Christian Century defends Focus on the Family

Well, sort of.

A good editorial on fear-mongering about religion (via Jesus Politics):

Exposés of right-wing Christian America are often hardly less apocalyptic than the pronouncements of the radio preachers citing Revelation. The sky is falling, the new brown shirts are taking over, our beloved republic is being conquered by fundamentalists who are as crazy as al-Qaeda zealots. A recent set of articles in Harper’s describes evangelical leaders such as Ted Haggard, leader of the National Association of Evangelicals, and James Dobson, president of Focus on the Family, in alarmist, almost panicked tones. The goal of such clarion calls is clearly the marshaling of another set of troops to take back America.

The religious movements Harper’s laments are worthy of the strongest critique. Yet at times the magazine seems to fear religious faith itself as a motivating factor or intellectual template for action—as if anyone who acts on faith has made a step toward embracing the swastika. The writers’ high level of fear blinds them to the many faith activists who have worked for agendas now taken to be “progressive”—Martin Luther King Jr., Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Dorothy Day, to name just a few. And fear blinds them to the rigidity of their own ideological demand that people have to be secular in order to be reasonable.