to rear a child “who finally enters manhood so bulwarked with stable work and emotional habits that no adversity can quite overwhelm him.”20 Watson looked to efficiency rather than sentimentality as the key to rearing effective citizens who could thrive in the rational, routinized environment of the industrialized era.
Within twenty years, on the other side of World War II, Dr. Benjamin Spock would take a very different approach. Spock advised parents to deal with and talk to their children in a respectful manner. Parents, he said, should expect some sassiness and tolerate acts of rebellion as their children explored who they were. He advised parents to encourage their
children’s curiosity and nurture their individuality. 21 Amid the postWorld War II fear of fascism and totalitarianism, parenting experts such as Spock used their child-rearing manuals to argue that individuality was the key to a vibrant American democracy. “Proponents of permissiveness,” Communications Professor Henry Jenkins stated, “saw [Spock’s] less restrictive approach as providing a more ‘democratic’ domestic life for the post-war era.”22 Within progressive family democracies, children were to be taught how to achieve goals by consensus rather than confrontation. These experts, later labeled “permissive” parenting experts, believed in this method because they trusted children’s innate sense of fairness and selflessness. 23
The authoritarian parenting of the pre-WWII era stood in sharp contrast to democratic ideals, argued Spock. In response, parents began distracting their rebellious children and involving them in decision-making rather than using more severe disciplinary techniques to teach them to respect themselves and their parents. This approach so resonated with American families that Spock faced little competition in shaping America’s children until the late 1960s, when “other gurus serve[d] up a jargonish rehash of Spock’s theories.”24
Although Spock reminded parents to be sure that their children recognized parental authority— and even advocated spanking— he became the target of attacks after he joined the protests against the Vietnam War. When young people heard that Spock had been arrested at a protest, they began carrying signs expressing solidarity that read, “I was raised on Spock.”
Not everyone was sympathetic to the counterculture, though. Millions of parents— many a part of what Richard Nixon would call the Silent Majority— looked for an alternative to Spock that would put an end to the anti- authoritarian protests and the sexual revolution, which seemed to be turning the world on its end. Among them were many Christians, who found their answer in Dobson’s Dare to Discipline. The book highlights an authoritarian, God- centered approach that was vague enough to appeal across Christian denominations as well as the liberal/conservative divide. As the book was passed from friend to friend, Dobson quickly gained a following
among those Americans who did not view the summer of ’68 as the “summer of love” or marches against the Vietnam War as expressions of freedom. These parents wanted to restore their homes to what they believed was a traditional order, with children who obeyed their parents and who did not feel free to experiment with sex and drugs or to challenge patriotism. Dobson instructed them that rebellion was not natural but indeed detrimental to the earthly lives and heavenly salvation of their children. Parents should squelch rebellion immediately and definitively. Children always needed to know who was in charge.
Although Dobson positions himself as a counter to Spock, there is actually a fair amount of overlap in their methods. It is in the end result that their vision differs most significantly: Spock seeks creative thinkers who can puzzle through moral dilemmas, while Dobson seeks disciplined thinkers who will ask what God, as defined by Focus and Christian tradition, wants of them in a given situation. It is not enough, however, to stop the inquiry there: we must ask what effect these prescriptions have on American families.
Scholars have begun to look at those characteristics that Dobson hopes to imbue in his followers through a close examination of his rhetoric. For instance, religious studies scholars Eithne Johnson and Anne Burlein, as well as comparative literature scholar Linda Kintz, offer insightful textual examinations of Dobson’s roles for women and the body politic, respectively. In so doing, they explore Dobson’s interpretation of how his view of the ideal family will affect women and children, the ideal Christian marriage, and the American electorate. 25 But while Dobson has sometimes been a loud voice in political debates, over the course of his career he has presented himself to listeners as less concerned with reforming the body politic than with forming the proper child. Still, through his prescriptions, he has sought to ensure that, when a boy grows up, he can create what Dobson believes are the Christian policies necessary to form a godly nation. Dobson’s desires, however, tell us little about the realities and practicalities that influence how Americans transform these desires into on-the- ground realities within their own homes.
By concentrating on Dobson’s advice as fixed words on a page, scholars have emphasized Dobson’s desires over those of the readers, leading people to believe that the organization’s members must all share the same ideas. Attending to the readers’ narrations of their own lives, however, elucidates how American Christians weigh their desires to create what they believe to be biblically mandated familial structures with their own familial needs and biblical interpretations.
