It wasn’t long ago that the death of an important figure among the Christian right would have been big national news. These were people held in high esteem by the political establishment, credited with electing Republican politicians to high office and protecting the nation’s moral character. But when the Family Research Council’s Dr. James C. Dobson — one of religious right’s most influential figures — died last week, it wasn’t much of a story, even in right-wing media.
You would think conservatives would have at least given him a proper memorial. After all, President Donald Trump and his MAGA movement would never have come to power without Dobson and others like him. But now that they have a full-fledged demagogue and cult leader running the country, it appears the American right is no longer interested in conservative Christian leaders of yesteryear.
Charismatic preachers with devoted followers have long been a mainstay of American life. It’s one of our defining characteristics. But there was a time when their importance, along with the activists who peddled their ideas, rivaled those of politicians themselves. Billy Graham and his crusades, Pat Robertson of the Christian Broadcasting Network, and Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority were, among others, prominent figures in the conservative movement and helped shape American politics for more than 50 years. But Dobson was one of the most instrumental — and effective — of those leaders in cultivating the culture war we are still dealing with today.
Dobson grew up in the fundamentalist Church of the Nazarene, one of those extremely conservative evangelical faiths that don’t allow dancing or dating, and remained a devoted adherent his entire life. But he was an ambitious type who saw the possibilities of combining his Christian faith with something a bit more modern: The field of psychology. This led him to earn a PhD from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles, where he went on to serve as a professor for over a decade. But he came to national prominence in 1970 with the publication of his book “Dare to Discipline.”
The timing was propitious. Baby boomers were charging through American society at warp speed, challenging the prevailing morals and mores — and terrifying large numbers of Americans, who felt that the fabric of the nation was unraveling. His book was little more than a permission slip for corporal punishment, something a good many people believed was sorely lacking in the homes and the schools of all those young people with their long hair, loud music and fragrant pot. “Dare to Discipline” was a big hit, and its sequel, “The Strong-Willed Child,” was even bigger.
Dobson believed children to be little performers who manipulate adults and need to be tamed. It wasn’t enough, he thought, to simply spank them; they had to be spanked until they lost their will to protest. In “The Strong-Willed Child” there is a very famous and horrific description of his beating of the family dachshund named Siggy (for Sigmund Freud) when he refused to go into his crate:
I had seen this defiant mood before and knew there was only one way to deal with it. The only way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me “reason” with Mr. Freud…I hit him again and he tried to bite me…That tiny dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast. I fought him up one wall and down the other, with both of us scratching and clawing and growling and swinging the belt.
This was how the great conservative Christian psychologist recommended people behave toward the innocent people and creatures who depended upon them. It was truly sick stuff.
Dobson’s radio show was heard daily on stations all over the country and it tilled the ground for what later became right-wing hate radio. Many years before Rush Limbaugh became a household name, James Dobson was spewing patriarchal vitriol across America’s airwaves.
Dobson entered the political scene around the same time as Jerry Falwell and the Moral Majority, in the late 1970s. His schtick, though, was a little different. While Dobson was a far-right evangelical, he wasn’t a preacher. His fame as an author was such that he was soon ready to get into media full-time, and he started Focus on the Family as a “parachurch” organization that openly combined his family psychology practice with evangelical religion and politics. Dobson’s radio show was heard daily on stations all over the country and it tilled the ground for what later became right-wing hate radio. Many years before Rush Limbaugh became a household name, James Dobson was spewing patriarchal vitriol across America’s airwaves.
He pushed creationism, religious home schooling, anti-pornography and gambling — the whole wish list of the Christian right. But he spent most of his energy excoriating LGBTQ people and feminists, particularly those who advocated for abortion rights. Over the years, his show became more and more explicitly partisan as Republicans embraced the Christian right as their most important organizing faction. Millions of people heard Dobson’s call.
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During the 1980s, along with a couple of other conservative psychologists, he created the Family Research Council to be a sort of evangelical think tank that would write and recommend public policy, steeped in Christian fundamentalist values, to Republican candidates and elected officials. By the 2000s Dobson was a kingmaker in the GOP and was feted by every Republican politician who coveted his endorsement.
An entire generation of conservatives grew up in households that were under the influence of Dobson and his beliefs. Day after day, they heard him on the radio and were indoctrinated into the hard-right culture war mentality that still pervades the Republican Party.
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But today’s Christian right has been usurped by Trump and his MAGA believers, a quasi-religious cult of personality devoted to the president. Dobson himself became an enthusiastic supporter. Sure, many MAGA voters still consider themselves to be Christians, and some no doubt attend church. But they have shown remarkable flexibility when it comes to the morality of their new leader, and while their culture war continues, it’s not explicitly religious anymore. Now it’s all about fighting the “woke” left, which refers to the same enemies — LGBTQ people and feminists mostly, along with Black and brown people who simply want to acknowledge their presence in American society — as before. Except for a few lone holdouts like House Speaker Mike Johnson, who sounds like a voice from the past when he brings it up, these days there’s nary a peep about the Bible in GOP politics. Then again, how can there be with such a mendacious, felonious, libertine as their standard bearer?
James Dobson spent many years at the pinnacle of social power and political influence in America. He lived to see Roe v. Wade overturned in 2022, which would have made him happy, and the right still hates the same people he hated, so there was probably some satisfaction in that. But on his death, the religious right was no longer the political powerhouse that it was during his heyday. Trump is now the GOP’s messiah — and Christian leaders like Dobson paved the way for his ascension. You have to wonder if, at the end of his life, Dobson realized whose work he had really been doing all those years.
