James Dobson facts for kids
Quick facts for kids James Dobson |
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Dobson c. 2007
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| Religion | Evangelical Christian |
| Founder of | Family Research Council Focus on the Family Family Policy Alliance |
| Education | Point Loma Nazarene University University of Southern California |
| Personal | |
| Born | James Clayton Dobson Jr. April 21, 1936 Shreveport, Louisiana, U.S. |
| Spouse |
Shirley Deere
(m. 1960) |
| Children | 2 |
| Religious career | |
| Works | Marriage Under Fire Dare to Discipline The Strong-Willed Child |
James Clayton Dobson Jr. (born April 21, 1936) is an American evangelical Christian author, psychologist, and founder of Focus on the Family (FotF), which he led from 1977 until 2010. In the 1980s he was ranked as one of the most influential spokesmen for conservative social positions in American public life. Although never an ordained minister, he was called "the nation's most influential evangelical leader" by The New York Times while Slate portrayed him as a successor to evangelical leaders Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.
As part of his former role in the organization he produced the daily radio program Focus on the Family, which the organization has said was broadcast in more than a dozen languages and on over 7,000 stations worldwide, and reportedly heard daily by more than 220 million people in 164 countries. Focus on the Family was also carried by about sixty U.S. television stations daily. In 2010 he launched the radio broadcast Family Talk with Dr. James Dobson.
Dobson advocates for "family values" — the instruction of children in heterosexuality and traditional gender roles, which he believes are mandated by the Christian Bible. The goal of this is to promote heterosexual marriage, which he views as a cornerstone of civilization that must be protected from the dangers of feminism and the LGBT rights movement. Dobson seeks to equip his audience to fight in the American culture war, which he calls the "Civil War of Values".
His writing career started as an assistant to Paul Popenoe. After Dobson's rise to prominence through promoting corporal punishment of disobedient children in the 1970s, he became a founder of purity culture in the 1990s. He has promoted his ideas via his various Focus on the Family affiliated organizations, the Family Research Council which he founded in 1981, Family Policy Alliance which he founded in 2004, the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute which he founded in 2010, and a network of US state-based lobbying organizations called Family Policy Councils.
Contents
Early life and education
James Dobson was born to Myrtle Georgia (née Dillingham) and James C. Dobson Sr. on April 21, 1936, in Shreveport, Louisiana. From his earliest childhood, religion played a central part in his life. He once told a reporter that he learned to pray before he learned to talk, and says he gave his life to Jesus at the age of three, in response to an altar call by his father. He is the son, grandson, and great-grandson of Church of the Nazarene ministers.
Dobson's mother was intolerant of "sassiness" and would strike her child with whatever object came to hand, including a shoe or belt; she once gave Dobson a "massive blow" with a girdle outfitted with straps and buckles.
The parents took their young son along to watch his father preach. Like most Nazarenes, they forbade dancing and going to movies. Young "Jimmie Lee" (as he was called) concentrated on his studies.
Dobson studied academic psychology and came to believe that he was being called to become a Christian counselor or perhaps a Christian psychologist. He attended Pasadena College (now Point Loma Nazarene University) as an undergraduate and served as captain of the school's tennis team. In 1967, Dobson received his doctorate in psychology from the University of Southern California.
Career
Medicine
In 1967, he became an Associate Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Southern California School of Medicine for 14 years. At USC he was exposed to troubled youth and the counterculture of the 1960s. He found it "a distressing time to be so young" because society offered him no moral absolutes he felt he could rely upon. Opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War was blossoming into a widespread rejection of authority, which Dobson viewed as "a sudden disintegration of moral and ethical principles" among Americans his age and the younger people he saw in clinical practice. This convinced him that "the institution of the family was disintegrating."
He spent 17 years on the staff of the Children's Hospital of Los Angeles in the Division of Child Development and Medical Genetics. For a time, Dobson worked as an assistant to Paul Popenoe at the Institute of Family Relations, a marriage-counseling center, in Los Angeles. Popenoe counseled couples on the importance of same-race marriage and adherence to gender norms for the purpose of eugenics. Under Popenoe, Dobson published about male-female differences and the dangers of feminism.
Dare to Discipline
Dobson became well known because of Dare to Discipline, his 1970 book about corporal punishment. In it, he encourages parents to use corporal punishment as a reminder of authority. The book quickly sold over two million copies.
