Inside the Mind of a Pedophile: Purity Culture is Pedophile Culture part 3

To read Part 1 go here.

To read Part 2 go here.

“Show me a little girl of five or six who can run into her daddy’s heart, sit on his lap, and kiss him any time she likes, and in fifteen or twenty years I will show you a young woman who is emotionally prepared to be a sexually responsive wife.” -Tim and Beverley LaHaye, The Spirit Controlled Family

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In all of our research, we found this part of the series on how purity culture is actually pedophile culture to be the most disturbing. We dug into peer-reviewed research about the psychology of childhood sex offenders and how they think, which was both heavy and devastating. And yet it’s incredibly important because it helps us understand how purity culture is actually pedophile culture — how the types of beliefs promoted within Christian publishing and by evangelical leaders align, in a disastrous way, with how childhood sex offenders see children, relationships, sex, and power. 

We hope that you take care as you read, and we know that this content isn’t for everyone. That being said, we believe that if you can gain more clarity about how offenders think, you’ll see how how purity culture supports a culture that accommodates the kinds of beliefs that drive childhood sexual abuse. Once you learn about these themes, you’ll be able to spot serial child predators anywhere — the first step to stopping them. 

To support our work, please join our Patreon (and get access to our discord server and bonus episodes).

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Religious conservatives like James Dobson have been making unsupported claims for decades about who was most likely to abuse a child in the United States. They’ve continually stated that pornography or queerness or paganism were factors in the abuse of children. But the research paints a different picture. Contrary to what these folks claim, it’s not someone’s gender expression, sexual orientation, or use of pornography that leads to the abuse of children — it’s simply how offenders view children and how they view relationships. Adults who sexually abuse children typically hold certain beliefs about children that they use to justify their abuse, often called implicit theories, cognitive distortions, or offense-supportive cognitions. 

Forensic psychologists have investigated these belief patterns and identified several themes that emerge in the mind of a serial child predator. And as we have researched this topic at STRONGWILLED, we’ve found an undeniable pattern of these beliefs showing up in a variety of religious authoritarian parenting manuals and accompanying materials. In fact, patriarchal evangelical communities and the authors they read — like James Dobson, Tim LaHaye, John Piper, Voddie Baucham and many more — actually promote these types of cognitive distortions. So today we will be taking a look at these belief systems and how they show up in religious authoritarian writings in the U.S. from 1970-on. 

Belief number 1: Children as sexual beings

The most common cognitive distortion among childhood sexual abusers is viewing children as sexual beings, according to studies among offending populations (1). In extreme instances, this includes believing that children desire sex, but can also include attributing any type of sexual behavior or characteristics to a child. In 2007, the APA produced a report on the sexualization of girls which defined sexualization as when any of the following occur:

(1) a person's value comes only from his or her sexual appeal or behavior, to the exclusion of other characteristics;
(2) a person is held to a standard that equates physical attractiveness with being sexy;
(3) a person is sexually objectified - that is, made into a thing for others' sexual use, rather than seen as a person with the capacity for independent action and decision making; and/or
(4) sexuality is inappropriately imposed upon a person.

This sexualization of children is a hallmark of purity culture, because it puts undo emphasis on a child’s sexuality and their sexual appeal to future partners. It condenses children down to their primary role of staying sexually abstinent until they enter into a life-long heterosexual marriage. The white supremacist patriarchal undertones of this endeavor are hard to overstate, which is why religious authoritarian parenting (RAP)  books are obsessed with shaping and developing a child’s (hetero)sexuality while they are still in early childhood. Dobson and other RAP authors continually put an emphasis on the sexuality of children, tweens and teens in a way that was developmentally inappropriate..

In his 1970 book Dare to Discipline James Dobson wrote: “perhaps the most important scientific fact suggested by Freud was his observation that children are not asexual. He stated that sexual gratification begins in the cradle .. . . behavior during childhood is influenced considerably by sexual curiosity and interest, although the happy hormones do not take full charge until early adolescence.” (2) Given what we know about Freud and how he used his theories to discredit survivors of child sexual abuse (and declare they made up their memories of abuse because they sexually desired their fathers/abusers) it is disturbing to see how James Dobson believes this is the most important contribution Freud made to his profession.

And yet the assumption that all children are sexual beings is rife in the RAP books, as well as in the cottage industry of purity culture books (including parenting, materials for teens, pastors and more). For those of us who grew up immersed in these beliefs, it was normal to hear constant discussions of sexuality when it came to children, tweens, and teenagers. It was discussed in youth groups, and in the music, books, and movies aimed at Christian youth ad nauseum, grooming young people to fulfill their divinely-appointed sexual roles assigned to them at birth.

The quote we began this post with is another clear example, where Tim Lahaye (of Left Behind fame) writes in his book, The Spirit Controlled Family: “Show me a little girl of five or six who can run into her daddy’s heart, sit on his lap, and kiss him any time she likes, and in fifteen or twenty years I will show you a young woman who is emotionally prepared to be a sexually responsive wife.” Here, he creates a link between the father-daughter relationship and the young girl’s sexuality. This is a clear example of what psychologists call the sexualization of children, but it is the norm for many of the RAP books we have read and researched for this project. 

Lastly, one of the primary aspects of sexualization was a continual and persistent emphasis on the virginity of children of any gender. However, as is often the case in patriarchal spaces, the weight of virginity fell on the shoulders of girls or people socialized as female. For many young women in religious authoritarian spaces, they were taught to equate their sense of worth on their ability to abstain from sex to keep their “virginity” intact for their husband — and were actually encouraged to pledge their sexuality to their fathers until such a time as he allowed them to be married. For people who grew up in evangelicalism in the 1990s and beyond, tweens and teens were encouraged to identify with their sexuality and purity by wearing “promise” rings. These rings served multiple purposes, symbolizing how a teenager should give up their bodily autonomy and find identity in making a pledge to abstain from sexual activity until marriage — usually making these pledges to their parents, their church, and to themselves.

James Dobson is perhaps the first of the popular modern religious authoritarian parenting  authors to promote the idea of a father giving his daughter a piece of jewelry in a ritual focused on sexuality. In the earliest edition of Dobson’s book Dare to Discipline in 1970 he writes, “I hope to give my daughter a small, gold key on her tenth birthday. It will be attached to a chain to be worn around her neck, and will represent the key to her heart. Perhaps she will give that key to one man only — the one who will share her love through the remainder of her life.” In the updated version Dobson remarks that he did give his daughter Danae a chain with a key on it, and that she kept her vow (Danae Dobson never married, and presumably still wears the necklace she was given 50 years ago). But in the updated version, Dobson encourages other parents to purchase jewelry for their children to serve as a constant reminder of what God wants for them sexually. And, of course, you could purchase the purity jewelry Dobson recommended from Focus on the Family. 

Belief number 2: Romanticizing the Father/Daughter relationship

While child sexual offenders can be driven by a variety of thoughts about sexual abuse such as objectification of children or sadomasochism, research shows that the most common theme among abusers is a desire for an intimate or romantic relationship with children. And while it is taboo to talk about, the prevalence of father-daughter incest has often been a secret hiding in plain sight — and psychologists from Freud to James Dobson have done everything they could to protect the powerful men who abuse their children.

Viewing father-daughter relationships through a romantic lens is one of the largest drivers of incest. Survivors of incest often report that their fathers rationalized abusing them as a “stand-in spouse,” when they felt distance in their marriages. Plus, abusers often believe they are helping children by giving them a romantic experience. While it seems unthinkable to non-abusers that offenders could view sexual abuse as a romantic, mutual, beneficial encounter, it’s unfortunately incredibly common. 

A related dynamic often present in offender psychology is a concept titled Intimacy-sex confusion, where abusers confuse emotional intimacy and sexual activity, which is very common among CSA offenders (3). They are more likely to conflate the two, supporting their rationale for the abuse: sexual intimacy fosters emotional intimacy, and emotional intimacy calls for sexual intimacy. It’s important for communities to not conflate intimacy between parent and child with the type of sexual intimacy between spouses — and yet, this line is often blurred in many purity culture materials. 

Despite these common psychological narratives among sexual abusers — that offenders fantasize about romantic interactions with children, turn to children as a stand-in spouse during marriage difficulties, and often blur the lines between emotional and sexual intimacy with children — evangelical books often encouraged fathers to take a husband-like role with their daughters, patterning their relationship after marital intimacy. Fathers are often referred to as the “first man” in her life, and compared to boyfriends or husbands, making an inappropriate connection between the father-child relationship and marriage.

Any patriarchal framework that promotes these blurred lines without also talking about potential abuses of power is setting up children to be exploited. As Judith Herman writes “Father-daughter incest is not only the type of incest most frequently reported but also represents a paradigm of female sexual victimization. The relationship between father and daughter, adult male and female child, is one of the most unequal relationships imaginable. It is no accident that incest occurs most often precisely in the relationship where the female is most powerless.” (4)

James Dobson’s participation in the Meese Comission on pornography confirms that he was informed about the prevalence of father-daughter incest and intrafamilial sexual violence, which makes it all the more troubling that he chose to focus on this relationship in particular in multiple books, including Dads and Daughters, Bringing up Girls, and more. Dobson's organization Focus on the Family also published dozens and dozens of books on this same theme, including titles like She Calls Me Daddy: Seven Principles for Building the Complete Daughter, Always Daddy’s Girl, Daddy Daughter Dates, and more (all of which we shall discuss in part 4 of this series). Not only that, but the founder of the Purity Ball movement (in which young girls dress up and attend a ball with their father where they pledge their purity to him and to God until they get married) began his career at Focus on the Family before starting his global purity ball organization based out of Colorado Springs, Colorado.

Encouraging these types of interactions was a part of Focus on the Family’s work from the beginning. In Dobson’s Bringing up Girls, there’s a passage that clearly encourages men to approach fatherhood as fulfilling the role of their daughter’s first romantic partner, and blurs the boundaries between parenthood and romantic partnership:

“[Your father] was the first man you flirted with, the first man you wanted to cuddle and kiss you, the first man to prize you as very special among all other girls. All these experiences with your father were vital to nurturing…your femininity. The fawning attention of a father for his daughter prepares her for her uniquely feminine role as a girlfriend, fiance and wife.” (5)

Elsewhere in the book, Dobson again places father in the same category of future romantic partners, blurring the lines between romance and parenthood:

“Few people realize just how intense a girl’s desire is to connect with the ‘first man’ in her life. If he was absent, or if he is there but not engaged, she will struggle with that vacuum, in some cases for the rest of her life.”

Experts in sexual abuse, like Herman mentioned above, have known for decades that sexual abusers create narratives about the “special bond” between a father and daughter. And yet, Dobson, along with the whole Christian publishing industry, actively promoted this narrative. In a world where girls need communities to encourage clear boundaries between fathers and daughters, Dobson’s work only served to blur those lines. These beliefs, coupled with an obsession with parenting methods designed to break the will of children, led to all sorts of abuse occurring within Christian homes -- all the while giving serial child predators the religious and philosophical framework necessary to exploit and prey on children.

Just one page from James Dobson’s book called Dad’s and Daughters, which he writes is his “obsession.”

Belief number 3: Children Need Help Developing Heterosexuality

A common justification that CSA offenders use is that they are offending for the benefit of the child, often to help them learn about sexuality. This can include talking to children about sex in inappropriate ways, or the offender believing that they should give the child a sexual experience to help them develop their sexuality. Sexual abusers may give rationalizations like, “It wasn’t for my enjoyment, I wanted to support them in developing and learning about their sexuality.” (6)

In purity culture literature, there is continuous encouragement for fathers (or other men, including uncles, family friends, pastors and men in the community) to engage with their daughters as women, in order to develop their sexual and gender identity. For example, in Dobson’s Bringing Up Girls, it is stated that, “when a father does not respond to his daughter’s femininity, she is stunted in her development.” (7) There are also countless reminders to fathers to touch their daughters as their bodies grow, and these writers remind fathers that even if they are attracted to their own daughters, that they should continue to embrace them — for their own good. (8)

While there is a disproportionately large amount of instruction for how fathers can help their daughters develop their femininity, boys are not exempt from the perceived need to develop heterosexuality. Dobson encourages fathers to take their sons into the shower to show them, “Dad has a penis, just like his, only bigger.” (9) This kind of approach, that exposing children to adult genitalia, for their own good, is the sort of thinking that CSA offenders often employ to justify their abuse. 

For many religious authoritarian parenting experts, they justify these actions as a way of teaching children heteronormativity. There are overt and covert references to children turning out gay if you don’t give your child enough explicit instruction on opposite gender sexual relationships. It’s this kind of intense focus on shaping a child’s sexual development through external interactions with adults that can bolster the narratives used by sexual offenders, promoting the belief that adults need to engage in sexual ways with children to develop heterosexuality.

Putting such emphasis (and anxiety) on developing heterosexuality puts kids at risk for abuse. For example, in Raising a Young Modern-Day Princess, published in 2016, the authors encourage communities to play matchmaker to connect girls with men in their life, such as “a good family friend who connects with your daughter,” writing, “Little girls look to their dads or other males for approval and love. Our prayer is that if a girl’s birth father is unavailable, then a step-in-dad will become a part of her life. God is calling many men to become ‘fathers to the fatherless.’”(10) Rather than addressing the particular risks of a male “family friend who connects with your daughter,” (a red flag that should give parents pause) the authors spiritualize and ordain this dynamic. It’s another example of how Christian communities fail to discuss the actual risks and safeguards needed to protect children. Instead, they promote the belief that men within the Christian community are to be trusted and that it is normal for adult men to seek out relationships with young women.

Belief number 4: Children Are Little Adults

This last cognitive distortion doesn’t include explicit sexualization, but is often a pillar in supporting all kinds of abuse against children: the belief that children are on the same level developmentally as adults. The MOLEST scale shows that often abusers endorse the statement, “Some children are more adult-like than other children.” (11) Child sexual offenders often view children as having more self-awareness and decision-making capacity than they do. Research also supports the notion that sex offenders are less likely to empathize with their victims, and project their own meaning onto children’s behavior — such as viewing affection, curiosity, or attention-seeking as evidence of sexual intent or initiation. (12)

FBI special agent Kenneth Lannings, who testified multiple times for the Meese Commission, reported after decades of studying the patterns of sexual abusers that,  “My experience has been that 95 percent of pedophiles who have admitted to molesting children will tell you they molest children for the same reason. They molest children because the children want it.” (13) This statement is undergirded by the belief that children are capable of making sexual decisions for themselves and communicating in an adult manner, two prerequisites for consensual sex, and is upheld by the idea that children are just like adults.

It is this kind of rationale that is often used by sexual abusers who don’t consider developmental factors like impulsivity, or naturally appropriate behavior when it comes to children interacting with them. And unfortunately, people like James Dobson taught parents that children are as sinful as a fully-grown adult as a justification for using corporal punishment on them. The cornerstone of Dobson’s best-selling abusive parenting methods rested on him getting parents to buy into the idea (or perhaps reinforcing an already-held belief) that small children need to be punished because they are making rational, self-aware decisions to disobey, ignoring any very important developmental context. Dobson and other RAP authors routinely assured parents that children were “begging” to be disciplined and that parents should be happy to comply.

