James Dobson Dead At 89

James Clayton Dobson, Jr. was born on April 21, 1936, in Shreveport, Louisiana, the second of only two children to Myrtle and James Dobson, Sr., a traveling gospel singer turned Church of the Nazarene minister. The mixture of itinerant ministry and strict Nazarene discipline seeded two lifelong impulses: a visceral compassion for anxious parents, and an unshakable conviction that the Scriptures provide a reliable blueprint for child-rearing. When half-hour television broadcasts first flickered into southern living rooms, the Dobson household was among the last to adopt one; in its place James devoured volumes of theology and psychology that his mother borrowed from the small church library. At Pasadena College he starred on the basketball team and graduated summa cum laude with a B.S. in psychology; those same competitive instincts took him next to the University of Southern California where, in 1967, he earned a PhD in psychology while holding faculty posts in both the School of Medicine and the Neuropsychiatric Institute. His dissertation-era research, controlled laboratory studies on the effects of mild corporal punishment, would become the unlikely cornerstone of a popular publishing empire.

The research papers were barely dry when Campus Crusade president Bill Bright urged him to translate lab jargon into living-room language for worried mothers. Needing a faster way to reach them, Dobson borrowed a campus studio on late-night weekends and taped what began as a 25-minute radio monologue called “Focus on the Family.” Listeners phoned by the hundreds; letters swelled to sacks. Within two years Dobson resigned his tenured post, mortgaged his house, and took the decidedly non-academic risk of launching the full-scale ministry of the same name. The 1970 bestseller “Dare to Discipline” hurled a gauntlet at permissive parenting gurus—the book’s jaunty title did as much rhetorical work as the dense footnotes inside. Overnight the wiry, soft-lipped professor became the genial but steel-willed voice of a million station wagons idling in school carpool lines.

Focus on the Family’s growth during the 1980s was a marvel of pre-internet expansion: magazines, filmstrips, cassette series, telephone counselors, and glossy advice cards tucked in every sales-clerk Bible at the Christian bookstore. Juggled alongside it was a quietly formidable political apparatus. Dobson helped script the 1980 Republican platform’s abortion plank and helped birth the Family Research Council into existence in 1981. However, Dobson himself disliked the term “political activist”; he preferred “preaching pastor.”

The division of Dobson, Inc., after February 2010—he stepped down as Chairman of Focus on the Family to launch the leaner Family Talk—was less the corporate maneuvering newspapers portrayed than the concession of an aging founder unwilling to let his last energies dissipate in overhead. Focus on the Family has not been the same since he left.

James Dobson’s death has been celebrated by enemies of Christ, which is a compelling endorsement of his life and ministry.