What’s Wrong with Focus on the Family

One of my children, can’t remember which one, rightly observed yesterday that every conversation we have now eventually ends up being about Trump, and Hillary, but also Trump. We start out talking about something else all together, like maybe the perfect seasoning of the mashed potatoes, or how everybody’s day is going, or what we need to remember to buy next time we venture all the way out to Aldi. Yesterday even we sat around talking about the Martian, and that old Mid Atlantic Accent. It’s not, in other words, like we’re incapable of carrying on fascinating family conversations about diverse topics of interest, both close to home and flung far afield.

Except that every single time we come back to the election. Every time. Eventually someone says “Hillary” or “Trump” and then we’re back in the stewpot of despair, shaking our heads in wonder and sorrow over what terrible fate is about to befall us.

What this observant child doesn’t know is that every evening, and every morning–which hems in and makes up the symmetrical rhythm and beauty of a day–I get online and further persecute myself by reading the ever more polarized array of political news and opinions. Last night I read various blistering indictments of #nevertrumpers and how insane it is to prefer a criminal to a….what’s a word that’s not completely profane that I haven’t already used. I am deeply sympathetic to this particular raging. I do think it is really gross–the preening willingness of many people already in power to say they are #nevertrump and #neverhillary but really they are just #nevertrump. For congressmen and women, who knew what he was, to have sabotaged every effort made to keep him from winning the nomination, to then try to pitch him over now is the height of jackassery.

But then, and this is more alarming to me, there is the sick hypocrisy of elements of the so called right who were mortified by the sins of Mr. Clinton, but who have come to view the grossness of Mr. Trump as not that big of a deal. I just read, and I’m not going to link it because it’s just so utterly foolish, that Mr. Dobson said, and I kid you not, “let him who is without sin cast the first stone.” For real? For all the saints in heaven above and on the earth beneath may this be some kind of mistake in reporting.

But, well, clear eyed biblical rationality hasn’t exactly been the hallmark of the religious “right” for quite a long time now. I always chafed (I mean, of course I am saying it now, you know, but I always did see this, you know, as I’m sure you did too) that Mr. Dobson, who seems to be a sweet kind man, had named his ministry Focus on the Family. Why, I would ask myself, didn’t he call it Focus on the Gospel? Because if you put the family, just like happiness, at the center of your vision, you won’t end up with a properly working family. If the Family is your main focus, the Family is going to end up being a failure. Just like, to bash away at the left also, if you put Social Justice as your main focus, you’re going to end up with no, or very little Justice at all.

No, see, when Christians took their eyes off of the scripture, which is the Word of Life to all those who are perishing (that’s everyone, just to be clear) and mistook the gospel for the political process and social activism, they did not then spread the light of the gospel into the darkness. Rather, they spread themselves, they preached the false gospel of humanity at the center, humanity saving itself. Seven steps to a Christian family on one hand, and Sojourners Magazine on the other.

One way you can, with integrity, be #nevertrump and #neverhillary is to admit that the church never should have focused on the family and never should have focused on racial reconciliation and clean water. Those things, Both of Them, are byproducts of the work that God does in the saving of his creation bit by bit. No, you, the Christian, focus on Jesus as he is known in the Scripture (and I hope you can hear that I am talking very slowly and a touch too loud, as if, in my speaking of a foreign language, if I just shout it emphatically everyone will suddenly understand). When you dwell deep in the riches of the gospel, the saving work of God as it is articulated in the bible, then you might also get to have things like an intact family, lower divorce rates, better relationships between different colors of people, cleaner water for other nations, less selling of young women into sex slavery, not so much confusion about gender, more babies making it out of the womb alive to breathe that first sinful breath.

Notice I didn’t say All. Not utopia. Not everything fixed forever just by the awesome force of our powerful and pure wills. No. Some things might get better. There are lovely effects of the gospel that spin out across generations and landscapes. But those things are not the gospel. And they should not come into the center of the canvas so that we think we’re looking at Jesus himself, when really we are looking at ourselves.

But take heart. Because really, though we keep blowing it, the gospel has not ceased to be a thing. God, though we constantly mistake ourselves for him, is sovereign over us all, even Mr. Trump and Mrs. Clinton. And, rest assured, all my conversations today will end up at exactly this same point. At least for another entire month.