Book Review: Dan Gilgoff's "The Jesus Machine"
Sat Apr 14, 2007 at 10:01:58 AM PDT
The Jesus Machine
How James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and Evangelical America Are Winning the Culture War
By Dan Gilgoff
St. Martin’s Press
New York, 2007
"The average person in the establishment is not aware of what Dobson is saying to five or ten million people every week," said Richard Viguerie, the conservative activist who pioneered the use of direct mail for the Republican Party in the sixties and seventies. "That has served us beautifully."
The Jesus Machine is a tough read, my friends, for anyone in this country who believes in the separation of church and state. Tough, but absolutely necessary.
As a case study in patience, ingenuity, flexibility and political movement building, this book can’t be beat. The rough read part comes in every time you get jerked back to reality about what the Christian Right wants to impose on this country, and how deeply and uncompromisingly convinced its members are about the sacredness of the mission. Slamming back and forth between being repulsed by their vision for America and in awe of – and trying to learn from – their inarguably successful strategies makes for a difficult experience.
Dan Gilgoff, a senior editor at U.S. News & World Report, outlines the piece-by-piece construction of the Christian Right infrastructure, entering the story through recounting the rise of the powerful James Dobson and branching off to detail other parts of the movement. Dobson serves as a lodestone throughout, the soothing presence that reassures evangelicals that their move into political action is really a moral, God-driven mission and not truly partaking of dirty secular politics at all.
And back when Dobson started his radio show in the late 1970’s, it certainly seemed an apolitical venture. Gilgoff points out that the turbulent 1960’s "gave the evangelical movement a culture to define itself against," and Dobson, a professor at UCLA with a strong Christian upbringing, early on tapped into the unease of listeners that "presented him with the opportunity to win their trust and to help instill in them an orthodox Christian worldview that rejected the reigning postmodernism." The founding of Focus on the Family by all accounts was not based on political calculation, but on the need Dobson identified in his largely female audience to find advice on child-rearing, straying spouses, addicted family members and all the other personal issues that suddenly seemed destabilized by the re-examination of cultural roles. Indeed, the radio host appears to have resisted – and still does – any inference that Focus on the Family is primarily a political machine, pointing to the bulk of its active correspondence with listeners still addressing the private realm of personal conduct, private adversity and Bible-based spiritual clarification.
As the popularity of his radio show exploded, along with sidelines of books and videos, he quickly integrated successful business advisors into his network and hired "correspondents" who helped Focus on the Family retain its customized, personal approach to listeners who contacted the organization for counsel. His insistence on quick response to those seeking advice led to an archiving of his broadcasts and numerous writings so that listeners who called or wrote in were able to have their problems addressed by Focus counselors who could access an immediate database on Dobson’s views. This reliance on amassing data extended to compiling of extremely valuable contact information on the listeners themselves, and it wouldn’t take long for more politically motivated religious leaders on the Christian Right to eye both the model and the data with envy.
While Dobson continued to struggle to maintain a scarcity value in the fledgling Christian Right political market – rarely giving interviews, rarely endorsing candidates or causes – other more politically ambitious leaders began to amass their own constituencies and causes. Jerry Falwell, Ralph Reed, Paul Weyrich and others began building a nuts-and-bolts parallel movement alongside Focus on the Family that urged evangelicals to end their retreat from public life and begin to demand that their views be reflected in issues and candidates in the public square. Much of this transformational movement from public to private rested on tapping into evangelicals’ retroactive anger at Roe v. Wade and court rulings regarding school prayer.
Gilgoff uses three main issues to tell the story of movement building: the Supreme Court nomination of John Roberts, the agitation to pass a constitutional amendment banning gay marriage and the Terry Schiavo affair. The mobilization of the Christian right base that crystallized around these all-out policy pushes are instructive in their glimpse of the tightrope the leaders walked when trying to satisfy purists and pragmatists. The frustration of the politically savvy often ran head-first into the all-or-nothing-at-all ideologues, particularly as the coordinating groups struggled with different approaches to gay marriage bans. Indeed, reading some of Gilgoff’s observations – and stripping them of the issue itself to look clearly at the tussles over strategy -- leaves one thinking of recent arguments among Democrats about where to draw the line with the Republican Party over various issues.
Consider this passage, which seems ripped right out of the dialogue we often have right here at Daily Kos about the value of taking a stand even if victory is unlikely:
"Leadership at that time [1998 mid-terms] was interested in winning, and if you didn’t win, they didn’t want to have the battle," said Coburn, who served in the House until 2000 and was elected to the Senate in 2004. "I had a different philosophy: that you don’t always have to win, but you can’t not fight for what you believe. You look through history and you see people who stood the high moral ground by continuing to lose until the public was awakened to the truth of what they were saying. The battle [in 1998] was not can you win or not; it was about whether or not the Republicans were fighting. Fighting and losing has value. Not fighting has no value."
One of the undoubted benefits to the Christian Right of this strategy has been how it has spoken directly to the evangelical base and integrated dormant members into the political sphere – even when success is elusive. Still, there is a discernable tension between those who now consider themselves inside the political system (like Ralph Reed and Paul Weyrich) and those who stand outside, demanding results.
But as evangelicals have risen to the upper echelons of the government, many have grown frustrated with what they consider the outsized expectations of Christian Right leaders....Some inside-the-beltway social conservatives complain that the Christian Right has come to see Washington as the solution to social problems, just as big-government liberals do.... "Politics follows culture, not the reverse," said Paul Weyrich.
Contradictions within movements are nothing new on the political scene, but Gilgoff really mines the ins-and-outs of this particular one in an objective fashion, separating the ideology from the method, in a way that makes The Jesus Machine about much, much more than simply Dobson, Focus on the Family or the politicization of the evangelical movement. He looks at some of the top-down models that worked and those that failed. He examines the creation of the Family Research Council and its Family Policy Councils at the state level that helped to distance Dobson from the day-to-day political mechanics, and the issues for which the bottom-up organizing were most effective. He looks at the rivalry and chase for the same donor dollars between the overlapping groups and at the ways the competition was resolved – or not – between them.
It’s well worth the effort as a reader to try and remove the religious content angle from most of the information on offer in this book and settle into an analytical frame of mind. There is much to be learned and even more to be considered and possibly adapted to our own needs, from use of "movement language" and how it can alienate outsiders, to how to activate an base that feels powerless. Aside from its "how to" value, it’s solid as a historical guide and reference book for a Who’s Who of the Christian Right movement. Gilgoff has done a masterful job here of expanding knowledge, not just in documenting the rise of a specific constituency, but in providing an outline of movement-building in general.
