James Dobson, influential voice of the religious right, dies at 89
James C. Dobson Jr., a child psychologist who rose to prominence by advocating the strict disciplining of children but went on to achieve even greater influence with his efforts to unite the Republican Party behind a sharply conservative evangelical agenda, died Aug. 21 at his home in Colorado Springs. He was 89.
A spokeswoman for the family, Jessica Kramer, confirmed the death but did not cite a specific cause.
Dr. Dobson’s views were shaped by his fundamentalist faith and in reaction to the tumult of the 1960s, notably the anti-war movement, changing sexual mores and drug use, all of which were seen by some conservatives as outgrowths of the permissive parenting methods of the postwar era made popular by Benjamin Spock.
For Dr. Dobson, advocating a return to traditional child-rearing practices led over time to a highly visible role in attempting to turn back that cultural tide, and ultimately to becoming one of the preeminent voices on the Christian right.
Dr. Dobson was the author of a best-selling book on parenting, “Dare to Discipline,” when he founded Focus on the Family as a radio program in 1977 to promote fundamentalist Christian values. He was credited with taking some of the first steps, two years before the Rev. Jerry Falwell launched the Moral Majority, toward bringing evangelical Christianity explicitly into the realm of conservative politics.
Focus on the Family quickly became a major - and controversial - player in the rise of the religious right as an electoral force, claiming an early victory with its role in the election of Republican President Ronald Reagan in 1980.
Because he operated Focus on the Family as a nonprofit, Dr. Dobson was legally obliged to observe limitations on the group’s political involvement. In 1983 he helped found the Washington-based Family Research Council as an advocacy arm.
He built a passionately loyal national following with his talk radio empire, which attracted an estimated 7 million weekly listeners. A pointed remark to his audience about home schooling or defunding the National Endowment for the Arts could light up the congressional switchboard.
Over the decades, Focus on the Family grew into a sprawling media enterprise that produced videos, magazines and podcasts. Significant resources were dedicated to answering thousands of letters and emails each day from listeners seeking advice on parenting or other personal matters.
“He was way out on the leading edge of this movement,” Laura Olson, a Clemson University political scientist who studies the role of religion in politics, said in a 2020 interview for this obituary. “He created this broad framework around which it was able to define itself.”
Dr. Dobson was not an ordained minister. But he was descended from a long line of Nazarene pastors in Louisiana, and the role of stern prophet was one that came naturally to him. In his broadcasts and lectures, he combined Old Testament fury with an engaging speaking style.
He decried any trend that smacked of liberalism, which he blamed for the decline of the family. “We’re in a moral free fall,” he declared at a rally in 2002. “Wherever you stick the thermometer into the American culture, you’ll find corruption.”
As he saw it, the family was the bedrock of civilization, and it was under assault by factors including women in the workplace, contraception and premarital cohabitation.
But those concerns, in his view, paled as a threat to the nation’s moral fiber when compared with abortion, an issue that traditionally had been seen mainly as a concern to Catholic voters. Dr. Dobson, who opposed abortion under any circumstances, played a key role in making the matter a centerpiece of the Christian right’s agenda. When the Supreme Court in 2022 overturned the right to abortion established by Roe v. Wade, Dr. Dobson was jubilant, saying that the justices had corrected “one of the court’s most shameful moments.”
Dr. Dobson also trained his ire on same-sex marriage, which he denounced as a peril to the structure of society.
When pressed on how allowing gay couples to wed undermined the institution of marriage or the family, he argued that same-sex marriage would set the country on a steep and slippery slope that could easily end in legalized polygamy. “The family was designed for a purpose,” he said on CNN’s “Larry King Live” talk show in 2002. “And if you go tampering with it, the whole thing crumbles.”
Critics denounced him as a bigot, but within the GOP his insistence on the primacy of what he presented as biblical principles became increasingly influential. He excoriated Republican politicians and even fellow Christian leaders who elevated tax cuts or other fiscal initiatives over moral issues. Doing so, he argued, presumed that Americans cared only about money.
Perhaps the high-water mark of his political influence was the 2004 presidential election, when he rallied evangelicals to the polls, admonishing them that failure to cast a ballot would be a sin.
The incumbent, Republican George W. Bush, went on to narrowly defeat Sen. John F. Kerry (D-Mass.). In the run-up to the election, Ralph Neas, president of the liberal advocacy group People for the American Way, told the New York Times, “There is no question that James Dobson is the most powerful and most influential voice on the religious Right.”
Dr. Dobson could at times exhibit a pragmatic streak in applying his moral principles to politics. He argued that Democrat Bill Clinton’s infidelity disqualified him from occupying the Oval Office. “If a man will lie to his wife and break his commitment to her,” he told his biographer, Dale Buss, “how could he be trusted to lead the free world?”
