Chasing Liberation

Reflections on the Lectionary for August 31st

Scenes from Exodus, including the tenth plague (top) and the Israelites leaving Egypt. From a Passover Haggadah, British Library. Author unknown; image is in the public domain, and taken from Wikimedia.

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Last week James Dobson died. James Dobson was one of those people who meant different things to different kinds of people. If you were non-religious or part of a Catholic or Protestant Mainline American religious group, then you probably knew James Dobson as a cartoonish far-right zealot who showed up to say outlandish things on television news shows after tragedies and disasters. You probably didn’t take him very seriously, and you likely thought of him alongside figures like Pat Robertson and Jimmy Swaggart—as one of a group of right-wing Christians who were trying to sway American culture and politics toward the direction of the so-called Silent Majority or Religious Right.

But if—like me—you were a part of the evangelical movement of the 1980s and the 1990s, you might remember James Dobson differently. I remember Dobson for the way he was a cultural and religious oracle—the way his opinions took on the strength of doctrine for millions of people who looked to him for guidance. His radio and television programs crowded the schedules of Christian broadcasters, and I can recall his writing and his ideas filling the pages of the magazines scattered around the break room of the Christian camp where I worked. They were glossy productions full of hip graphics and cheerful headlines, pushing profoundly conservative—and often misogynistic, homophobic, and conspiracy-minded—ideas.

As news of Dobson’s death ricocheted around social media last week, many of the reactions were from people like me—people whose formative years were profoundly influenced by (and tainted by) Dobson and his ideas. I was more fortunate than many of those people. My parents never bought into one of Dobson’s most harmful ideologies, which was that in order to raise a child properly you must viciously discipline them with violence. People remembered all kinds of trauma. Dobson recommended spanking children with their pants down, which led to the kinds of disturbing stories you might imagine, and one man told the story of being beaten by his parents so many times that he started lifting weights. When they asked what he was doing, he told his parents that his plan was to get big and strong enough that they couldn’t beat him up anymore. Others told stories of years of physical abuse. Upon Dobson’s death, thousands of stories like those poured out—stories of deep trauma and fear caused by Dobson’s “family” advice. And let’s not forget that Dobson’s views on AIDS were so reprehensible that the United States Surgeon General, who was a fellow evangelical, had to publicly denounce him for spreading hatred and conspiracy theories. Even if you didn’t personally pay much attention to James Dobson and others like him, they spent decades spreading their ideas and slowly building networks to carry them out, so that now the social and political world we live in is very much the world they envisioned.

In the lectionary for August 31^st we find a curious passage from Jeremiah. In some ways this passage is pretty standard prophetic fare. It’s a denouncement of popular religious practice by way of contrast to the kinds of religion that Jeremiah (or God) thought people ought to be practicing. This is the kind of thing that shows up again and again in the prophets: a claim about an original, true religion, and a catalog of the ways people have failed to live up to its demands.

I’m always a little skeptical of these kinds of claims, both ancient and modern. The structure of this kind of thinking is seductive: it’s not our religion that’s problematic, it’s the degraded way people practice it that causes issues. This kind of claim lets religion off the hook for its bad parts while blaming the religion’s practitioners for not grasping its truly good parts. It lets some religious people feel like they aren’t responsible for the bad parts of their own religion. It keeps God’s hands clean by blaming the people for anything that goes wrong. And it assumes—as is never the case—that there is an ideal, pure, and unsullied form of religion out there somewhere, free of human touch or error, to which we could aspire.

I don’t think that’s how religion works. There’s no original and pure form of religion out there to be found, and religion is always created through the course of people practicing it. Religion is a thing people do, not a thing that gods drop from heaven. Religion can’t be sullied and diverged away from, like misguided people making imperfect copies of an original. Religion can only evolve and be changed through reform and hard work. Religion is always what we, its practitioners, are willing to let it be. It is a mirror in which we see ourselves.

Still, though, there’s something to this passage from Jeremiah. What wrong did your ancestors find in me, it asks in God’s voice, that they went far from me and went after worthless things and became worthless themselves? The passage is framing things in that old frustrating way, that God is all good and that all the bad things come from humans. But there’s something in that language of worthlessness, and the idea of fleeing far away from God, that resonates with me when I think about James Dobson’s career. The Christian tradition is full of both wretchedness and beauty, the Bible is full of both horror and sublime truth, the Church is full of histories of both tragedy and hope, and Dobson chose to take the worst of it and distill it all into hatred. It’s not that Dobson invented something new in the history of Christianity—he did not. But the remarkable thing for me, and the way his life resonates with this passage from Jeremiah, is that of all the resources available to him from the Christian tradition and of all the ways he could have tried to move the church, James Dobson chose to boil it all down to beating children and blaming AIDS on gay people. He went after worthless things, and he became worthless himself.

