Today, Michele Bachmann and her husband Marcus joined James Dobson on Family Talk. The congresswoman described her career in politics, which started with her working against the public education system up to today as a presidential candidate. Bachmann told a familiar story where she took on two of the institutions most opposed by the Religious Right, public schools and the federal government. She said she entered politics when she became troubled about “what came home in the backpack” from her foster children who attended public schools, and diligently worked until she “overthrew” the “national standards” that public schools followed, which she called “politically correct, dumbed down standards, in many ways they were against the Christian values that a lot of parents hold.”
Bachmann also gushed over Dobson for helping her and Marcus lay “the foundation brick by brick in our life” and credited Francis Schaeffer with leading her to develop “the concept of biblical worldview, that God has something to say every aspect of life, because He’s the creator of life.” Schaeffer’s series, How Should We Then Live?, blames increasing secular humanism and moral relativism for social decay and calls on Christians to fight back and put biblical precepts into law in order to curb society’s unraveling. The film series, along with Schaeffer’s other works such as A Christian Manifesto and Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, had a tremendous role in shaping the modern Religious Right, a movement that Bachmann isn’t just courting but is also a part of.
Bachmann: To be with Jim and Shirley Dobson and your family is a thrill. Marcus and I have known about you since the very earliest days that you went on your show, there’s hardly a show that we ever missed and we almost committed to them to memory.
Dobson: Are you exaggerating?
Bachmann: Not at all, you and Shirley have been tremendous mentors for us. You’ve been a wonderful example, a teacher, a preacher for us in a lot of ways. And we knew of you before we got married and we’ve listened through our early married years as we had our children and you’ve really pricked our hearts on many different subjects and you laid the foundation brick by brick in our life growing up, maturing in our own family life, and we want to thank you for that.
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Bachmann: You asked us before about ‘pro-life,’ when Marcus and I were nineteen in college we had gone to see the film series by Dr. Francis Schaeffer, How Should We Then Live, and when we saw that film series it changed our lives forever. We understood the concept of biblical worldview, that God has something to say every aspect of life, because He’s the creator of life. And Dr. Schaeffer said in that series that the abortion issue is the watershed issue of our time, that struck a chord of recognition with us. And we started reaching out to women in unplanned pregnancies, we got married right after college, and we started inviting women into our home, and informally we counseled them, we took them to pro-life centers, I went through childbirth classes with women, I held their hands as they gave birth to babies, because we didn’t want to just talk the talk, we wanted to walk the walk.
