“Family values” have returned to eugenics, the practice of selective breeding of humans to improve their genetic composition. The new champion of eugenics, now known as the pro-natalist or genetic-determinist movement, is Elon Musk.
“Family values,” a political weapon of the evangelicals, has become obsolete.
From its inception as a political ploy to hide the origins of the movement’s racism and commitment to segregation, family values has been the most formidable weapon in the evangelical arsenal.
Musk, the world’s wealthiest man, Trump’s wrecking ball and a baby-making machine, has upended evangelical family values. The distance between James Dobson and Focus on the Family and Musk’s desire to make a “legion of babies before the apocalypse” is a “great chasm,” as Scripture might say.
Yet MAGA evangelicals are singing like a bunch of secular liberals. You can hear it in the excuses they now make: “Who am I to judge another Christian? After all, when it is all said and done we are all sinners. It is up to each of us to do the best we can by loving one another. Nobody is perfect.”
A term of promiscuous and indeterminate meanings, “family values” helped evangelicals attack a liberal culture over abortion and gay rights. Family values organizations popped up everywhere.
Donald Wildmon, campaigner against immorality on TV, poses with arms crossed on top of a TV in the offices of American Family Association in 1989. (Photo by Will And Deni McIntyre/Getty Images)
Donald Wildmon, a Mississippi Methodist minister, founded the National Federation for Decency. His passion was ridding television and movies of profanity and explicit sex. The group later renamed itself the American Family Association. Images of Wildmon’s employees sitting in a dark room in Tupelo, watching explicit sex scenes on shows to count and catalogue them seemed almost pornographic.
James Dobson is the unquestioned star of family values. Founder of the vast Focus on the Family empire, he touts a traditional, strict, moral approach to marriage, family and children. Dobson’s multimillion-dollar empire in Colorado Springs produces a mountain of material counseling followers on the importance of avoiding sexual impropriety, encouraging Christian entertainment and hobbies, and learning self-discipline.
Dobson’s claims about the importance of spanking, the nature of homosexuality, and gender roles have marked his ministry. Evangelicals still believe in the “traditional family,” still embrace “family values,” but more as an ideal than a practice among their political leaders.
Dobson and Focus on the Family today are more political operatives than family counselors.
What went wrong
Assuming there ever was a pure intent in the beginning, the idea of family values was seriously damaged by the personalities promoting family values. From the 1980s to the present, sex scandals have dogged evangelical televangelists and megachurch pastors.
The Southern Baptist Convention remains embroiled in a sexual misconduct battle. The path from Jimmy Swaggart to a group of Dallas megachurch pastors “falling from grace” made life tough for family values. The examples are too numerous to mention.
Next came the political lobbyists.
Tony Perkins and Ralph Reed haven’t exactly been paragons of moral virtue, parlaying “family values” politics into full-time lucrative lobbying careers. Somehow Reed survived his relationship with Jack Abramoff and the Native American casino scandal in Louisiana.
Perkins now is a far-right lobbyist in Washington, and Reed is leading the second of two Religious Right political action groups tied at the hip to the Republican Party.
Then some more politicians fell from grace.
Rumors of sexual scandal were ruinous for any politician until the Age of Trump. After the impeachment of President Bill Clinton failed, a number of leading politicians faced career-ending sexual misconduct accusations and even convictions. Rep. Robert Livington of Louisiana resigned from the House after admitting to adulterous relationships. Rep. Dennis Hastert of Illinois eventually was convicted and sentenced to prison for sexual misconduct. Sen. Al Franken of Minnesota resigned over sexual misconduct rumors.
Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York resigned from Congress in June 2011 after it was revealed he sent sexually suggestive photos of himself to different women, including a minor. In 2017, Weiner pled guilty to transferring obscene material to a minor and was sentenced to 21 months in prison. He also was required to register as a sex offender. Weiner began serving his federal prison sentence the same year and was released in 2019.
But now times have changed. What was bad for Bill Clinton is just fine for Donald Trump.
