They too shall pass
"Character does matter. You can't run a family, let alone a country, without it. How foolish to believe that a person who lacks honesty and moral integrity is qualified to lead a nation and the world!"
- James Dobson | September 1998
•••••
These words from James Dobson were, of course, referencing the moral failings of President Bill Clinton. I was 10 years old at the time, and the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal is one of my earliest political memories. The details were fuzzy to me back then, but it seemed to be a big deal, including in the evangelical church I grew up in.
As I’ve mentioned before, my evangelical upbringing was somewhat abnormal compared to other kids my age. There was some thoughtfulness in having age-appropriate conversations; as such, I didn’t hear all the details until my early high school years, when a youth group leader said that one of the central problems with Clinton’s behavior was how he wrongfully wielded his power through the whole debacle. I don’t recall hearing Dobson’s direct views on the matter, but his words hovered in the background, mostly that character matters.
It was several years later that I learned of Dobson’s own views on the matter, part of a longer rebuke that included the following:
“As with many Christians around the country, Shirley and I have been in prayer for our leaders in government who must deal with the fallout from this scandal. They will need great wisdom and discernment in the days ahead. Our most serious concern, however, is not with those in Washington; it is with the American people. What has alarmed me throughout this episode has been the willingness of my fellow citizens to rationalize the President’s behavior even after they suspected, and later knew, that he was lying. Because the economy is strong, millions of people have said infidelity in the Oval Office is just a private affair–something between himself and Hillary. We heard it time and again during those months: ‘As long as Mr. Clinton is doing a good job, it’s nobody’s business what he does with his personal life.’
That disregard for morality is profoundly disturbing to me. Although sexual affairs have occurred often in high places, the public has never approved of such misconduct. But today, the rules by which behavior is governed appear to have been rewritten specifically for Mr. Clinton. We now know that this 50-year-old man had sexual relations repeatedly and brazenly in the White House, with a woman 27 years his junior. Then he spoke on national television while shaking his finger at the camera, and denied ever having a sexual relationship with Miss Lewinsky. He was the most powerful man in the world and she was a starry-eyed intern. That situation would not have been tolerated in any other setting — ever. And yet the apologists for the President have said endlessly, ‘It’s just about sex,’ as though cheating on your wife was of no particular significance. But the majority of the American people replied, ‘I support the President.’
Let me ask, in what other context such behavior would have been acceptable? When a professor is known to have had consensual sex with a student, the university dismisses him or her forthwith. Academic institutions recognize their responsibility to protect the interests of younger and more vulnerable individuals. When a corporate executive is similarly accused, especially if numerous women claim to have been ‘groped’ or abused in the manner of Kathleen Willey or Paula Jones, that man is fired. Period! If a middle-aged physician had sex with a younger patient in his office, he would probably lose his medical license. If a psychiatrist, psychologist or counselor entered into a sexual relationship with a patient of any age, he would be charged with malpractice. It is stated in the code of ethics for these professions…We are facing a profound moral crisis—not only because one man has disgraced us—but because our people no longer recognize the nature of evil. And when a nation reaches that state of depravity—judgment is a certainty.”
Dobson never exited the political fray; in fact, by that point he had been in the culture wars for decades. But 18 years later, Dobson himself was proudly displaying the same “disregard for morality” that was “profoundly disturbing” to him. Good character in public life no longer mattered to him, as he justified supporting Donald Trump in 2016, saying "I'm not under any illusions that he is an outstanding moral example...It's a cliché but true, we are electing a commander-in-chief, not a theologian-in-chief."
The obvious question, of course, is what happened?
A Christianity without Jesus
James Dobson died on August 21, 2025 at the age of 89. A child psychologist by training, Dobson became prominent in the 1970s with books like Dare to Discipline, in which he advised parents to spank their kids to enforce compliance and that "the spanking should be of sufficient magnitude to cause genuine tears."
