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What a sneaky business model!
Preying on some parents’ desire to raise children with a Christian mindset, Focus on the Family is trying to imprint children with the Focus on the Family brand. And they do this under the guise of caringly selling Christian teaching materials to parents.
Check out the sales pitch e-mail (right) I got today from Jim Daly, President of Focus on the Family.
Focus on the Family creates a sense of urgency in parents, saying:
It’s especially important for parents to teach their children spiritual truths while they’re still young. That’s because three out of five Christians make a decision to follow Christ by the age of 18.
Then they come to the rescue of the “many parents [who] don’t feel equipped to guide and shepherd their children in their faith” by offering “a broad range of faith-building resources that will help parents evangelize and disciple their kids.” The package includes:
* Thriving Family magazine
* Engaging websites with games and crafts like JellyTelly.com and WhitsEnd.org
* Adventures in Odyssey radio drama
* Focus on the Family Clubhouse and Focus on the Family Clubhouse Jr. magazines
* TrueU—a curriculum-based study to help young people develop a deeper understanding of their faith
The problem here is two-fold. First, these items prominently carry the Focus on the Family Brand. They’re not simple teaching tools, they’re branding strategies. For example:
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Second, the problem is deeper and more insidious when you consider what the brand entails. Focus on the Family brands lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people as sinners and actively opposes civil rights protections for LGBT people. Besides spreading their anti-LGBT message through over 230 publications, some of which are aimed at children, Focus on the Family uses its state-level Family Policy Councils to directly inject anti-LGBT bias into local lawmaking efforts.
For example, the Family Policy Council called Family Policy Institute of Washington (right) is using its personnel and resources to try to repeal Washington’s marriage equality law that was passed with bipartisan legislative majorities and signed into law by Gov. Gregoire.
To recap, Focus on the Family is using Christian parents to create brand loyalty in a new population (today’s children). Along the way, Focus on the Family’s resources and materials are being used to crush the souls of LGBT children who are exposed to them, bias parents against their own children, strip LGBT children of their civil rights, and help instill anti-LGBT bias in the hearts of non-LGBT kids.
6 Comments
The Focus on the Family child indoctrination kit probably includes a big paddle, because Dr. Dobson believes in beating children.
Why does this make me think of Twilight imprinting where grown men imprint on little girls for the explicite purpose of sleeping with them when they grow up?
Translation: It is critical that we brainwash your children early, or in the future 3/5 of our donations could dry up.
Laurel, it’s worse than you think.
FotF has been at this for years. When our child was born, Mrs Peterr and I started getting all kinds of mailings from companies wanting to sell us baby-related stuff — diapers, baby food, toys, clothes, music, etc.
This we expected. The marketing world is adept at finding potential customers, and putting their wares in from of them.
What we did not expect were the FotF materials we started getting out of the blue. Mrs Peterr happened to open the first letter we got, and quickly looked at me and said “who the hell is FotF and why are they peddling this crap to us?” I laughed, and explained to her that this was Dobson’s outfit.
It was clear to us that FotF had obtained a similar mailing list of the mothers of newborns, and sent out mailers to “help them get their child off to a good start.”
They are slick, and they’ve been doing it for many years.
The funny thing is that they don’t understand that there are LGBT people who want to stay with their churches but can’t because they are made to feel unwelcome. If they could get off their podia long enough to see that they aren’t supposed to do that according to the instruction book that they claim guides them they’d get more people in their churches. Not FotF, but mainstream churches would. I’m an ex-Catholic because I’m an atheist, a friend is an ex-Catholic because he’s gay. He definitely would have stayed with the church and probably could have used the support when he was a teenager who was in major denial about his orientation.
I am reminded of the passage about “The Mark of the Beast”