James Dobson, president of the Colorado-based group Focus on the Family, knows a little about the price of ink.
His evangelical-political ministry, one of the mainstays of the increasingly fragmented religious right, publishes 10 magazines claiming 2.3 million readers. Focus on Family sends out 55,000 letters a week to politicians, its own members and other interest groups. It publishes innumerable books and brochures.
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Last week, speaking to the Southern Baptist Convention, Dobson said that he would add some new information to each and every one of those publications.
(Dobson, 62, reportedly suffered a mild stroke this week. A family spokesman said he was resting comfortably.)
Amending so much printed matter is no small commitment. What could be so important?
Would the new information be about abortion or homosexuality, two pillars of the Focus on the Family moral agenda? Would it be an ultimatum for Republican leaders, whom Dobson accuses of betraying the Christian conservatives who elected them?
Perhaps a new 800-number?
No, Dobson announced that what Focus on the Family must start including in every publications are “the fundamentals of the faith.”
Dobson cited a 1994 poll that asked, among other things, who Joan of Arc was; 10 percent of the respondents identified her as Noah’s wife.
(The evangelist also told the Baptists about a poll in which only a small percentage of teenagers queried could name any of the four gospels of the New Testament. I could not track down that poll, but you can imagine some Chicago kid answering, “Matthew . . . Mike . . . Luc . . . and, uh, Toni?”)
In other words, Dobson was not talking about heavy theology. He meant that some substantial portion of the people he’s trying to reach don’t have the foggiest notion of basic Christian teachings.
“What good does it do to build the most magnificent ministry we can if we forget the message?” he asked.
This is not a new complaint, though it seems to grow more pertinent every day. Usually experts chalk it up to the larger intellectual black hole in culture. After all, are those people who don’t know anything about the Bible more conversant with Shakespeare or Aristotle or simple geometry?
That, however, may not be the whole truth. The uncomfortable part of the story, especially for mainstream religious leaders, is that a few traditions seem to do a pretty good job of teaching their beliefs in spite of the surrounding culture.
The evidence lies about an hour’s drive away from Salt Lake City, at the Missionary Training Center in Provo, Utah.
There, even as Dobson was speaking, some 3,000 young Mormons were partway through a 13-hour daily schedule of worship and study that serves as a kind of boot camp for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints’ evangelistic efforts. In a few more weeks, those 19-year-olds will be out walking the streets of the world, knocking on doors with their message, and 3,000 more will take their place in Provo.
It’s an extraordinary regime of training, which, when combined with the two years of mission work, is credited with making the Mormon church as strong as it is today. Not only church leaders, but also a substantial portion of rank-and-file members have learned their scriptures and church teachings top to bottom.
And though church officials stress that their missionaries are just like any other group of 19-year-olds you might meet, that is not exactly true. Most of them have already been studying their religion an hour a day for seven years by the time they arrive.
“We assume they’ve been taught the Gospel well enough to teach it themselves,” said Elder Earl Tingey, executive director of the Missionary Department of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. “It’s a discipline we have throughout the church.”
Discipline is not a popular word in much of modern religion. Particularly in America, institutional discipline is portrayed as the enemy of conscience, compassion and truth. Indeed, it can and has made possible abuses large and small.
But if you are looking to promote religious literacy, it is hard to ignore examples like the Mormon missionaries. And if Dobson is serious about his new campaign, he might take a look at what his neighbors to the west are doing.
They might have more in common than he thinks.
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