The Jeremiah passage is comparing and contrasting two ideas, and really two periods of history. The first idea and period—the bad one, for Jeremiah—is the prophet’s present day. This is when the people had defiled my land and made my heritage an abomination, according to Jeremiah. How had they done that? They did it by forsaking the other idea and period—they did it by forsaking liberation.

Look at 2:6 and its appeal to the time of the Exodus from Egypt. For Jeremiah, that’s the moment when a true and original and pure religion emerged—when God empowered Moses to lead the people out of slavery and into freedom. Even if we argue, as I would, that there was plenty wrong about that time and place, and that there were lots of non-liberating parts of the moment Jeremiah is lifting up, something remains true about his larger point. Jeremiah is arguing that religion is at its best when it is about liberation, when it is about journeying and seeking, and when it is about freedom. He’s pointing to the flight from Egypt and the period in the wilderness as the moment when God and the people were on the same page, all chasing freedom together. Jeremiah is suggesting that the Exodus was the moment when the purest form of religion could be found, and that the forms that came after that—especially the idolatrous forms of religion that chased after the god Baal—all represented a decline and a fall from that moment.

I do think that the best expressions of religion can be found in liberation. The Exodus was a complicated event, even on the terms by which it is described in the Bible. Yes, it was about the freedom of the Israelites, but it was also the story of the slaughter of a lot of Egyptians and the murderous purge of a lot of Canaanites from the Promised Land. There is a lot to criticize about the story, both what’s on the page and what’s left out of the story. But the idea that God is a God of liberation is a powerful one, and the Exodus is that idea’s most prominent example. The notion that God seeks freedom is at the heart of the Exodus story, and Jeremiah is holding that up as an example.

James Dobson represents a generation of evangelical leadership that turned away from liberation. Dobson led a generation that chose a twisted kind of power for themselves over freedom for others. They would not agree with me—they would probably claim that they were helping people find their true callings from God and building a world in which politics and culture and family life all conspired to help people be faithful. But from my perspective, Dobson and others like him were the ones who went after worthless things and became worthless themselves, leading their form of Christianity down wayward paths. Those who handle the law did not know me, Jeremiah writes, the rulers transgressed against me, the prophets prophesied by Baal and went after things that do not profit. It’s not hard for me to recognize the politicians, the religious leaders, and the social movements of the 1980s and 1990s in that passage from Jeremiah. There was a lot of renouncing God’s liberation going on, and there were a lot of rulers transgressing against God.

I was texting the other day with a friend and colleague who was driving through a part of the South that we both have in common in our pasts. The ways in which this part of the world has gotten openly mean since I left, she wrote, makes me so sad. I agreed. The places most influenced by James Dobson and other figures on the evangelical right are now the places most likely to gleefully call for deportations, roll back equal protection under the law, abandon the vulnerable to hunger, and tolerate an out-of-control culture of gun violence. The places where Dobson was heard most clearly are now the places where God’s liberation seems to be most absent. The descendants of the people who knew liberation are now the ones cheering on Pharoah and his armies. Be appalled, O heavens, at this; be shocked, be utterly desolate, says the Lord. In the Jeremiah passage, even the natural world recoils from the way the people have forsaken God.

The premise of Jeremiah’s messages, and the premise of all the prophets, is that our waywardness is caused by ignorance, and that by being reminded we might be called back into the truth. That’s why Jeremiah and the other prophets went about conveying God’s messages—in the hopes that the people would repent and choose God’s way. There is yet time, Jeremiah is saying, to choose the Exodus way—to follow God to liberation rather than to follow false gods and broken ideologies. As James Dobson and others from his generation pass away, and as we see the traumatized people and the empty churches and the distrust of religion that are the legacy of their ideas, we have the opportunity to change. We live in a world as Dobson and others imagined it—a world of shrinking rights for LGBTQia+ people, a world of naked xenophobia, and a world where prominent politicians can openly endorse ideas like stripping the vote from women or imprisoning migrants. We live in a world of weaponized cruelty, a world of open meanness, as my friend put it, that was built over decades of intentional right-wing Christian intervention into our politics. We have gone after worthless things and become worthless ourselves, because enough people followed James Dobson and others like him, and they have remade our society in the image of the theocracy they spent their lives proclaiming.

The message of Jeremiah and all the prophets is that there is still time to choose another way. The message of Jeremiah and all the prophets is that liberation is still at hand. We can still trade our ignorance for knowledge; we can still return to the truth. God still waits, they would have us remember, to see us through to a time of freedom. We do not have to labor under pharaoh forever.