James Dobson, an architect of evangelical Christian cruelty, is finally dead at 89

His toxic teachings on family, sex, and politics left generations scarred—and America worse off

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The world is a slightly better place today because Dr. James Dobson is no longer in it.

The founder of Focus on the Family, whose parenting “advice” terrorized generations of children growing up in conservative Christian families, died today at the age of 89. While a cause wasn’t given, it sure as hell couldn’t have been a heart attack.

James Dobson (screenshot via YouTube)

Many mainstream obituaries talk about how influential he was, spearheading the rise of the Religious Right and the movement that has since morphed into Christian Nationalism. No doubt he was a leading figure in that world for decades through his ministry, radio shows, commentaries, and books. We’re now living in a country where LGBTQ people are constantly living in fear, where access to women’s health care depends on where you live, and where Republicans who namecheck Jesus can get away with all kinds of batshit crazy policies because their voting base has been led to believe it’s all part of God’s Plan.

That’s the world Dobson always wanted: One where people who didn’t fall in line with his theology suffered.

The irony is that, for a man who always implied that his Christian vision of a nuclear family was the only moral option, he had no qualms about endorsing Donald Trump, a man whose entire life has been one giant slap in the face to decency and honor. Dobson even insisted in June of 2016 that Trump had become “born again,” adding that he personally knew the person who “led him to Christ,” though he wouldn’t tell anyone who it was. Dobson believed Trump “really made a commitment,” even if he was only a “baby Christian.” (Half right!) Imagine spending your entire life pretending to be someone who knew right from wrong, only to fall victim to the most obvious scam of all time. (Dobson half-heartedly walked back those comments days later.) He lated served on Trump’s “Evangelical Executive Advisory Board.”

He was just as thoughtless in earlier elections.

In 2008, Focus on the Family, under his leadership, issued a statement warning Christians about Barack Obama. In fact, they wrote up a fictional “Letter from 2012 in Obama’s America” explaining what had happened over the past four years… as a way to frighten Christians before they voted. It laid out a country in which a “liberal Supreme Court” took away everyone’s freedoms with their 6-3 supermajority, where “homosexuals [were] now given special bonuses for enlisting in military service,” where after school bible clubs were banned, where private ownership of guns was illegal, and where churches were forced to host same-sex weddings.

His fear-mongering was based entirely on lies, and we’re now seeing what happens when, in many of those cases, the exact opposite has come true.

He did something similar in 2021, after Joe Biden was inaugurated. Dobson wrote that this spelled doom for Christians everywhere:

We can infer from what they have told us that the years ahead will bring more regulation, less freedom, more taxation, less religious liberty, more socialism, less democracy, more funds for abortion, less support for the sanctity of human life, less funding for the military, more illegal immigration, more restrictions on speech, less patriotism, more wasteful spending, less support for families, more regulations on business, more appeasement of China, Iran, Russia, and North Korea, less support for the electoral college, trillions more dollars for climate nonsense, more LGBTQ propaganda, less moral compunction, more governmental corruption, less oversight of elections, more "cancel culture," fewer police officers, more gun control, and less government of the people, by the people and for the people.

To say all that was an exaggeration is an understatement. The man who worried about “less freedom” never gave a damn about the Trump administration building concentration camps. The man who feared “appeasement” of Russia didn’t care about Trump cozying up to dictators. The man who warned against government corruption didn’t say shit about the constant grifting now emanating from the White House.

But wait, there’s more! In 2017, when child sex predator Roy Moore was running for U.S. Senate in Alabama and after a Washington Post article detailed what he had done, Dobson recorded an ad urging Christians to ignore how Moore had been “personally attacked by the Washington establishment” and to vote for this “man of proven character and integrity.” (Moore thankfully lost that race, but not by much.)

If these were Dobson’s only mistakes, we wouldn’t be talking about him, because plenty of conservative Christians have done the same things.

What made Dobson unique was his sadism.

He delighted in watching others in pain—especially children. Since 1970, when he published “Dare to Discipline,” and later, with books like “The Strong Willed-Child,” he was an advocate for beating children into submission.

He began the latter book with an anecdote about how he physically abused the family dog Siggie (short for Sigmund Freud) with a belt as an example of what you needed to do to your kids.

“The only way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works,” he wrote, before bragging about how “That tiny dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast.” (Siggie weighed a mere 12 pounds. Dobson was 200.)

He closed that section with the moral of the story: “Just as surely as a dog will occasionally challenge the authority of his leaders, a little child is inclined to do the same thing, only more so.” He wrote later, “When that nose-to-nose confrontation occurs between generations, it is extremely important for the adult to win decisively and confidently. The child has made it clear that he’s looking for a fight, and his parents would be wise not to disappoint him!”

As recently as 2015, Dobson was still encouraging abuse. He said that one reason spanking kids sometimes fails is that you didn’t do it hard enough.

The spanking may be too gentle. If it doesn’t hurt it isn’t worth avoiding next time. A slap with the hand on the bottom of a multi-diapered thirty-month old is not a deterrent to anything. While being careful not to go too far, you should ensure he feels the message.

