Photo: Mark Peterson/Redux

About ten years ago, I created a Google alert so I’d know the moment James Dobson died. Sometimes an obituary would pop up, but it was always for some other James or Dobson — a benign stranger. On Thursday morning, my inbox was empty, and then I saw the news on Slack. A few minutes after that, a friend texted: “JAMES DOBSON IS DEAD!!!” I looked at X and read the headline again. I started to believe it. My husband walked into the room, where I sat on our bed, and I told him. He said he’d bring me Champagne that night. I told my mother. My Google alert went off at last, and I started to write a eulogy that I’ve been planning since I was 10.

To almost everyone else, James Dobson was the founder of Focus on the Family, a co-founder of the Family Research Council and the shadowy Arlington Group, and a titan of the Christian right who labored long and hard to bring a bleak world into being.

To me, he was a personal enemy.

Before he died at the age of 89, Dobson wrote more than 70 books and built a radio empire that lasted for decades and reached millions upon millions of listeners around the world. Dobson was not a preacher like Jerry Falwell or a lobbyist like the lesser-known Gary Bauer, though he moved in the same circles and pursued similar aims. He was a child psychologist who exchanged academia for Christian ministry because he was horrified by the sexual revolution. The traditional American family was at risk, he thought; Christian parents should enforce their values through corporal punishment at home, and later, by voting according to Biblical principles. He endorsed Donald Trump in 2016 after it became clear that Ted Cruz did not have enough Evangelical support to win the Republican nomination.Trump was “a baby Christian,” Dobson said, and though he was no longer at Focus and had probably entered his final decline, his words still mattered. Dobson lived just long enough to see his work bear hideous fruit. He committed his life to violence and cruelty – toward women and queer people and children – and he discovered a brother in Trump.

I never met Dobson, but I hated him, and sometimes the hatred kept me up at night. I hated him the way you can hate only a man who destroyed you as a child. There are other culprits, certainly. Dobson did not hit me; my father did. But Dobson told him that he was right to hit me, that God gave him permission. That if he hit me, I would obey my parents and the Lord, and that everything would be all right because to strike a child is to love her. Or as Dobson once put it, “Corporal punishment, when used lovingly and properly, is beneficial to a child because it is in harmony with nature itself.” So I can remember the crack of a belt, and the shouting, and my own fear. One day, I decided my father did not love me, because how could he, and I cried until I felt nothing at all. Later, I pulled nails out of the walls so I could cut up my arms.

In my earliest memories, one of Dobson’s best-known books, The Strong-Willed Child, sits in our living room. It was there because the title described me, and my parents wanted to change who I was. Dobson offered solutions, within certain parameters. He often told his followers they had to break a child’s will, but not their spirit, as if such a distinction exists. To Dobson, the parent-child relationship was little more than a battle for power, which the child must lose in order to become the right kind of adult. Parents should not insult their children, or beat a toddler unnecessarily, but they must wield a firm hand – or a belt or a switch. In The Strong-Willed Child, he wrote of his dachshund, Siggie, whom he had named after Freud. Siggie would not obey, and Dobson would not be thwarted, so he attacked the dog. “I fought him up one wall and down the other, with both of us scratching and clawing and growling and swinging the belt,” he wrote. Dobson believed he won because Siggie lay down to sleep “in perfect submission.”

When I rejected Christianity in my 20s, I thought Dobson’s power might be waning. Obama was president, and although the Christian right remained a formidable enemy, I allowed myself to feel a little optimism. I got a job at Americans United for Separation of Church and State and moved to Washington, D.C., where I would eventually attend a right-wing press conference on Obergefell, the case that legalized same-sex marriage. The Supreme Court had not released its decision, but gender traditionalists were already frantic. At the press conference, they played a video message from Dobson, who warned of the Obama administration arresting pastors. I thought he sounded old.

The court issued its decision, but no one rounded up any pastors. For the rest of us, catastrophe arrived a year later, when Donald Trump defeated Hillary Clinton with Dobson’s endorsement, Dobson’s machine, and Dobson’s values. By Trump’s second victory, in 2024, Dobson’s individual support meant far less than it once had. Trump did not need Dobson the man because he already owned what Dobson had helped build.