Like many in the Religious Right, Dobson saw a rejection of rigid, white male authority in American life as the source of the country’s social ills. He founded Focus on the Family in 1977, which soon became an evangelical mega-organization. He was soon busy helping to build networks of activists and organizations that opposed legal abortion, advocated against the rights of specific minorities, and cranked the volume up on countless other fundamentalist goals. To give you an idea of just how influential Dobson was in his heyday, when Focus on the Family relocated to Colorado Springs in 1991, the city started to be referred to —ironically— as “The Vatican of the Religious Right” and “The Mecca for Evangelical Christians,” with Dobson treated as a de facto white evangelical pope of sorts.
Dobson believed “biblical values” —a squishy term evangelicals often use to force the Bible into supporting their cultural desires— should shape public policy and all facets of life, especially in the home, where the husband should be the breadwinner and the wife should care for him and their children. Much of Dobson’s work revolved around trying to batter the entire country into submitting to this narrow view of how the world should operate. He was a true fundamentalist, in belief and posture, a kind in which fragile rigidity boiled down to a demand that others treat him as a prophet.
After the major cultural shifts of the 1960s, many white evangelicals found themselves fearful of what else could be on the horizon. In books, talks on his radio programs, and at conferences, Dobson —who was neither a trained pastor nor biblical scholar— and his acolytes offered evangelicals a straightforward explanation of what had gone wrong in America—again, the rejection of “biblical” male authority. Dobson pushed bite-sized solutions far and wide into the already burgeoning evangelical consumer culture. Much like in the MAGA Imperial Cult today, this became a feedback loop that fused together free-market capitalism and culture warring, pumping new fears and overwhelming noise into evangelicalism that turned into people buying more books, magazines, DVDs, and merch from groups like Focus on the Family.
Dobson’s teachings came to include things like purity culture and the “72-Hour Rule,” the latter of which states that men need biological sexual release every three days, and it is the wife’s responsibility to see to it. Such ideas came to be taught as “biblical values” in white evangelical culture and were sometimes even pitched as being backed by science, despite there often being little to no biblical or scientific basis. Dobson’s own writings became more blatantly fascistic, hateful, and fear-ridden along the way, especially after 9/11. As white evangelicalism drifted further into extremism and more fully became a post-truth subculture, Dobson took ever harsher positions in the culture wars, perhaps easiest to see in his 2021 newsletter entitled The War on Children.
While Dobson wasn’t the only white evangelical leader who pushed these ideas into churches and families, the organizations and networks he helped start were critical to their dissemination. In her authoritative book Jesus & John Wayne, acclaimed Calvin University historian Kristin Kobes Du Mez sums this up:
“In the end, Doug Wilson, John Piper, Mark Driscoll, James Dobson, Doug Phillips, and John Eldredge all preached a mutually reinforcing vision of Christian masculinity—of patriarchy and submission, sex and power. It was a vision that promised protection for women but left women without defense, one that worshiped power and turned a blind eye to justice, and one that transformed the Jesus of the Gospels into an image of their own making. Though rooted in different traditions and couched in different styles, their messages blended together to become the dominant chord in the cacophony of evangelical popular culture. And they had been right all along. The militant Christian masculinity they practiced and preached did indelibly shape both family and nation.” (294)
Winning the culture wars usurped the Gospel of Jesus. Dobson and men like him kept the trappings of Christian religion but discarded the Jesus of Scripture, replacing him with a version of themselves. Those in the fold who begged to be saved from the resulting abuse —or who merely disagreed with a Dobsonian view— were attacked, silenced, and cast out. From big platform evangelicals to pastors and elders to families, the church culture Dobson played a crucial role in creating only radicalized further as emerging abuse and brokenness were seen as threats to their authoritarian rule.
By 2015, the accelerating diatribes and angry, controlling vibes of Dobson and other white evangelicals had made growing numbers of Americans look on this subculture with deep suspicion. And, like so many other divisions in American life today, when resistance began rising up inside white evangelicalism, fighting largely broke out along generational fault lines.