Dobson didn’t just offer shitty parenting advice. He was just as ignorant about sex, though he pretended to be an expert in that, too. He promoted Purity Culture before “Purity Culture” was a thing. Sex only came in one flavor: missionary style, with your wife, where the man orgasms and the woman is… there.

Everything else was downright satanic.

Consider this video where he describes other sexual acts (some of which are obviously fringe behaviors) to an audience full of shocked—shocked!—Christians.

I will say: It’s very amusing to hear Dobson try to explain glory holes, all-female threesomes, and Prince song lyrics to a bunch of very scandalized evangelicals.

In 2015, while denouncing pastors who were kind to LGBTQ people, also claimed that the B in that initialism stood for orgies: “I would like them to think, just for a moment, about 'LGBT'… The 'B' stand for bisexual! That's orgies! Are you really going to support this?”

But even when he wasn’t trying to play off non-traditional sex for shock value, his vanilla advice was bad as well.

Just consider this absolutely real passage from 1975’s What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women. He wrote that when men aren’t getting sex, their semen literally builds up inside to the point that his body needs a release “and if she loves him, she will seek to satisfy those needs as meaningfully and as regularly as possible.” (Her sexual needs, of course, are never considered an equal priority, because “her needs are typically less urgent and pressing.”)

The 72-hour rule, which says a woman needs to satisfy her man at least once every three days or else, is a myth.

In his book Dare to Discipline, Dobson also implied the only thing women bring to a relationship is sex, and so if they have it before marriage, they bring nothing to the table: “The natural sex appeal of girls serves as their primary source of bargaining power in the game of life. In exchange for feminine affection and love, a man accepts a girl as his lifetime responsibility—supplying her needs and caring for her welfare. This sexual aspect of the marital agreement can hardly be denied. Therefore, a girl who indiscriminately gives away her basis for exchange has little left with which to bargain.”

I realize these are just a handful of examples, but they’re not cherry-picked. They’re emblematic of what Dobson encouraged Christians to do with their families. There are countless stories online from people who survived being raised in households where Dobson’s “wisdom” was taken as gospel and who have vowed never to do the same with their own children (and spouses).

While we’re at it Dobson blamed the Sandy Hook massacre on atheism, abortion, and same-sex marriage. He blamed a mass shooting in El Paso, Texas on “The LGBTQ movement… closing in on the God-inspired and established institution of the family.” He signed the Nashville Statement, which was a declaration of faith-based bigotry signed by some of the most powerful Christians in the country. He equated Obamacare to living in Nazi Germany.

The point is: Dobson’s entire career has been devoted to scaring Christians too dumb to realize that Dobson has no clue what he’s talking about. His parenting advice was awful. His sex advice was awful. His political advice was awful. The people who spent today praising his legacy are awful. Last year, one historian wrote an article about how Dobson, despite his faults, taught his own father how to love his family more. But as I wrote at the time, if you need to learn how to love your family from a man whose idea of love involves hitting your kids, lying about gay people, promoting violence against trans people, then your life has already taken a tragic turn. If some of those parents turned out to be decent, it’s only because they didn’t listen to Dobson’s advice.

One way to know if someone’s truly intelligent is if they’re willing to change their mind when faced with new evidence, even about things they’ve believed their whole lives. By that measure, Dobson was not an intelligent person. He insisted he was right about all these topics despite overwhelming evidence—and non-stop anecdotes—that his advice was harmful.

There’s a joke you could make about how a man who denied climate change is about to experience a toasty afterlife. Or how, after a lifetime of looking down on him metaphorically, we can all do so literally. But unfortunately, he’s just dead and there are no consequences for him. All we can hope is that his legacy remains that of a broken man who spent his life ruining other people’s lives in the name of Jesus. One of the amazing things about Pat Robertson is that I’ve almost never heard his name mentioned, even in Christian media, since he died two years ago. For all the power he amassed during his life, even Christians have been quick to just move past him. Dobson was mostly a relic in terms of influence over the past few years, and I’d bet that after the next few days, you’ll hear very little of him. Because the legacy he left behind isn’t one that made people’s lives better. His legacy includes generations of kids who no longer want a relationship with their shitty parents who took his advice.

His influence corroded the moral compass of generations, teaching parents to break the spirits of their children, teaching husbands to treat their wives as disposable vessels, and teaching Christians that fear, control, and violence were virtues since they were backed by the Bible. He weaponized family, sexuality, and politics, not to uplift people, but to oppress them.

His legacy can be found in estranged families, the self-loathing of those who survived his teachings, and in a political landscape warped by his toxic theology.

If Dobson had any positive impact on the world, it’s that he made evangelical Christianity so unpalatable to decent human beings that they now want little to do with it. As Kristin Kobes Du Mez wrote in Jesus and John Wayne, Dobson “corrupted a faith and fractured a nation.”

His death won’t erase the pain he caused, but maybe we’re moving past an era in which religious men like him wielded unchecked cultural and political power. He won’t be remembered as a hero of faith but rather as a sanctimonious tyrant whose name became synonymous with the rot at the core of American evangelicalism. He preached about stronger families but fractured so many of them. He preached morality while debasing it through his political maneuvers. He preached love but trafficked in hate.

He is survived by his wife, two kids, two grandkids, and countless individuals who blame him for ruining their lives.

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