The families I spoke to were not looking for dictates. They turned to the organization because its prescriptions offer them tools and strategies that they can deploy with a great deal of flexibility. What matters for these families is not that they execute the organization’s teachings perfectly, but that their family is the focal point. They are trying as many strategies as possible to improve their family and bring it closer to God. Rather than simply conform to a singular ideal, my conversations revealed how diffuse and contradictory these families’ beliefs are about the nature of the ideal family. What drew these Christians to Dobson and to each other was their common commitment to engage in the struggle of focusing on their families, even as they recognized that their family ideal was always being reshaped as their children grew older, their circumstances changed, and their relationship with God continued to develop.
In teaching parents and children how to act at home, through its many books and broadcasts, Focus continues to influence how they behave in schools, at work, and at the voting booth. 26 As a trusted voice, Focus introduces Christian families to conservative organizations they might otherwise never encounter, just as the organization introduces less engaged Christians to philosophies it supports. Further, many groups more conservative than Focus, such as the Quiverfull movement— in which Protestant couples forgo birth control to allow God to decide their family size— seem to be both adopting and extending Dobson’s techniques. 27 Dobson was once the only Christian voice in the mainstream childrearing sphere, but by the time I began my research he was one among many— and far from the most conservative. All of these movements inform their constituencies, but to the end of Dobson’s tenure as president and CEO, Focus remained the most
powerful organization devoted to conservative Christian family life. This book seeks to understand how that power plays out in people’s everyday lives.
Dobson’s public persona and the way he and his followers are perceived created a difficult challenge for me in talking to Focus users. I had to create a space in which people could speak freely about the organization without seeming to buy into the standard liberal critique of it. To that end, all of my interviewees informed me in one way or another that they were not “brainwashed” or “unthinking,” as they feared I (or my future readers) might assume. After all, many outsiders see these folks as blind, sheep-like followers whose belief in submission to authority and the inerrancy of the Bible keeps them from breaking with their leader. Yet this one- sided caricature masks the reality of lived evangelicalism, a reality that can be telling about religious communities, families, and the micro-politics of American life.
Rather than becoming preoccupied with Dobson as a person or a leader or a caricature, I try to view him in the way that my interviewees did: by attending to how the Dobson brand that he presented to his listeners and readers each day inflected and shaped their reception of Focus’s teachings. As the founder and head of Focus on the Family, Dobson became the brand as well as the face of his organization a decade or more before Martha Stewart and Oprah Winfrey did the same for their own media empires. In describing Oprah’s transformation from an individual to a brand, religious studies scholar Kathryn Lofton writes, “Oprah has become an insignia, supplying a stylized economy that includes multiple print cultures multimedia programing … educational philosophies … and product plugs… . The brand supersedes her biography.”28
Dobson likewise melded his public biography with the organization’s mission to such a degree that he and his organization were interchangeable: he was the voice of the radio broadcasts, the author of the newsletters, and the gatekeeper for all the material distributed by the ministry. As the gatekeeper, Dobson ensured that his listeners heard him in the way he intended. To that end, until the 2000s he rarely gave
interviews or appeared on television: he maintained near total control over his brand.
Although listeners developed a personal relationship with Dobson, they knew little about him beyond his carefully scripted narratives. These few stories were repeated so frequently that listeners knew them and told them as if they were their own. This repetitiveness, as Lofton argues, gives audiences a feeling of consistency: “If brands were not reliable, they would not be brands; when brands evidence inconsistency the audience parries, complains or even abandons. The success of a product depends upon its predictability.”29 Through quoting himself in his own texts, developing a biography that was at once personal and universal, and embodying his often-discussed timeless truth amid the fashions and fads of modern America through his use of radio as well as his personal style (or lack thereof), James Dobson the person became “Dr. Dobson” to his listeners. His non- descript, “nice” clothing and haircut along with his confident yet compassionate voice marked Dobson the multi-millionaire as an everyman who was standing up to all of America for his listeners. 30
Although none of my interviewees described Dobson as a brand, neither did they describe him as fully human, for he appeared to them as a mono- dimensional person without selfish intentions or bad days. The interviewees to whom I talked never questioned Dobson’s motives even when they questioned his conclusions. To them, “Dr. Dobson” was the one expert who reached out to them, understood the importance of God in their lives, and wanted only to help them reach the Christian ideal with their family so they could attain salvation together. My interviewees’ concern was how to bring his teachings into their increasingly complicated lives; mine was whether and how they did so.