The asymmetrical 2015-2020 evangelical civil war
The rise of Donald Trump in 2016 was apocalyptic for white evangelicalism in a dizzying number of ways. For many evangelicals, Trump was seen as an opportunity to wind the clock back to a mythical 1950s America, a time Dobson considered to be more “biblical.” But for others, especially for some younger evangelicals, the widespread evangelical embrace of Trump was an existential crisis.
I know this because I was one of those younger evangelicals. My generation was raised to take the Bible seriously and many of us did. By the time I was 18, I had read the Bible twice all the way through and the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament countless more times. Like many of my millennial brethren, I noticed things in Scripture that were rarely talked about: loving neighbors and enemies, caring about the stranger, and pursuing justice. But I didn’t think much of it. I saw evangelicals who donated to charity, volunteered, and went on mission trips, albeit in some ways I now view as extremely problematic. As for the culture wars, like many my age, I believed they were a bad hangover of the older generation, one that would slowly end as they departed this world.
Oh, God, how naive we all were.
My generation that wore WWJD bracelets looked at Trumpism through the Jesus-centered lens we were taught to look at everything through. Even as youth who were culturally conservative, it was obvious there was no compatibility. Trump’s serial pattern of sexual assault, infidelity, and divorces made his candidacy a dealbreaker. We already knew our Bible verses to back those “biblical values” up, so we raised our hands and pointed to Jesus. We did exactly what we were taught to do.
Our reward was a civil war with the larger, mostly older, and better organized Dobsonian majority that still controlled the levers of power in evangelical churches. We were called heretics, gossiped about, and even threatened, sometimes for reasons completely unrelated to the division caused by Trumpism. As we dug deeper to try to understand the damaging response, we stumbled into stories of abuse in our churches that were covered up, sometimes for many years.
Dobson’s fundamentalist shadow loomed large through it all. Elders and fellow congregants called us “strong-willed” and demanded we “submit to authority,” no questions asked. We weren’t “being biblical,” we were told, with nothing from Scripture provided as proof. This went well beyond a disagreement; indeed, our pointing to Scripture, past evangelical statements about moral failures, and even their own stated “biblical values” only further enraged those who were eager to bow the knee to Trumpism. Along the way we learned shocking, even disgusting things about broader white evangelical culture, such as the fact that one of James Dobson’s mentors was Paul Popenoe, a prominent eugenicist.
This was truly apocalyptic, an unveiling of truth and reality for what they are. For those of us who believed this had always been about Jesus and the Bible, learning what we were actually a part of —a system that existed chiefly to promote white supremacy and patriarchy in service to a fascistic political project— was deeply disorienting.
The generational divide wasn’t the only fault line in this conflict, but it was one of the most visible. People of all ages have since departed white evangelicalism and are still fleeing today; but, for many of us, the January 6 Insurrection was the final breaking point. The scale of white evangelical culpability in the crimes committed were obvious in scenes from the Capitol, as were the justifications and downplaying of the violence in our churches, or cowardly silence in the face of it.
Looking back, it’s obvious those of us who spoke out never stood a chance. We chose some important hills to die on and I don’t know a single former evangelical who has any regrets about it. But because evangelicals fetishize white male authority and people in this subculture usually only wake up to its harms by being harmed themselves, it became clear there will never be a critical mass of people willing to change the direction of white evangelicalism, even down to most individual churches.
The only viable option is to see white evangelicalism for what it is: the cultural fever dream of James Dobson and men like him. It’s a subculture that makes truly bowing to Jesus impossible. It’s a subculture that can only be left behind.
Understanding the raw rage against Dobson
James Dobson isn’t the only man who made white evangelicalism what it is today. John MacArthur, another influential figure in a similar vein as Dobson, recently passed away at the age of 86. Many Christians who have left the evangelical fold expressed frustration that white evangelicals were honoring MacArthur, a hurtful and autocratic man who justified slavery and brushed off concerns about the abuse of women and children. Others who knew less about him simply shrugged their shoulders and moved on.