Like most CSA offenders, religious authoritarian parenting authors taught people to dismiss or ignore power dynamics in the parent-child relationship and used the Christian doctrine of original sin to make the case that there was no real difference in maturity levels or a need for corporal punishment. And as we made the case in chapter 16, this leads to a recipe for abuse in patriarchal authoritarian homes, time and time again. 

What does this mean?

In the 1980s, James Dobson was informed over and over again by the premiere experts in the field on what profiles of people were most likely to abuse and sexually exploit children. As a child psychologist and popular parenting author, he could have warned religious communities about how to spot red flags and he could have helped implement parenting methods and policies that would protect children. 

Instead, he failed to do anything that would keep children safe from abusers — and even worse, he created a whole movement of books, teachings, events, and magazines that supported the beliefs that child sexual offenders could use to justify their harm to children. Within the framework of a patriarchal authoritarian hierarchy, he promoted the sexualization of children, continually romanticized the father/daughter relationships, encouraged parents to actively shape their children’s heterosexuality, and assigned adult intent to children inappropriate to their developmental context. He promoted the very cognitive distortions that pedophiles hold, all while passing himself off as a champion of the family.

While this does not mean that every person who utilized Dobson’s parenting methods — or that of the dozens and dozens of copycat authors — was a pedophile, it means that his work created situations where predators could not only abuse children but where they could get away with it. Because one of the other hallmarks of serial child predators is the large number of victims they abuse unless they are stopped. 

As patriarchal male leadership — from Hollywood to Washington D.C. to Evangelical Christianity — continues to fail children and protect serial predators, it is time for us to do the work that Dr. Dobson refused to do. We are committed to educating people on the hallmarks of serial child predators because they continue to be a risk to children everywhere. By understanding some of the hallmarks of their cognitive distortions, we can all be better equipped to spot the red flags of serial child predators. No matter how much religious language they hide behind.

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In part 4 we’ll look at a phenomenon that occurs among pedophiles in which they create content that appeals sexually to them, yet exists in plain sight — we’ve seen this at Nickelodeon, Jeffrey Epstein’s house, and now we want to examine some purity culture materials with this framework in mind. 

Thank you for your support. Without readers like you sharing and supporting our work, this would not be possible.

Endnotes:

1. Marziano et al., 2005

2. 1970 edition of Dare to Discipline p. 182

3. Gannon TA, Keown K, Rose MR. An examination of current psychometric assessments of child molesters' offense-supportive beliefs using Ward's implicit theories. Int J Offender Ther Comp Criminol. 2009 Jun;53(3):316-33.

4. Judith Herman Father-Daughter Incest p. 27

5.  James Dobson Bringing Up Girls p. 89

6. We recently discussed the movie Spotlight on our podcast, and in one scene an abusive priest flatly admits he molested children, and then adds, “Yes, yes, but as I said, I never got any pleasure from it. That’s important to understand.”

7. Bringing up Girls p. 89

8. Bringing Up Girls p. 94-95

9. James Dobson, Bringing up Boys p. 120

10. Hannah & Whiting, 2016, p. xxxxiii-xxiiv.

11. Bumby, K. M. (1996). MOLEST Scale [Database record]. APA PsycTests

12. Moulden HM, Firestone P, Marshall WL (2020) Social Competence in Men Who Sexually Offend Against Children: Testing an Integrated Model. JSM Sexual Med 4(6): 1050.

13. Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography Final Report Part 1 (1986). Accessed here.

James Dobson’s Worst Nightmare Part 2

A history of James Dobson, his political movement, how his purity culture was pedophile culture, and how he supported Putin's rise to power in Russia.

Welcome to STRONGWILLED, the multimedia project aimed at helping survivors of religious authoritarian parenting methods develop autonomy and find solidarity.

TW: eugenics, racism, forced sterilization, gendered violence, child abuse, child sexual abuse materials, and homophobia/conversion therapy.

This episode, DL gives an overview Dobson’s far-reaching political career, including his international influence, how his purity culture protected pedophiles, and more.

TRANSCRIPT

James Dobson's Worst Nightmare Part 2

DL: I'm not really James Dobson. I'm DL Mayfield. And I'm James Dobson's worst nightmare. Welcome to part two of our series called… 

Krispin: James Dobson's Worst Nightmare. 

DL: That's me. That's you. That's Krispin. That's anybody who has any degree of familiarity with their own will and their true selves. So if you're listening, that's you. You found your way to us. Welcome. 

Krispin: That's our stubborn dog, Fern, the Corgi.

DL: Oh, our Corgi is very strong-willed!

Krispin: She's definitely James Dobson's worst nightmare.

DL: Actually, my nephew was over yesterday and was like, Fern would actually love Trump. And I was like, that's true, our dog does love everyone. But also has a strong will, so Trump would not like our dog. 

Krispin: Oh, uh-huh. Haha.

Anyways, welcome to part two. I am assuming you listened to part one where we talked about the ideological roots of James Dobson and his parenting and marriage empire. Today we're getting into the nitty gritties of his political involvement, which, you gotta buckle up because it's all over the map and his…

Krispin: So, yeah, I feel like we should start with trigger warnings.

DL: No. People know what they're getting in for. No, I'm just kidding. You go for it. What do you want, what do you think the trigger warnings say? 

Krispin: Well, obviously like anti-queer ideology, politics, et cetera. We're going to be talking about child porn, child sexual abuse materials, child sexual exploitation, probably corporal punishment.

DL: Yeah. And, and I want to say really quick that the point of this two part series is, I mean, to be honest, it's just for, for me to get it out of my head. Obviously we've been writing about a lot of these things. Some of this information is going to be in future chapters that we're working on right now.

But really it's just to have a resource for people are like, I know Dobson was a bad guy, but how do I tell people? Send him to this podcast! You know what I mean?

Krispin: Mm-hmm.

DL: We’re doing this as a resource. I am just being my full self, which means you're going to hear a lot of research and then I'm gonna be a total little shit sometimes.

Anyhoo, that's what this is about. And I don't want to overwhelm people with this information. I actually think knowledge is power. And I think being fully informed of the forces that are at play, both in, possibly your own childhood development, but also in America's Christian nationalists political movement, I think is really important. I actually think it can motivate people, I think it can enrage us, and it can actually fortify us to keep doing what we need to do to resist authoritarianism. So, I think it's encouraging. Maybe I'm a weirdo, but I mean, we all know I'm a weirdo, but you know what I mean?

Krispin: Yes. Right. Yeah.

DL: That's the vibe. Okay? Are you ready? 

Krispin: Yeah. We said this in the last episode, but so many people just have a framework of Dobson through books or Brio Magazine, or Adventures in Odyssey, and don't really know all the ways that Dobson was working politicly behind the scenes, in part because he kept so much of that quiet and we are going to make sure that it is not kept quiet. 

DL: Exactly. So part one, we actually talked just so much about the eugenics beginnings of Dobson, and it's really important to point out that he didn't come up with the idea for Focus on the Family, which is the organization he started that he's most well known for.

He didn't come up with that in his own. He was actually modeling it after Paul Popenoe's American Institute for Family Relations, which was explicitly started as a positive eugenics movement and program to help white women be in servitude to white men, have their babies, and raise them. Now, Dobson came on as sort of like the disciplinarian expert.

Krispin: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. 

DL: And then after working for with Popenoe for 10 years, when he retired, Dobson started his own org. So I think that's just really important because today we're getting into the Focus on the Family of it all. 

Krispin: Right. 

DL: And that's what we're doing. So if you were raised evangelical, you heard of Focus on the Family. Right?

Krispin: Yes. Mm-hmm.

DL: I think what people don't know is that Focus on the Family also has a global presence, obviously through their radio programs, which I believe were heard in 163 countries around the world. But also because Dobson wanted global influence. And he did things in America, he saw that it worked and then he outsourced that to other countries.

Krispin: I forgot about the Russia connection! It just came back to me.

DL: We're gonna talk about Russia. We're gonna talk about Putin. We're gonna talk about Uganda. We're gonna talk about Kenya. It's all there. But to start, I think it's important that it's not just me, DL Mayfield, that thinks Dobson is one of the most influential people in American history. The New York Times called him the most influential evangelical in America, right? And this is because of his political lobbying against gay people and abortion.

So those are like what the mainstream media, at least like in the past two decades, have been calling Dobson – the most influential evangelical. Now the evangelicals have taken over, right? Literally as we are recording this, a Wheaton College graduate is basically holding our entire country hostage because he wants his budget passed.

Russell Voight is an evangelical who worships at the p***s of Dobson. You know what I mean? 

Krispin: Mm-hmm!

DL: So Dobson starts Focus on the Family in 1977. He turned it into this multimedia empire. He didn't want to just publish books. He knew that radio was really important. That's why I find it so fascinating that he, even though he was born and raised in Louisiana, he spent most of his life in California and then moved to Colorado. But he kind of kept that accent going. Do you have any thoughts why?

Krispin: Right. Well, for one, I think we think of middle America as evangelical. We also know that there are large portions of California that are conservative, et cetera. But yeah, I think it just is that like cultural cachet. And,  I think what you are getting at, is that he wants to come across as low key, I don't know what the best word is, like colloquial, sort of just a common sense guy. Just a humble common sense guy. 

Yep. And I think that's really important. He became most well-known for his radio programs. And he's just like, [DL imitates a soft-spoken southern man] “Hi, I'm Dr. Dobson, I'm here to talk to you about how to raise your children God's way.”

Krispin: Right. It is offensive to compare him to Garrison Keeler…

DL: Why? I think I don't even like that guy. You don’t even know Garrison Keeler!

Krispin: I actually don’t. No, I don’t. But I feel like it's that same…

DL: Folksy.

Krispin: Right.

DL: And so you can say a lot of shit if you come across as mild mannered, right? And that is just what a lot of evangelical male pastors did. And I think they modeled it a lot after Dobson's, like, I'm a nice patriarchal bigot, right? And so that's kind of how he got famous.

Now, the thing I've been sort of obsessed with for the past few months is something that I don't know if people are going to follow me on this rabbit trail, but it's really important. I'll say that we've had to read so many Dr. Dobson books and there's, like, weird shit in them, right? 

Mm-hmm. 

And some of it has to do around children and sexualizing children. Romanticizing the father-daughter relationship. There's just weird stuff that keeps happening. And I have been troubled by this for the past two years. There's been certain things that have happened where I've slowly, against my will, had to become more aware of how serial child predators operate.

And some of Dobson's materials, I'm like, some of these seem like dog whistles to child predators, if I'm being honest. So in doing all that research, I had to sort of become an expert in this time in Dobson's life when he served on the presidential commission on pornography. 

So, Dobson's relationship with presidents starts with Jimmy Carter. Dobson had a very lofty view of himself, and he believed that the presidents should listen to him. And Jimmy Carter snubbed him. Didn't invite him to be a part of…

Krispin: Some federal family conference. 

DL: Yeah. A conference on families. And so Dobson got Focus on the Family listeners, he urged them to write to President Carter. He got 80,000 people to write in and demand that Dobson should be invited. And he was. 

Krispin: And this was all, this is not like an online petition where things are getting shared through Facebook groups.

DL: Nope. 

Krispin: This is old school.

DL: Mailing list and radio. 

Krispin: And just thinking about that, people had to write a letter, get a stamp, put it in their mailbox. 

DL: 80,000 

Krispin: Right. 

DL: So Dobson was like, Oh my God, am I God? And that started his whole thing. So then he was always like chasing after that sort of prestige in that way. But he never ran for office because he thought he would be stymied, he would be pigeonholed. And he liked actually pulling the strings for many, many, many Republican elected officials and, as we'll see, hundreds and hundreds of policies.

So he never wanted to run for office, but he was obsessed with being seen as a power player for multiple presidents. So when Reagan was elected, kind of with some pressure about just sort of like computers were starting to be around, and you know, people were really worried about child pornography as they should be. So he started this commission on pornography in 1985, and James Dobson was one of 11 people asked to be a commissioner.

So for a whole year he was a part of this commission. He had to travel around the country. He had to hear like, I would almost say hundreds of expert testimonies and witnesses about the harms, or whatever, of pornography, but it mostly focused on the harms. And so much of it was about child sexual exploitation, how that's connected to child pornography, all this stuff.

The only reason I got interested in this is because Dobson talked about it constantly. He referenced being on this commission constantly. He bragged about it. He boasted about it. He felt so important. So finally I was like, ugh, I have to read this report, which is like 400 pages long. And that's the edited document, right?

Krispin: Yeah. And it wasn't – tell me about how you had to access this. 

Well, there's – okay, so you're going to hear about some weird research stuff that I got into. So the 400 page synopsis of this year is available to anyone. You can download it. But I started to notice, the commission kind of would reference various testimonies, various expert witnesses.

And I was starting to realize, wow, they seem to have talked to a lot of people who were experts on pedophiles and serial child predators and getting information about, how do these people operate? What are they like? This is not just about pornography, it's about this whole issue, serial child predators.

But I couldn't access those transcripts. We actually have a STRONGWILLED reader and listener, Elizabeth Gonzalez, who went to the National Archives for me and took pictures. I had to look through hundreds and hundreds, thousands of pages of testimony that has not been digitized to prove that Dobson was made aware dozens and dozens of times of the dangers facing children.

Right. And do you want to sum up what I found? Who's the most likely to harm children in the United States? 

Krispin: Right. Yeah. It's, uh, you, it's men established in a community, often – I don't know if that's that research, I'm thinking about when you interviewed RL Stollar, it fits those same statistics.

Yeah. 

Krispin: Tends to be fathers or stepfather. Tends to be Christians?

Yeah, they mentioned that a few times, but they never said that is the profile, someone who's religious, but we now know it is, right? 

Krispin: Mm-hmm. Yeah, but they did say it. I mean, there were expert witnesses that said, it could likely be the man in your local church. It's not a guy in a trench coat. 

DL: Nope. Not a guy in a trench coat. That was like the most common thing these experts said, because in 1985, we were at this age where we were finally starting to grapple with how untrue stranger danger was. And you know, that's what most of these, like FBI agents were saying, it's not the man in a trench coat, right? It's a pillar of the community. It's a coach, it's a priest, it's a pastor, it's a business person with lots of connections. And they use those connections to abuse children over and over and over again. 

So I have proof that Dobson heard all this. He heard it a ton. And then what I find really chilling is he then went back to focus on the family and did the exact opposite. He promoted stranger danger whenever he could. And in fact, he targeted Satanic Panic. He targeted Dungeons and Dragons.,

Krispin: Castles and Cauldrons.

DL: Castles and Cauldrons.

Krispin: For those who know.