Christian Broadcasting
When the American Psychological Association de-pathologized homosexuality by removing it from their list of mental disorders in 1973, Dobson resigned from the organization in protest. In 1976 he took a sabbatical from USC and Children's Hospital; he never returned. With funding from a Christian publisher he began to broadcast his ideas on the radio and in public lectures. Saying that he feared to repeat the mistakes of his own absentee father by being away on the lecture circuit, Dobson video recorded and distributed his lectures. He sent a representative around the country to solicit funding from Evangelical businessmen and distribute the videos. A video about absent fathers called Where's Dad? proved particularly successful; an estimated 100 million people viewed it by the early 1980s.
Focus of the Family
In 1977 he founded Focus on the Family.He grew the organization into a multimedia empire by the mid-1990s, including 10 radio programs, 11 magazines, numerous videos, and basketball camps, and program of faxing suggested sermon topics and bulletin fillers to thousands of churches every week. In 1995 the organization's budget was more than $100 million annually.
Jimmy Carter organized a White House Conference on Families in 1979–1980 that explicitly included a "diversity of families" with various structures. Dobson objected to this, believing that only his preferred notion of the traditional family — one headed by a male breadwinner married to a female caregiver — should be endorsed by the conference. He also objected to the fact that he was not invited to the planning for the event. At Dobson's urging, his listeners wrote 80,000 letters to the White House asking for Dobson to be invited, which he eventually was. This demonstrated to Dobson his power to rally his followers for political ends.
Beginning in 1980, Dobson built networks of political activists and founded lobbying organizations that advocated against LGBT rights, among other socially conservative policy goals. He nurtured relationships with conservative politicians, such as Ronald Reagan. He was among the founders of Family Research Council in 1981, a federal lobbying organization classified as a hate group, and Family Policy Councils that lobby at the level of state government. When Focus on the Family moved to Colorado Springs in 1991, the city started to be called "the Vatican of the Religious Right" with Dobson imagined as an evangelical pope.
Shift to Political Activity
Around two thousand radio stations aired Dobson's program to an audience of six to ten million by the early 2000s. With over two million addresses on his mailing list, his organization launched a publishing house. He was an established power broker. Richard Land called him "the most influential evangelical leader in America" at that time, saying his influence was comparable to Billy Graham in the 1960s-70s.
Dobson stepped down as president and CEO of Focus on the Family in 2003, and resigned from the position of chairman of the board in February 2009. Dobson explained his departure as twofold: firstly, to allow a smooth transfer of leadership to the next generation, and in this case, to Jim Daly whom he directly appointed as his replacement. And secondly, because he and Daly had divergent views on policy, "especially when it comes to confronting those who would weaken the family and undermine our faith." After he stepped down, Focus on the Family hired an orthodoxy expert to maintain Dobson's message. Free to become more explicitly political without imperiling Focus on the Family's tax exemptions, Dobson rededicated himself primarily to lobbying instead of advice to families. Focus on the Family removed archives of Dobson's writing from their headquarters and website.
In 2004 Dobson founded Family Policy Alliance, a lobbying arm of his media empire. With a more permissive tax status than Focus on the Family, it is allowed to directly fundraise for political campaigns. The Alliance also coordinates the action of Dobson's network of state-based Family Policy Councils. Together, these organizations seek to encode traditional gender roles into public policy and law. They consider LGBT rights to be a threatening "LGBT agenda."
Throughout its existence, Dobson has attacked the President's Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a US government program to fight AIDS worldwide. In 2006 he claimed that "80 percent of this money is going toward terrible programs that are ... ineffective."
Dr. James Dobson Family Institute
In 2010, Dobson founded the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, a non-profit organization that produces his radio program, Dr. James Dobson's Family Talk. On this program, he speaks about his views. He stepped away from leadership of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute in 2022, naming Joe Waresak the new president. He continues to broadcast his radio show.
Nashville Statement
In 2017 Dobson was among the first to sign the Nashville Statement, written by the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood. The statement specifies conservative evangelical views on gender roles.
Dobson frequently appears as a guest on the Fox News Channel.
Personal life
Dobson married Shirley Deere on August 26, 1960. The couple have two children, Danae and Ryan.
Dobson turned control of some of Focus on the Family's youth-oriented magazine titles over to his son Ryan Dobson in 2009.
Awards
At the invitation of Presidents and Attorneys General, Dobson has also served on government advisory panels and testified at several government hearings. He was given the "Layman of the Year" award by the National Association of Evangelicals in 1982, "The Children's Friend" honor by Childhelp USA in 1987, and the Humanitarian Award by the California Psychological Association in 1988. In 2005, Dobson received an honorary doctorate (his 16th) from Indiana Wesleyan University and was inducted into IWU's Society of World Changers, while speaking at the university's Academic Convocation.
