Stations of the Cross: Adorno and Christian Right Radio, and: The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas' Radio Addresses (review)

Stations of the Cross: Adorno and Christian Right Radio by Paul Apostolidis Duke University Press, 2000

The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas' Radio Addresses by Theodor W. Adorno Stanford University Press, 2000

The evangelical cum political broadcasts of James Dobson's Focus on the Family are an unlikely place to go looking for salvation if one is a Marxist-inflected critical theorist. After all, it is this Colorado Springs-based organization that lent its considerable support to Colorado's anti-gay rights Amendment 2 and counts Gary Bauer and Oliver North among its most popular guests. Nevertheless, it is in this seemingly most conservative of cultural products that Paul Apostolidis hopes to find the "negative-utopian" glimpses of a path to revolution.

Using the cultural writings of Theodor W. Adorno as his template and as his foil, Stations of the Cross argues that Focus on the Family radio broadcasts constitute "autonomous" aesthetic objects that lay claim to "truth content" and the possibility of social change. Apostolidis asserts that looking at Focus on the Family as a "coherent, tradition-bound religious phenomenon" endows the program "with a dialectical claim to autonomy from political and economic instrumentalisms. By virtue of this autonomous moment, Focus on the Family can be seen as retaining a weak but abiding negative-utopian ferment." Given the contradictions embedded in the program's message, which Apostolidis will trace through a number of episodes, "Focus' necessarily unsuccessful attempt to rearticulate a coherent narrative of religious salvation, in a society rent by antagonisms but still sporting the pretense of harmony, negatively illuminates those antagonisms and thereby preserves the hope of their radical transcendence" (18).

An understanding of the fissures in Focus's logic will hopefully lead, Apostolidis argues, to a practical response by progressives and socially conscious Christians that transcends the traditional antagonisms between the left and the right. In his view, evangelicals are not a regressive social force but the revolutionary vanguard that might "counterintuitively provide intellectual and political radicalism with a new voice" (213). Adorno, who provides for the possibility of immanent critique of cultural objects and the negative-dialectical charge contained therein, lays the groundwork for this transformation.

The argument is ambitious, and Apostolidis mobilizes the strengths and presumed weaknesses of Adorno's Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft (Cultural criticism and society) and The Psychological Techique of Martin Luther Thomas' Radio Addresses to analyze the "social physiognomy" of Focus on the Family and its uneasy dialectical contradictions given the conditions of the post-Fordist society in which the broadcasts are produced. In the three sections dedicated to Focus, "Christian Professionals," "Christian Politicians," and "Christian Victims," Apostolidis is at his best—and at his most Adornian—when illuminating the clashing requirements of a free-willed individual in the service of a (conservative) Christian ideal. For instance, when discussing the capitulation to the subordinating logic of state and religious domination required of women and people of color, Apostolidis can deliver a truly elegant dialectical sentence: "This aspect of the social totality," he writes, ". . . finds vivid expression in Focus's narrative of the forgiving victim [of injustice], when the narrative's call for social transformation recedes behind the securing of the hero's individual safety and survival, by virtue of which—and only by virtue of which—the narrative finally attains closure" (206).

It is, however, Apostolidis's use of Adorno as an organizing principle that leads Stations of the Cross seriously astray. In his treatment of the Dobson programs themselves—as well as in his discussion of the shift between Fordist and post-Fordist government policies— Apostolidis is both careful and graceful. Yet by suggesting that critical theory—as embodied by Adorno—can open up avenues for Christians and progressives to effect social change, Stations of the Cross commits sins both venial and mortal. Some of the problems are...