DL: He targeted queer people and then eventually trans people, as being the ones who are most likely to prey on children. And that's just not true. Now you can read part of my research on this. We have two parts up as of this recording on how purity culture is actually pedophile culture. In it I tell the story of Dobson's best buddy on this Meese Commission on pornography, who was this Catholic priest named Father Bruce Ritter.

Krispin: I think you should talk about who he was in his community. 

DL: Yeah. So Father Bruce Ritter basically fits this role of a serial child predator. He was a Catholic priest who started this house for homeless boys in New York City in Times Square. All these prominent New York business people were on the board of this Covenant House. He was on the Meese Commission. 

He was being interviewed by the Washington Post and the New York, New York Times along with Dobson. They were the two that were saying, you must criminalize all pornography, because it's all bad and it will lead men to do horrible things if they look at it, plus it normalizes homosexuality, which they both hated. And because he was so upfront in this culture war as a religious person, suddenly some of his victims started speaking up. And so it turns out that there were so many people, young men in his houses, that accused him of sexually abusing them,

Plus he embezzled tons of money, all this stuff. And Dobson knew about that too! This was his buddy. It came out the year after this commission that the pedophile that they kept being warned about was one of these religious men. 

And so, again, Dobson could have used that to actually help protect children.

Krispin: Right. To educate communities about, here are the red flags. I really like what one of the experts said was something to the effect of, yeah, there are obviously people that want to invest in children and that's great, but also people that exploit children are drawn to that and we need to be aware of that and we need to create accountability. And Dobson totally did not do anything that would create accountability for men that would try to exploit children.

DL: Yeah. He never once shared the information with his wide audience about how to be aware that there are predators hiding within churches, hiding within places of power. But instead, he did the exact opposite. He continued to teach people that you need to discipline your kids in such a way that they always obey Christian male authority. And again, you can read our chapter called A Recipe for Abuse, where we talk about how that sets children up for being abused.

Krispin: Mm-hmm.

DL: I find it just so insidious, and as we talk about as well, this is two years after this all happened with Father Bruce Ritter, with him being informed about pedophiles on the Meese Commission, he actually helped create this radio program for children called Adventures in Odyssey, which centered around…?

Krispin: Mr. Whitaker.

DL: Mr. Whitaker, who has a lot of these red flags for a serial child predator. 

We're not going to get into all that today. You can read our piece on that and we will talk about that in a later episode, but I just have to throw that out there. Anything you want to say about that? 

Krispin: Yeah, no, I think that this, in in the eighties, I think is so important. I'm so glad that you've gone back and looked at, what was it that Dobson actually heard? And I think that really frames how we understand what he writes about and says in the future what he omits. Because I think it's just so clear that he had this really important information, and we don't know why, but he definitely did not use it to protect children.

DL: Yeah. And I think that actually this issue of pornography, which – do I want to talk about pornography? No. Are there issues to talk about when it comes to pornography? Yes. But I think the reason that Dobson was obsessed with this issue is because, I believe, it was a cover. It was a smokescreen. It was a way to view himself as a morally upright person, when in actuality he was doing all these things that created children and families where, people were actually more susceptible to serial abusers.

And many of the materials that he published through Focus on the Family read as dog whistles to, at best, authoritarians, at worst, pedophiles. So that's what I'm saying with all that. 

Krispin:  Right. And if you're like, what do you mean? We'll get into that later. We'll explain all of that. But yeah, I think that's really important. And what he said, what he and Ritter said, was that if you start with soft core pornography, you eventually get to these extremes of abusing children. Which the research currently does not support, the research then did not support.

DL: Yeah, so the commission, including the four women on the commission, did not agree with Ritter and Dobson who wanted to criminalize all pornography. They're like, what? That doesn't make any sense. We should criminalize pornography that hurts people and all, you know, child pornography, of course. So I think we have to keep talking about this just for a tiny bit, just because Dobson was so obsessed with it.

Some of the other things are, Dobson scored the last interview with serial killer Ted Bundy in 1989. And in it, he got Ted Bundy to confess that the reason he killed women was because he was addicted to pornography. And Dobson videotaped this chat, this deathbed confession, and then sold it through Focus on the Family for $25 a pop.

Krispin: Which back then was like $60 in today's money, by the way. That's not a small amount.

Right. And Focus on the Family, let me be clear, is a nonprofit. Tax free. 

Krispin: Right. 

DL: So he is literally profiting off of this. So gleeful. And then anybody who's an expert, anybody who even knew Ted Bunny was like, he's a serial liar. And he looked gleeful as he was being like, yes, this is why I did it. You know, it's wild to me. But then Dobson used that experience to continue to fundraise, to continue to get money for his organization and to promote his belief that pornography makes people violent and that it's progressive. 

Krispin: Makes people kill other people. Oh my god.

DL: Makes people kill other people. These are the two things. It makes people kill other people, and it makes people sexually abuse children. So I'm just being clear, that's what he said.

And there's just so much here. Here's another rabbit hole. Bill Hybels, you know, founder of Willow Creek, he wrote a book called, okay, what is it called? Christians in a Sex Crazed Culture. And in it – this is just indicative of the rot at the core of evangelicalism. Now, Bill Hybels eventually resigned from Willow Creek because he had been accused by multiple women, his staffers, for being sexually harassed, groped, and being forced to watch pornography with him.

Now, in this book he wrote in the eighties, right? When did he publish it? Oh, 1989. Same year Dobson was talking to Ted Bundy. He says Dobson came to him, they were having lunch, and he was asking Dobson about the Meese Commission was like, what's the big deal? What's all the drama with the, with pornography?

And Dobson was like. It's a big deal because it's changed. And so Dobson was like, are you going be talking about pornography at your church? And Hybels was like, yeah, I think so. And then Dobson said, well, you better prepare. You better prepare. And Hybels was like, what do you mean? And so Dobson said, you better research it.

This is what Dobson said. Well, this is what Hybels says. Hybels says. “He, [Dobson] looked me right in the eye and said, get yourself educated young man, firsthand. Get educated and then just do as God leads from that point on.” 

So Bill Hybel writes, “So I did, and I have to confess with a certain amount of embarrassment that when I began my study, a little voice told me that this might even be interesting. After all, I'm as red blooded as the next guy. But it wasn't interesting. It was disgusting and depressing and filthy. It was shocking and sickening.” 

And then he literally talks about…he watched child porn.

Krispin: Mm. Okay.

DL: Okay, so he says, “Next, I had my assistants rent some adult videos. I'm not sure what I was expecting but I saw a steady stream of sexual perversion, including fathers having sex with daughters, sons with mothers, siblings with each other, adults with children, and children with children.” 

And so basically, Hybels is admitting to watching this, because Dobson told him to. Now of course, he's couching it in this entire book where he's very anti-it, and it's shocking and disgusting and filthy. But now he has this airtight reason why he has this stuff on his computer. Let's then switch into – Dobson is sort of known as the founder of purity culture around this time. There's a lot of, and you know, you and I have had to read a bunch of these books, so there's lots of these white evangelical men in particular, who were writing books about how to keep your kids sexually pure. You want to talk about LaHaye’s book really quick? 

Krispin: Oh my God. Are we talking about the one where he says that fathers are responsible for their daughters being sexually responsive wives?

DL: Yeah. I mean, there's so much going on in these evangelical books from the seventies and eighties that is truly wild.

Krispin: I mean, really it is. So healthy families are like, hey, you're going to develop sexually. We can talk about it. I can support you in having your boundaries around your sexuality. In these books, starting at a very young age, I mean that’s what LaHaye says, you know, show me a girl, five or six, and I will tell you about her, like how she's going to, in the future, respond to her husband sexually. And that is sexualizing a child.

DL: Which is something pedophiles do. Right? 

Krispin: Right. 

DL: And so that's why we're going with some of our research again, is just saying Dobson, and a lot of these people, they sexualize children and they also treated children as little adults. And that's the hallmark of Dobson's discipline methods is children are sinful… 

Krispin: I thought you were going to say hallmark of pedophiles. 

DL: Well that too. So pedophiles view children as little adults. And Dobson makes it very clear in all his parenting materials, that is the backbone of his belief, too, is children are sinful, just as sinful as any adult. And you have to parent them with that in mind, or else you won't hit them. 

Krispin: Right. And if you are attempted to look at them through a developmental lens, he's like, no, they are defying you. They are trying to take your authority away. They know what they're doing. They know what their behavior means. Rather than being like, yeah, a child is a child and they don't always know what they're communicating, you know, that sort of thing. 

DL: Yeah. I mean, Dobson said this, the most important contribution Sigmund Freud made to his profession was that children are sexual beings. They're not asexual and it starts in the crib. And so for us, as we've been reading these books, there's these three things that really stand out. The sexualization of children, viewing them as sinful and adults, and then romanticizing the father-daughter relationship. And these three things are just like candy for serial child predators. 

Now, there's a few other things too. I don't know when it all started, but in Dare to Discipline, that Dobson wrote in 1970, he writes – I don't know how old his, his daughter Dene was at this time – but he says when she turns 10, I intend to have a ceremony with her. This is in his chapter on discipline and morality, and sexual immorality. He's like, I plan to give her a necklace with a key on it, you know, so she’ll pledge her virtue and purity until she finds the one man. And, and in later additions, he says, I did that when she was 10, gave her this key necklace, she pledged, her virginity and all this creepy shit. 

And then he is like, and you can buy these same necklaces at Focus on the Family! You know, again, it's the grift. It's the grift. But I don't know if there's an example before 1970 of a dad giving his young daughter a piece of jewelry meant to signify her virginity that she pledges to God and to him until she gets married, you know? 

Krispin: Right. 

I don't know. I haven't found it. So anybody listening, if you find an earlier example of this happening in American evangelicalism, let me know. I do think Dobson was the first. And if you grew up in this world, you know about True Love Waits, you know about getting these purity rings. And Focus on the Family was so into all that stuff. Dobson was so into this purity culture. Right? 

Krispin: Right. Mm-hmm. Whether he started it or not, he really got it off the ground. 

DL: Yeah. So the guy who eventually ended up starting purity balls, which if people don't know, that's where they take this sort of ring and jewelry thing to the next level and hold this ball where the young girls dress up in white and go with their dads. And it's kind of like a marriage ceremony. It is fodder for pedophiles. I'm not saying everyone is. 

Krispin: Right.

DL: I'm just saying that is what pedophiles dream of and fantasize about. So whatever you think of that, that's just the reality for some people. Do you want to hear what the official pledge is for the purity balls? 

Krispin: Yes.

DL: By the way, the guy who started the purity balls, that's what I was getting to. He worked at Focus on the Family.

Krispin: Okay.

DL: He left Focus on the Family to start the purity ball movement, which was based in Colorado Springs, Colorado. So it all comes back to Dobson, the purity balls. Current speaker of the house, Mike Johnson participated in a purity ball, which the American media doesn't give a shit about, but Germany is all over it. 

Krispin: Uh-huh! Uh-huh!

DL: And they're like, this is the creepiest thing we've ever seen. Okay, here's the pledge. Pledge is: 

“I, (somebody's father, you have to say your daughter's name) choose before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the area of purity. I will be pure in my own life as a man, husband, and father. I will be a man of integrity and accountability as I lead, guide, and pray over my daughter and my family as the high priest in my home. This covering will be used by God to influence generations to come.”

I'm not focusing on what the young girls say, but I'm just saying, this is just so disturbing. And so like a patriarchal wet dream. At best. Right. And at worst is what I already said. 

Krispin: Right. And recognizing that fathers sexually abusing daughters is way more common than society would like to believe.

DL: I mean, that's some of the things that Dobson was told in the Meese commission by an FBI, detective named, um, Kenneth Lanning. And he actually has written so many books on this, but in the 1980s, and he told them this, he said, the most common form of child sexual abuse is father daughter incest. That's the number one.

And in fact, most social workers, detectives, that's what they think of when they think of child sexual abuse. That's how prevalent it was. As we made the case, Sigmund Freud also found this out, right? And yeah, do you want to talk a tiny bit about that?

Krispin: Mm-hmm. Right. So basically, Freud was working with a lot of women that had mental illness, in hospitals.

DL: Yeah. “Hysteria.”

Krispin: So he was talking with them and he found this pattern that so many of them, the majority of them, nearly all of them, reported being sexually abused by, most often a father, or another patriarchal figure. So, like, an uncle,  their father's friend or, yeah. And so he actually wrote a paper about it, but then what are the implications for society, if all these men are abusing their daughters? 

DL: Powerful men.

Krispin: Yes. Right, and this implicated the powerful ruling class as well as the middle class. And so where he went with that was, he was like, well, it must not be true. It must be fantasies that these women have.

DL: They have sexual fantasies for their dads, is what he said. 

Krispin: Right, exactly. Which is unfortunately, like, the basis of psychoanalytic great theory, which is the basis of psychology and therapy. So, that's just another example of how common it is. And when we start to face it, when we start to look at the reality of that reality, most often societies are like, that can't be true, we need to not focus on that, or come up with an excuse or a reason. 

DL: Yeah. And I think Dobson and Focus on the Family have been a huge part in shifting the conversation away from, we need to have these conversations about incest, about interfamilial sexual violence, about a community member’s sexual violence. And he totally erased that from the narrative. 

Krispin: Right. And the point I was going to make is what happens when the person who is most likely to sexually abuse others is given the ultimate divine ordained power? Who holds them accountable? Right. 

DL: Nobody. Yeah. 

Krispin: If the father is the high priest of the house. And I mean, then, then we're getting into a patriarchal marriage, where women are not allowed to – they have to submit to the authority of their husbands. It really fails to protect kids. 

DL: Oh my God. Okay. Well, we're done with the pedophile part now. Just keep that in mind for everything else. Now we have to sort of – I don't even know how to do this. I don't know how to do this, Krispin, to talk about how Dobson switched from focusing mostly on parenting, discipline, marriage and family advice, which he continued to do.

Krispin: Mm-hmm.

DL: But there’s, in my mind, there's two phases to Dobson's life. There's that phase where he's telling people how to discipline their kids in such a way they will obey authority. Then he starts his political activism.

Krispin: Which, this thought just occurred to me. You can really see that shift. 

DL: Yeah? 

Krispin: If you've read his books from the 2000s or 2010s, he's phoning it in, his energy is elsewhere. Because he’ll do a whole chapter of, here's a letter that a woman sent me thanking me for the way that she raised her boys. 

DL: He's a busy man, Krispin, he's a busy man.

Krispin: Or it's just rambling stories. It's like he sat down and just talked for 12 hours and then put it into a book.

DL: Yeah. I mean, he has said, especially in the beginning because of the positive eugenics influence, they're trying to change culture that way. And eventually he realized, and a lot of other conservative men realized, you have to go through the political apparatus. You have to go through the courts.

