James C. Dobson

• James C. Dobson
• Born: April 21, 1936

Founder and former president of Focus on the Family, founder of Family Talk, evangelical Christian, and psychologist. Dobson is a powerful figure in American politics. Like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, he is an inspiring and uplifting figure to his many followers, who pay careful attention to what he says. Unlike Falwell and Robertson, he is not an ordained minister but a clinically trained psychologist. Dobson has made a strong, personal connection to his audience by offering advice on how to maintain traditional family values in contemporary society.

The son, grandson, and great-grandson of Nazarene evangelists, James C. Dobson, Jr., was born in 1936 in Louisiana and grew up in Texas and Oklahoma. An only child, he was doted on by his parents, who maintained the strict moral code of the Nazarene faith. He often spent weeks alone with his mother, whom he has described as a disciplinarian, while his father worked as a traveling preacher conducting revival meetings in small towns. Despite the long absences of his father, who was an artist as well as a minister, Dobson developed a close relationship with him. “He was a gentle man, a kind man, an easy touch, but outraged toward sin,” Dobson told Gerson. “He had an abhorrence of that which offended God, and a lot of what I feel today reflects that.”

After graduating from high school in San Bonita, Texas, Dobson attended Pasadena College, a Nazarene religious institution in California. Although he had accepted the Nazarene faith as a child and never rebelled against it, Dobson has said that he did not feel the calling to follow his forebears’ path into the ministry. He studied psychology at the University of Southern California (USC), in Los Angeles, and received a PhD in child development, in 1967. He spent 14 years as an associate clinical professor of pediatrics at the USC School of Medicine, and he served for 17 years on the attending staff of Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles, in the division of child development and medical genetics.

During the 1960s, Dobson worked as a family counselor. He was often “appalled,” as he once put it, by the reluctance of many parents to establish rules and guidelines for their children. As a result, their children tended to be unruly and undisciplined. Convinced that parents were being negatively influenced by the liberal sexual and cultural mores that prevailed at that time, he began accepting speaking engagements to discuss the importance of discipline and traditional family values in the home. In 1970, his book Dare to Discipline was published, and Dobson became a sought-after celebrity on the lecture circuit as well as on radio and television talk shows.

Unlike Benjamin Spock, Dobson, in Dare to Discipline, advocated spanking as an effective and necessary form of discipline for children between the ages of one-and-a-half and eight. Corporal punishment is of “vital importance to Christian parents who wish to transmit their love of Jesus Christ to their sons and daughters,” Dobson has said. In Dare to Discipline, he provided detailed instructions on how spankings ought to be administered—with a paddle on the buttocks and upper part of the legs only. “If it doesn’t hurt, it isn’t worth avoiding next time,” he wrote. Dobson has cautioned, however, that parents with a history of abuse or who have violent tempers should never administer corporal punishment. He has also emphasized that parents must be “emotionally accessible” to their children and develop solid relationships with them; otherwise, the imposition of a strict moral code, including spankings, can lead to resentment and rebellion.

Dobson has said that the women’s liberation movement of the mid-1970s, which he considered a threat to the nuclear family, prompted him to give up his career as a clinical psychologist and academic and devote himself full-time to promoting family values. In 1977, he started his own weekly radio program, broadcast locally, in which he talked about his views on parenting. Dobson found a receptive audience right away. People who were trying to raise their children with traditional values in the 1970s, when the “do your own thing” ethic was in vogue, “never heard their perspective in the national media,” Dobson was quoted as saying in U.S. News & World Report (April 24, 1995). “They couldn’t find it in the sitcoms; they found it contradicted in almost every movie that came out of Hollywood.”

In addition to doing his radio show, in the 1970s Dobson began to travel throughout the country, giving seminars on family issues. One of the tenets he stressed was the need for fathers to be fully engaged in the lives of their family members, and not fall into the role of the emotionally and physically distant breadwinner of the past. Ironically, Dobson’s popularity as a speaker meant he was spending less and less time at home with his wife, Shirley, and their two children, Danae and Ryan. To rectify that, he decided to put his seminars on tape. The seven-part “Focus on the Family” video series came out in 1979; it was an instant hit. Dobson’s savvy evangelizing became a vast media empire.

