In this diary I will write a little about Jim Wallis of Sojourners and about differences between him and Dr. James Dobson. I will explain why I think Dobson intentionally ignores evidence that conflicts with his view of homosexuality. In the next diary I will show that the Bible specifically teaches Christians to "do the right thing," something Wallis does instinctively, instead of sticking to the letter of the law, as Dobson does on homosexuality and other issues.
Some of us here at dailykos have expressed hope that Reverend Wallis (who has worked personally with President Bush and was critical of the president in the famous Ron Suskind article that started the recent faith-based vs reality-based political discussion) might be willing to challenge Dr. James Dobson on behalf of Democrats.
After looking over some of his writing, I find it unlikely that Wallis will entertain such a notion. The title of one book written by him is
God's Politics : Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It. In a recent
Sojourners article he repeated the some of the basic points of that book:
Almost a year ago, I wrote in Sojourners and in an op-ed piece for The New York Times that too many Democrats still wanted to restrict religion to the private sphere and were very uncomfortable with the language of faith and values even when applied to their own agenda. And that Republicans wanted to narrowly restrict religion to a short list of hot-button social issues and obstruct its application to other matters that would threaten their agenda.
Well, after a year of political campaigning we ended up at about the same place. While some Democrats are now realizing the importance of faith, values, and cultural issues, a strong group of "secular fundamentalists" still fight to keep moral and spiritual language out of the liberal discussion. And while some Republicans would like to see an expanded application of faith, the "religious fundamentalists" still want to restrict religious values to gay marriage and abortion, and a very smart group of Republican strategists effectively appealed to both the faith and the fears of an important conservative religious constituency.
And, from the same article, it seems that notable Democratic pundit E. J. Dionne has also encouraged Wallis to be more critical of Republicans, but Wallis feels Democrats also fail to promote an acceptable agenda:
Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne covered our "God is not a Republican or a Democrat" campaign as a real sign of hope. Days after the election, he said, "What's required is a sustained and intellectually serious effort by religious moderates and progressives to insist that social justice and inclusion are `moral values' and that war and peace are `life issues.' As my wife and I prepared our three kids for school the day after the day after, we shared our outrage that we in Blue America are cast as opponents of `family values' simply because we don't buy the right wing's agenda. No political faction can be allowed to assert a monopoly on the family."
Later that day, Dionne told me that when he called for that deeper discussion of religious issues and moral values, he was thinking of Sojourners. "That's your job!" he challenged me.
OUR VISION - a progressive and prophetic vision of faith and politics - was not running in this election. Neither candidate championed the poor as a "moral value" or made the war in Iraq a clearly religious matter. And neither advocated a "consistent ethic of human life" beyond single issue voting. The ways in which the visions of both parties are morally and politically incomplete must now be taken up by people of faith. That can best be done by reaching into both the conservative Christian communities that voted for George Bush and more liberal Christian communities that voted for John Kerry.
I recently wrote to Reverend Wallis to suggest a valid Biblical criticism of the approach of Dr. Dobson and others that might be put forth in a book, but I haven't heard back from him yet. Some of the principles I would base such a book upon can be found in previous dailykos diaries
here and
here. Simply put, I think that Dr. Dobson's approach to the Bible wrongly eliminates a necessary human judgement element and an injunction to "do the right thing."
To demonstrate what I mean about a human judgement and doing the right thing, there are several places where the Bible insists that slaves be obedient to even unreasonable masters (Ephesians 6:5, Colossians 3:22, I Peter 2:18 are some prominent examples). Few today would defend slavery, but if Christians had followed New Testament advice on this there would never have been a Civil War (and yes I know lots of history buffs say the Civil War was about state's rights and not about slavery but you all see what I mean I think). Christians have to use their judgement and answer their conscience and do the right thing in spite of what the Bible seems to say, which many of them did during the Civil War period.