So they set their sights on the Supreme Courts. They set their sights on sort of flooding the zone when it came to bills, and they decided to set their sights on abortion after Roe v. Wade happened, and they started to realize, oh wow, this is an issue that Christians really care about. Would you like to guess what Dobson's view on abortion was pre 1973? Now remember, he was working for a eugenics at the time who loved forced sterilization. So, do you have any guesses on what he thought about abortion? 

Krispin: Yeah, I mean my guess is, if we're bringing the eugenics into it, if there are going to be birth defects or other undesirable characteristics, that abortion is his advice.

DL: I mean, all I could find, and again, I haven't done too much research into this, basically in a forward for a book – just listen to this title. The book is called Sex is a Parent Affair. I don't know. Dobson said that the Bible was silent on the subject and that some interpretations of Exodus 21 could suggest that a fetus was not regarded as a full human being. And so he was like, I'm neutral. 

However, we do know that if you are for sterilization, you're probably pro-abortion for non-white populations and for non-able-bodied people. So I just find this another example of him being so two-faced. He erased his entire relationship with Popenoe and the eugenicist movement, and later on in his career made this big show about calling Planned Parenthood a eugenics place.

Does that make sense? And it just infuriates me.

Krispin: Uh-huh. Right. Oh my God.

DL: Krispin! So that's annoying. So that's just one thing that he started to get involved in. But we have to talk about these organizations that he started, and there's too many to talk about. So I'm trying to conceptualize, how do I talk about this? How do I talk about this?

But the first one that he started after Focus on the Family was the Family Research Council, which he helped found in 1981. So the Family Research Council was basically like, we have to start to do things lobbying at the federal level for – basically they focus on anti-gay stuff. 

Right? Because that was starting to pick up some steam. Um, 

Krispin: You mean anti-gay legislation? 

DL: What did I say? 

Krispin: You said anti-gay stuff, which makes it sound like you're against gay stuff. 

DL: Well, he was, yes, that's true.

Krispin: Not gay people, but like gay stuff, like doing gay stuff, which is true. He was against doing gay stuff.

DL: I'm telling you what, I don't even know how to talk about this. But basically the Family Research Council was like, we're going to put out a lot of books and we're going to write academic papers to support anti-LGBT views, which then we can pass into laws. So this Family Research Council, they write all these model legislations, and then they created a family policy alliance that helps work with individual states to get these bills onto the floor, to get voted on and to get passed into legislation. 

Krispin: When you say model legislation, you mean like something where it's sort of like, here's the legislation and then on a local level, people can fill in the blanks and use it?

DL: Yeah. So here's a modern example of, again, they've been doing this since 1981, and you know, there's actually a few places you can Google, that are trying to do the work of showing every single bill they've been involved in. But I've yet to find one that actually shows every single one. But here's an example of a more recent one. 

So the Family Research Council proposed this legislation, they wrote it, called the Save Adolescents From Experimentation Act, the SAFE Act, which is about not providing gender affirming care to trans youth. They wrote that and then 34 states introduced a bill with that language modeling that bill they wrote in the the legislative season from 2021 to 2022. So that's just one example. Right.

Krispin: Yeah. They just like, they write it, their lawyers do all of that work and then they distribute it and then people adapt it to their local state.

DL: Yeah.  So in the eighties and nineties, they were really focused on trying to get gay marriage from being legalized. And in recent years, they've really gone hard after transgender youth in particular. And here's something that's really interesting. In 2022, the Pew Research Center found that roughly eight in 10 Americans believed that there's some discrimination against transgender people in American society.

And the survey also found that most Americans favor laws to protect trans people. But the survey also gave a clue why conservative Christians and Republicans have focused on high school athletes in many bills, because it said that about six in ten Americans favor requiring transgender athletes to compete on teams that match their sex at birth.

So this is just to show how intense this Family Research Council is. They are looking at what the statistics are saying and then they found there's this weak point, right? Where people are most likely to feel weird about trans athletes, which is why that's what they focus on, that they started doing all these bills about that.

Krispin: Right. Which is why it's become the national conversation. 

DL: And that's what I think people don't know. This is Dobson's doing. He started the Family Research Council. He started it. And they're the ones promoting the trans athlete panic because it was the weak link in people caring about human rights for a minority population.

So I'm starting to get so intense about it, but that's one example. Think about how many things they've been involved in. So the thing about the Family Research Council is that that's just the big nationwide one. Dobson then helped start them in basically 48 of the 50 states. If you're listening to this right now and you live in the United States, you can look up your state's Family Research Policy Council. They will probably boast about all the bills they are putting forth, all the ones they've won. And they're all going to be anti LGBTQ. 

And now anti-abortion because that's now happening again. So I just think people have no clue that Dobson is behind so much of this stuff. Do you want me to keep going? 

Krispin: Yes. 

The next big group – so those are the two big ones. Family Research Council, and then the family research policies for each state. I guess it's called the Family Policy Alliance. One more thing to say about those Family Policy Alliances. Here's another example of what happened in 2021. The Idaho Family Policy Center did not exist as an organization. But then less than a year later, it became an organization and it helped draft and push three of the biggest and most controversial pieces of legislation.

During the 2022 session, there was a bill banning most abortions in Idaho by allowing for civil lawsuits against medical providers, a bill making it a felony to provide gender care to a minor, and a bill holding librarians criminally accountable for children accessing obscene materials.

Krispin: Whoa. Mm-hmm

DL: I mean. That's one state, right? Think about what these places are doing in your state, what they have already accomplished, and that is due to Dobson. 

So then in 1994, they really focused on, we have to go to the Supreme Court. We need, first of all, we need to work to stack the Supreme Court in our favor. We need to challenge it. So six conservative men, one of whom was Dobson., they founded the Alliance Defending Freedom. This group advocates for the criminalization of homosexuality in the US and abroad. And at this point, they claim to have been involved in 47 legal victories at the Supreme Court.

And they claim to have over 3000 affiliated attorneys across the country. So this is the legal defense fund that Dobson has raised millions and millions of dollars for, and promotes. They're the famous ones that helped the baker won't bake a cake for a gay couple thing, you know?

Krispin: Yeah.

DL: It's hard to express how much damage the ADF has done. So remember the A DF, remember these organizations, um. Those are three big ones. I have asked people to help me research this because again, there's no one article you can go to in order to see every single piece of legislation that has been touched by Dr. James Dobson.

Krispin: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

DL: But there's hundreds and hundreds of them. You can look into that. He's also been a part of so many of the different organizations that are on the board of Project 2025. I also had people help me create a document with that. We can link in the show notes. It's so overwhelming the amount of places he either helped start, he helped fund, they helped fund him. And they're getting what they want right now. And, again, Dobson is at the core of it.

Anything else you want to say before I move on?

Krispin: No, I think that, I think for me that was– I feel like Baptist News Global as in article at one point saying, hey, all these, uh, anti-trans bills, they’re not just spontaneously—

DL: Coming out of nowhere.

Krispin: Right. Yeah.

DL: It’s like a cut and paste format, honestly. And they're winning. So we mentioned briefly, Dobson isn't just involved in shaping American politics, but he is also involved in shaping it globally. And so there's this really interesting article that I found talking about Dobson's global influence and, this is by these Russian academics who are looking at, how did this language of family values and a culture war help elect Putin. Which kind of ended any democratic future in Russia right? In the eighties and nineties. 

And so, it talks about how the first contact between Russia and Focus on the Family goes back to the late 1980s. And it is talking about the Russian academic community reached out to James Dobson, was like, can you come and teach us about these culture war tactics you've used to get people elected into power? And he was like, sure. And so basically he served as a consultant to these academics and to eventually Putin's team.

And was like, just go full bore on the family values. Make queer people the scapegoat, make outsiders the scapegoat, you know? That got Putin elected and the rest is history, unfortunately.

Krispin: Wow. Yeah. And I am certain nobody – not nobody, now a lot of people know – but who knew that Dobson was part of Putin getting elected?

I mean, are we surprised? 

Krispin: No. 

The religious right I think is often like, I bet there's up to some something nefarious over there, but I'm like, yeah, you can trace it to Dobson. There's also, there was this article that came out actually just a few months ago in The Republic and it's called How Defending African Values Masks a New Colonization. And it talks about how those three groups, I just told you, that Dobson started, they've been really important in both Uganda and Kenya for helping, again, these culture war values.

And they claim their African values to be anti-LGBTQ plus. Then they get these far right people elected in these countries. And we know, Focus on the Family is involved in this, the Heritage Foundation, but it's also, they named these three organizations that Dobson started. So I, I just think these things are everywhere.

It's a playbook. It's a playbook at this point to amassing cultural power and to getting authoritarians elected. And guess what? Once they're elected, do they leave?

Krispin: The pattern is no.

DL: The pattern is no, unless we make them. So let's keep that in mind too, y'all. Obviously Dobson has been involved in the attack on trans people. What other things? He has ties to Blackwater and Betsy DeVos. I mean, there's too many conspiracies to go down.

Krispin: Right.

DL: And I can't do that. But again, I want to just reiterate, all of these things that he runs are nonprofits. All of them are non-taxed. He also served on a tax advisory council for Reagan, by the way.

Krispin: Right. So, wait. Pause there for a minute. What you're saying is that someone with their doctorate in psychology, and who focused on pediatrics was a consultant on tax code? 

DL: Yeah. And then all of his hate-filled organizations that have changed the course of American politics and ruined my childhood were tax free thanks to his work with Reagan.

Krispin: I often think about how Focus on the Family is located in Colorado Springs but I think it is currently classified as a church so it doesn't pay any taxes. 

DL: Yeah. Oh, they are a church. Krispin. They meet once a week to pray and sing songs to their despicable little God.

Krispin: And in the last 10 years or so, at one point Colorado Springs shut down its parks and lights because they didn't have enough public funding. While Focus on the Family was located there, funneling millions of dollars through their organization that did not – I mean, I come from a small town that was nationally known for, between raising taxes or shutting down the library, they chose to shut down the library. 

DL: Good old Roseburg!

Krispin: Right. And I feel like Colorado Springs has those same sort of political leanings. So it's not a surprise, but it's just wild. 

DL: Yeah. And in the very last part of his career, he left Focus on the Family. He stepped down because he was getting too political even for that. And then that's when he started focusing on all these other groups and he started James Dobson’s Family Talk. So he continued to have influence, but even Focus on the Family was like…

Krispin: Well, I don’t know if it was…I think it was that, but I think it was also that he was limited…

DL: In what he could do. 

Krispin: In what he could do because of what nonprofits are allowed to do and not allowed to do,

DL: But they've gotten away with so much. I find that to be a flimsy argument. Also I think he was a, a horrible person and so people were maybe ready for him to move on. But I'm just going to rapid fire a few quick last things to keep in mind about James Dobson being the worst.

He was very anti- climate change, and very anti- talking about humans having any responsibility in climate change. So let's keep that in mind as we're living through climate catastrophe right now. 

Dobson was a member of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, which I don't know if listeners are aware, but in 1997, Dobson got really upset because he heard that the NIV version of the Bible was going to include some gender neutral language.

So Dobson called a meeting at Focus on the Family and got all these influential men, and he was like, we can't have this happen. And so that's when the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood was started. That's when they started this committee to require Bible translations to use male default language.

And then they like helped promote the ESV, which when I was going to Bible college, that was the thing everybody was reading. Dobson started that too. 

Krispin: And for people that don't know, the ESV was specifically translated with a bias to uphold patriarchy. 

DL: Male supremacy. Yes. Um, so that came out of that, we haven't even talked about this, but Focus on the Family established an ex-gay program called Love Won Out in 1988. So it's conversion therapy. Dobson has a long history of being obsessed with conversion therapy which actually started out as autistic conversion therapy. Dobson took those principles and actually met with the founder of it and used those for gay people. Both are horrible. Obviously conversion therapy of any kind is horrible. And Dobson was a huge proponent of bringing that to United States and making it popular. 

So, I don't know. I'm kind of at my end of my rant today. There's so much more to say. If I got anything wrong or if you think I got it wrong, you can try researching. If there's any autistics out there who want to help me, you can email me at strongwilledproject@gmail.com.Right? Is that the email? 

Krispin: Yep!

DL: And I can give you some tasks! Because I would like to continue to work towards getting some sort of article or some sort of resource where we amass all of the political lobbying efforts Dobson has been behind, just so that people can see what he's involved in.

Now I want to end it with this question.

Krispin: Okay.

DL: I'm going to ask you and then I'm going to answer it myself. Do you think Dobson was an evil genius? Some sort of mastermind? Like, what do you think is going on here with all of this information that I just vomited out here, which you've heard me talk about obviously for the past three years. What do you think?

Krispin: I really don't know. I mean, I tend to think that he's relentless. I also think that there's this element of like, when people start with a level of privilege and power, like he did, right? He got to this point where he had a big audience. And once you have a big audience, you can convert that into lots of different power, even if you're not very smart or like, not very like strategic. You know, there's just like the blunt force of it. 

DL: Yeah. Yeah. I think he was relentless. I think he was abused by both of his parents. I think that he doesn't appear to be – he’s not a good writer, I'll tell you that. But yeah, he never stopped. He just never ever stopped. Which I think is interesting. There are just a lot of authoritarians who are like that. They will not stop unless they are stopped. 

So I think that's what I want to keep in mind. I don't think he was a genius. I think he was strategic. I think he was very invested in the white supremacist patriarchy and he never let go of that. And I think he's kind of the story of the last century in America, because he had a two-pronged approach and one was abusing children so that they were more susceptible to embrace and accept authoritarian rule, and then he went about implementing authoritarian rule through his policies and through his political activism. 

So I think that's a big deal. I think it's a big story. I don't want to give him too much, like, intellectual credit. But that's why I wanted to make this series. That's why I've been obsessed with Dobson, is because he deserves this look as an influential person. And he influenced us on a personal level and on a political level. 

And I'm here to be his worst nightmare by telling the truth about him, his ideology, and just how much harm he has done. And he's never been held accountable for it. I mean, he died a month ago. And boy, howdie, were the praise is rolling in, you know?

Krispin: Mm-hmm.

DL: So I just think we do what we can. Going back to how we were parented, the best thing we can do is try to get in touch with and reclaim that strong will that was beaten and shamed out of us, and continue to be in touch with that as we have to live in the world that Dobson created. And it's not a world I want for my kids. It's not a world I want for my neighbors. It's not a world I want for me. I want a world that is actually a democracy. Right? Wouldn't that be cool? 

He obviously hated it. And again, his authoritarianism comes out even in his approach to, to politics. I will write these policies, you all just implement them. We can change people because they're gullible, they're sheep, you find their weak points and you pressure that, and you just flood the zone with endless radio programs, endless books, you know? 

And I'm like, sure, he won in some ways. And yet there's people like us, there's people who listen to our podcast, he didn't get us all. And there's actually so many Americans who are waking up to this reality of having been played by these men who were hypocrites, possibly pedophiles, but who truly abused people left and right and did not care.

Krispin: Mm-hmm. 

