The Strategy of Focus on the Family
Evangelical Christians also do consciousness-raising
It’s easy to dismiss the fundamentalist ministry Focus on the Family these days: gay marriage is almost a nonissue, the culture war has shifted to transness and race, and Focus on the Family has halved its budget from where it was at its height. But it was a powerful force in politics in the late twentieth century, one of the most powerful social-conservative lobbying groups. At one point, every soldier in the US Army was required to watch a particular Focus on the Family video, Where’s Dad?1 So I think it’s interesting to look at how Focus on the Family worked.
What many non-evangelicals don’t realize about Focus on the Family is that it wasn’t primarily a social conservative lobbying organization. Throughout its existence, Focus on the Family’s primary activity has been giving advice to evangelicals (mostly white, middle-class, and female) about marriage, parenting, and family life. At its peak, it gave a lot of advice. In 1993, Focus on the Family's headquarters received its own zip code in order to manage the thousands of letters that came in daily—and that’s not counting the phone calls and (later) emails, nor the many people who received advice from Focus on the Family’s book, radio show, or extensive family of magazines.
Focus on the Family’s advice also tended to be broadly reasonable. Certainly, it was not immune to Questionable Evangelical Takes. Focus on the Family’s founder, James Dobson, explained in his books that:
Only women are attracted to the whole person. Men are exclusively attracted to people’s physical appearances.
Unlike women, men were designed by God to be good at working with “metal, wood, or stone.”
PMS makes women overemotional, unintelligent, and prone to getting into accidents.
Ted Bundy is a reliable source who should be believed when he attributed his serial killing to using porn.
A typical gay bathhouse visit involves twenty to fifty partners in an hour and a half.2
Having a child come out as gay is worse than having your child die.
But many of Focus on the Family’s positions make sense even from a secular perspective. Dobson taught parents to prevent child molestation by not teaching their children to unquestioningly obey authority and instead teaching their children “the right time to disobey.” He rejected the then-common evangelical idea that God found The One for you like a sort of divine yenta, and instead encouraged people to pray for the wisdom to choose rightly for themselves.
Dobson assured his audience-- both in Preparing for Adolescence and other writings-- that masturbation was not sinful, was not harmful, did not cause mental illnesses, and was impossible to either prevent or cure. Parents, he taught, should never suggest that children's bodies are wrong, bad, or evil, and should simply encourage them to masturbate in their rooms with the door closed. He also reassured parents concerned about their gender-non-conforming children that most tomboys or sissies grew up well-adjusted and heterosexual, and they should simply love their children and not freak out.
More broadly, Dobson responded deftly to shifts in evangelical culture. He took a bunch of second-wave feminist complaints—such as men not being aware of their wives’ emotional needs—and put an evangelical spin on them. In the wake of the sexual revolution, he spoke explicitly about sex and encouraged husbands to ensure their wives orgasmed and to behave romantically towards their wives.
Similarly, Focus on the Family took a moderate position on racial issues. It was opposed to “multiculturalism” and made many missteps, such as promoting a series of biographies of American heroes that included multiple Confederate generals. Nevertheless, it made serious efforts to support black pastors and writers. Particularly in the 1990s, “racial reconciliation” was popular among evangelicals. Focus on the Family taught that racism was a sin and that and white evangelicals needed to commit time and energy to fighting racism alongside black evangelicals. However, government intervention wasn’t the solution; the solution was individual self-improvement founded on Christian love, faith, and healing. Further, abortion was a genocidal program founded by eugenicists to eliminate black people—a black nationalist talking point which became popular among the pro-life movement. Many evangelicals in the late twentieth century were concerned about racism. Focus on the Family’s approach allowed them to marry their opposition to racism to their preexisting small-government and pro-life political commitments.
Above all, Dobson was skeptical of work. Before Dobson, Christian masculinity was centered around work outside the home. Dobson defined Christian masculinity primarily as being a good husband and father. He himself had founded Focus on the Family so he could work from home and spend more time with his children. He sometimes teared up when talking about how much it meant to him to spend time with his kids.
In the 1970s, the economy was quite bad. Many evangelical men felt like they were failing as providers. Men who didn’t earn a lot of money, weren’t successful in their careers, or worked unfulfilling jobs could still see themselves as masculine, because they spent time with their children. Further, many men want to prioritize their families over their careers. In a sexist subculture such as evangelicalism, those men might face stigma or have a hard time fitting that preference into their self-concept. Focus on the Family allowed those men to step back at work to spend more time parenting without gender role strain.
Focus on the Family generally emphasized that whether to work was a personal choice made by a woman and her husband, but that it should be taken as a last resort and never out of feminist beliefs or a personal desire for a career. Its ambivalent feelings about mothers working come from the same source as its support for men who prioritize their families. It didn’t like that men were working long hours and taking time away from their families. The same perspective turned into not liking that women worked at all.
In sum, James Dobson and Focus on the Family were trusted sources among many evangelicals about all issues of family life. The trust created an opportunity for what I can only call consciousness raising. Focus on the Family’s advice helped you feel closer to and fight less with your husband, have better sex, choose age-appropriate movies for family movie night, potty-train your toddler, get your elementary schooler to do their homework, and keep your teenager off drugs. So when they tell you that gay people aren’t interested in long-term monogamous marriages and so they only want to get married in order to destroy marriage for everyone—well, it seems plausible, doesn’t it? Would James Dobson lie to you?
Focus on the Family’s audience was far more politically involved than the average person. In 1994, 92% of Focus on the Family's audience had voted in the general election, compared to only 50% of the general public. They were also more likely to write public officials, engage in political activism, donate to political candidates, run for office, and otherwise do every other kind of political engagement you could imagine. The effect size seems too large to be attributable to Focus on the Family providing marriage and parenting advice to unusually politicized people. It made people political.
In the fucking 1990s, when sodomy was a crime in many states, James Dobson said that he was oppressed by the all-powerful gay mafia which controlled “Hollywood, the press, the media, the university, the professionals (the American Bar Association, the Medical Association, etc.) and the judiciary.” I think that this claim seemed more plausible to Focus on the Family’s audience because the audience thought of James Dobson as a nice guy. Why would someone throw in a brick through Focus on the Family’s windows or make a bomb threat at its offices? James Dobson just wants to help other children the way that he helped your children! The gay rights supporters must be totally irrational, motivated purely by anti-Christian animus.
Focus on the Family built a quite powerful social movement through giving useful, mostly non-political life advice and then connecting it to tangentially related political issues. Although it didn’t actually win at any of its key issues and declined in the Obama years as the culture moved on, its success in movement-building can still offer lessons to writers.
Family Matters: James Dobson and Focus on the Family’s Quest for the Christian Home. By Hilde Løvdal Stephens. 2019. 304 pages. $47.
Where’s Dad? is about why fathers should spend more time with their children and not neglect their families for their careers. It apparently drove multiple Republican politicians to tears.
I spent a while trying to figure out how this could possibly work and decided that probably that there was a sort of top assembly line bringing them in a systematic fashion from bottom to bottom. If you use this idea for pornographic purposes, please don’t credit me, I am trying to have a v sirus effective altruist blog here.
> Focus on the Family built a quite powerful social movement through giving useful, mostly non-political life advice and then connecting it to tangentially related political issues.
That's how successful left-leaning political movements worked in the past too? Come for the food bank or housing advice, and then hear a bit about Marx (or whatever else the organisation is about) along the way?
So...they were the influencers of their day? Seems like a pretty straight throughline from James Dobson to Joe Rogan?