James Dobson, who has died aged 89, was for many years one of the leading members of the religious right in the US, mobilising the millions of followers of his daily television and radio broadcasts over more than 40 years, invariably to vote on supposedly moral grounds for Republican candidates, even Donald Trump.
In the early 2000s Dobson was described by the New York Times as the most influential evangelical leader in the country, able to affect the choice of candidates by judging their ideological soundness, and the series of organisations he founded – primarily Focus on the Family but also the Family Research Council and latterly the Family Policy Alliance – became powerful lobbying bodies at state and national levels. His daily broadcasts were available in a dozen languages on 60 US television stations and to a potential worldwide audience of 220 million people.
The message was uncompromisingly conservative, anti-feminist, anti-abortion and anti-gay rights: a fight for what he called a “civil war of values”. Children should be chastised from babyhood to teach them about the wrath of God, women should stay at home, inter-racial marriages and LGBT activists were undermining the family and the US constitution.
“The wages of sin is death and children have the right to understand that fact,” he insisted. He told CNN in 2002: “The family was designed for a purpose and if you go tampering with it the whole thing crumbles.”
He claimed: “We’re in a moral freefall. Wherever you stick the thermometer into the American culture you’ll find corruption.” Bill Clinton and Barack Obama (“the abortion president”) failed the test, as did John McCain, because he endorsed abortion in some circumstances, and even George W Bush only narrowly passed the test.
Despite his three marriages, occasional lewdness and untruthfulness, Trump was eminently supportable: “I really do love and appreciate that man,” Dobson told an interviewer on the Christian Broadcasting Network in 2019, “I wish people would get off his back.”
The cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants was teaching children homosexuality; The Da Vinci Code “was cooked up in the fires of Hell”; and Dobson’s followers were warned off the Harry Potter movies for their occasional profanity (“Ron has a habit of saying ‘bloody h***’”) and worse: “It is impossible to invest in a series that glamorises witchcraft.”
Yet Dobson was not an ordained hellfire minister but a child psychologist who held a doctorate and had spent 14 years as an associate clinical professor of paediatrics at the University of Southern California medical school and at the Los Angeles children’s hospital.
He was born at Shreveport in upstate Louisiana, the son of Myrtle (nee Dillingham) and James Dobson, who was a third-generation itinerant travelling preacher for the fundamentalist Church of the Nazarene, holding services across Oklahoma and Texas. Dobson himself claimed that he made a commitment to Jesus at the age of three.
It was the social and liberal changes of the 1960s, and particularly the Watts riots in Los Angeles, that reinforced his views and led to his first book, in 1970, Dare to Discipline, which – against the teachings of Dr Spock – advocated the parents should chastise their children with a paddle or a belt, which could be left within their sight on the dresser in their bedrooms.
Dobson himself had been beaten by his mother as a child and he advocated that 18 months was not too young to start the process. He drew the line only saying that those with violent tempers or who enjoyed chastisement should leave punishment to their partners.
The book, the first of 70, sold 2m copies. It was followed by screeds with titles such as What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women (1975) and Parenting Isn’t for Cowards (1987), and a constant message that “Men like to hunt and fish and hike in the wilderness” while women prefer “to stay at home and wait for them”; and “Men derive self-esteem by being respected; women feel worthy when they are loved.”
The family as the bedrock of civilisation was undermined if wives went out to work, or by contraception, cohabitation and abortion. Same-sex marriage would lead down a slippery slope to polygamy and worse. Mass shootings such as at Sandy Hook were judgments from God because of abortion and gay marriage. “The LGBTQ movement is closing in on the God-inspired and established institution of the family,” he said in 2019.
As a dreadful warning of the perils of pornography, Dobson interviewed the serial killer Ted Bundy a few hours before he was executed in 1989 persuading the man to claim that porn had encouraged him to kill 30 women. Tapes of the interview allegedly raised $1m for Focus on the Family, though some was donated to anti-pornography and anti-abortion groups.
The Focus on the Family organisation was founded in 1977 and moved to Colorado Springs in 1988, eventually covering an 80-acre site, employing a staff of 1,300 answering readers and listeners’ questions, sending out tapes, tracts, magazines and videos and having an annual turnover of $140m by 2004. Unlike some televangelists, Dobson himself did not have a particularly lavish lifestyle, not taking a salary but living off book royalties.
Republican politicians certainly paid attention, especially after the warning arising from a meeting between the aspirant presidential candidate Phil Gramm and Dobson, in 1995. The Texas senator told him that he would not make his campaign a moral crusade, that he was running for president, not preacher: “I just don’t feel comfortable going round telling other people how to live their lives.” Dobson stalked out saying; “I walked into that meeting fully expecting to support Phil Gramm for president. Now I don’t think I would vote for him if he was the last man standing.”
When another candidate claimed his campaign was big enough to accommodate abortion supporters, Dobson sent an eight-page letter to his 2.1 million subscribers, 112,000 clergy, 8,000 politicians and 1,500 journalists telling them that he would “never again cast a vote for a politician who would kill one innocent baby”.
Tolerance, he said, was not the greatest good. Dobson was jubilant when the supreme court overturned the right to abortion in 2022.
Dobson married Shirley Deere in 1960. She survives him, as do his daughter Danae and son Ryan.
• James Clayton Dobson, psychologist, writer and broadcaster, born 21 April 1936; died 21 August 2025