In 2008, Dobson's Focus on the Family program was nominated for induction into the National Radio Hall of Fame. Nominations were made by the 157 members of the Hall of Fame and voting on inductees was handed over to the public using online voting. The nomination drew the ire of gay rights activists, who attempted to have the program removed from the nominee list and to vote for other nominees to prevent it from being approved. However, the program garnered enough votes and was subsequently inducted into the Radio Hall of Fame.
Social views
Views on marriage
James Dobson is a strong proponent of marriage defined as "one where husband and wife are lawfully married, are committed to each other for life," and have a homemaker mother and breadwinner father. According to his view, women are not deemed inferior to men because both are created in God's image, but each gender has biblically mandated roles. He recommends that married women with children under the age of 18 focus on mothering, rather than work outside the home.
Views on schooling
Focus on the Family supports private school vouchers and tax credits for religious schools. According to Focus on the Family website, Dobson believes that parents are ultimately responsible for their children's education, and encourages parents to visit their children's schools to ask questions and to join the PTA so that they may voice their opinions.
According to People for the American Way, Focus on the Family material has been used to challenge a book or curriculum taught in public schools. Critics, such as People for the American Way, allege that Focus on the Family encourages Christian teachers to establish prayer groups in public schools. Dobson supports student-led prayer in public schools, and believes that allowing student-led Christian prayer in schools does not violate the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Views on discipline of children
The Strong-Willed Child says that if authority is portrayed correctly to a child, the child will understand how to interact with other authority figures:
By learning to yield to the loving authority ... of his parents, a child learns to submit to other forms of authority which will confront him later in his life—his teachers, school principal, police, neighbors and employers.
If allowed to challenge parental authority, Dobson says, children would challenge God's authority when they grew older. Hence, rebellion must be punished to protect the child's salvation. The parent should model both divine mercy and wrath to prepare the inherently sinful child for a relationship with God. Dobson warned of the dire consequences of failing to discipline one's children: "Eli, the priest, permitted his sons to desecrate the temple. All three were put to death."
Political and social influence
Dobson's social and political opinions are widely read among many evangelical church congregations in the United States; he is also highly influential within the United States Republican Party. Among other conservative causes, his lobbying contributed significantly to banning same-sex marriage across many US states.
Social influence
Dobson's books on corporal punishment helped to legitimize the practice, providing it with theological grounding for Christian readers. When opposition to physical discipline became widespread in the 1980s and 1990s in American society, conservative Protestants emerged as perhaps the most ardent remaining supporters of corporal punishment. This support was bolstered by "authority-centered" parenting techniques advised in Dobson's books.
Throughout his career at Focus on the Family, Dobson argued for gender role instruction. He believed that gender was not fixed from birth, but required careful cultivation. He sought to provide boys with outlets for their natural aggression, and to teach girls how to develop romantic partnerships, which they use to channel and refine male destructive impulses into civilized behavior. Thus the feminist and LGBT rights movements, because they seek to disturb gender roles, are a threat not only to family harmony but to national strength. To preserve pious gender roles, Dobson distributed Christian-targeted psychological advice. His daily radio program Focus on the Family was (according to his organization) broadcast in more than a dozen languages and on over 7,000 stations worldwide, and reportedly heard daily by more than 220 million people in 164 countries.
Through his books and broadcasts, Dobson sought to prepare parents to fight in the American culture wars, which he called the "Civil War of Values". He is a founder of purity culture, a nationwide chastity movement through which he significantly shaped American attitudes about sex and gender.
Political influence
Dobson has chosen to exercise political influence behind the scenes, as "political fixer." This helps him to maintain his credibility with his audience. He has never run for office or acted as the public head of a primarily political organization.
Starting in 1980, Dobson began to build a network of conservative activists. In 1981 he founded the Family Research Council as a political arm through which "social conservative causes" could achieve greater political influence. Through the 1980s he coordinated the creation of Family Policy Councils in most US states, lobbying organizations that act on the level of state politics. Beginning in the 1990s, Dobson and his vast activist organization helped pass state-level bans on gay marriage across the US. His top legislative goal was prohibiting gay marriage at the federal level, with a constitutional amendment.
Dobson founded a fund-raising and lobbying arm of FotF called Focus on the Family Action, now called Family Policy Alliance.
In November 2004, Dobson was described by the online magazine Slate as "America's most influential evangelical leader."
See also
In Spanish: James Dobson para niños