To discover the ways in which the laity enact and transform the teachings of the evangelical elite, I met weekly in 2006 with a group of about twenty men and women from an interdenominational church in Madison, Wisconsin, to watch Focus on the Family’s then-new video series, Focus on the Family’s The Truth Project. After four months of learning the “Christian worldview” as presented by Focus in The Truth Project, I began interviewing the members of that group, then
slowly expanded my interview outreach to include more than fifty mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters who had used Focus materials or had been reared on them, although some no longer identified with Focus at the time of our interviews.
Although all of the individuals and families I interviewed had used Focus to some degree, they did not usually link their comments to a specific text or radio broadcast. Further, even though my interviewing extended beyond Dobson’s tenure at the organization, his name and teachings were central to the discussion. None of my interviewees mentioned his predecessor, Jim Daley. Perhaps they so associated Dobson with the Focus brand that when they heard his new radio program, Family Talk (2010), they assumed it was also a Focus production. Although I had questions to guide the conversation, the interviewees had ample opportunity to address this change in leadership, but for them Focus was Dobson.
On average we talked for about seventy-five minutes, but some interviews lasted much longer. I met with some families more than once for formal interviews; I kept in touch with others through e-mail and Facebook. These communications revealed a great diversity of both Focus users and interpretations of Focus’s teachings. Thus, rather than finding conservative Christians blindly following their leader, the reactions of my interviewees revealed to me that many conservative Christians are using Focus’s materials to inform but not necessarily determine their understandings of what it means to be an evangelical Christian in America.
The interviewees understood that we would be talking about their interaction with the organization and answered with that in mind. Often their responses sounded like those that might be given in other Christian groups because Focus had influenced those groups in some way. For instance, the ministry had members on the board of Exodus International, the ex- gay ministry, and when members of that ministry went to work for Focus, it often softened their anti-gay rhetoric. 31 Focus helped to start Promise Keepers. It also promoted Tim and Beverly LaHey’s books on marriage as well as Timothy LaHey and Jerry B. Jenkins’s bestselling Left Behind series and the cartoon Veggie
Tales. Moreover, Focus on the Family’s publishing brought thousands of influential conservative Christian texts to market. Along with promoting books and other media, Focus also had an extensive internet presence by 2000 that began with its flagship Focus on the Family website; in turn, it linked to numerous other Focus- sponsored sites on parenting, homosexuality, conservative politics, and other issues the organization considers to be centered on “family.” Religious Studies scholar Ludgar H. Viefhues- Bailey describes Focus’s web presence as a web itself:
The internet presence of Focus demonstrates well that this is an organization embedded in and spinning a wide web of references and discourses. More inspirational sites (such as Dobson’s Family Guide) are linked to other websites presenting allegedly scientific information about homosexuality, and from there we can click on pages about how to make schools safe for Christian children and connect to Citizenlink, Focus’s explicitly political information site. 32
Along with these virtual links, Focus used its radio program, magazines, newsletters, and children’s radio theater to cross-reference and reinforce its message.
Further, Focus’s popularity meant that many younger evangelical personalities modeled themselves on Dobson’s style or message. As religious studies scholar Tanya Erzen concluded, “The national coordination by Focus on the Family binds the grass roots to the national Christian movement.”33 So, although my interviewees did not label their statements as coming directly from the organization, if the statements addressed the ministry’s message, it seemed likely that they were being influenced by Focus in some way. If, on the other hand, they marked their statement as differing from Dobson or as having no connection to Focus media, I tried to address that in the interview, and I highlight it in the analysis.
Since I did not grow up in a conservative Christian tradition, when I first came to that community it was difficult for me to parse the multiple ways members of the community were using terms like “discern”
and “conviction,” and to understand what was at stake in dividing the world into the secular and the Christian. To engage with this group, my future research consultants, I first had to learn their language. Only then could I venture into this web of influences and understand how Focus had shaped each of their families and how they, in turn, had reshaped the teachings of Focus. So I began attending the intradenominational church in Madison in September of 2005. I went to services on most Sundays for two years and attended Awana meetings (a Christian children’s program similar to the Scouting programs in which the children learn scripture, play games, have devotions, and earn patches) and joined a small group at the church, which met each Wednesday night for twelve weeks to watch and discuss one-hour installments of The Truth Project. Being present at the church for a variety of events helped me to learn the vocabulary of this subculture and to understand how their reading of the Bible made issues such as evolution, school prayer, and same- sex marriage into a threat not just to themselves and their children but also to the salvation of all of humanity.