Yet he offered a more lenient appraisal of Republican Donald Trump, who was married three times, was heard on an “Access Hollywood” recording using a vulgar term to describe groping a woman and paid hush money to an adult-film star.
While acknowledging that Trump was “not a perfect man,” Dr. Dobson praised the president for keeping “every promise he made to the faith community,” adding that Trump was “the most pro-life president we’ve ever had.” He served on the Trump campaign’s evangelical executive advisory board in 2016 and continued to support Trump during his subsequent campaigns.
“I really do love and appreciate that man,” Dr. Dobson said on the Christian Broadcasting Network in 2019. He added, “I wish people would get off his back.”
A preacher’s son
James Clayton Dobson Jr. was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, on April 21, 1936. His father, an itinerant preacher in the Church of the Nazarene, was often away as the family moved across Oklahoma and Texas. James completed high school in San Benito, Texas, and graduated in 1958 from Pasadena College, a Nazarene school in California.
In 1960 he married Shirley Deere. In addition to his wife, survivors include two children - Danae, an author of Christian-themed children’s books, and Ryan, who has done pastoral work of his own - and two grandchildren.
After receiving a doctorate in child development in 1967 from the University of Southern California, Dr. Dobson spent 14 years as an associate clinical professor of pediatrics at the USC medical school, while also serving on the staff of Children’s Hospital Los Angeles.
The Watts riots that shook Los Angeles in 1965 had a profound effect on Dr. Dobson, who had just become a father for the first time, and who wondered what would happen to his daughter in a nation that seemed, in his eyes, to be coming unglued. As he recalled in his 1980 book “The Strong-Willed Child”: “Accompanying this social upheaval was a sudden disintegration of moral and ethical principles such as has never occurred in the history of mankind. All at once, there were no definite values. There were no standards. No absolutes. No rules. No traditional beliefs on which to lean.”
His child-rearing philosophy centered on the belief that parents should set firm boundaries for their kids and that spanking, with a paddle or other implement, was an essential tool to that end.
Dr. Dobson cautioned that spankings should be carefully administered and should never turn into abuse. But he insisted that the affirmation of parental control, with the help of corporal punishment, was of “vital importance to Christian parents who wish to transmit their love for Jesus Christ to their sons and daughters.”
In the late 1960s, he became a coveted speaker for Christian audiences and eventually a familiar figure on television programs, including Dinah Shore’s talk show. In 1970 he published a manifesto of his views, “Dare to Discipline,” that became a bestseller. Over the years he wrote more than 70 books, according to his foundation, mostly on parenting and relationships.
Resigning from his clinical duties, he started his Focus on the Family radio program from a two-room office in Arcadia, California. Eleven years later, in 1988, he moved the operation to Colorado Springs, where it eventually occupied an 80-acre campus, with a staff of 1,300. In time the headquarters became a pilgrimage destination for his supporters, attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors a year. By 2005, the organization had annual revenue of nearly $140 million.
Dr. Dobson at times attracted criticism with his forays into the culture wars. In 1989, he conducted an interview with serial killer Ted Bundy hours before Bundy was executed in Florida. The interview was “a message to the American people about pornography,” according to Dr. Dobson, which Bundy cited as a source of his urge to kill.
Experts objected strongly to the interview, noting that there was little if any evidence that pornography led to violence.
In 2005, Dr. Dobson created a kerfuffle when he portrayed a popular cartoon character, SpongeBob SquarePants, as a menace to the nation’s youth. In the Nickelodeon series, SpongeBob and his best friend, a dotty starfish named Patrick, are occasionally depicted holding hands. At a speech in Washington, Dr. Dobson objected to SpongeBob’s appearance along with other cartoon favorites in a video aimed at children to promote tolerance, calling it “pro-homosexual.”
Amid the resulting ridicule, even a Baptist minister in Oklahoma denounced Dr. Dobson as a “fundamentalist demagogue.”
Dr. Dobson stepped down as chairman of Focus on the Family in 2009. He founded a new nonprofit, the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, the next year.
For all his influence, Dr. Dobson eschewed the trappings of power and wealth that led to criticism or scandal for some other evangelical leaders. He lived off his royalties, taking no salary from Focus on the Family, and avoided using his radio programs for on-air fundraising. He and his family lived a comparatively modest life in a home in Colorado Springs.
“Building a power base means nothing to me,” he once told The Washington Post. “I’m uncomfortable with what I have. But I do feel I cannot sit on my hands while everything I care about goes down the drain.”