DL: And I guess that's how I want to end it, is if you care about children, if you care about children flourishing, if you care about children being protected from serial predators, if you care about children not being bullied for their gender expression or sexuality or race, this is our time to stand up to the bullies in our life who listen to Dobson and agreed with him. 

It could be your parents, it could be your faith community, it could be Facebook friends, could be people on your local city council. They're coming for us all. And if we don't stand up to them in whatever ways we can, because not everybody can do everything, they won't be stopped. So I don't know. That's how I want to end this. Do you have anything to say, Krispin? 

Krispin: Yeah, I totally, totally agree. And, yeah, I don't even know how to make sense of Dobson’s legacy. But it really sucks where we're at right now, and I also do have hope that we're going to shift things and work towards equal human rights for everyone. Because that really is the core. 

DL: That's just the core of it. All we want is equal rights for human dignity. 

Krispin: I was going to say that's the core of what Dobson fought against. 

DL: I know. It really was. And if you're having trouble with your evangelical parents, that's probably the core of it. They probably don't actually view all humans as being worthy of dignity and food and safety. So I don't really know how you overcome that gap, but I do believe in those things. And actually that is what is at the core of my strong will is my belief in human rights for all. And my belief in democracy. And Dobson found that so dangerous he had to write an entire book telling parents how to beat and punish their child who had access to that strong will. So that's the best defense we have, right?

Krispin: Yep.

DL: Is to keep developing that. Get in touch with your autonomy. Do not obey in advance. Right? 

Krispin: Mm-hmm. 

DL: That goes without saying. And thanks for listening to this. If you found it helpful at all, please share it. Please share it on social media. You can support our work financially. You can support our work emotionally, you know, by commenting or reaching out. If you support us on Patreon, you get access to our really cool Discord plus some fun bonus podcast features. Yeah, thanks for being here. Thanks for letting me present my – what is this? 

Krispin: Thank you for, I mean this is years of work and research and connecting with people, so also thanks to all the folks that have helped us in this research. 

DL: Yes. 

Krispin: And when I say us, I really mean you. You have just like put so much energy and effort into this and I'm really grateful for that.

DL: Aw, thanks. Thanks to everyone who's helped me with my little research parts. And I don’t know, this is a community led project. This is survivor led. It's for survivors of these religious authoritarian parenting methods and unfortunately, I'm like, is all of America now a survivor of religious authoritarian parenting methods? You know?

Krispin: Feels like it.

DL: Well, so we're going to keep going. We're going to keep doing our thing. Thanks for your support, and I guess we'll catch you on the next episode. Yeah, we will be back soon and we will be digging a little bit deeper into some of the stuff that we covered briefly in this. So be on the lookout for that. We're not exactly sure when that's coming, but it is coming. And in the meantime, we really appreciate your support and for listening. Bye!

DL: Thank you, bye!

James Dobson’s Worst Nightmare Part 1

A history of James Dobson, his eugenic beginnings, his work on the Meese Commission, and how he ushered in religious authoritarianism in the US

Welcome to STRONGWILLED, the multimedia project aimed at helping survivors of religious authoritarian parenting methods develop autonomy and find solidarity.

TW: eugenics, racism, forced sterilization, gendered violence, child abuse, child sexual abuse materials, and homophobia/conversion therapy.

This episode, DL gives an overview of the beginning of Dobson’s career prior to founding Focus on the Family, including his eugenicist beginnings and the ways he ushered in the religious authoritarianism we’re living under right now.

TRANSCRIPT

DL:  Hello and welcome to a very special edition of the STRONGWILLED Podcast. Today we are doing part one of James Dobson's Worst Nightmare. That's right. That's me. I am James Dobson's Worst Nightmare. And today I'm going to make all of you his worst nightmare too, just by giving you information about this wretched, wretched man. Krispin, it's been one month since Dr. Dobson died. Do you think that has encouraged me or discouraged me from becoming an expert on every wretched thing he did?

Krispin: It's hard to say 'cause you've been doing this for a long time. So I feel like your passion is at 100 and nothing could have, you know–

DL: It's been 100 for a bit.

Krispin: It's been 100 forever. So his death doesn't necessarily increase or decrease that. Because it just is. It's just a fiery, burning passion inside of you.

DL: Yeah. That's so accurate. I feel exactly the same about James Dobson in life and in death. Of course I was excited he died. Now I feel a little bit more like, well, he can't sue me. So I guess that's good, but I've just been on this slow, seemingly endless treadmill of finding out information about Dobson that is not widely known and trying to communicate it through our STRONGWILLED project. 

So most of what I'm sharing today in this podcast, you can find sprinkled throughout our chapters on strongwilled dot substack dot com. So if any of this is interesting, most of it's going to be in there. I'm going to dive a little deeper into some of it, but it's time. It's time to become his worst nightmare. And how would you describe being James Dobson's worst nightmare? What does that mean to you, Krispin?

Krispin: To make your own choices and refuse to fall into the Christian, patriarchal, racial hierarchy that he fought his whole life to uphold. 

DL: Yeah. I mean, there's two ways we can look at it. One is, we can think about what he hated. And what Dobson hated was people having autonomy, and he hated democracy. He hated democracy, especially in an increasingly diverse United States.

Krispin: Yes. 

DL: Okay. What did he love? 

Krispin: Authoritarianism. 

DL: Well, he loved white people, man. He loved white men. And so he was sort of projecting into the future if he's living in this multicultural, diverse United States in the 1960s where people are getting more rights. He was like, but I really love white men, and I only want them to be in power.

So how do we kind of future-cast? How do we get white men back into the position of power that they so rightfully deserve? He, like many authoritarians, believes that humans are inherently weak, stupid, and need to be controlled. And they need to be controlled by who God says should control them, which as you know, God said, white, American men should control everyone. I mean, that's all over the scriptures, really.  

Krispin: Right, exactly. And it's such a burden on these men that have to lead and have to control everyone. Like a goose at the start of a vee – I don't know how to say that. We're going to cut that. 

DL: Don’t cut it. Yes, today I'm actually channeling some of the energy of James Dobson. I'm wearing some clothes I feel like he would wear, just to really get into character about this man who I personally believe has done so much to influence American culture and American politics.

And unfortunately, American politics are even now influencing the world, especially with the rise of authoritarianism that has been fueled by all this public rhetoric around focusing on the Christian heteronormative white family and building that up. So are you ready, Krispin? 

Krispin: Yes. Yeah. What is your plan today? 

DL: My plan today is to start off with where Dobson was educated, where he got so many of his ideas, and go from there. We're going to look at his first two books in particular. Then we're going to have to take a break because there's lots more coming up. But that's what this first part is going to be about. 

One of the reasons why I think this is so important is because James Dobson has done so much to erase one particular part of his history. So that's where we're going to camp out a little bit today. I'm excited! Are you excited to talk about eugenics? Dobson loved eugenics. So we gotta talk about it.

Krispin: I'm excited to talk about Dobson's connection to eugenics. For the record, I'm never excited to talk about Eugenics. 

DL: Okay. Caveat, this podcast is not pro-eugenics.

Krispin: Yes. Okay.

DL: I’m excited to expose these rat bastards that were obsessed with it. Okay?

Krispin: Yes, great. Okay.

DL: So that’s what we're going to do. 

Krispin: You asked me, are you excited to talk about eugenics? And I'm like, I do not want this clip taken out of context! Let me be really clear.

DL: The superior race is dwindling, Krispin! What must we do? Okay. The reason why I think it's so important to talk about eugenics is because, again, that has been erased from this conversation, and yet it is the bedrock of everything Dobson did, everything he wrote, the way he structured his organization. And people are very unwilling to see that. 

However, I would say the current Trump administration, especially with the Minister of Health, they're going full blown eugenics. So I think, again, it's an interesting time to look back at these roots. So are you ready to start?

Krispin: Right. So, ready. 

DL: Okay. You can help me with this first part, because before we get to where he was educated and who he studied under and all that, we have to talk about the thing that nobody wants to talk about, which is thinking about how we ourselves were parented, right?

That's what STRONGWILLED is about. That is something it's hard for people to do. Dobson tried to come to terms with his own childhood throughout his writings. What do you remember? What do you recall from us having to read his books over and over again? What did he say about his mom and dad?

What do you remember? 

Krispin: I remember very little about his dad. I remember that his mom was violent towards him.

DL: No, no, no, no, no. She was the best, most godly Christian woman that ever existed, Krispin. 

Krispin: And that meant that she loved him. 

DL: Yeah. Okay. You're right on. Dobson's dad was a Nazarene minister, like a traveling minister. So Dobson didn't see his dad that often. And I think there's even parts where he wasn't with his mom, he was just, like, hanging with relatives. So the ministry was the most important thing, right? 

Krispin: Mm-hmm. 

DL: But he only said positive things about his dad, even though much of his early career was about, dads, you need to be present with your kids. So that's interesting. 

Krispin: Right? Uh huh. Sounds, sounds a little personal, Dobson! 

DL: His dad was great! Okay? But he talked a bit more about his mom. And he dedicated a lot of his books to his mom, which is interesting.

Krispin: My favorite dedication is the–

DL: We're going to get into that already?

Krispin: If it’s alright.

DL: Okay. Well, you can share about that in one second. First we need to talk about the premier story that Dobson shares about his mother. Now, he doesn't write about it so much in his first book, Dare to Discipline, but he does write about it in his second bestselling book for children – I mean, parenting children – called The Strong-Willed Child. So I'll share the story about his mom and then you can read the dedication to his mom after I share. Does that sound good? 

Krispin: Yes. Sounds great. 

DL: Okay. So, in The Strong-Willed Child, Dobson talks about, his mom hated sass. She hated backtalk. And I believe when he was 12, he backtalked to her, meaning she told him to do something, he didn’t immediately comply. And it sounds like she had hit him before, obviously. He was aware of this. And he was like, I didn't make the right calculations, so I was within hitting distance. She grabs a girdle. An old-school, women's undergarment full of leather straps and belt buckles, and just smacks him with this girdle.

Krispin: It’s sort of symbolic. 

DL: Is it??

Krispin: In the sense of, if we think about the girdle as, like, the way that the patriarchy puts all these constraints on women. And she hits him with it. Sorry, you asked for my help interpreting this first story. Think about the patriarchy that Dobson has perpetuated throughout his life. And then think about this story. 

DL: Yes. Shirley Dobson was a victim of the patriarchy, so she used her intense, corset-girdle-underwear to physically hurt her 12-year-old son. Other authors, you know, not I have really mentioned how weird that could be if you're a 12-year-old boy and your mother is inflicting pain on you with something full of leather and straps and related to women's undergarments. And that becomes this like formative experience for you that you then write books about.

Who knows, who knows? But obviously this stuck with him and how he ends the story is like, then I realized if I was going to sass her, I needed to be even farther away from her. Again, setting up this like, kids want to push their parents to hurt them because they actually want to know their parents love them enough to punish them.

So that's like what he tells that story of, and to glorify his mom. Now, Krispin, do you want to read the dedication to his mother in this book? 

Krispin: Yes, I do. 

DL: Okay. I can hand this to you. 

Krispin: “This book is affectionately dedicated to my own late mother, who is blessed with a brilliant understanding of children. She intuitively grasped the meaning of discipline and taught me many of the principles I've described on the following pages. And of course, she did an incredible job raising me, as everyone can plainly see today. But I've always been puzzled by one troubling question. Why did my fearless mother become such a permissive pushover the moment we made her a grandmother?”

DL: Ahahaha! She became a permissive pushover the second she became a grandmother. Yes. Thank you, Krispin, what's your favorite part of that acknowledgement? 

Krispin: I like that he basically says, she was a great mother, as evidenced by how amazing of a person I am. 

DL: That's it. Dobson was like, my mother had an intuitive grasp of how to raise a child. The evidence is that you can plainly see, I am amazing. Like that's it. That's the introduction. 

Krispin: Yeah. Right.

DL: So that’s Dobson. That's his psyche going into writing these parenting books. Now, before he started writing these parenting books, he went to school. You know, people love to be like, stop calling him Dr. Dobson. But he was a doctor. He did get his graduate degree in child psychology and child development.

Krispin: Right, I mean, he is a psychologist. Like, there are some people that get their PhDs, but [he’s a PsyD which includes residency]. He has the [arguably] the highest level of training in psychology. 

DL: Yeah. So that's why I'm like, he was a doctor. He liked to really boast and brag that he knew about child development. Even though his parenting methods contradicted so much of what child development was saying at that time, which we've talked about in our project.

Krispin: He literally says, I like to ignore the data.

DL: Yeah. So he studied and he rejected much of what he was learning. Now, of course, higher education in the late 1960s is going to be such a mixed bag, as we will actually get into, but his book, really his first book, Dare to Discipline, he's like, this is in rebuttal to Doctor Spock, and permissive parenting, which we'll get into in a little bit, why he hated that so, so, so much. 

But he did have these degrees. He had these prominent positions at the University of Southern California Medical School. He worked in pediatrics. And he really liked to boast about having these titles working in these prestigious places. He worked at the Los Angeles Children's Hospital. He had all of these positions of prominence.

Krispin: Which is really interesting for those of us that grew up evangelical, where, you know, you have people that are in this church or in this ministry or whatever, Dobson was interacting with the broader world. And like you said, given these positions of prominence in psychology in California. 

DL: Yeah. Yeah. So he was living in California at the time. Now California has a really interesting role, I believe in where America is today. We like to think of California as being very progressive. Lots of shit was going down in California in the 1960s. And that is actually where Dobson ended up going to work when he graduated. He started working for a man named Paul Popenoe at the American Institute of Family Relations. So Paul Popenoe, we did a whole chapter on him and, I'm sorry, but we gotta talk about him.

We gotta talk about him. I had a really hard time, when I was writing my chapter on Popenoe, finding actual quantifiable information about Dobson's relationship with Popenoe. Now, I was able to find a few clippings. There's a really great article by Audrey Claire Farley, where she talks about the connection, but there wasn't a ton of – you know, I love my artifacts, right?

Krispin: Right. 

DL: There wasn't a ton of, like, proof of how close this relationship was. Now, some of the proof we have is like in the original Dare to Discipline book, Popenoe writes the foreword and is like, this is great, this is what we need. But there's actually lots more proof than that. But before we get to all that, we have to talk about Popenoe and his belief system. Because the truth is Dobson worked for Popenoe for 10 years, held high up positions, and was mentored by him. Uh, Popenoe retired. 

Popenoe retired from his long career in 1976. In 1977, James Dobson started Focus on the Family and modeled it exactly after Popenoe’s American Institute of Family Relations, except he added Christianity. To be more prominent. Christianity was always a little bit a part of AIFR.

Okay, I'm going to be so mean to you. What do eugenists believe, Krispin? 

Krispin: Typically that white races, ethnicities, I don't know what the right term is, are superior and better, and usually should control, but control through majority is my guess. I guess it's not even necessarily about control or power, it's  that those races should be promoted. Right? Propagated?