At church I read the bulletin inserts that were produced by Focus on the Family and saw how the organization’s teachings were interwoven into the church’s sermons and weekly devotions. After nearly a year of observation, I began interviewing parents who had attended The Truth Project with me. When their children were interested, I spoke with them too. In conversations with each mother and father, daughter and son, sister and brother, I learned each person’s self- understandings of what was taught during The Truth Project. As I watched Del Tackett, series host and the president of the Focus Leadership Institute for college students, convey Focus’s understanding of how God wants Christians to see the world, I attended closely to the audience’s response. Their gasps and nods directed me to the themes with which they agreed with Tackett, just as their comments in our group discussions and later interviews suggested, if not articulated, points at which their interpretation nuanced or even challenged the Truth that Tackett presented. Although these moments of disagreement were clear to me
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CHAPTER II.
OUR weeks before the next Christmas the Baron proclaimed there would be good cheer for all comers two days and nights at the castle. And when the time came, the bell on the tower, which sounded only for births, deaths, and weddings, rung merrily through the frosty air, bonfires were lighted on the hills, the fountain ran wine, and every man who chose might put in his cup and drink his fill. Outside the wall were crowds of men gaming, wrestling, and trying their strength, and a few bloody noses and a cracked skull or two; but that was nothing in those rough times.
In the hall were knights and earls wearing belt, spur, and plume; gay ladies in velvets, with sweeping trains; and children pages, and pert maids, who did nothing but stand under the mistletoe; and then what kissing, what blushing, what shouts, what laughter! The sun never shone on so merry a Christmas!
Instead of the red rose, Ginevra wore a coronet of pearls; and in that goodly company her beauty shone like a star, the brightest where ten thousand are.
The ladies’ hall was a lordly room, with long rows of columns, wreathed with garlands; and there the guests assembled at night. As they walked together, Ginevra said to Lord Lovel:
“I will give thee a weary chase for me some day. I will frighten thee now.”
And, with a bound, she darted from column to column, and was out of sight. Vexed and troubled, Lovel flew after her. He was swift as a deer, but could not overtake her; and in the midst of the chase, she
stole behind and touched him on the shoulder, laughing merrily at his fears.
“Promise me, sweetheart,” said he, “thou wilt never fly from me again, till thou spread thy white wings for Heaven. Even Ban lost his breath trying to follow thee.”
“I will not promise,” she said, shaking her sunny ringlets. “I love to tease too well. Ban says my feet have wings, and with them I find hiding-places where no one can follow.”
“I fear thou wilt be lost in some of these dark passages; no one living understands all their windings; but I’ll hide thee next Christmas!”
“Where, my Lord? In the donjon keep, behind the iron gratings?”
“A safer place than that. In my heart, sweet love. There I’ll shut thee up, and keep thee safe forever and a day.”
Then he gave a close kiss, and did not take his eyes off her till it was time to part.
When the night was far spent, a strange minstrel came to the door, and begged to look, if but for one moment, on the Lady Ginevra.
He was old and poor, and shook with cold. Room was made for him by the fire; and when he had eaten and drank, he lifted his harp, and, moving back from the crowd, passed under the mistletoe. Now, it was a great slight for one to do this and not be kissed, and, of course, nobody wanted to kiss an old beggar. He heard the laugh and jeer, and, looking up, saw the green branch; then his head sunk on his breast with shame. Ginevra saw it, and snatched an ivy wreath, and stepped toward him, saying playfully,
“Kneel down!”
He knelt and kissed the hem of her robe. Not even she was ever more beautiful than then.
“I crown thy harp, and call thee knight”—she touched his shoulder. “Be thou wise, brave, and tuneful. Rise, Sir Minstrel, and
let these lords and ladies hear thy bravest harping.”
For a moment the old man was overcome. Then he swept the harp with such skill and grace there was instant silence. He sang:
.
He had heard of her beauty, but the half had not been told; what his eyes had this night seen would ever be a part of sight; his hand was weak and old, but so long as he could touch a string it should be to her name; and at his dying hour thought of her tender pity would warm his heart as it had never warmed with wine.
