The Focus of a Father: The Life of Dr. James Dobson

Dr. James C. Dobson was the leading U.S. advocate for children and families of the last half century. His loss is immense, and he is mourned by millions. The accolades that ought to have been his may never come, but he never wavered, in season or out, for the well-being of the young. The name of the signature organization he founded, Focus on the Family, was perfect in its simplicity and global in its reach. It was Christian, faithful, and principled. He lived his mission to the full and he finished the race, faithful to the last.

The tributes pouring in tell his remarkable story with statistics that are overwhelming even in this era of overnight influencers. Today we are saturated with attention to social media personalities who can claim millions of views or followers. Before social media there was that older form involving a microphone and broadcast towers. Beginning in a small studio in Arcadia, California, in 1977, the Focus on the Family program grew exponentially in a time of mounting distress about the state of the family. Its span became worldwide, with an estimated audience of more than 220 million people in 164 countries. It was broadcast in more than a dozen languages and reached audiences in Russia and China.

Over time it added to the daily Dr. Dobson radio program an array of magazines, newsletters, and books, by Dobson and others, that offered families advice, solace, and spiritual support. Dr. Dobson wrote more than 70 books and set high standards for every communication. To read a “fundraising” letter from him was always an education on an issue of magnitude, a sign of profound respect for his audience.

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These achievements alone should be enough to mark Jim Dobson’s special place in American culture. To some in the media he remains — wrongly and sadly — a primarily partisan figure to be viewed with disdain as an exemplar of the “Christian right.” My years working with Jim Dobson — 17 in all at Family Research Council — featured many occasions dealing with the political filters the media applies to issues and people of public moment. I remember one conversation with a reporter who referred to “Rev. Dobson” repeatedly. I finally broke in and said, “Dr. Dobson is reverent, but not a reverend. His Ph.D. is in psychology from the University of Southern California.” This latter fact had always spawned some gentle sparring between him and me, a University of Notre Dame grad, every fall when a certain football rivalry was renewed. Everything about Dr. Dobson was pastoral, but his career was that of a secular professional — he worked as a counseling psychologist at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles for 17 years, and his passion for helping families and children struggling with severe challenges was nurtured there every day.

Focus on the Family expanded its work from broadcasts and hotlines and entered the realm of public policy slowly at first. In the late 1970s, the Carter administration established the White House Conference on Families under the leadership of Jim Guy Tucker, a former attorney general and member of Congress from Arkansas. Dobson and others were concerned that the Conference, which issued a final report in October 1980, was a step toward redefinition of the family after a decade that had seen the upheaval of the abortion decisions and new conflicts over values issues. The Commission’s report reads mildly now from the vantage point of nearly half a century, but Dobson’s sense of the coming clashes over virtually every aspect of family life, from no fault divorce and abortion to rampant pornography and drug abuse, proved prophetic.

In 1983, he and colleagues in evangelical Christian circles founded Family Research Council, a Washington, D.C. group that, as its name implied, was designed to gather and promote the best research about families and the interplay of their well-being with the growing array of public policies affecting them. Jerry Regier, a scholar with strong credentials in history and public policy, became its founding president.

In those years, the Reagan administration was very friendly to the budding family values movement. Dobson entered the realm of national policymaking as a member of the Meese Commission on Pornography. It issued a report in July 1986 that documented the extreme trends in the production of obscene materials and the corrosive effects of these materials on both those who produced it and those who consumed it. Like other Dobson-related policy products, the nearly 2,000-page report was research-based and meticulously documented, as well as reflective of a mature moral perspective. To say the least, this is not the image many political liberals wished to offer for Dobson and FRC.

For my part, I recall learning about Focus on the Family in those years when Dobson, whose business sense was every bit as keen as his other attributes, sent a team to the White House correspondence office to study our methods. The Dobson radio show was generating tens of thousands of phone calls and letters (no emails yet in that era) seeking advice and support for every family problem imaginable. The Focus team had learned that the Reagan White House had been receiving eight million pieces of mail a year and they wanted to know how such a volume was handled with limited staff.