Rep. Lauren Boebert’s public display of sexual misconduct at the Buell Theatre in Denver didn’t harm her politically A video shows Boebert being groped by a male companion and groping him in return.
Matt Gaetz speaks at AmericaFest at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix Dec. 22. (Photo: Alexandra Buxbaum/Sipa via AP Images)
Former Rep. Matt Gaetz faced allegations of paying for sex, having sex with a 17-year-old and illicit drug use — all of which colleagues overlooked until he was nominated by Trump to be attorney general.
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, during his confirmation hearing, faced allegations of sexual assault, abusive workplace actions and public drunkenness. He was confirmed by the thinnest possible margin with Vice President JD Vance’s vote breaking the 50–50 tie. But conservative evangelicals barely blinked.
Along came Trump and Musk
The antics of the lower lights of the current administration pale compared to the brightest stars in the evangelical darkness — Trump and Musk. Trump’s own sexual misconduct allegations have been endlessly discussed and dissected. He was convicted in New York City on 34 felony counts of paying hush money to a porn star, and he was found liable for sexually abusing a woman and ordered to pay her $5 million initially with subsequent penalties adding up to $83.3 million.
Musk has outshone the sexual antics of Trump by miles and he has miles to go before he’s finished. Musk appears to have a lust for making babies from as many women as possible. His prodigious record seems to threaten the heights achieved by King Solomon and Wilt Chamberlain.
The Wall Street Journal — no scion of liberalism — published an in-depth report on Musk’s “baby mission,” reporting the tech billionaire “has had at least 14 children with four women, including the pop musician Grimes and Shivon Zilis, an executive at his brain computer company Neuralink.”
According to the Journal:
- Musk refers to his offspring as a “legion,” a reference to the ancient military units that could contain thousands of soldiers and were key to extending the reach of the Roman Empire.
- Musk suggested they bring in other women to have even more of their children faster. “To reach legion-level before the apocalypse,” he said to Ashley St. Clair in a text message viewed by the Journal, “we will need to use surrogates.”
- Musk claims “civilization is going to crumble” if people don’t start having more children.
Musk also believes it is the duty of men like him to seed the earth with children of high intelligence.
Where are the family values now?
If Trump set the house of family values on fire, Musk is carpet bombing the burning building.
Evangelicals have come a long way from condemning Onan to celebrating Elon. Evangelical preachers once used the Old Testament story of Onan spilling his seed as a way of condemning masturbation. (Genesis 38:8–10). Now, it appears the seed of Musk should be impregnating as many women as possible.
Elon Musk holds his son named X Æ A-XII during a visit at the company’s electric car plant in Gruenheide near Berlin, eastern Germany, on March 13, 2024. (Photo by ODD ANDERSEN/AFP via Getty Images)
Musk’s ideas always have been around in evangelical circles. Every year on Mother’s Day at the country Southern Baptist church of my childhood, the pastor presented flowers and gifts to the youngest mother, the oldest mother and the mother with the most children. Here was our own version promoting the notion of women having as many children as early as possible and as long as possible.
According to a report in The Information, a Silicon Valley trade magazine, Shavon Zilis and Musk have used polygenic embryo screening. Zilis shares four children with Musk. Elizabeth Bruenig, in The Atlantic, calls Zilis Musk’s “favorite concubine.”
Since when have evangelicals embraced the modern idea of men having a concubine?
Musk ignores traditional family ties. The bonds of love appear absent. He seems to have reduced traditional family relationships to mere financial arrangements. He is the definition of the absentee father.
Yet there are no evangelical voices condemning Musk for his sexual deviance.
Musk’s vision sounds more like a cult than a “family values” movement. He has purchased a $35 million three-mansion compound in Austin, Texas, where he plans to house all his children and their mothers. The participants in Musk’s cult may not be drinking Kool-Aid laced with drugs, but they have succumbed to the psychology of the cult.
Family values, indeed.
Rodney W. Kennedy is a pastor and writer in New York state. He is the author of 11 books, including his latest, Dancing with Metaphors in the Pulpit.
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