James Dobson, the evangelical Christian broadcaster who waged war on homosexuality and championed “family values” in a long crusade that made him one of the nation’s most influential leaders of the religious right, died Thursday at his home in Colorado Springs, Colorado.
He was 89.
A spokesperson for the family, Jessica Kramer, confirmed the death but did not provide a cause.
In an era of change that revolutionized concepts of family life, child-rearing, marriage and sexual identity, Dobson was for countless conservative Americans a rockbound beacon of resistance who denounced the “wickedness” of abortion and same-sex marriage, and who advised parents how to communicate better with each other and how to educate and discipline their children.
A former professor of pediatrics at the Keck School of Medicine at the University of Southern California and a psychologist at Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, Dobson began worrying about the unraveling social order in the 1960s, appalled by the impact of sexual and cultural permissiveness on people he encountered in family counseling.
In 1970, he published a child-rearing manual, “Dare to Discipline,” that advocated corporal punishment in moderation to curb disruptive behavior. It earned Dobson a name as an evangelical antithesis to Benjamin Spock, the prominent pediatrician who favored greater flexibility in raising children.
Dobson founded the nonprofit, nondenominational religious group Focus on the Family in 1977. Over three decades, it became a $140 million multimedia empire that produced radio programs hosted by Dobson, published 11 magazines, made films and videotapes and promoted his more than 70 independently published books. The output turned Dobson into a national celebrity.
Without a church or an ordained minister’s credentials, Dobson reached vast audiences daily with “Focus on the Family” broadcasts over a network that, at its peak in the 1990s, included 2,000 radio stations and several television outlets in the United States. He said his radio programs were also translated into a dozen languages and heard by 220 million people in 157 countries worldwide.
Focus on the Family was founded in Pomona, California, but moved its headquarters to Colorado Springs in 1991. In 2004, Dan Gilgoff, then an editor at U.S. News & World Report, visited the group’s 88-acre campus, interviewed Dobson and chronicled his organization’s rise in “The Jesus Machine: How James Dobson, Focus on the Family and Evangelical America Are Winning the Culture War.”
“Dobson’s avuncular manner,” Gilgoff wrote, “and his capacity for letting grown men break down with the tape rolling were a sharp break with Christian radio’s customary fire-and-brimstone sermons.” Eventually, Gilgoff said, Dobson supplanted Jerry Falwell of the Moral Majority and Pat Robertson of the Christian Coalition as the primary political spokesperson for America’s evangelical Christians.
Because Focus on the Family was officially nonpolitical, dispensing mainly marital and family advice, Dobson for years insisted that his remarks were not endorsements for candidates or legislation, although he often brought his perspectives to bear on political issues, especially his opposition to abortion, homosexuality, divorce, drugs, pornography and the teaching of evolution.
He grew more openly political in the mid-1990s. In 1996, he charged that Republicans and Democrats alike were ducking serious discussion of moral issues, preferring arid debates over spending and tax cuts. Meanwhile, he said, millions of Americans “grieve over what we’re doing to unborn children.”
In 2004, he addressed thousands of conservative Christians gathered in Washington to protest same-sex marriage and, for the first time, endorsed a presidential candidate, George W. Bush, who was running for reelection. He also urged Bush to endorse a proposed federal marriage amendment to the Constitution, which would define marriage as a union of one man and one woman.
During the 2008 presidential primaries, Dobson attacked Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic candidate, for his support of abortion rights, saying that he wanted “to go to the lowest common denominator of morality” and impose “his bloody notion of what is right in regard to the rights of tiny babies.” Dobson also rebuked Sen. John McCain, the Republican candidate, saying that he had not spoken out energetically enough against same-sex marriage.
Dobson began withdrawing from leadership roles at Focus on the Family in 2003 and was succeeded as president by Donald P. Hodel, who had served as secretary of energy and secretary of the interior under President Ronald Reagan. In 2005, Jim Daly became Focus on the Family’s president. Dobson resigned as its chair in 2009, citing differences with Daly.
The next year, Dobson gave up his long-running radio show and created a new one, “Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk,” which he hosted with his son, Ryan, author of “Be Intolerant: Because Some Things Are Just Stupid,” a 2003 broadside against moral relativism. Ryan Dobson left the program in 2016.
The new program, eventually heard on 1,300 stations, allowed greater leeway to address political issues. “Our nation is facing a crisis that threatens its very existence,” Dobson said at the program’s founding. “We are in a moral decline of shocking dimensions. I have asked myself how can I sit and watch the world go by without trying to help if I can. That is what motivates me at this time.”
James Clayton Dobson Jr. was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, on April 21, 1936, the only child of James and Myrtle (Dillingham) Dobson.
He was the son, grandson and great-grandson of Church of the Nazarene ministers. The family avoided dancing and movies. His father, who never attended college, was a traveling evangelist, primarily in the Southwest, and young James lived mostly with his mother in Bethany, Oklahoma, and graduated from San Benito High School, in San Benito, Texas, in 1954.
He received a bachelor’s degree in psychology in 1958 from Pasadena College (now Point Loma Nazarene University) and a master’s degree in 1962 from the University of Southern California.
In 1960, he married his college sweetheart, Shirley Deere. She survives him, as do his son; a daughter, Danae Dobson; and two grandchildren.
Note to readers • This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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