As a Christian teenager in the late 80s, I found Dobson’s frank writing about puberty, sexuality, and growing up to be profoundly helpful. As young parents, the title of his book Parenting isn’t for Cowards was kind of a catchphrase in our home. Neither my wife nor I had actually read the book, mind you, but the expression itself, “parenting isn’t for cowards,” came up a lot when we were tempted to chicken out on our parental responsibilities. We have financially supported Focus on the Family in the past, mostly because we saw value in its pro-life advocacy at the time, and there are one or two episodes of Adventures in Odyssey that still stand out as meaningful in my memory.
At the same time, however, I have often felt that much of Focus’s work, and the tone with which they conduct it, is not theologically sound, and may even be harmful to the witness of the church. Its legacy of opposing human rights for LGBTQ people is one such example. In 2009 it sold the so-called “ex-gay” branch of its ministry, “Love Won Out,” to the ex-gay organization Exodus International, only to see Exodus close its operations in 2013 and issue a public statement acknowledging the harm its conversion efforts have caused. Then there are the theological challenges posed by Focus on the Family’s political activities. I am generally cautious when it comes to making political statements as a pastor, because I recognize that there is a diverse range of political opinion represented in my congregation, but even so, I have to say that the day James Dobson publicly endorsed Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential race was the day I finally withdrew any moral or financial support I had once given to the organization.
One of the most problematic aspects of Focus on the Family’s work, though, is also the hardest to pin down. Somehow it took a very good thing—supporting the nuclear family—and made it the most-important thing—the mark of a faithful follower of Jesus. I remember a theology professor of mine who once waved the red flag over Focus on the Family’s ministry by saying this: their work assumes that the church exists primarily to serve the family, to make the nuclear family strong and keep it growing spiritually; when theologically the reverse is true. If anything, the family exists to serve the church, to help it in its work of glorifying Jesus and proclaiming the Gospel of our Lord. My theology professor was riffing on Ephesians 5 when he said this, that part where Paul says that a godly marriage functions, primarily, as a living metaphor for—and thus a beautiful witness to—the love that Christ has for the Church.
I think there is something to this, and over the years I have seen the fall-out of a “misaligned focus” on the nuclear family in the church. Pastors who council abused wives to stay in the marriage no matter the cost, no matter the risk, may be part of the fallout. Christian families who leave a local church when the children’s ministry no longer meets the felt-needs of the kids, may be some of the fallout. Christian parents who feel that they have no other choice when their LGBTQ kids come out to them than to ostracize them, may be some. So might the alienation that divorcees often feel in the church, or singles who wonder why there’s never a sermon series on “how live without a godly marriage.”
This post isn’t a theological critique of Focus on the Family, however. It’s actually part of the “Christian conversation” I’ve been having over the last few weeks about a queer-themed kid’s show named Steven Universe, and what it can teach the traditional church about being a community of hospitality for LGBTQ people. We’ve talked about things like: learning the queer aesthetic, and the pain of feeling like “the other,” the role of hospitality itself, and the complex nature of human sexuality.
Today all I want to point out is just that, theologically, the nuclear family is not the biblical ideal for human relationships; brotherhood (read: siblinghood) in Christ is, which is a relationship that actually sits above, and informs, all other human relationships. And whatever else Steven Universe does, with all its intergalactic space travel and mysterious battles with the Gems from Homeworld, it helps us explore what a familial relationship that “transcends and informs” the nuclear family might look like.
I remember the day I realized the true significance of “siblinghood in Christ,” as the ultimate human relationship. One of my theology profs (the same one waving the red flag about Focus on the Family, in fact), explained to our class that before your wife is “your wife” she is your sister in Christ; and before your kids are “your kids” they are your brothers and sisters in Christ. This bond that we share in Jesus, he argued, comes first.
