James Dobson Ruined My Mother’s Life
My mother’s smile was as wide as the Hudson River and her mezzo-soprano voice could move mountains. Valedictorian of the Hastings-on-Hudson High School class of 1947, she was smart and determined. She played basketball and tennis, preferred comfortable clothes, and planned a career in economics—not typical choices for young women of her day. She hailed from a family of Evangelicals, Baptists shaped by the holiness movement, who were more likely to vacation at America’s Keswick Christian Retreat and Conference Center than on Cape Cod. In the early 1950s, Evangelical culture was still only a side current in American life, focused less on transforming U.S. politics and more on saving souls. Billy Graham was just launching his national preaching career on his way toward rebranding the faith.
So, rather than Smith or Wellesley, my mother headed off to Wheaton College in Illinois (Graham’s alma mater), the premier school for academically minded young Evangelicals. She dove into glee club, late-night study sessions, and dates with clean-cut, earnest men; she later described her college years as the high point of her life. All students signed the college’s honor code forbidding alcohol, sex, dancing, and playing with “face cards.” Even so, my mother almost got expelled for going to see the Ice Capades in downtown Chicago with a roommate. Despite its strictures, Wheaton raised my mom’s sights and instilled confidence and purpose. She graduated with high honors in 1951, one of only two women to complete degrees in business and economics that year, and she headed back to New York City for a master’s in retail merchandising at NYU. My mother had spunk.
Perhaps for that reason, it took her longer to marry than most women of her generation. When she did, in her late twenties, she chose someone untraditional: a lively Dutch man who had come to the United States to pursue a PhD in international economics. They met in New York, where he was working at the Federal Reserve Bank. Their courtship played out within the safe spaces of Intervarsity Christian Fellowship meetings. “[He’s] sooo nice,” she wrote in her diary.
Their marriage was a disaster.
My father was brilliant and charming, but also quick-tempered and controlling. His Dutch heritage came with a strong dose of Calvinism infused with patriarchal order. He had survived the brutal German occupation of the Netherlands in World War Two and suffered from undiagnosed trauma. While his career took off on Wall Street, my mother quit her well-paying job at AT&T to care for my two siblings and me. It was the 1960s, after all, with neat suburban neighborhoods, women’s lunch clubs, and Tupperware parties. She tried to mold herself to the homemaking ideal.
But behind closed doors, the marriage was far from ideal. Words and fists flew, food was flung against the wall, china shattered. The police became familiar to us. One Sunday evening when my sister and I were teenagers, we stood red-faced and exposed in our nightgowns, making pancakes for dinner, while two officers arbitrated a fight. Eventually the physical altercations subsided, but my father’s emotional and financial abuse continued. Yet, somehow, my smart, strong mother continued to submit. She never left the marriage. And I blame James Dobson.
Rather than cigarettes or four o’clock martinis, Dobson, who died in August, became her drug. Her kitchen radio was constantly tuned to “Focus on the Family,” Dobson’s popular radio show, launched in 1977. When the show ended on the FM station, she switched to the AM station to absorb some more. Dobson’s nasal Southern drawl was the soundtrack of her day. He became her ballast, her succor. She fed his multimedia empire with generous donations and devoured each new book, pamphlet, magazine, and tape that arrived in the mailbox, all in a search to discover the secret that could transform her situation. Instead of talking to a lawyer, she relied on Dobson’s marriage advice. Rather than reading Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963), she studied What Wives Wished Their Husbands Knew About Women (1975) and prayed that my father would miraculously change. Dobson offered an imagined Christian world where men loved (and led) their wives, women joyfully obeyed, children easily responded to discipline, and families were never broken or messy. Anthea Butler recently observed on MSNBC that Dobson was a psychologist who didn’t grasp the human condition.
Dobson was the tip of a new Evangelical iceberg forming beneath the surface of American life in the 1970s; his books were the harbingers of today’s culture wars. Every Evangelical household had a well-thumbed copy of Dare to Discipline (1970). Regular spanking and mouth-washing would surely prevent one’s children from growing up to like the Grateful Dead, attend antiwar protests, or take the Lord’s name in vain. In an age when second-wave feminists were expanding the boundaries of gender roles, Dobson’s version was fixed. After a broadcast in which Dobson warned against encouraging girls to pursue sports (“it will damage their femininity”), my mom chided me for running too much. Perhaps a vigorous walk was sufficient? I didn’t buy this nonsense. I talked back, reminding her of her own athletic past. This, of course, just confirmed that I was one of those strong-willed, defiant children whose will needed to be broken. “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,” Dobson wrote in 1978’s The Strong-Willed Child.
“Loving authority” forever became an oxymoron for me. My mother encouraged my sister and me to pursue careers and maintain financial independence, and yet held firm to the notion that men should be “the providers.” In her vulnerable state, she couldn’t recognize the contradictions between Dobson’s teachings and her own experience. She wanted us to be successful women but also wanted us to adhere to Evangelical notions of femininity. She was perplexed when we did not follow Dobson’s model.
As the decades passed, Dobson grew more political. My mother succumbed to his culture of fear—of liberals and secular humanists, of feminists and reproductive-rights activists, of Muslims and new immigrants, and of course, anything related to LGBTQ+ rights. In Marriage under Fire: Why We Must Win this Battle (2004), Dobson cast the fight against gay marriage in apocalyptic terms: “The homosexual activist movement has sought to implement a master plan to utterly destroy the family.” When my oldest child came out as gay in high school, painful as it was to conceal the truth, we decided not to tell my mother.
Dobson was one voice in the expanding chorus of today’s more politicized and commercialized forms of Evangelicalism, a process chronicled so well by Kristen Kobes du Mez in Jesus and John Wayne (2020). But his sense of marketing, his commercial reach, his black-and-white vision of the battle between good and evil, his patriarchal view of the family, his hellfire-and-brimstone approach to those who differed from him—all delivered in the dulcet cocksure tones of the Southern preacher—set him apart. Dobson’s message prevented my mom from recognizing her own agency, from confronting humanity’s messiness, and from fully understanding and accepting her kids and grandkids for their unique attributes.
After my mom died in 2018—before we even planned the memorial service—my siblings and I performed a short ritual of our own. We went to the bookshelf in her bedroom, crammed with heavily annotated volumes of Dobson’s screeds, and one by one tore them into shreds. It was the start of a long grieving process for what might have been, the life she might have led if Dobson hadn’t become the parasitic worm in her ear.
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