James Dobson, Godfather of Child Abuse, Finally Dies

Edited by Spencer Ackerman

SPENCER HERE. Today, Sam, FOREVER WARS' resident Christian, eulogizes radical cleric James Dobson. While Sam's focus is appropriately broad, it wouldn't be FOREVER WARS if we didn't observe that Dobson's enthusiasm for sanctifying violence made him a thought leader of the War on Terror. "If the Islamic law were the law of this land, there would not be that freedom," he told Larry King in September 2003 as he pursued Christian supremacism. When the Pentagon's deputy undersecretary for intelligence gave speeches to Christian groups saying Islam was idolatry, Dobson called the ensuing criticism "nothing more than an assault on the Christian faith." After a 2007 White House meeting with George W. Bush about "Iraq, Iran and international terrorism," Dobson told his radio listeners, "It feels like somebody ought to be standing up and saying, 'We are being threatened and we are going to meet this with force—whatever's necessary." His conception of the alleged dangers of Islam was pure projection. If Bush was Darkseid and the War on Terror the Omega Sanction, James Dobson was Glorious Godfrey. OK, here's Sam. 

JAMES DOBSON, 89, died this week after a long battle with children. He was defined by an unshakable belief that godly parents, governments, and churches could eradicate unacceptable kinds of people with the tactical application of beatings and shame. He leaves behind the destruction of families in the service of conformity to his personal vision of society. 

With his popular jeremiads endorsing corporal punishment, his vicious crusade against women’s healthcare, his apologies for all manner of violence, and his network of anti-gay “conversion” ministries, Dobson rose to fame, fortune, and a political stature that got him access to presidents including Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. He pioneered a style of activism, always academic and religious in tone but unfettered by denominational structures or university norms, that used hundreds of millions of dollars from opaque donor-advised funds to unite the disparate factions of the nascent evangelical movement in the early 1970’s. He and his imitators led American Christianity’s descent into a madness that has now spread through every level of society, producing misery, estrangement, and suicide.

Dobson’s legacy is complex. That's not because it is in any sense positive—it isn’t—but because its tentacles extend into so many areas of modern life. The beginning of his celebrity, though, is a clear starting point. It went like this: When Benjamin Spock emerged as a peace activist during the Vietnam War, Dobson published Dare to Discipline in 1970 as a response to Spock’s watershed parenting book Baby and Child Care. Spock, a laureled pediatrician, had said that children benefit from affection and consideration and were suffering from rigid toilet-training schedules and limited affection.* Dobson contended that children were born sinful and must be beaten without mercy in order to secure their bond to their parents and the church, and, of course, to save them not from germs, but from damnation.

Dobson’s own psychology was frankly sick. Near the beginning of “Dare to Discipline,” he writes:

[Spankings] should be anticipated as important events, because they provide the opportunity to say something to the child that cannot be said at other times. It is not necessary to beat the child into submission; a little bit of pain goes a long way for a young child. However, the spanking should be of sufficient magnitude to cause the child to cry genuinely. After the emotional ventilation, the child will often want to crumple to the breast of his parent, and he should be welcomed with open, warm, loving arms. At that moment you can talk heart to heart. You can tell him how much you love him, and how important he is to you.

He was also happy to suggest more advanced ways to produce subservience:

The parent should have some means of making the child want to cooperate, other than simply obeying because he was told to do so. For those who can think of no such device, I will suggest one: there is a muscle, lying snugly against the base of the neck. Anatomy books list it as the trapezius muscle, and when firmly squeezed, it sends little messengers to the brain saying, "This hurts; avoid recurrence at all costs." The pain is only temporary; it can cause no damage.

In a major revision, The New Dare to Discipline, Dobson wrote that previous editions had sold 3.5 million copies. A sequel, The Strong-Willed Child, opens with an anecdote about Dobson beating the family dachshund with a belt, and advises parents that they may begin spanking their children when they reach the age of fifteen months. 

Dobson loved to lord his credentials and experience over his detractors. He held a doctorate in psychology from the University of Southern California and worked at the prestigious Children’s Hospital Los Angeles in its departments of child development and medical genetics. He was less forthcoming about his mentorship by Paul Popenoe, who wrote the since-excised introduction to the first edition of Dare to Discipline. Popenoe advocated for the sterilization and slavery of people he considered “waste humanity” —he particularly singled out prisoners and people with learning disabilities—served as board member of the American Eugenics Society, staunchly opposed interracial marriage, and co-authored both a textbook on eugenics and Sterilization for Human Betterment: A Summary of Results of 6,000 Operations in California, 1909-1929. Under Popenoe at his Institute of Family Relations in Los Angeles, Dobson began his writing career. Dare to Discipline cribbed liberally from Popenoe’s own writing.

