The Focus on the Family Institution is an organization founded by evangelical Christian Dr. James Dobson in the 1970's and it is a "global christian ministry dedicated to help families thrive"-directly quoted from their website. Their core beliefs include:
- All people are of infinite value
- Marriage is the foundation of family life
- Children are a gift from God
- Sex is given by God as an expression of love
- Christians have the responsibility to promote truth and social policy
- Follow the teachings and spirit of Jesus
To me every word that spews out of his mouth sounds ludicrous, horrifying and simply traditional. However, Dr. Dobson and Focus on the Family uses rhetoric that appeals to a specific audience. Throughout their website words such as 'family', 'faith', 'values', and 'tradition' are used to attract conservative, right-wing people who feel that America has lost its core identity and sound judgement. This group has an overt prestige where their dialect is that of the American family. Their websites, magazines, radio shows and other forms of media try to aid the American family and create an ideal lifestyle.
This organization personally scares me because of the high influence it has had in this country and their outright secular worldviews. I find their values, beliefs, and ideas to be complete b.s. because the underlying reasoning follows the literal translations of the bible that For the Bible Tells Me So discusses. Like many other forms of worldviews, it creates two-sided answers that are reduced and simple in order to have firm and clear opinions to subjects. In their minds, there is no room for multiple perspectives and ideologies because then the bible would be wrong, nothing would mean anything anymore. So in conclusion, Focus on the Family along with Dr. Dobson and other conservative evangelical Christians have a specific dialogue and perspective that can be appealing to a few but simply gibberish to me.
I think that your argument can be made for almost any organization or person with a point of view. With all due respect it seems to me like you're just saying that Focus on the Family uses words that persuade people with certain beliefs, well that is true with any agenda. People always have a target audience and it's impossible to write or produce anything without having a specific audience in mind and using techniques to reach those people.
ReplyDeleteHaha i found it interesting that you used Focus on the Family as your topic of argument...my parents were really big on this organization and as a child growing up, I listened/read a lot of stuff by them. I agree, some of the things they said are over the top, and very narrow minded. But I must point out that I think that they are not all bad, and that some of their motives and ideas are worthwhile. Trust me, as an individual who went from private Christian schools up through 8th grade and then to a public high school and college, I have spent a lot of my life pondering and even struggling with my faith; why do i believe the things that I believe, and how can i call myself a Christian in a time where there is so much negativity around Christianity, and how i don't want to be like "those other Christians". At first it was hard, because the older i got, the more i realized that the ideals i had been raised on (like many of the ones promoted by focus on the family)were not always good ones or the right ones. But for me, like everything else, the more I know and the more I experience, the harder it becomes to pick a clear side and have the right answers.
ReplyDeleteSure, ALL positions, formations, discursive constructions, social constructions--whatever--are 'made' (Latour on facts fits here) by the actions of words and images. That's what rhetoric does. What's interesting here is HOW things like 'For the Bible...' or the counter positions from FOTF work on us, how they relate.
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