Praises ran through the crowd; the Baron sent Alfred with a purse of broad gold pieces, but the minstrel put it back with a smile, and unclasped the ragged cloak; down dropped hood, mask, and gray hair; out stepped a youth, tall, straight, and handsome; on his neck a sparkling chain the Baron knew right well.
“It is Prince Edward! Long live the Prince!” he exclaimed. And every man knelt and shouted, till the arches rang, “Long live Prince Edward!”
He bowed his thanks, and lightly touched the harp again. His fingers strayed uncertainly among the strings, like one busy with memory; a moment more, and he seemed to catch the melody, and, resting his burning glance upon Ginevra’s fair face, he sang:
’ .
“In blinding snow, as wild winds blow, I left the forest’s gloom, And, following sounds that change the night To brightness and to bloom,
“I’ve found where all sweet flowers live, Where summer sings and never dies, Its roses, Lady, on thy cheek, Its violets in thine eyes.
“The harp and sword I bring to thee Are not an offering meet; With them, my hand and England’s crown, I lay before thy feet.
“O, Lady, like the evening star, Bend to me now or never; For I will see thee ne’er again, Unless I see thee ever.”
Then the Prince led Ginevra to the dance, and it was whispered she was fit to be a queen; but the Baron shook his head, even in that proud hour, and said:
“She must wed whom she will. I cannot force her heart.”
When the holidays were ended, Lovel set off to Holy Land, to be gone a twelvemonth and a day. Ginevra wept bitterly, but promised to keep true heart and constant mind till he should come home, never, day nor night, to leave her more.
The King’s son tarried and wooed her with words women love to hear; but she quietly said:
“I will wed my own true love, or die a nun.”
He prayed her to give him a favor, a scarf, a glove, a ring; but no; she spoke so firmly he saw it was useless to stay longer, and went away, swearing he would spring into the Thames or the depths of the sea, and drown himself.
Ginevra watched a splendid train escort him through the forest, and when it was out of sight, said:
“Ban, dost thou think he will kill himself? It would be a sad thing to lose our Crown Prince.”
Ban smiled grimly; he had been a wild one, but was tame enough now.
“Lady Ginevra,” he said, “ever since the world was made, men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love. Prince Edward’s heart is sound; he will marry in less than a twelvemonth and a day.”
And so he did.
Now there were many curious things about this castle which have not been mentioned. In the bell-tower, so high, it seemed to touch the sky, lived a crow, said to be a hundred years old, and an owl that hooted at night, and winked and blinked by day. There were lonesome cells where monks used to live; narrow corridors and winding ways easy to be lost in; and secret doors in odd places where you would never think of looking for a door; but Ginevra knew every dark corner from turret to foundation; in every black closet her bright eyes had peered, and under every hidden archway her fairy feet had glided along.
Looking from the highest tower of the castle, a dim line of heavenly blue marked the Ocean. More than any other view Ginevra loved that. When the day was fine, she could see the curlews and herons in the glancing light, and almost hear their screaming and the lapping of the water among the stones of the pebbly shore. Sometimes it showed as many tints as though the sea-shells from the depths had swum to the surface, opened to the sun, and floated on the top of the waters like many colored blossoms. And when the sun went down it was a path of gold, a splendor like the pathways of
angels. In calm or storm, in leaden sky or roseate light, through every change, Ginevra loved the sea. Ban used to watch her to the top of the tower, and grumble and mutter: “My Lady will come to grief all along of her skipping and racing into strange places. She’ll be sorry for it some day.”
“Is it so very hard, my good Ban,” she would say, laughing at him, “for a strong soldier, who fought in Flanders, to follow one girl over one house?”
And he would bow and smile back again, as he said:
“I was only thinking of my Lady’s safe keeping. There’s no tiring me. No, no, no! I would march my feet off for her.”
So petted and guarded, so gay and full of pleasantness was her life, that every day of the year was happy as a birthday.
The Baron did not worry Ginevra with teachers and grammars. He did not think much of book knowledge, calling it a weariness of the flesh, and a wiser man than any Baron called it that, three thousand years ago. Nor was her nurse allowed to tell her frightful tales, though the old woman liked nothing better than to scare the servants with ghost stories in windy nights. Her orders were to tell no Christmas stories, except such as the Bible told; and she used to show a book with pictures of the Holy Family, the shepherds listening to the angels’ songs, heard but once on earth, and the flight into Egypt. This last was a very choice engraving of Mary, the Virgin Mother, asleep under a palm-tree, and baby angels bending back the leaves, smiling sunnily down on the Divine Child, whose light lightened the bank of lilies where they lay. Then the nurse would explain how the Mother of Christ still lives, and is always near motherless children, listening to their prayers and waiting to comfort them. And Ginevra loved the tale and believed it, and never spoke a word she would not wish the Holy Mother to hear
In those good old times people played and laughed more than we do, and a first-rate story-teller was better thought of than a fine musician nowadays.