Between Dare to Discipline and The Strong-Willed Child, Dobson wrote more books, publicly left the American Psychological Association over its 1973 decision to depathologize homosexuality, and founded the culture war propaganda and lobbying juggernaut Focus on the Family. From his non-denominational bully pulpit, Dobson inveighed against everything he hated, especially pornography. He helped write Reagan attorney general Ed Meese’s widely mocked 1986 report on connections between pornography and organized crime.**

The serial killer Ted Bundy sensed an opportunity for reputation management. The day before he went to the electric chair, Bundy gave Dobson a lengthy interview blaming his murders on porn. (Florida killed Bundy anyway.) Dobson sold the interview as a $25 hourlong VHS cassette called Fatal Addiction vindicating his much-maligned work on the Meese report. The sleeve copy read: "A controversial presentation-recorded just hours before Bundy's execution—'Fatal Addiction' is the story of a tormented man, a man caught between the right and wrong he learned as a child and his plunge into the dark world of hard-core, violent pornography." Churches screened it for their parishioners.

Dobson’s tactics changed with time. He published not only right-wing parenting, marriage, and sex education manuals, but also commissioned children’s entertainment options designed to do battle with secular culture. I had a couple of the sex ed books; my favorite memory of Preparing for Adolescence is that while Dobson is expectedly brutal about premarital sex, he makes specific allowance for people who like feet. It’s the most inclusive thing I think he ever wrote. I worry a lot about kids who read this line:

Homosexuality is an abnormal desire that reflects deep problems, but it doesn't happen very often and it's not likely to happen to you.

Focus on the Family enthusiastically joined the Southern Baptist Convention’s boycott of the Walt Disney Company, which was liberalizing its policies toward gay people in recognition of its many gay employees; Dobson’s cultural offerings reflected a simultaneous distaste for and obsession with the entertainment industry. These included teen-friendly bibles, but also kids’ radio shows like “Adventures in Odyssey;” direct-to-VHS programs like McGee and Me (which was ordered to pilot by ABC); and magazines for teenagers who might otherwise be tempted to read smut like Seventeen or a comic book (Brio featured diet plans for teen girls). Focus on the Family’s kids’ entertainment products were filled with dire warnings against everything from adultery to swearing. If you were a kid, the politics probably went over your head, but the message of the shows was always that you, the young viewer or listener, were irredeemably sinful. The programs’ production values were often very high, and they offered what Dobson probably thought was a positive vision for society, in which he personally controlled all media. But for kids who lived in this little cultural empire, the result was confusion and misery intended to produce dependence as surely as a paternal pinch of the trapezius.

Dobson was a contradiction. He was a fearless tactical innovator, responding enthusiastically to new media and using avenues of distribution like Christian bookstores and radio stations in remarkable, unexpected ways. And yet he was incapable of accepting any challenge to his preconceptions about gender roles, childhood, or family structure—it was, remember, Spock’s refutation of his beloved corporal punishment that first moved Dobson to action. From that, much else flowed: If paternal authority could be established early in life as unquestionable, he reasoned, children could be prevented from being different or strange. In conformity was the discipline he so prized; an obedience that could scale up. Dobson experimented throughout his career, but he never lost sight of his ideal: A society free of anyone he judged undesirable, and of any temptation to become undesirable.

As the gay rights movement made headway in the late 1990’s, Dobson's reaction was, again, innovative. He changed tack from merely condemning homosexuality as subhuman and too uncommon to bother with to endorsing the “ex-gay” movement. Dobson started yet more organizations, like the Love Won Out conferences, and embraced then-fringe group Exodus International, which promoted “reparative” therapies, more commonly known as conversion therapy. These therapies had already become part of children’s camps and “scared straight” reform schools. “Christianity Today” noted Dobson’s shift in 2007:

Perhaps nothing has brought Exodus into the mainstream of evangelicalism more than its embrace by James Dobson's Focus on the Family. Alan Medinger, the semi-retired founder of Regeneration (a sexual freedom [sic] ministry in Baltimore), remembers calling on Focus early on and finding the door completely shut. "I still don't know why," Medinger says. "When they swung around and began the Love Won Out conferences, it made a huge difference. They're a tremendous support to us now."