DL: Yeah. Right. Propagated. I mean, Popenoe did get his start looking at how to create the best dates you can eat. The fruit, dates. Then he went on to people. By the way, he had no higher education really. He went to college for three years and then dropped out. 

Krispin: Oh my God. 

DL: And that's it, bud. And we'll get into how upsetting that is later. So this is sort of how others, especially people in the marriage and therapy world, are trying to now reckon with the roots of eugenics being at the heart of, you know, marriage and family counseling.

Krispin: Right. Yeah. I want to dip in there because, yes, I grew up evangelical, influenced by Dobson. When I trace that back, I get to Popenoe. I also am a couples therapist. And Popenoe really is like the grandfather of couples therapy. And really it was not to help relationships get better or for people to be healthier, but to maintain marriages where white people would have more kids. 

DL: Yeah. And it's even a little bit more than that, but this is how people now would characterize eugenics. They believed that the population of healthy white people was declining and that undesirable people were reproducing at a higher rate.

So there were two ways that they wanted to go about fixing that. The first way is forcible sterilization. And again, these are all white pseudo-academics. So that was their whole thing, let's forcibly sterilize the undesirable population. 

Krispin: Mm-hmm. Wow. 

DL: However, we do see that with the Third Reich and the Nazi regime, they took it a step further to say, we actually need to exterminate undesirable people. So before we got to that extermination line, there was the forced sterilization route. Now, Popenoe was obsessed with forced sterilization. That was, like, all of his early work. Hmm. Again, this is in our chapter nine of our STRONGWILLED project. But Popenoe literally wrote the book called Sterilization for Human Betterment.

Krispin: Wow. 

DL: He wrote that book, which, guess what? The Nazis fricking loved it. So they used that as they were planning, because they also started with forced sterilization before moving on to the extermination phase. 

Not only did the Nazis love this book and quote it extensively but, Popenoe, even in the 1930s, wrote this whole paper called the German Sterilization Law, where he just waxes poetic about how incredible the Nazi party is, how amazing Hitler was. This was like Hitler's first year. And he was like, their plan is to forcibly sterilize 400,000 people in one year alone. Like, this is incredible. And, California, we need to do this. That's what he was writing his whole paper about.

So he was in charge of trying to move the needle for how to do this. And then he also said in this paper, which is very fascinating, he said, even though Hitler's a bachelor, which is bad because he's white, he should be married and having kids, he does focus so much on telling white German women to marry, stay at home, have kids, raise those kids to perpetuate the race. He's like, that's amazing. That's also eugenics, and that is so important moving forward.

I just feel like maybe we should sit with that for a little bit. I just feel like the entire history of forced sterilization in the United States is also not talked about. From 1907 to 1960, over 65,000 people were forcibly sterilized in the United States. Would you like to guess what populations were forcibly sterilized? There’s three populations that were the highest.

Krispin: I was thinking of Black folks, Latina, Latino folks,  and I don't know. 

DL: Indigenous people. Yeah. Those were the three groups. I'm sorry, this is really heavy stuff. And Popenoe was involved in all of that. And I believe one third of all sterilizations in the United States happen in California. 

Krispin: Hmm. Mm-hmm.

DL: And these are when Popenoe’s living there, writing these things. And actually there's a few more connections to that that we'll get into in a minute. According to Popenoe’s son, David Popenoe, he said that by his dad's estimate of who is undesirable in the United States, 10 million Americans ought to have been sterilized. 

Krispin: Wow. 

DL: So this is the guy that trained Dr. James Dobson. Now, Popenoe opened his American Institute of Family Relations in Los Angeles in 1930. By the 1940s and when everything came out about the Holocaust and how eugenics had been taken to this extermination level, he was like, oop, I guess we can't talk about that anymore. We have to go underground.

So he decided to do the other thing Hitler did, which is focus on positive eugenics. How do you get white American women to marry white men?

Krispin: I thought you're going to say focus on the family. 

DL: He started Focus on the Family. Yeah. Again, according to his son David, his dad was such a misogynist that he was like, his father expected women to get married and become stay at home servants. And their main value was to uphold and promote the man, have a bunch of kids and then discipline their kids. 

And so later on is when Dobson came in and was like, I actually have a lot of ideas about discipline. And so for the very tail end of Popenoe's career, he and Dobson kind of pioneered, how do we discipline kids? Because in the 1960s – 1967 is when Dobson first started working for Popenoe – is when, we talk about this a lot in our project, the white kids were wilding out, according to Dobson. Right? What does he say? He's like, they're protesting Vietnam. They need to be disciplined.

And so he was like, I have this method. And Popenoe was like, this is great. Like thanks for quantifying it right into these books. Into these materials. Here's how you discipline in such a way where kids will be obedient to their white mothers and fathers and perpetuate the norms. Anything you wanna jump in and say? 

Krispin: I think what's wild about this is if you grew up evangelical, which I know many of you listening did, you just had no idea about this. Dobson's history here. He's just the soothing voice on the radio, which I know we'll talk about in a minute. But yeah, it's just wild to hear all of this and hear his history. 

DL: Yeah, and I think obviously our work focuses a lot on these parenting methods, which we will dive into. But also there's such this running undercurrent of women, of wanting to subjugate women and trying to coerce women into signing up for a lifetime of servitude and second class citizenship, and Popenoe was really big into this stuff. 

In 1942, Popenoe wrote, “The future uncertainties are one of the strongest reasons why people who can give children a good start in life should do so right now”. And he said, women who choose to go to college rather than to start a family early, were destined for trouble. “Girls who go to college often try to assert their individuality in marriage. As a result, the divorce rate is four times higher than that of college men.” 

So this is just even in the forties. They're like, if women can go to college, and divorce... And this is before no fault divorce, right? That happened in 1969, right? 

Krispin: Yeah, I mean, in Dare to Discipline, he has this chapter called A Moment for Mom or A Minute for Mom or something. And it really, when you talk about that idea of being a servant, that fits, because he says things like, yeah, the mother should have a couple of hours on a weekend to go work out at the gym. You know? It feels very much like, yeah, the servants should have an afternoon to themselves.  

DL: The servants should–! Okay, this is how Popenoe describes how housewives should be: “subservient, affectionate, sexy, and domestic.” 

Krispin: Wow. 

DL: Does that sound fun? I mean, I guess to some people, but not to me. Now Dobson was first employed as a marriage counselor at Popenoe’s institute, and that was from 1967 and 1968. And I actually had a person reach out to me who did their own independent investigation of Dobson's connection to Popenoe because they come from a Nazarene background and they were just very interested.

They went to the Popenoe archives, which are located in Laramie, Wyoming. Took a bunch of pics, sent me this information, and so we can prove that he worked for Popenoe for 10 years. Now, some of the files and everything are missing, especially the years that Dobson was this marriage counselor. And this is what my source told me.

It says that, “Those files were destroyed in 1974. The story broke in 1974 of the USC Medical Center where Dobson was working.” I guess Popenoe had a connection there. “There was a forced sterilization of undocumented Hispanic women from 1968 to 1974. In that same year Popenoe and his institute destroyed all their case files from 1930 through 1968, and that is 100,000 files.”

Is that a coincidence? 

Krispin: Wow. It's also, let's see, 68 to 74. I mean, currently you're supposed to keep records for seven years.

DL: But to destroy all their case files from 1930 to 1968, this is officially conspiracy territory, and this source told me nobody's looked into it. You know? 

Krispin: Mm-hmm. Exactly.

DL: It's just like, oops, we only have the files from 1974 on.  So that’s really wild to me. There is a documentary made about these forced sterilizations of undocumented Hispanic women called, No Más Bebés, that PBS aired that has some of this information, but obviously doesn't talk about Dobson.

So I just think this is a part of American history, it's a part of Dobson's history, and because it's a part of Dobson's history, it's a part of our history. Right? 

Krispin: Mm-hmm. Right.

DL:  If we were raised under his books. But to be doing that kind of work to be involved in that kind of work, I think is chilling. I think it's totally chilling. 

Krispin: Yeah. It’s horrific.

DL: Now, it isn't just about race for these motherfuckers. It's about, to promote the white race, you have to promote heterosexuality. To promote the patriarchy, you have to promote an intense gender binary. Right?

Krispin: Right. Mm-hmm.

DL: Again, there's like, white people should control others, but it's really only white men. But the white women can help them do that for more privilege, you know what I mean? 

Krispin: Right. 

DL: So this means that very early on, Dobson was very much against the gays, and was very much wishing and hoping they could continue to be categorized as deviant. These are obviously the undesirables that Dobson and Popenoe wanted sterilized, possibly exterminated. 

And actually, when the APA, the American Psychological Association, depathologized homosexuality in 1973, Dobson resigned in protest. And that's when he started really removing himself from all of these other institutes, because they wouldn't say that it was a mental disorder to be gay. 

I don't know if you have any thoughts on that. 

Krispin: One thought I had is, I don't think it matters why you're homophobic. If you're homophobic, that's problematic. But recognizing, like for Dobson, of course he used Christianity as an excuse, but really it was the eugenics behind it. 

DL: Yeah. Well, and authoritarianism hates queer people. Because it actually breaks apart these binaries of control. And so that's always been a part of it.

Krispin: Right. Mm-hmm.

DL: Now, Dobson didn't really… I mean, he does obviously talk about that stuff in his books, but it has really only ramped up, this obsession with trans people, in the past few decades. But in the beginning, Dobson was basically like, yeah, you gotta just train your kids to be heterosexual, obviously. So here's how you do that. 

Krispin: Which was how he made sense of – he knew that they queer people existed, and he didn't even go the route of like, it's because of abuse or something. He's like, you have to actively make sure that your kid is heterosexual. Which is just a wild take and, you know, really sad to think about. I know so many people that are listening grew up with parents that took advice from Dobson. 

DL: Yeah. Yeah. I think, you know, maybe we can talk about these two books, and then we can end part one. But before we do that, I think we have to talk about how popular these books and talks Dobson gave were.

Again, he was working for Popenoe at the time. He started kind of making the lecture circuit talking about two things. Actually, three. One was, Where's Dad?, telling fathers to be more involved in their child's life. Another was called Dare to Discipline where he outlined the importance of using corporal punishment to punish your child every time they asserted their will against you. Starting when they're 15 months old, I believe. 

Krispin: Yeah.

DL: And then the third talk he gave was called The Strong-Willed Child, which is about, there's some kids who this corporal punishment doesn't actually work on. They continue to defy. So how do you kind of single them out, target them and, and punish them more. 

So those are like the bread and butter. They started to become very popular. He filmed them, they sent them out to schools, to police stations, to churches, 

Krispin: To prisons? 

DL: I believe to prisons. So these were videotaped and they were seen by anywhere from 80 to 100 million people in the 1980s alone. Which was one third of the American population at that time. 

Krispin: Wow. 

DL: Now I think that's really important to remember. Oh my gosh. Now, by the time you and I were a little older, Focus on the Family, the organization that he started that kept promoting these ideas and packaging them in all these different ways, they had an audience of around 200 million people in the early two thousands. So that's a huge block of voters, if I'm being perfectly honest, that Dobson eventually became very interested, partly because of a snub from Jimmy Carter, in how to mobilize his huge audience for political favor for him.

But in the beginning, he wasn't that politically active, he was more interested in the positive eugenics approach. How do you change culture by getting white women to marry white men and have a bunch of kids.

Krispin: Yeah. Totally. And I think that in a lot of ways, that is the foundation of his whole work. It continued throughout. 

DL: Yeah. And I think today, looking at where we're at in America with our authoritarian leader, you could find a lot of this in here. In fact, in, Dare to Discipline, this is what Dobson writes, he says, 

“During the 1950s, we saw the predominance of a happy theory called permissive democracy. This philosophy minimized parental obligations to control their children, in some cases, making mom and dad feel that all forms of punishment were harmful and unfair.” He then says, “Is it merely coincidental that the generation raised during this era has grown up to challenge every form of authority that confronts it? I think not.” 

So he's very upfront in the fact that democracy is not for him. Democracy is not for the Christian, honestly. Right?

Krispin: Right. I mean in, The Strong-Willed Child, he talks about his hamster–

DL: Oh his animal anecdotes are out of hand.

Krispin: Yes. But I think this is such a good picture of how he thinks about humans and thinks politically. Basically he's like, my hamster wants to get out of the cage, but if I let my hamster get out of the cage, my dog will eat it. And so I need to keep the hamster in the cage for his own good. And we all are like hamsters. We all need to be controlled and caged and we shouldn't have actual freedom. 

DL: Yeah. So white supremacist, patriarchal control freaks, they hate democracy. I hope we're all aware of that by now. 

Krispin: I mean, even in the most recent season of Shiny Happy People, there's this clip of him in there saying, “We are trying to cut out low information voters,” is what he calls them.

Yeah. So basically, he's like, yeah, there are certain people that should call the shots that should not be democratic. 

DL: Yeah. I think he's very anti-democracy and always has been. And actually we've seen that theme again and again in these religious authoritarian parenting books, where they straight up say that.

And so, for them, it really begins in the home. If you wanna train someone to live in an authoritarian country, in an authoritarian state, and to not make a fuss about it, you better beat that into their little bones. Like that's the whole thing. That's what Dare to Discipline is. And I feel like so many people are unwilling to see that it is a political white supremacist, patriarchal movement aimed at controlling children so they will grow up to be adults who don't resist being controlled by their white Christian male leaders.

Krispin: Right. Yeah. Totally. 

DL: That's it. That's it. So that's what the book is about. Now, the nitty gritty of it is, you know, Dobson was like, you can't just hit kids. And you can't be super rageful when you do it, or else they just become rebellious. 

Krispin: They write you off. 

DL: They write you off. It doesn't work. So he came up with what we have termed, like a ritualized spanking method. Do you wanna kind of explain what that is real quick?

Krispin: Yeah. Basically it's, for one, it is whenever your child in your perspective defies you, and even if the child sees it differently, if you perceive it as them trying to defy you, you need to respond. But you do it calmly, you theoretically take them to another place. You explain to them, this is what you did wrong. This is why God wants me to punish you. 

This is why it's important that I hit you after you disobey me. Then you hit the kid and then you hug them and tell them how much you love them. So the phrase that comes to mind for me is emotional manipulation. On top of corporal punishment.

DL: Yeah. So Dobson was very clear. You have to hurt your child, enough where they cry, right? And feel very sad that they did whatever they did. 

Krispin: And if they keep crying, you hit them more. 

DL: And if they keep crying, you hit them more because they're just trying to manipulate you and make you feel bad. And you have to end the ritual with the child hugging you and basically thanking you for the abuse. And the child has to acquiesce their will to yours and say, thank you so much for spanking me. Everything's great now. I love you, Mommy. I love you, Daddy. 

Now, not all of us who were raised this way can even remember these rituals, but I definitely remember at the end of being spanked – not like I was spanked that much – I had to make my parents feel better. You know? You know what I mean? 

Krispin: Right. Yeah. 

DL: Was that a part of your experience, too? 

