There was a time when I used to listen to James Dobson. I was a young kid in high school and college and you heard his name a lot. I read a couple of his books, and I even had friends whose parents played his cassette tapes on the birds and the bees for them. But somewhere in the past decade or so he seemed to become more and more irrelevant.
Now two things are probably happening:
- I have gotten older, matured, and my views: spiritually, theologically, psychologically, politically, etc. just don’t line up with James Dobsons’.
- The current younger generation (late teens to early 30′s) just don’t find Dobson to be very relevant. A lot of people in my Christian circles as Tyler mentions, don’t even know who he is.
- I think we are tired of some major evangelical figures coming out and acting as if they speak for us. Whether he is trying to do that or not, that’s how it appears, and it rubs people the wrong way. This isn’t just limited to James Dobson. But why do we see the same evangelical leaders paraded before the media for a sound bite on various issues? I don’t think most of us believe they speak for us.
Now, I don’t think Barack Obama or James Dobson speak for me, but I just wish there would be some new Christian leaders..not to speak on our behalf..but to offset some of the noise coming from certain evangelical circles. In this day and age there are many, many voices, and therefore not one voice speaking for all of us. Rather, I think you will find a majority of younger Christians identifying with ideas and thoughts coming from a variety of people, rather than one person.
