Constitutional Law

Religious Leader Criticized For Election Year 'Fear-Mongering'

Jim Wallis, of Sojourners, raps James Dobson, leader of the socially conservative religious organization, Focus on the Family, for widely distributing a document dubbed “Letter From 2012 in Obama’s America.” Dobson’s “letter,” 16-pages long, was sent to his religious organization’s members, supporters and sympathizers and it paints a seriously dire picture of the nation’s future.

As Wallis describes it for a piece on The Huffington Post, the letter “apocalyptically depicts terrorist attacks in American cities, churches losing their tax exempt status for not allowing gay marriages, pornography pushed in front of our children, doctors, and nurses forced to perform abortions, euthanasia as commonplace, inner-city crime gone wild because of lack of gun ownership, home schooling banned, restricted religious speech, liberal censorship shutting down conservative talk shows, Christian publishers forced out of business, Israel nuked, power blackouts because of environmental restrictions, brave Christian resisters jailed by a liberal Supreme Court, and finally, good Christian families emigrating to Australia and New Zealand.”

Wallis goes on to slam Dobson’s missive as “the kind of negative Christian leadership that has become so embarrassing to so many of your fellow Christians,’ and to say that Dobson owes the nation “an apology.”

David Waters, in a column for The Washington Post/Newsweek, criticizes Dobson’s work, noting that it also claimed the Boy Scouts would be banned as an organization and public elementary schools would be forced to include gender identity classes in the First Grade.

“It’s easy (and getting easier) to make fun of Dobson’s fanciful fear-mongering,” Waters writes, “but he’s not so easily dismissed. The smooth-talking radio evangelist has a media ‘ministry’ that reaches more than 220 million people in 155 nations. He’s a child psychologist who claims to know the mind of God and the true meaning of scripture and who purports to speak for all Christians. That is scary stuff.”

Full post as published by ACS Blog on October 31, 2008 (boomark / email).