So, with play and needlework, time went on. Knights, earls, and gentlemen tried to win Ginevra from her vows; but she sent them away more madly in love than when they came to offer hand and heart. At the hour when the nightingale sings, minstrels and lovesick troubadours harped under her lattice; but she kept true heart and constant mind, and when six months had passed, a carrier-dove—a tame, fond thing—flew to the balcony, bearing a letter tied around its neck, sealed with red, and stamped with a rose. It was from Lord Lovel, who wrote he would be home Christmas.
The Baron went to London for her wedding-clothes. They were rich and rare as any princess’s; her veil was like silver mist; but nothing was so fine as a pair of slippers of white velvet, embroidered with pearls. Had you seen them, you would have said they were for some little child.
CHAPTER III.
HRISTMAS came, and home came Lord Lovel on his milkwhite steed.
The night before the wedding the Baron brought to Ginevra a curiously carved ivory box.
“This is thy mother’s wedding gift,” said he. “Now is the time to open it.”
He took from his purse a small gold key. Ginevra turned the lock. The lid flew up, and showed a heap of strung pearls, each one large as a robin’s egg.
“They are beautiful!” exclaimed Ginevra, in delight.
“Beautiful!” echoed Geta.
“Yes,” said the Baron. “Their like is not in old England. I bought them at Constantinople, when I was returning from Palestine.”
He lifted the long rope, and wound it round his daughter’s neck.
“They are fair, my darling,” said he, tenderly, “but thy throat is fairer.”
Ginevra looked dreamily at the jewel-case; then, turning her eyes inquiringly to her father’s, she suddenly asked:
“Was my mother happy?”
“Happy in that she died young,” answered the Baron, gloomily.
“Wouldst thou say that of me?” she asked, in wondering sadness.
“No, sweet child. Thou art dear to me as the blood-drops of my heart; and had I as many lives as thou hast hairs on thy head, I would give every one of them for thee, my precious pearl. But no
more of this! See, here is thy wedding-ring, my gift to thy mother, engraved with the name of both—Ginevra. I had it from a Jew in Venice. He said it bore a charm, and always brought good fortune to the wearer. And so it has; it has brought me thee.”
Ginevra laid the jewels back on the violet velvet lining, and was soon chatting gayly with Geta; but the Baron was restless and uneasy. When he said good-night he strained her to his heart and kissed her again and again, as if it were a last parting; then he doubled the guards of the castle, walked the great hall, and made the grand rounds like one whose anxious thoughts will not let him rest.
Ginevra’s quick eye marked the movements of the Baron, and she waited till he rested a moment in his favorite seat by the chimney-corner, and, seating herself on the heavy arm of the oaken chair, she said:
“Is my father troubled to-night? Tell me what the trouble is, and I may chase it away.”
“No, no, little one,” answered the Baron, making an effort to smile, “but—”
“But what? Go on! What, father?”
“Only this, dearest. Art thou sure of being perfectly happy?”
“Entirely sure; but I could not be if Lovel should take me from thee.” She patted his cheek, then touched her blooming mouth to it.
“He will not come between us, child. Nothing on earth, nothing outside of heaven, can do that. But listen, what a fearful night! How the sea rises, like a fierce beast chained, roaring for its prey! The coast will show wrecks to-morrow.”
“And is it that which makes thee so uneasy, so sorry?”
“No; but the raging swell, which we hear here as a weak moaning, stirs strange thoughts and brings up strange scenes, vanished long ago. The sea has changing voices. Now as we listen, I hear great guns booming shot and shell, the rush of thousands of feet, the tramp of armies fighting. I loved it when I was a young man;
but it is not the same, because I am not the same. Then it spoke to me of the future; now it is all of the past. As I hold your dear hand”— he touched the pinky finger-tips to his lips as he spoke—“I am hearing a text my mother taught me (God rest her soul!): “Boast not thyself of to-morrow.”