"Reparative" therapy is a catch-all phrase for a suite of treatments widely and thoroughly reported to have no effect on sexual orientation and to increase the incidence of depression, substance abuse, suicide attempts, and fatalities. Dobson used his influence to normalize “aversion therapies” and other procedures that amount to torture by any sane measure. "Anti-gay slurs, beatings, shackling, food deprivation and even exorcisms" are features of the “treatment," a United Nations expert told the Human Rights Council in 2020. But in much the same way that the thousands of forced sterilizations never seemed to bother Popenoe, the distress of his victims eluded Dobson completely. To them, he added new guidelines for parents of gay kids, including instructions for shunning family members who came out of the closet and resources for seeking solace from the subsequent loneliness. By now a ubiquitous talk radio presence, Dobson filled his shows with guests who claimed to have abandoned their sexual orientations with the help of his organization, and promised the same "help" to others "struggling with same-sex attraction." Focus on the Family sold the Love Won Out conferences to Exodus International in 2009. In 2013, Exodus shut down after president, Alan Chambers, came out of the closet. 

Dobson’s most lasting accomplishments in politics are his lobbying and financing networks, which are designed to help conservative social causes and conservative social causes alone. He founded the anti-LGBT lobbying group The Family Research Council; the Family Policy Alliance, which focuses on making Dobson’s obsessions into local laws; and an ALEC-like network of state-level groups called Family Policy Councils. As Dobson’s power and influence grew in the 1990s, he aligned himself forcefully with the paramilitary wing of the anti-abortion right, even endorsing Operation Rescue founder Randall Terry for a House of Representatives race in 1998. Since then, various "crisis pregnancy centers" have passed a portion of their revenues to Focus, according to my review of Focus’s 990 forms and the nonprofits listing it as a recipient.

Dobson himself left Focus on the Family at the end of the George W. Bush administration over concerns that his politicking imperiled the group’s tax exemptions, but his legacy was already secure. In 2017, Focus on the Family hosted then-Vice President Mike Pence, who proclaimed Donald Trump’s loyalty to Dobson's cause.

Two months after Pence celebrated the group’s influence in politics with its own members, Focus declared itself a church. The intention was to cloak the names of its donors in deeper secrecy; it also hid executives’ exorbitant salaries. CEO James Daly made more than $285,000 in 2015, the group’s final year reporting salaries to the IRS. Right-wing donors have long flocked to Dobson’s organizations. His vast policymaking infrastructure has flourished with the help of millionaires and billionaires, including the Brown petrochemical dynasty and the DeVos family. While Dobson celebrated the overturning of Roe v. Wade as his moment of glory, Betsy DeVos’s ascent to secretary of education during the first Trump administration might be Dobson’s greatest success: Conservative religious school curricula stopped being out of bounds for public schools, Title IX protections were all but eliminated, and school voucher programs funneling public money to private religious schools flourished on DeVos’s watch. 

Dobson’s war on children continues. In many ways, despite his recent receipt of his eternal reward, it intensifies. Emboldened and enabled by his networks of finance, communication, and distribution, social conservatives have made life much harder than it might otherwise be for gay, trans, pregnant, and mixed-race children. His influence on survivors of child abuse extends beyond evangelical communities, which might have accepted those survivors, and can be seen in the wider culture in the mainstreaming of anti-trans rhetoric, and in the networks of severely traumatized former Christians and their support groups. In death, Dobson becomes a kind of reverse saint, a name to invoke every time a child is struck, or goes into labor, or tries to take their own life. 

*It’s worth noting that Spock was offering a corrective to routines recommended by officials concerned about the spread of disease in the 1940s when his book was first published, shortly after the Works Progress Administration had finished building badly needed sanitary toilets. In the absence of modern drug therapies, official documents even warned against kissing your children too much in order to slow the spread of rampant diseases and parasites during the Depression, and Spock, rightly, saw these instructions’ persistence as an overreaction to a problem that had mostly been solved by 1947. The government was not recommending cruelty qua cruelty as a method of moral improvement; Dobson, however, was.

**Some historical context is worth adding here, too, especially since Dobson’s career can be seen as a war on it. The Meese report was a reaction to Lyndon Johnson’s study on obscenity, which had suggested loosening restrictions on prurient literature in the face of evidence that it caused no genuine harm. As with the case of sanitation guidelines, on the one hand you had people trying sincerely to examine the causes of suffering and ameliorate them, and on the other you had Dobson and his nest of weird sadists who saw the law as a handy tool to distribute the suffering they so enjoyed.