Krispin: Yeah, totally. 

DL: And I think that is just such an insidious part of Dobson's method, is it's like getting this into the child's bones. Like this is love, this is love, this is love. Even though I'm being hurt by my caregiver, I now have to hug them and stuff down all my feelings, which is very much tied to the evangelical view of God. 

Krispin: Right.

DL: So, you know, there's, there's so many amazing people who've sort of written about how awful evangelical theology is to children, and actually lots of religions are to children, and how much suffering children experience in these homes, in these religious homes and how that suffering is then turned into this is God's will for you and it's actually loving. That's so fucked up. You know?

Krispin: Right. Yeah.

DL: To start your child that way in life. You are actually priming them to be in abusive, controlling relationships for the rest of their lives, and to say, I deserve it and this is actually love. 

Krispin: Right. And it's hard enough to come to that recognition of like, my parents being abusive, not everybody is like this, there are other options of relationships, but then you bring God in and it's like where can you escape to? 

DL: There is no escape. If you are raising your child as Dobson suggested with this view of, the parents are doing this not because they want to, but because God demands it of them. You can just look at how much that messes with the child. There is no escape. God wants this, which is why the parents are doing this, so the child has no recourse. No one to turn to. And that's designed on purpose: God as the ultimate authoritarian, which will pave the way for children to grow up to be adults who actually crave an authoritarian leader in their life and are primed to obey. Like they should, be the sheep that they should, the heteronormative, white, child-bearing sheep. 

Krispin: Yeah. 

DL: You know?

Krispin: Did you wanna talk about Donald Capps? 

DL: Yeah. This book called, The Child’s Song: The Religious Abuse of Children by Donald Capps. Krispin and I found this book and there's actually a few white male Christians who have written kind of in depth about how bad people like Dobson are. And so in this book, he talks a lot about Augustine. He talks about, James Dobson, and actually even talks a bit about Alice Miller, who, again, going back to this connection to eugenics, the Nazi party, there's such real similarities between the ways that German Christians parented their children in the decades, even a century leading up to Hitler, and how Dobson promoted those exact same methodologies starting in the 1970s in the United States. We're now at five decades of Dobson's methods being used by hundreds of millions of people in America.

And that's the other thing I always wanna stress is that there's all these academic discussions of what makes an evangelical, what makes a Christian fascist? And I'm like, it's the parenting methods. Like that's the one common denominator. Of course, they're all going to interpret scriptures differently.

They're all going to have their own little microcosms where they exist. But Dobson and Christian publishing, which he helped create into this billion dollar industry, basically, this propaganda machine, before Fox News existed before Rush Limbaugh existed, we had Focus on the Family and their millions and millions of followers.

Krispin: Right. 

DL: And he was sending out parenting inserts that churches could put in their bulletins. So many different kinds of churches, including Mormons, including Jehovah's, witnesses.

Krispin: Catholics. 

DL: Catholics, they all use these books. Parenting is the common denominator. Which was also true in Germany. So, I just wish historians, I wish people would talk about this more. The ways we are parented shape society. They shape politics.

Krispin: Which Dobson knew and exploited. 

DL: Exactly. So I believe, just as, as much as him and Popenoe were aware of the Nazi parties eugenics policies, both positive and the sterilization ones, I have to assume he knew about the parenting philosophies of the Nazis, and that he was trying to replicate it in his own way. I can't prove it. 

So there's that. Okay. Last thing we're going to talk about today is, you know, even though he was doing these video lectures, he waited about seven years between his two most bestselling books. The second one published in 1977, which is the year he started Focus on the Family, is called The Strong-Willed Child. And this book, I believe, is more well known to people who experienced this kind of upbringing. We've heard from lots of people that they remember seeing this book on their shelves and being like, oh, this is about me. Or this is about my sibling. Do you want to kind of talk about, from a therapist perspective, why this book and this sort of targeting of children with autonomy is so bad? 

Krispin: Yeah. I mean, basically it's because he says, follow my methods, discipline your kids, they will obey, and then that doesn't happen. Right? And there are kids for a variety of reasons that even when they are disciplined, they don't fall in line. And those people are great because they continually save us from authoritarianism and fight against authoritarianism. Right? 

DL: We love the strong-willed children! 

Krispin: And I mean, it's wild. As a therapist who specializes in working with autistic folks, the description of the strong-willed children in this book are like this child that, you know, was very rigid on schedules and didn't like certain textures and like all, you know, so you're like, oh my God.

But I think really what you have to do in any dysfunctional system, you have to split, you have to split between the golden child and the black sheep. 

DL: Yeah. 

Krispin: And you need a scapegoat. You need, when there are problems in the family, which inevitably there are, you need a scapegoat to blame. And I think that that's basically what this book was. 

DL: Yeah. So I think this book is absolutely about scapegoating and targeting people who are more connected to their autonomy. Because what I believe is that every person has a strong will. 

Krispin:  Right. Uh huh.

DL: And as we're kind of talking about in our more recent chapters on abuse within these religious authoritarian communities, including sexual abuse, is the number one way a child can resist predators is if they have access to a strong will. Now, that's the very thing that Dobson was teaching people to target. Okay. So he's literally setting up children who are going to be more susceptible to being abused in so many different ways. Exploited by political authoritarian leaders, abused by sexual predators, fawning to abusive parents and church leaders. You know what I mean? 

Krispin: Right. Yeah. 

DL: It's because he has targeted the breaking of the will, and he has been very clear about that. The first thing he writes about in the strong-willed child is the story of him and his little dog. Which is a dachshund – am I saying that right?

Krispin 4: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

DL: A wiener dog that he named after Sigmund Freud, which is weird, based on all the stuff we're currently researching and talking about Freud and Dobson and all this stuff. 

Krispin: Yes. 

DL: But his little dog Siggy disobeys him one day. And so he gets a belt and he just like describes this fight he has with this tiny dog. Just beating the shit out of this dog. And then the dog never disobeyed him after that. And he was like, and kids and dogs aren't that dissimilar. And that's why I'm going to write this book and tell you how to parent your kids. That's the first story. And so I think reading it as an adult, it just made my heart sink to know that my parents read that and were like, great, this guy seems great. 

Krispin: Right. Uh huh. 

DL: And a lot of our parents thought that, if I'm being perfectly honest. Millions and millions and millions of them. If you think that is a funny story, and give someone to do all that. Wow. I think authority is such an interesting thing. Going back to Paul Popenoe only having three years of college and then he passes himself off as this expert in eugenics and the father of modern marriage and family counseling. 

Krispin: So wild. 

DL: And he inspired Dr. Dobson to start his organization. Like, all of this from these uneducated, racist, bigoted, misogynistic, homophobic men. 

Krispin: Mm-hmm. Yeah.

DL: And that's why I wanna be their worst nightmare because they deserve to be haunted by people like you and me, the people listening who, despite everything, we've retained a strong will. You and I are currently living in a country where the government doesn't want us to have a strong will.

And so I think by researching this, by taking some time to think about the origins of these evangelical parenting methods, how they impacted us personally, but how they're also a part of this larger social movement basically to enslave everyone who isn't a white man or a white woman who supports them, you know, I think this is the perfect time to be talking about this. And to be their worst nightmare. So that's kind of where I wanna end for today. Is there anything else you wanna say, Krispin? 

Krispin: No. I mean, I think you set the stage well for where we're going next. 

DL: Because there is a whole lot more that Dobson has been involved in, and this is just setting up kind of the ideology behind it all. Which is really important to talk about, and it's really important to reckon with that this is a part of American history. Fascism has always been here. Authoritarian control has always been here. And we are making the case that has been Christians who have been instrumental in bringing fascism back onto the menu for America.

Krispin: Yeah. Right. I mean, I think about in the nineties, like a third of the US identified as Born Again or Evangelical. And so if you think about that–

DL: And they all knew Dobson. 

Krispin: Right? 

DL: Every single one of them knew him.

Krispin: Exactly.

DL: And we'll talk in part two about why he never ran for office and why he actually really liked being the person, almost like the Wizard of Oz, behind the screen. And we'll talk about that a bit more too. 

Krispin: Yeah. And I think this is something I think about a lot. You and I try to keep track of like the YouTubers or actors or comedians that we know that have an evangelical background. 

DL: Yeah, we do. 

Krispin: Because it's something that just doesn't get a lot of airtime. 

DL: Yeah. 

Krispin: Like what you're saying, we don't really think about this as part of American history. But if you actually pause, and if we were to do a raise of hands, you know, society wise, who was raised this way, like so many people have been impacted by this and it just is something that you just don't talk about.

DL: Yeah. 

Krispin: You know? 

DL: Yeah. Okay. Well here's a sneak peek into the next parts. We're going to talk about purity culture. We're going to talk about what Focus on the Family did. We're going to talk about all the political activists and lobbying groups Dr. Dobson started, all the legal defense funds he started, his work with project 2025, his work with the Heritage Foundation. Yeah. 

Oh, and we're going to talk about the Meese commission. My goodness! We can't forget that! That’s right. 

Krispin: Isn't that sort of like center stage? 

DL: Yeah. There's just so much, babe. 

Krispin: Yep. Yeah. Thanks y'all for listening along. We just really wanted to put all of this in one place. 

DL: Yeah. 

Krispin: It is going to be long, but it's all going to be, you know, like you can listen through, and DL is going to be downloading all of the information that they've been digging into for what, three years now? 

DL: DL downloads. Yeah. And if you appreciate this work, we would really appreciate your support. You can write a review for this podcast. Which we always forget to ask people to do. You can share about this podcast. You can share about our written work. I put my heart and soul into writing these chapters. You can find them on Substack. You can also follow us now on our website, strongwilledproject.com. You can support us on Patreon. We can't do this without your financial support. We can't do this without your input. 

Thank you to everyone who reaches out to us and lets us know that this is resonating. And that it is helping you understand where we are in our current political situation, but also giving you the tools to begin the slow process of processing your childhood and developing autonomy within yourself. So thanks so much to everyone. We do this for you.

I'm James Dobson's worst nightmare, but you can be too, right, Krispin?

Krispin: Right! 

DL: Just by connecting to your true selves and resisting authoritarian control in whatever ways makes sense for you. So we'll see you next time. Bye!

Hiding in Plain Sight: How Child Sexual Abusers Operate (and How to Spot Them)

Welcome to STRONGWILLED, a multi-media project aimed at helping survivors of religious authoritarian parenting methods develop autonomy and find solidarity. Today we are releasing part 2 of our series on how purity culture is pedophile culture, looking at serial child predators who hide behind religious language, hierarchical structures, and abuse power imbalances to get away with abuse. Please be mindful of triggers as you read, and if you appreciate our content consider liking, sharing, and subscribing. This is a survivor-led and survivor centric project, and we cannot do this work without your support. 

CW: Talk of child sexual abuse and grooming in a religious context, and lack of consequences for the abusers

“Pornography's greatest harm is caused by its ability—and its intention —to attack the very dignity and sacredness of sex itself, reducing human sexual behavior to the level of its animal components.”

— Father Bruce Ritter in his personal statement for the Meese Commission (1)

Father Bruce Ritter, the other prominent conservative religious figure alongside James Dobson on the Meese Commission, had been on a personal crusade against pornography since 1979. Father Ritter was a known figure in New York City in the 1970s and early 80s, mostly for starting Covenant House, a home for runaway boys in Times Square. At the time of the Meese Commission, Ritter was a well-respected priest who, like James Dobson, positioned himself as a defender of traditional family values who was intensely interested in protecting the youth of America.

A Franciscan priest who began his ministry with a focus on addressing poverty, by the 1980s Father Ritter had been campaigning against pornography as the number one evil in society. Both Dobson and Ritter used their extensive platforms to promote the ideas that pornography was being operated by the mafia, and that it was an evil that made men progressively more and more violent (which the commission itself could not find plausible evidence for). He was so focused on pornography that, unprompted, he submitted two separate papers totaling tens of thousands of words to include in the final Meese Report. Ritter also constantly strove to equate homosexuality (which was often shown in pornography) with sexual deviancy. From the Meese report: “Distressed by the idea that queer relationships would be viewed with the same respect as straight ones, he asked, ‘So much of the available pornography is homosexual pornography. Is this Commission obliged to say . . . that heterosexual activity is no more normative to society than homosexual behavior?’” (2)

Like James Dobson, “Father Ritter argued that the ‘single greatest harm’ of violent pornography is its attack on the family. He said pornography ‘attacks radically the concepts of love, affection, commitment, fidelity. Frankly, it despises them, and literally teaches a contempt for the very glue that holds the family together . . . There is no longer any necessary connection between sex and families, between sex and love, between sex and commitment.’" Interestingly, the four women on the Meese Commission disagreed with this argument as a means to criminalizing all pornography, but Dobson and Ritter would not be deterred.

The media used the logic of Dobson and Ritter to joke about the hundreds of hours these two Christian men spent looking at some of the most violent and degrading pornography available. The Washington Post asked the commissioners: “Given their concern that pornography is hazardous to public health, did the commissioners and staff suffer from all that exposure? ‘I was worried it might,’ says Dobson, ‘but it didn't.’" Another commissioner, Deanne Tilton, responded: “Watching this material for a year did not create deviant behavior on the part of the commissioners. At least I don't know of any of the commissioners being arrested for sex crimes. I certainly haven't been.” (3)

But Tilton turned out to be wrong. As Father Bruce Ritter was busy researching and typing up his soliloquies on the exploitative nature of pornography for the US government, he was also paying for young men to come to his hotel rooms in the various cities the commissioners traveled to. And within the next year, at least 15 of the young men and boys who lived at the Covenant house under the care of Ritter would accuse him of sexual abuse. For nearly two decades, in fact, rumors had been circulating around Father Ritter and abuse of the youth in his care, and it was his hypocrisy of being on the Meese Commission as a defender of “family” values that encouraged several of his victims to speak up.

The journalist who broke the story of Father Ritter was Charles M. Sennot, who eventually published a book about Ritter called Broken Covenant. But reading the media coverage of the "downfall" of Father Bruce Ritter is an exercise in seeing how badly American society was failing to keep children safe at the expense of protecting the powerful and religious. Ritter had stacked the board of Covenant House with prominent and successful New York leaders. So when Sennott broke the story of Ritter using Covenant House money to pay former male prostitutes, New York institutions like the New York Times came to Ritter’s defense. Eventually, they conceded the allegations were credible but they still seemed swayed by his charisma: “Father Ritter himself was often mentioned in the same sentence with Mother Teresa, but perhaps Sennott's phrase, ‘the Donald Trump of Catholicism,’ better captures the personal drive and entrepreneurial spirit that led to Covenant House's phenomenal growth.” (4)

Eventually, the Manhattan District Attorney compiled enough evidence for a case against Ritter but in 1990 he was allowed to resign from Covenant House in exchange for all charges being dropped. Ritter never admitted to doing anything wrong and lived out the rest of his days on a farm for troubled priests in upstate New York. He never faced accountability and none of his victims had a chance to share their stories in court. In 2018 the New York Post published an update on their reporting of the case that included a letter from 1990 written to Ritter from one of the victims, a man named Darryl Bassile: “You were wrong for inflicting your desires on a 14 year old . . . I know that someday you will stand before the one who judges all of us and at that time there will be no more denial, just the truth.”(5)

In an era before the Boston Globe shone a spotlight on the wide prevalence of pedophiles in the priesthood, Father Bruce Ritter was seen as an anomaly. Hushed up, sent to a farm out of sight, he lived out the rest of his days adamantly denying the allegations of abuse. A serial predator hiding in plain sight while he pontificated on the dangers of pornography and fought for "traditional family values,” while privately abusing his power over the most vulnerable people in society — the very youth that the Meese Commission members swore they were working hard to protect. 