If he was right, it would explain why Jesus says that everyone who leaves behind their “brothers or sisters or mother or father or children for the sake of the Gospel,” will get them back—brothers and sisters and mothers and children—a hundred times, in this present age and eternal life in the age to come (Mark 10:29-30). Jesus is talking there, I think, about how the Christian Church functions—or at least it should function—as God’s compensation for any human relationships we may have had to give up, because they could not bear our commitment to Christ.
Passages like these shed fresh light on those places in Paul where he uses the imagery of “adoption” to describe our experience of salvation, or when he talks about Christians being "members of the household of God" (an ancient term for the Roman family). It turns out it wasn't just a polite convention when the early Christians took to calling each other "brother" and "sister." We tend to take it as “only metaphor” when the Bible says that we are all children of God, but I think the early church took it very seriously and tried to live out implications of this truth. They understood that in coming to Jesus they had been quite literally adopted into a divine family, and so shared a sibling relationship with each other, one that transcended even their natural familial relationships.
If it is hard for us to process this idea, that God intends for us to experience in the Church a relationship with each other that is more compelling and intimate even than that which we experience in our nuclear families—if we find that hard to believe—it may be owing to the decades-long work of Focus on the Family, teaching us to focus especially on the nuclear family as the place where our need for love is met. If it’s not that, at the very least it is owing to an evangelical church culture that has privatized the faith and relegated the church to the role of a simple dispenser of religious goods and services, instead of letting it be what God says it is: his divine answer to the deepest human longing for agape love.
In his ground-breaking book about being a gay Christian, Washed and Waiting, Wesley Hill argues that God meant for the church to be his “sanctified remedy” for human loneliness, God’s “compensation” to gay Christians for their sacrifice of homosexual partners. He challenges Christians to recognize that “the New Testament views the church—rather than marriage—as the primary place where human love is best expressed and experienced.” He is talking specifically there about marriage, but I think we could safely expand his point to include this discussion about the Church as God’s ultimate offer of “family,” too. That many of us balk at this idea, because so few of the Christian communities we have experienced actually live up to this ideal, suggests a dereliction of duty on the part of churches, if not a complete failure of the Christian imagination.
To help our imaginations along, perhaps I could point you to the kid’s show that sparked this blog series, that sci-fi fantasy adventure known as Steven Universe. As I’ve mentioned, the central hero of the show, Steven Universe, is being raised by three alien life forms, gems from a planet called Homeworld. Steven himself is the son of a gem named Rose Quartz, a child she had through a love affair with an earthling named Greg Universe. Rose has since died, but Greg, Steven’s dad, is still very much in the picture. What stands out to an astute viewer however, is that although Steven and Greg very clearly share a familial bond, Steven does not live with his dad (this despite the fact that Greg just lives a few doors down).
Steven’s filial love for the gems and their paternal care towards him will become a more prominent theme as the show progresses, and it continues to deconstruct the traditional definition of what constitutes a “family.” In one episode, Steven meets a human cousin he never knew he had, a gruff traditionalist named Andy DeMayo. Over the course of the episode, Andy learns to let go of his conservative views and expand his definition of family so that it can, indeed, include the likes of the Crystal Gems.
In this regard, I would argue, Steven Universe’s family is actually one of the best analogies for the church I’ve come across in contemporary children’s entertainment. Because like the Crystal Gems, the church is community of people with no biological relation, but bound together the way blood-brothers and blood-sisters are supposed to be bound together. It is a spiritual family created by the divine—but not less literal for all its being divine—adoption of strangers. In this adoption we are asked to identify with our fellow believers, who are just as much children of God as we are, with the same care, concern and mutuality we would show our biological siblings. From a biblical perspective, it is a family very much like Steven Universe's family, one formed by choice (first God’s, then ours), by circumstance (the divine circumstances of our adoption), and by a radical commitment (God’s to us, and then ours to each other).
Can you imagine?
If not, perhaps a couple of episodes of Steven Universe might help, as it explores the possibility that our deepest longing for family can in fact be fulfilled in ways far beyond our wildest dreams.
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