The most notable place I think Dr. Dobson wrongly eliminates the matter of conscience is on the issue of homosexuality. Since Romans seems to him to say unequivocally (and yes I know "seems to" and "unequivocally" don't usually apply to the same item) that homosexuality is an abomination, Dr. Dobson intentionally ignores all evidence to the contrary. If he is wrong, then he is being unfair to a whole group of people. There are lots of Christians who instinctively sense that the Bible comes up short on the issue and come to different conclusions than Dr. Dobson. These are the people who are applying judgement and conscience and trying to do the right thing, just as many did with slavery.
Just to be clear, there is not academic unanimity, at least not yet, on whether homosexuality is inborn or a choice or the product of one's environment, etc. But there are some key developments that Dobson seems to be intentionally ignoring. David Myers, the author of a widely used psychology textbook, sums up recent developments thusly (link:
Regardless of the process, the consistency of the genetic, prenatal, and brain findings has swung the pendulum toward a biological explanation. Nature more than nurture, most psychiatrists now believe, predisposes sexual orientation.
My personal belief is that sexual attraction is a product of prenatal hormones. For example, it is widely recognized that women's brains communicate more between the two hemispheres than men's do. I've heard Dr. Dobson discuss this very thing on his radio show as part of his explanation of how gender identity forms prior to birth. Although Myers doesn't include this in the same section as his own discussion of prenatal hormone influences, it does serve to show some contradictory biological evidence that Dobson skips over when he discusses the influence of pre-natal hormones:
Laura Allen and Roger Gorski (1992) also concluded that brain anatomy influences sexual orientation after discovering that a section of the anterior commissure (fibers connecting right and left hemispheres) is one-third larger in homosexual men than in heterosexual men. "The emerging neuroanatomical picture," noted Brian Gladue (1994), "is that, in some brain areas, homosexual men are more likely to have female-typical neuroanatomy than are heterosexual men."
This different brain physiology is consistent with anecdotal evidence that gay men are similar to women in matching colors, intuition, verbal abilities, etc. Here are some other physiological differences mentioned by Myers that are associated with prenatal hormonal influence:
With humans, a critical period for the brain's neural-hormonal control system may exist between the middle of the second and fifth months after conception (Ellis & Ames, 1987; Gladue, 1990; Meyer-Bahlburg, 1995). Exposure to the hormone levels typically experienced by female fetuses during this time appears to predispose the person (whether female or male) to be attracted to males in later life.
Some tests reveal that homosexual men have spatial abilities more like those typical of heterosexual women--a pattern consistent with the hypothesis that homosexuals were exposed to atypical prenatal hormones (Cohen, 2002; Gladue, 1994; McCormick & Witelson, 1991; Sanders & Wright, 1997).
Curiously, in some (but not all) studies, gay men have had fingerprint patterns rather like those of heterosexual women (Mustanski & others, 2002; Sanders & others, 2002). Most people have more fingerprint ridges on their right hand than on their left. Jeff Hall and Doreen Kimura (1994) first observed that this difference was greater for heterosexual males than for females and gay males. Given that fingerprint ridges are complete by the sixteenth fetal week, the researchers suspected the difference was due to prenatal hormones. Prenatal hormones also are a possible explanation for why data from 20 studies revealed that "homosexual participants had 39 percent greater odds of being non-right-handed" (LalumiPre & others, 2000).
Lesbians may likewise have more male-typical anatomy. For example, the cochlea and hearing system of lesbians develop in a way that is intermediate between those of heterosexual females and heterosexual males, and which seems attributable to prenatal hormonal influence (McFadden, 2002). This phenomenon--of homosexual individuals of both sexes being intermediate between heterosexual females and males--crosses many traits (Table 1).
I've listened to Dr. Dobson a lot over time, and I think he intentionally ignores a lot of what I have included here in an effort to make others believe that homosexuality is a choice or learned behavior.
In the next installment of this diary series, I will outline why I think the Gospel of Matthew specifically instructs Christians to "do the right thing" instead of just obeying the letter of the law.