Now that Dobson is dead, it is easier to see the scope of his legacy. A childhood like mine is a personal tragedy with political dimensions. Dobson served tyranny all his life, and over time, he sought to enshrine it in the highest seats of power. To him and his heirs, the American home is a laboratory; they inflict suffering in private to better reproduce it in public. “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!” the Lord told Isaiah. Dobson is my horror, and yours.

During Trump’s first campaign, the conventional wisdom held that Trump’s three marriages and general impiety would alienate “values voters,” who would naturally prefer a candidate like Ted Cruz or Ben Carson. After Trump became the obvious front-runner with an assist from the godly, analysts scrambled for some explanation or easy conclusion. “RIP religious right,” a CNN story announced that March. But the religious right, or Christian right, had not gone anywhere; it was simply evolving into a fuller expression of itself. A few months after CNN ran that headline, Dobson hitched himself to Trump. In one sense, the elderly Dobson merely followed power where it led. In another, Trump fit into Dobson’s world more naturally than many understood at the time. The broadcaster had always believed in the divine merits of brute force. So does Trump, in his own way.

There is arguably no path to Trump without Dobson, and it begins with the broadcaster’s commitment to violence and ideological rigidity. In 1970’s Dare to Discipline, Dobson’s first major book, he urged parents to keep a belt or switch on a child’s dresser as a visible and perpetual threat. When parents spanked their offspring, whether by hand or with an object, they should follow the pain “with a clear reaffirmation” of their “love for the child,” as Dan Gilgoff explained in The Jesus Machine: How James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and Evangelical America Are Winning the Culture. Evangelical readers bought around 2 million copies, and Dobson was off. In 1975, he published another book, What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women, and two years after that he founded Focus on the Family, which distributed his message through radio programs, magazines, and endless books. In the mid-’80s, Dobson became an adviser to President Ronald Reagan and joined the administration’s Commission on Pornography. Gilgoff wrote that, by 1987, Focus had a yearly budget of $34 million, with most of its funds coming from individual donors. By 1988, the year I was born, Focus was receiving “150,000 pieces of mail a month, almost all addressed to Dobson and mostly from fretful mothers and wives,” and Dobson’s profile would only grow from that point on. In 1989, he interviewed Ted Bundy, who said that porn had turned him into a serial killer.

During the 1990s, Dobson was a fact of Evangelical life. Everyone in my small universe listened to him on the radio, or at least knew of him, even if they didn’t follow his advice to the letter. On car rides, we’d tune into Adventures in Odyssey, a Focus radio drama for children. One episode introduced me to Dungeons & Dragons, which it called Castles & Cauldrons and which could supposedly summon evil spirits. Though Dobson didn’t host every broadcast his ministry produced, he was enough of a presence that I can still hear his voice if I think about him now. He spoke the way he wrote, with an even tone that could lull you into quiet agreement. Then he’d slap you across the face with a sinister observation. Husbands ought to romance their wives, he wrote in What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women, but wives should also know their place. “How many wives have ‘let themselves go,’ waddling around on massive rhino haunches and looking like they had spent the night in a tornado?” he wrote.

According to Dobson, God made man a despot. A father’s children could not flee him, and neither could his wife. As a child, I knew I had no way out, and as long as I listened to Dobson, I could never find one. I figured that I’d die young, unless I got Raptured. Either I would kill myself or someone else would do it for me. A woman named Laura once wrote to Dobson because her husband had “loosened three of her teeth” and cut the inside of her lip. “I really thought he was going to kill me!” she recounted, but Dobson told her that because she was a Christian she could not get divorced. “Our purpose should be to change her husband’s behavior, not kill the marriage,” he wrote. Marriage was not a relationship but another battle of wills, and Dobson knew who should concede power to whom.

I don’t know what happened to Laura, and I doubt Dobson did, either. He didn’t care about her or about any of us. All that mattered was order, and if brutality got the job done then so be it. Later, I learned that he would routinely twist research or simply make things up to justify his convictions. Dobson told women that men needed to ejaculate every 72 hours because if they didn’t, semen would build up and men would become frustrated and stray. This is not true, of course; the point was to coerce women into having sex. There is no evidence that corporal punishment is beneficial to children, but there is evidence that it can inflict long-lasting psychological harm. Conversion therapy doesn’t make queer people straight, either, yet Dobson promoted it until the day he died.