Only near the end of the Reagan years did I find out that Family Research Council had expanded its operation on Pennsylvania Avenue close to the U.S. Capitol. Dobson had named attorney and advocate Gary L. Bauer as its president and, alarmed as before by the evident decline in moral standards, he and Focus wanted to redouble their efforts to adopt public policies that embraced faith, family, and freedom.

FRC, as it is known, promptly built a staff of analysts and communicators with national experience. It participated in regular Focus on the Family broadcasts on public policy topics. The bulk of the program remained as it had been for more than a decade — offering family-building expertise, moral and spiritual support, and an array of resources including Dobson’s books and videos on fatherhood and similar topics. FRC published policy papers on single topics and longer guidebooks like “Free to Be Family” and “The Whole Family Catalog,” which featured dozens of proposals for changes in law and the tax code designed to strengthen the family unit and promote fidelity and stability. Interest in the family was by no means solely a Republican concern in the 1990s. One of the prime entities in that decade was the National Commission on Children, chaired by West Virginia Senator John D. Rockefeller. The Commission was the first public body of any weight to endorse the creation of child tax credits. FRC became the prime conservative exponent of the credits and was the major force responsible for their inclusion as the crown jewel of Newt Gingrich’s 1994 Contract with America.

All of this is to underscore what was unique and effective about Jim Dobson’s sortie into national affairs. The 1990s were in fact a banner decade for the advancing of pro-family public policy across an array of topics. The decade saw the adoption not only of child tax credits, but of the Communications Decency Act, adoption tax credits, education savings accounts and the Coverdell health savings accounts. In 1993, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was also passed, putting back in place a high standard of legal scrutiny for any law or practice that infringed on religious liberty. RFRA effectively overturned the Supreme Court decision in Employment Division v. Smith, in which the Supreme Court had upheld the denial of unemployment benefits to two Native American counselors who had used peyote in a religious ceremony.

Virtually all of these enactments are still good law, and none is particularly controversial. The same cannot be said for the continuing struggle over the sanctity of human life, which was primary with FRC. The 1990s brought the tragedy of Bill Clinton’s vetoes of the Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act, which Dobson strenuously championed.

On the other hand, if FRC, which was just one piece of a four-part strategy Dobson’s genius devised, chose to oppose a measure in Congress, the Focus on the Family broadcast was as formidable a weapon as any Washington, D.C., had ever seen. When Dobson and Bauer teed off in a broadcast about a bill by Rep. Augustus Hawkins of California to create a national childcare industry, Congress received a reported 15 million contacts opposing the measure. Liberal Democrats were, it’s fair to say, not pleased by the outpouring. This is not the occasion to delve further into why, of course, some in the press continue to go out of their way to vilify Jim Dobson’s record and astonishingly full life. The issues we now fight over have a newfound intensity and extremity, including same-sex marriage, abortion on demand, bizarre sexual behavior, and attacks on religious liberty that see Democrats hounding the Little Sisters of the Poor, of all people, to provide contraceptives and abortive drugs.

The reality is that Jim Dobson provided an enduring model for how Christians who are proudly evangelical should champion life and family in the public square. He spoke with clarity and charity alike. He expressed his convictions with evidence and exemplified works of mercy through Focus on the Family and his later work with the James Dobson Family Institute. He was a loyal friend and colleague. He led through an era when Christian leaders sometimes compromised themselves and their ministries with self-serving behaviors or abuse of others, and he did so with unfailing integrity. He worked for long-term goods and, as Gary Bauer phrases it, “the permanent things.” He was grateful to God for all that he accomplished, and he inspired those around him, by his example, by his good nature, by his prayer as we assembled.

“Well done, good and faithful servant!” the Scripture (Matthew 25:21) says. How lovely to think those words now ring in his ears and draw the cheers of the saints whose company he has joined.

LifeNews Note: Chuck Donovan is a 50-year veteran of the national debate over the right to life and served from 1981-89 as a writer in the Reagan White House.He is the former Executive Vice President of Family Research Council.

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