The reaction to the white evangelical response to MacArthur’s death was mixed at best, but the response to white evangelicals celebrating the life of James Dobson has been one of visceral rage. Some of the anger is over the social positions Dobson took. More is about the bizarre, hateful comments he was known to make, such as suggesting the mass murder of children at Sandy Hook was the result of the “redefinition” of marriage and “abortion.” Still more is about the fact that Dobson encouraged child sexual abuse, such as in his book Bringing Up Boys, where he pointed to Joseph Nicolosi’s work Preventing Homosexuality: A Parent’s Guide, which suggested a father “can even take his son with him into the shower where the boy cannot help but notice that Dad has a penis, just like his, only bigger.”
But men who have views like Dobson’s are a dime a dozen in white evangelicalism. None of this explains the pure, unadulterated rage many people feel toward Dobson specifically. For that we have to understand just how personal Dobson’s teachings were made to be felt, especially to wives and children who survived a living hell. In his 1983 book Love Must Be Tough, Dobson advised women in physically abusive relationships to work on changing “her husband’s behavior, not kill the marriage” with a divorce. “Let him rage if he must rage.” He goes on to write “In short, by taking a beating, she instantly achieves a moral advantage in the eyes of neighbors, friends, and the law.” Predictably, untold numbers of evangelical men beat their wives without consequence. And I personally know men and women in my generation whose parents physically beat and verbally abused them as children —well beyond spanking and raised voices— often in eyesight of Dobson’s books on the shelves. Survivor stories of physical and sexual abuse abound online too, such as from Sarah Jones, who doesn’t mince words about what this abuse could do and the ultimate goals of it:
“Dobson did not hit me; my father did. But Dobson told him that he was right to hit me, that God gave him permission. That if he hit me, I would obey my parents and the Lord, and that everything would be all right because to strike a child is to love her…So I can remember the crack of a belt, and the shouting, and my own fear. One day, I decided my father did not love me, because how could he, and I cried until I felt nothing at all. Later, I pulled nails out of the walls so I could cut up my arms…
Now that Dobson is dead, it is easier to see the scope of his legacy. A childhood like mine is a personal tragedy with political dimensions. Dobson served tyranny all his life, and over time, he sought to enshrine it in the highest seats of power. To him and his heirs, the American home is a laboratory; they inflict suffering in private to better reproduce it in public. ‘Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!’ the Lord told Isaiah. Dobson is my horror, and yours.”
More and more average evangelicals over the years learned in painful ways that the bill of goods Dobson sold was neither true nor good. Many of his ideas are pockmarked with intellectual problems, but it’s taken people feeling the harmful consequences to walk away. Consequences like purity culture leading to the hyper-sexualization of women and underage girls, and the further erosion of virtues like male self-control. The “72-Hour Rule” gave way to severe sexual dysfunction in marriages, porn addictions, and marital rape. Spanking the “strong-willed child” morphed into full-blown beatings of children, before sometimes parlaying into husbands physically abusing their wives. Sexual assault crises in male-dominated evangelical churches were covered up writ large.
Yes, some evangelicals were drawn to Dobson because they were already abusive and looking to justify their actions. Other parents weren’t always like this though; some were even empathetic before their church signed off on Dobson’s call to inflict society-wide abuse as “biblical.” The harm the latter kind of parents inflicted is not justified, at all, but Dobson spiritually abused these parents into believing the only way to keep their children out of sin was to sin against them.
Trauma of this kind doesn’t just disappear; it extends deep into adulthood. The body keeps score. My generation is littered with relational problems ranging from sexual dysfunction in marriages to struggles speaking of our emotional needs, to poor self-esteem and crippling anxiety to a reluctance to stand up for ourselves out of fear of being yelled at, to being overly cautious in opening up to friends about our struggles to walking away from the Christian faith entirely. Many in my generation will never step foot into a church of any kind ever again. I not only know people who were abused in Dobsonian households; I know people who no longer have a relationship with their parents because of it. Now that he’s dead, Dobson’s bold talk of “the war on children” seems to be nothing more than a projection of his own war on children.