As Dobson aged, his folksy act receded in favor of open sadism. He reserved a specific revulsion for LGBTQ+ people and devoted much of his life to attacking them. People became queer only because they had been sexually abused or had absent fathers, or because feminists had “feminized, emasculated, and ‘wimpified’” men, as he wrote in Bringing Up Boys. Dobson wanted to eradicate any trace of homosexuality from American society because it threatened the natural order of things, like the gender hierarchy that so preoccupied him. Christian parents needed to recognize signs of “pre-homosexual” behavior in boys and then root it out, he wrote. Dobson’s obsession with sexuality affected his parenting advice in nearly every respect; his vision of fatherhood turns innocent moments into something bizarre. In Bringing Up Boys, he urged fathers to shower with their sons so they could see “that Dad has a penis” like theirs, “only bigger.” This would affirm a boy’s masculinity and prevent him from becoming gay. Elsewhere, he told fathers to organize “daddy-daughter dates,” and not because they enjoyed spending time with their girls. As the scholar Sara Moslener noted in Virgin Nation: Sexual Purity and American Adolescence, the dates “encouraged” girls ages 6 or younger “to develop romanticized attachments to the opposite sex and learn how to nurture a heterosexual partnership.” After Adam Lanza murdered dozens of children in Sandy Hook, Dobson partly blamed the bloodshed on the “redefinition” of marriage.

When Focus first threw itself into electoral politics, it was on behalf of gender traditionalism. As Gilgoff reported, Dobson backed a 1992 effort to amend the Colorado constitution in order to ban future gay-rights laws, including anti-discrimination ordinances. The amendment passed, though the Supreme Court later struck it down. In 1998, the organization launched an “ex-gay” ministry called Love Won Out, which claimed it could “heal” a queer person by making them into someone else. Love Won Out no longer exists, but Dobson was relentless. After he left Focus in 2010, he dedicated his final years on earth to a war against “transgenderism.”–

Dobson has many successors within the Christian right, the GOP, and the Trump White House. The Supreme Court felled Roe in Dobson’s dotage, and abortion bans were killing and maiming women long before he breathed his last. The parental-rights movement would make every home a fiefdom. Pronatalists may not adhere to all Dobson’s religious convictions, but they do share his birth-rate obsession and want American women to produce brood after brood. Now, they have the attention of the White House. Trump’s quest to erase LGBTQ+ people from public life would fulfill yet another Dobson goal.

Focus on the Family still marshals voters. The Family Research Council still puts out shoddy white papers while its lobbying arm pummels Congress. At the state level, the Family Policy Councils he helped create still push the archaic policies he preferred. As one anonymous source put it to Gilgoff nearly 20 years ago, Dobson “told me that closing down the congressional switchboard was more interesting than talking about changing diapers and potty training.” Much later, the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute joined the coalition that advised Project 2025.

Dobson was not The Mule, Isaac Asimov’s famous mind-controlling mutant, and he could not force anyone to do anything they were not inclined to do. Even in my home, he was merely one influence among many, albeit an important one. I’ve heard him described as a moderating force in the Evangelical world because he called for only a little violence instead of a lot. Maybe that’s true. Maybe my father would have hit me regardless. But Dobson made it easier. Dobson promised families like mine that we’d be happy if we listened to him, so we did. He had a doctorate, and he followed God, and he was so damn pleasant on the radio.

The point of transforming the American home was to reshape American society. Should Dobson achieve posthumous victory, through Trump or whoever comes after, the public sphere will look a bit like my childhood home, only worse. Dobson wanted to grind us all down into particles so he could rebuild us into something unrecognizable. There would be suffering on a mass scale if he ever won, but he hasn’t yet, and he still might not. The future is not fixed. On Friday morning, I woke up and the sun had risen. I listened to my husband breathe. I watched our cat roll around in her sleep. I thought about Dobson, who has gone where Bundy went, which is oblivion. For a moment, I felt all right.

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