“But you have not boasted.”
“No; we seem over-confident, and there is a happiness that makes my soul afraid. Look out!”—he pointed to the window—“I thought I saw something pale, a tall shape fly by the window. There! Now!”
“You might have seen a pale shape half an hour ago in the dusk, where the sun left a little light. It is all black darkness now ” She rose, drew aside the curtain, and knelt on the deep window-sill among the roses. “I see nothing but dark. The wind howls like a mad thing in the air, trying locks and bolts to get in. Sad for the poor sailors and their wives waiting at home. Maybe they will never come back, poor things!”
She returned to her place beside the Baron, who looked silently into the fire; her pretty head drooped on his shoulder, and he leaned his cheek to hers, her hand in his.
“My daughter!” he said, in a tone he never used to aught on earth but her.
“My father!” she answered, softly as a wind-harp sounds.
“I would have my baby once more.”
He turned to the maid:
“Geta, go get your mistress ready for bed. Wrap her in my Siberian mantle. She shall rest to-night in the arms which were her first cradle, and I shall rock her to sleep.”
Ginevra laughed. “I can easily be a child again. I have only to go a few steps backward,” and she disappeared with Geta.
A moment later she was robed in a snow-white mantle which muffled her from head to foot. And, like a wintry fairy, she passed her
chamber door, where her father stood waiting. He caught her up from the floor.
“Take care of the baby feet,” he said. “These floors are never warm. Thou art all fair, my love. We will not go below. We will sit in the brown parlor.”
This was a small room adjoining Ginevra’s bedroom, where there was a cumbrous chair, called Prince Rupert’s, which was shaped like a throne. The walls were made strange with portraits—men in queer costumes looking stiff and ghastly, women rigid as pasteboard, except the picture of one young girl in long bodice and flowing skirt, around her hounds and huntsmen, a hawk on her wrist, her horse at hand ready for mounting—a lovely lady. This was Ginevra’s mother; and she loved the portrait, and always kept a lamp of perfumed oil burning below it.
The fire was low and ashy in the big fire-place. The Baron blew a silver whistle, and while waiting for a servant to answer the call, he kicked together the chunks of logs, sending a train of fiery sparkles up the chimney.
“Make haste, man!” he said, impatiently. “Heap on the wood.”
The obedient servant piled it from a box like a high, oldfashioned bedstead, which held at least a half cord of logs.
“Quick! quick! What carelessness! This room is cold as death.”
The man went out soon as he could escape, and reported to the servants that the Baron was in one of his tiger fits. They wondered why, when he was so pleased over the wedding, and in their own hall they talked it over with many wonderments.
But the lord of the castle had no dark mood, no tiger fit for Ginevra.
“Now, my darling,” said he, holding the light shape across his breast, while he wrapped the fur round her feet, “now I have my little girl all mine own for the last time. What shall I sing?”
“About the Norse kings, father. How they used to steal their brides and sail away over the foaming North seas to the lands of
snow and ice.”
The Baron was not much of a singer; but the deep roll of his voice well suited the thunder of the storm without. A strange cradlesong, to be sure, of fighting, of hunting, of blood, and of victory. An hour passed. There was no rift in the clouds, no lull in the dismal wind. Then the snow began to fall—the hushing snow, which seems to quiet heaven and earth.
“It will be fair to-morrow,” said Ginevra, sleepily, rousing a little. “That was a brave song of the pirates. Now the wind goes down.” She opened the clear blue eyes once more and smiled, showing the pearly little teeth. “Good-night. Do not let me tire you, father dear;” and so, murmuring love words her nurse had taught, she went to her innocent dreams—in all the kingdoms of sleep, the sweetest thing that breathed.
It snowed and it snowed and it snowed. Toward morning the castle was a very castle of silence; and the noiseless world lay like a cold white corpse in its cold white shroud.
Ginevra, lapped in downy fur, nested like a bird in her father’s breast, and he watched the delicate, upturned face with a watch that knew no weariness, till gray dawn broke over the earth, and the hilltops were tipped with silver.
Many times he touched her feet to feel if they were warm. Many times he leaned his ear to her fragrant breath and softly wound a stray curl of her hair, in rings of gold, round his forefinger. He hummed verses of old tunes some lost love sang in the years long gone, when he was young; and once he whispered a prayer.
Fond, foolish old man! Why wore he the night away in such sad, sweet watching, when there was nothing to make afraid?