These harms are the source of the intense anger we are seeing. After all the pain, in the aftermath of all the familial and communal destruction, white evangelicals are still celebrating outright abuse as “biblical,” righteous even. There is an earnestness in their praise, that Dobson’s teachings put into practice were necessary to save their churches, families, and country. Should anyone, then, be surprised at the wrathful response, or the numbers of people leaving this subculture? Or, as C.S. Lewis once succinctly shared in a metaphor about the importance of morality:
“I’d sooner live among people who don't cheat at cards than among people who are earnest about not cheating at cards.”
Discerning fruits and writing history
More white evangelical men in the Dobsonian vein will die of old age in the coming years. MacArthur is already gone. John Piper and Doug Wilson are in their 70s. Other lesser known figures are even older or marginally younger, from big platform names to aging pastors and elders in churches of all sizes. These men who played dress up as gods are not immortal, and neither is their Empire. White evangelical denominations and churches are aging, shrinking in size, and slowly diminishing in influence just like most forms of Christianity in the United States. Their seminaries and parachurch organizations are in decline. At the time of this posting, even Focus on The Family has announced “a $2 million ministry shortfall.”
What do we make of all of this? Or, in keeping with my evangelical youth, maybe we should first ask “What Would Jesus Do?” in trying to answer this question. Near the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus provides a striking bit of wisdom in how to discern such moments:
“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Are grapes gathered from thorns or figs from thistles? In the same way, every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a bad tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus you will know them by their fruits.” (Matthew 7:15-20)
If part of practicing discernment is surveying history and claiming agency in the telling of it, then we are all deciding right now how men like Dobson will be remembered. The white evangelical praise for his teachings is earnest, but it ignores the “fruits” that Jesus calls us to examine. The resentment against the man is even more profound, rooted in the bad fruits of lies and the flagrant desecration of the Imago Dei.
Now, what do we make of all of this? It seems we are entering a period in which the white evangelical fruits of the last five decades are fully ripening. If we are to take Jesus seriously —and I think we should— then we know a good tree cannot bear bad fruit. If the fruit is bad, the tree is bad. The fruits of James Dobson are ever-widening outcry and resentment from those who have fled the evangelical fold. Families and faith communities torn asunder. A country that is decidedly more divided and less Christian today —even as Dobson defined both— than when he started out. Churches that are as arrogant as they are fearful, with racism barely hidden at best, and misogyny proudly displayed among the hollow battle cries of “being biblical.” Countless stories of abuse and endless attempts at covering it up. And now the institutions that oversaw it all in decline, still grasping for power in their waning days.
History may be written by the victors in the moment, but the consequences of generational sin always have a way of bubbling back up. The picture clicking into focus tells us we are, quite literally, living in this truth. Long have white evangelicals dominated the writing of their own history, but in their bowing to MAGA they invited public investigation and judgement upon themselves like never before. And in the death of James Dobson —in all the pain, rage, and stories of sin and brokenness spilling into the light— white evangelical history is being corrected, in real time, by those who know it best for what it is.
If the judgement feels heated now, this is likely only the tip of the iceberg. White evangelical fingerprints are all over Project 2025, including by organizations Dobson played critical roles in. The country is already souring on the authoritarian policies and fascistic approach to implementing them, even with the effects still largely unfelt. Much like those who have fled the white evangelical fold, when the dam finally breaks, when more Americans fully feel what it’s like to have tyrannical men like Dobson trying to control them, the storm of backlash and judgement may make the anger today look like nothing more than a gentle breeze.
Closing Thoughts
Every movement has leaders with a long half-life. Dobson’s teachings will live on despite his death. They’re still rooted in an older, shrinking generation of churches, evangelical networks, and acolytes that refuse to repent. His teachings will survive for a time in newer, copycat organizations and platforms that are slightly more or less fundamentalist than Dobson was. And yes, the man’s teachings will tarry on as a bad memory with the abused —those walking with a limp, still hobbled by wounds that never fully healed— who feel as if stepping foot into a church again will never happen.