Dobson’s first foray into the political world came during the administration of President Jimmy Carter (1977-81). When he heard that the White House was organizing a conference on the family, he asked his listeners to write to the White House and suggest his name as a delegate. Some 80,000 letters later, he was invited to participate. In 1982, he created the Family Research Council, a political advocacy group, to promote his and his followers’ views in Washington. By establishing the group, Dobson had hoped to avoid getting directly involved in politics so that he could stay focused on family issues. But Dobson has had a hard time staying aloof. He mobilized his audience to take action in support of several conservative causes, including the cut-off of funds to the National Endowment of the Arts. During the administrations of President Ronald Reagan (1981-89), Dobson was appointed to the advisory committee of the attorney general’s Commission on Pornography, which “suggested a link between sexually violent pornography and actual sexual violence,” as one writer put it.

Dobson made national headlines in 1989, when he interviewed the serial killer Ted Bundy on Florida’s death row hours before Bundy was sent to the electric chair. In the interview, Bundy said that pornography had played a role in his development as a criminal. After Bundy’s death, a number of psychologists disputed the notion that there was a link between pornography and violent crime, calling the correlation unproven. Dobson came under some criticism for selling his video of the Bundy interview for a $25 “donation.” In a letter to his constituents, he defended himself, railing against a “secular press” that was hostile to his ideas. Not long after the Bundy episode, Dobson launched a new effort to establish regional Family Councils. These were to be grassroots organizations that would fight abortion, homosexuality, and pornography and support such things as prayer in public schools.

During the 1996 presidential campaign, Dobson had multiple skirmishes with the Republican National Committee chairman, Haley Barbour, former United States secretary of education William J. Bennett, and the Christian Coalition executive director, Ralph Reed, over their purported willingness to compromise on language about abortion and other issues in the GOP platform as a means of advertising that their party had a “big tent” that includes people of differing views. In Dobson’s view, there could be no compromise on “issues of good versus evil,” as he has put it.

Dobson’s message was heard loud and clear on Capitol Hill, and the spring 1998 congressional agenda was full of “pro-family” legislation. Included in various bills were provisions to lift the “penalty tax” for married couples; to ban federal support of clean-needle exchange programs for drug addicts; to begin a pilot program that would give parents of children attending public schools vouchers so that they could attend private schools; to ban federal funding of overseas organizations that condone abortions; and to outlaw “partial birth” abortions. Since then, Dobson has held sway over the politics of the culture wars and has exercised an important influence over the language of American conservativism. He has frequently intervened in political controversies and has been highly critical of politicians from both the left and right of the political spectrum, including Senator John McCain of Arizona and President Barack Obama.

Dobson led Focus on the Family until 2003. In 2010, he founded Family Talk, a nonprofit organization. His new radio broadcast, “Family Talk with Dr. James Dobson,” was launched on May 3, 2010. In 2005, The New York Times dubbed Dobson, “the nation’s most influential evangelical leader,” a title suggestive of his profound impact on evangelicalism, politics, and contemporary culture.

For further reading see Christianity Today (April 22, 1988), New York Times (June 5, 1990), Saturday Evening Post (April) 1982, U.S. News & World Report (April 24, 1995, May 4, 1998, June 1, 1998). For Dobson’s works, see Dare to Discipline, 1970, The Strong-Willed Child: Birth Through Adolescence, 1985, What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women, 1988, Raising Teenagers Right, 1988, The New Dare to Discipline, 1994, Parenting Isn’t for Cowards, 1994, When God Doesn’t Makes Sense, 1995, Love Must Be Tough: Proven Hope for Families in Crisis, 1996, Home with a Heart, 1997.