James Dobson

James Clayton Dobson Jr. (April 21, 1936 – August 21, 2025) was 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 being a successor to evangelical leaders Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.

As part of his role in the organization he produced the daily radio program Focus on the Family, which was broadcast in more than a dozen languages and on over 7,000 stations worldwide, and heard daily by more than 220 million people in 164 countries. Focus on the Family was also carried by about 60 U.S. television stations daily. In 2010, he launched the radio broadcast Family Talk with Dr. James Dobson.

Dobson advocated for "family values"—the instruction of children in heterosexuality and traditional gender roles, which he believed are mandated by the Bible. The goal of this was to promote heterosexual marriage, which he viewed as a cornerstone of civilization that was to be protected from his perceived dangers of feminism and the LGBTQ rights movement. Dobson sought to equip his audience to fight in the American culture war, which he called the "Civil War of Values".

His writing career began 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 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.

James Clayton Dobson Jr. 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 was the son, grandson, and great-grandson of Church of the Nazarene ministers.

His parents were traveling evangelists; as a child, Dobson often stayed with family members while his parents were out traveling. Like most Nazarenes, they forbade dancing and going to movies. Young Jimmie Lee, as he was called, concentrated on his studies. As a teenager, he was rebellious, though he eventually found a close relationship with his father.

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. 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, where he met his wife, Shirley, and served as captain of the school's tennis team. Dobson graduated in 1958, served in the National Guard for six months, and began working at Children's Hospital Los Angeles. In 1967, Dobson received his doctorate in psychology from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

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."

Based on these experiences, in 1970 Dobson published Dare to Discipline. The book encouraged parents to assert their authority over their children, particularly by corporal punishment. Dobson saw children as rebellious and inherently sinful and believed a rejection of authority to be the source of societal problems. He wrote that "Respect for leadership is the glue that holds social organization together. Without it there is chaos, violence, and insecurity for everyone."

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 and counselor at Popenoe's 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. 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 titled Where's Dad? had 100 million views by the early 1980s.

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, basketball camps, and a 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.

Dobson and Shirley Deere were married on August 26, 1960. The couple had two children. Dobson turned control of some of Focus on the Family's youth-oriented magazine titles over to his son Ryan Dobson in 2009. He gave his daughter a golden key necklace as a gift when she voiced her commitment to sexual purity at age 10. He encouraged other parents to give similar gifts.

Dobson died at his home in Colorado Springs, Colorado, on August 21, 2025, at the age of 89.

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 (an advocate agency against child abuse) in 1987, and the Humanitarian Award by the California Psychological Association in 1988. In 2005, Dobson received an honorary doctorate 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 inducted into the National Radio Hall of Fame to controversy from secular listeners opposed to Dobson's views, along with those supporting LGBTQ rights. The National Radio Hall of Fame noted the program's status as an "internationally syndicated radio show heard on over 3,000 radio facilities in North America and in 27 languages in over 160 countries."

James Dobson was a 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 inferior to men because both are created in God's image, but each gender has biblically mandated roles. He recommended that married women with children under the age of 18 focus on mothering, rather than work outside the home.

Dobson could be said to have viewed marriage as a transaction in which women exchange sex for protection:

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.

He advised wives to use their social and sexual skills to coerce their husbands into becoming good partners. By doing this, according to Dobson, women would transform male lust into love, and male destructive impulses into useful accomplishments. He regarded heterosexual marriage as the cornerstone of civilization, as women fulfilled their role of civilizing their husbands.

In his 2004 book Marriage Under Fire, Dobson suggested that heterosexual marriage rates in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden was falling due to the recognition of same-sex relationships by those countries during the 1990s. He remarked that the "institution of marriage in those countries is rapidly dying" as a result, with most young people cohabiting or choosing to remain single (living alone) and illegitimacy rates rising in some Norwegian counties up to 80%.

Dobson's social and political opinions were widely read among many evangelical church congregations in the United States, and he accrued substantial influence in the Republican Party. Among other conservative causes, his lobbying significantly contributed to numerous state-level bans on same-sex marriage.

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.

Dobson frequently cautioned parents to use corporal punishment in a limited way. Theologian Donald Eric Capps and psychologist Adah Maurer argued in the 1990s that, in practice, parents frequently use indiscriminate violence against children. They argue Dobson's work provides parents with self-serving theological rationalizations for their violent outbursts. Capps and Maurer conclude that the popularity of corporal punishment in this era damaged children in ways that may last into adulthood.

Throughout his career at Focus on the Family, Dobson argued for gender role instruction. He believed that gender and sexuality were 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 LGBTQ 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.

During the 1960s and 1970s effort to legalize abortion, journalism often reported the plight of women in need of abortion, such as Sherri Finkbine. Dobson, together with Francis Schaeffer and others, shifted the public conversation away from the suffering of women, toward the suffering of the fetus and the selfishness of women who seek abortion.

Dobson and Charles Colson participated in a 2000 conference at the Vatican on the global economy's impact on families. During the conference, the two Protestants met with Pope John Paul II. Dobson later told the Catholic News Service that although he had theological differences with Roman Catholicism, "when it comes to the family, there is far more agreement than disagreement, and with regard to moral issues from abortion to premarital sex, safe-sex ideology and homosexuality, I find more in common with Catholics than with some of my evangelical brothers and sisters."

In November 2009, Dobson signed an ecumenical statement known as the Manhattan Declaration calling on evangelicals, Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians not to comply with rules and laws permitting abortion, same-sex marriage and other matters that go against their religious consciences.