I take no pleasure in speaking ill of the dead; in fact, I almost stopped writing this at several points. What made me continue is the knowledge that the abuse Dobson demanded and provided cover to was worsened by the simple fact that, for many years, most of it was met with utter silence by the “good” evangelicals —including me when I still was one— before I too received my own metaphorical limp. One critique such evangelicals levy against the outcry we are seeing is that the brush stroke is too broad. “Not all of Dobson’s teachings were bad” and “not all evangelicals are like this” are common responses I hear behind closed doors. There are small truths here. I personally know evangelicals who aren’t mean-spirited, including some who have sincere disagreements with men like Dobson, if not always in substance than at least in tone and posture.
But this criticism is nowhere close to being the full truth either. “Softer” evangelicals rarely if ever speak out and take action against blatant abusers, false prophets, and known liars in their midsts. They undermine their own claims to care about truth when they refuse to stand up for basic truth when it matters most. It is not difficult to understand why so many people interpret the silence of “softer evangelicalism” as tacit agreement with the harsher strands. The only way people are going to believe “not all evangelicals are like this” is if such evangelicals prove it in word and deed. How many more decades must we wait for them to do so?
We are now living in the world James Dobson wanted all of us to live in. Trumpism is the penultimate bad fruit of Dobsonian evangelicalism, but there is hope in seeing the real impermanence in the brutal sameness both men demand. As Scripture tells us again and again, God is not black and white; if anything, both Scripture and lived experience suggests He is quite colorful. It is good to pray for evil empires to come crashing down, for systems worthy of being met with our strong-willed rebellion to be rebelled against. Every day that disobedience continues in ways big and small in the lives of those trying to find Jesus in the wreckage. Our allegiance is to Christ, not to bad authority figures trying to usurp Him. As the Apostle Paul writes in Romans 12:
“I appeal to you therefore, brothers and sisters, on the basis of God’s mercy, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your reasonable act of worship. Do not be conformed to this age, but be transformed by the renewing of the mind, so that you may discern what is the will of God—what is good and acceptable and perfect. For by the grace given to me I say to everyone among you not to think of yourself more highly than you ought to think but to think with sober judgment, each according to the measure of faith that God has assigned. For as in one body we have many members and not all the members have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another. We have gifts that differ according to the grace given to us: prophecy, in proportion to faith; ministry, in ministering; the teacher, in teaching; the encourager, in encouragement; the giver, in sincerity; the leader, in diligence; the compassionate, in cheerfulness.”
Because of James Dobson and others like him, so many evangelical spaces confuse sameness with faithfulness, and transformed minds as cultural catastrophe. This is not faith according to the New Testament. Faith demands that we are always transforming to be more like Jesus, not conformed to the oppressive sameness of this passing white evangelical age.
The days grow few for other men in the Dobsonian vein. Doug Wilson, John Piper, and countless others have often doubled and tripled down in producing more bad fruits these past several years. I pray they see the stories of harm and the anger pouring out in the wake of Dobson’s death. I pray God softens their hardened hearts and forces them to see the bad fruits of their own, nearly identical teachings. I pray they repent, step down from their pedestals, and spend what little time they have left seeking the healing of the churches and people they wrecked. I pray they would take the words of the Psalmist to heart: “Teach us to number our days, that we may gain a heart of wisdom.”
Much suffering can be avoided in the future if they committed themselves to this true transformation the Apostle Paul calls us to. I know this is unlikely to happen; but, I pray for it nevertheless.
If you were harmed by Dobson’s teachings, I pray you find peace, hope, and life more abundant now that the false prophet is gone. I pray it becomes easier for you to embrace the truth that your humanity is a direct reflection of the God of the universe, who loves you deeply, no matter what was said or done to you. I sincerely believe God gave you a strong will so you could survive those who tried to steal your humanity away, who used you like a pawn in their absurd political game.
I pray you stay strong-willed. Lord knows we all need you to be, especially now.
About Me
I explore faith, church culture, and formation in the American South from my hometown of Memphis, TN. I’m an institutionalist who believes the means are just as important as the ends. Everything on this site is an expression of my faith and love for the Church.
Never miss an article by signing up for my newsletter and subscribing to the podcast. You can also become a member or leave a tip to help keep everything free and open to all.