//

“The good influence of godly citizens causes a city to prosper, but the moral decay of the wicked drives it downhill” — Proverbs 11:11, TLB

Father Bruce Ritter was one of the first pedophile priests to garner media attention, but he was far from the last. He holds many of the hallmarks of pedophiles and serial child predators that multiple expert witnesses testified to repeatedly for the Meese Commission. He embedded himself in a community as a trusted adult to children in a venue absent of supervision. He used the concept of spiritual authority to gain power over children. He also found ways — including using religion — to view himself as a good person and to position himself as a revered, influential member in the community. Lastly, he was able to escape any prosecution or jail time by cultivating his image as a respected, upstanding religious authority, and he declared until the day he died that he had done nothing wrong. (6)

People like Father Bruce Ritter are not as uncommon as we would like to think. In 2004, the New York Times reported on multiple studies that found 4% of priests had been accused of molesting children, an epidemic that “peaked with the ordination class of 1970, in which one of every 10 priests was eventually accused of abuse.”(7) One out of ten priests is an enormous number — and so too is the level of devastation caused by the vast number of victims that most pedophiles abuse. But whereas the Catholic Church has been forced to have a reckoning with the number of abusers in their ranks, protestant churches — and evangelicals in particular — have been slower to face such accountability.

This is due to a variety of reasons, including the reality that evangelicalism in the US is a decentralized affair. But if the public awareness of the growing number of pedophile priests has taught us anything, it should be that this is not an issue relegated solely to Catholics. Since serial predators are enabled by the structure provided in patriarchal, religious authoritarian movements, it’s no surprise that there are increasing reports of abuse occurring within protestant churches. (8) Precisely because these high control frameworks give people access to vulnerable communities, protect abusers if they are male and identify as Christian, and create the perfect conditions for power imbalances to be exploited. 

Patriarchal buddies Father Ritter and James Dobson, who had been so cozy together on the Meese Commission, went their separate ways after 1985. Dobson, in all of his years recounting his time on the Meese Commission (including the book he co-authored on the subject titled Pornography: A Human Tragedy) never mentioned how his fellow commissioner Father Ritter was credibly accused of child molestation, exploitation, and embezzlement. (9) His fellow champion of the conservative patriarchal family was erased from the narrative that Dobson was weaving. 

But didn’t Father Ritter exemplify the very point Dobson was striving to make about the progressive nature of pornography? Ritter was a textbook example of the type of child abuser exactly described by experts who testified to Dobson and to the rest of the Meese Commission. His story could have been an example of how parents and communities must remain vigilant and a way to discuss the warning signs of those who seek unsupervised access to children with no accountability. 

Dobson could have written in his books and talked on his radio programs about what the experts on child sexual exploitation had stated repeatedly; the most likely offender was male, usually known to the victim, and often a pillar of the community who sought out the company of families and children. He could have taught communities about basic protocols that keep kids safe and encouraged the kinds of policies that responsible organizations use, such as not allowing adults to be alone with children and requiring background checks for all volunteers. 

And yet — despite his tireless recounting of his time on the commission — Dobson neglected to use what he learned on the Meese Commission and the outing of Father Bruce Ritter as a serial child predator to educate his large listenership and to teach kids about safe and unsafe adults.

Instead, Dr. James Dobson went and did the exact opposite. 

//

“If anyone causes one of these little ones—those who believe in me—to stumble, it would be better for them to have a large millstone hung around their neck and to be drowned in the depths of the sea.” Matthew 18:6 NIV

comic-book style images from this page

Two years after his time on the Meese Commission, and one year after the story of Father Ritter broke in national media, Dobson’s organization Focus on the Family premiered a radio drama show for children, complete with high quality voice actors and professional scripts called Adventures in Odyssey. The show revolved around a small town in middle America named Odyssey, and the Christian patriarch at the center of it: Mr. Whitaker. 

Mr. Whitaker was older, in his 50s or 60s, was a widower, a millionaire businessman who left behind corporate life (and espionage with the CIA) to start an ice cream shop for children. He was also an inventor, and his crowning achievement was the Imagination Station, a virtual reality simulator where he could send the children of Odyssey on realistic adventures to Bible times, revisionist history experiences in American colonization, or even to hell (in order to scare them into being Christians, of course). 

Mr. Whitaker, who seems to have been a self-insert of James Dobson, was held up as the wise patriarch and it was assumed that the children of the town should not only listen to him — but that they needed to obey him immediately and without question. He was often found dispensing wisdom and life one-on-one to children, including on the topics of modesty (for girls), the dangers of tolerance and queer people existing in public, creationism, and more. In one series, released in 2014, where Mr. Whitaker works to cancel the town’s pride parade, Mr. Whitaker took it upon himself to teach the children at his ice cream shop about the importance of heterosexuality. The purity culture world of Adventures in Odyssey considered it preferable for a man to teach a child about sexuality in the back room of an ice cream parlor, than for children to receive formal sex education in a classroom setting which would provide the safety of a more public setting.

Early on in the series, listeners hear an episode about Mr. Whitaker crossing boundaries, when his 10yo grandson Monty comes to stay with him, and Mr. Whitaker spanks him — against his daughter’s wishes. “Whit” as he is often called on the show, explains how the spanking was necessary, and that his grandson found it loving and even begged for it. He modeled a way of interacting with children under the belief that adults knew better than children about what they wanted, and that children often actually want the behavior they are saying no to. And, to prove his point, he often pointed out how beloved he was by the children and their families, and how it gave his ministry more purpose. (10)

Millions of evangelical children grew up listening to Adventures in Odyssey (AiO) episodes, imbibing the belief that any man who calls himself a Christian is worthy of respect, admiration, and immediate obedience. Mr. Whitaker wasn’t a pastor or a priest, yet he was upheld as the town’s spiritual guru for children, sometimes even pitting him against the hapless parents of the town. Adventures in Odyssey normalized the concept of having older Christian men hold authority over and proximity to children, absent any structure that would ensure that this relationship would be safe and beneficial for the children. It was a program designed for children that taught them that being chosen by a Christian man for spiritual mentorship was a special prize. Devoted listeners of the show will easily remember Mr. Whitaker’s common refrain to children, inviting them to withdraw from the loud public parlor area to a back room of the shop because, “It’s much quieter back here.” 

Many organizations, such as the Scouts of America, 4-H, or the YMCA, know that their programs run on the generosity of the adults who volunteer to support children. We want to be clear that the problem is not that adults might want to invest in the younger generation. The problem is when that investment has no policies or protocols to ensure the safety of children. As Lois Harrington, Assistant Attorney General of the United States testified to the Meese Commission, “Many people who truly love children want to be their teachers and their coaches and their school bus drivers. But unfortunately, so do those who seek to exploit.” 11 James Dobson and Focus on the Family did not in any meaningful way grapple with this reality, which in turn placed vulnerable children at risk — especially coupled with the religious authoritarian parenting methods they promoted. 

Focus on the Family used its extensive network to turn AiO into a hit show. At its heyday in 2005, 1.2 million people were listening to AiO daily, and the Focus on the Family show regularly partnered with Chick-Fil-A to give out cassette tapes and CDs of episodes up until 2005. Former Vice President Mike Pence often talked about how he and his family loved AiO, because it upheld Christian family values. 

While the show holds nostalgia for many people raised evangelical, a cursory glance at the way the show sets up its main protagonist should give anyone pause. Dobson’s organization spent decades creating and championing a man who fit the Meese Commission’s description of a possible child predator, without any source of accountability or structure to ensure the children in his care were safe. This, coupled with Dobson’s parenting methodologies that relied on spanking children on their buttocks for every act of willfulness, refusing to teach children about consent or bodily autonomy (and villainizing public school systems that did), and demanding instant obedience to godly authority, is a recipe for abuse of all kinds to take place. In many ways, Mr. Whitaker can be seen as a prototypical groomer, who hides behind his religion and his copious connections to have unlimited access to children who have been conditioned to obey him, with no oversight or accountability for his actions.

Instead of asking whether Mr. Whitaker was a safe adult, and if conditions existed that would increase child safety, the Focus on the Family radio program continually questioned the children in Odyssey: Would they obey quickly? Would they maintain their Christian patriarchal values, and perpetuate them through both social and political avenues? By listening to this show, evangelical children were having their experiences in their homes confirmed: obedience and conformity, driven by pain and corporal punishment, was essential for ensuring that children obeyed the teachers, pastors, and law enforcement in their life. At best, Adventures in Odyssey is a sophisticated indoctrination attempt aimed at children idealizing a Christian nationalist utopia run by benevolent patriarchs. At worst, it is a program telling children to trust and obey all Christian male authority figures and look to them for wisdom, instruction, and unsupervised mentorship. 

All of this takes on a more sinister note when you realize the records show that in 1985 alone, Dr. James Dobson was bombarded with evidence as a part of his time on the Meese Commission of the growing epidemic of children being sexually abused by their fathers, stepfathers, acquaintances, and religious leaders. Testimony after testimony — from victims sharing impact statements to professionals sharing statistics — painted a picture of how vulnerable children are to serial child predators. And yet in all the books he published, all of the talks he gave on the radio, and all of the Adventures in Odyssey episodes he promoted, not once did Dr. James Dobson give concrete advice on how to identify and protect children from serial child predators from within religious authoritarian communities. 

The danger was always outside — a stranger snatching your child at the grocery store, a queer person giving a reading at a public library — and never from within the community. He was grooming entire families to fall into patriarchal Christian norms that would protect abusers while giving them access to vulnerable populations. Mr. Whitaker from Adventures in Odyssey is a classic example of someone who fits the profile of a serial child predator: he seeks out access and employment that puts him around children; he was currently or formerly married in a heterosexual marriage; he is a Christian who believes children should respect and obey him; he is often finding ways to get children to have one-on-one conversations with him; he is connected to all the powerful people in town who hold him up as an exemplary figure and pillar of the community. 

And like most serial child predators (including Father Ritter), Mr. Whitaker believed he could do no wrong. He believed he was helping the children he abused. That they were begging for it — to be disciplined, controlled, and loved. Just like all children were. 

Just like Dr. James Dobson always said.

//

Coming up next: Part 3: How Pedophiles Think (And the Origins of the Modern Purity Culture Movement)

Many thanks to STRONGWILLED member Elizabeth Gonzales, who was able to access and photograph transcripts from the Meese Commission hearing at the National Archives and Records Administration.

To support our project consider subscribing to our Patreon (plus get access to our discord channel and tons of bonus podcast episodes).

 Endnotes:

1.     Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography Final Report Part 1 (1986).  P. 98: Accessed here.

2.      Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography Final Report p. Xli. Accessed here.

3.     Lloyd Grove, “Descent into the World of Porn” The Washington Post June 6th 1986. Accessed here.

4.      Margaret O'Brien Steinfels, “The Priest and the Runaways” The New York Times December 13th 1992. Accessed here.

5.     Steve Cuozzo, “This New York priest’s dramatic downfall was just the beginning of the perv-priest scandals” The New York Post September 13th 2018. Accessed here.

6.     Ritter also demonstrated the pedophile hallmarks Detective Lanning identified, as he was someone obsessed with the issue of child pornography and child sexual exploitation, he collected materials that had to do with these issues, and considered himself an expert on helping vulnerable youth.

7.     Laurie Goodstein, “Two Studies Cite Child Sex Abuse by 4% of Priests” The New York Times February 27th 2004.

8.     Larger organizations within the framework of evangelicalism have all been accused of covering up serious crimes against children (like the Southern Baptist Convention, Sovereign Grace Ministries, and more). But there is no study or framework or even spreadsheet document that has catalogued the various patriarchal protestant pastors, youth pastors, deacons, volunteers, and more who have been credibly accused of sexually abusing children. We suspect that if one was put together, the results would be overwhelming and we hope intrepid lay scholars, archivists, and whistleblowers continue to do this important work. Here is one article that delves into the SBC in particular: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/investigations/article/Southern-Baptist-sexual-abuse-spreads-as-leaders-13588038.php

9.      Dobson had a history of trying to erase his ties to problematic people — including trying to obfuscate his close connections to white supremacist eugenicist Paul Popenoe, who he worked with for ten years from 1967-1977. You can read our Chapter on Dobson and Popenoe here.

10.   We’ll discuss in our next chapter how this sort of belief system enables sexual abusers of children.

11.  Transcript of proceedings United States Department of Justice Meeting of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography Volume II. Washington DC, June 19th 1985. P. 12

Purity Culture is Pedophile culture

For this series we at STRONGWILLED are exploring how purity culture, as prescribed by so many religious authoritarian parenting authors, created the ideal conditions to enable predators to sexually abuse children. This is part one in a weekly series on this topic. In typical STRONGWILLED fashion, we’ll be weaving together the history of this movement, the politics undergirding it, as well as analysis of evangelical books, and exploring the impact of those who grew up in purity culture. Please consider supporting our work on Patreon or Substack, and sharing this content if you find it valuable. 

TW: sexual abuse, incest, child pornography (child sexual abuse materials)

Purity Culture is Pedophile Culture

Part 1: It’s Not the Man in the Trench Coat

“In the United States, society’s historical attitude about the sexual victimization of children can generally be summed up in one word: denial.” —FBI Special Agent Kenneth Lannings (1)

“The ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable. Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried.”— Judith Herman, M.D. (2)

The responsibility of keeping children safe from sexual exploitation belongs to all of us. And yet, in the United States there is still a shroud of mystery surrounding the scope and scale of the victimization of children. The loudest voices proclaiming they keep children safe — conservative Christians, in particular — are often the very communities where abuse of all kinds passes down from generation to generation. But before we talk about this unspeakable reality, perhaps it would be best to start outside the US with the so-called father of modern psychotherapy, Sigmund Freud.

In the late 1800s, Freud was one of several therapists interested in understanding hysteria in women. He asked his patients about their inner worlds and childhood experiences and in the process discovered that many of his patients recalled being sexually abused by their fathers or other men in the community. Freud was shaken by what he was hearing. As Judith Herman writes, “his correspondence makes it clear that he was increasingly troubled by the radical social implications . . . if his patients' stories were true . . . he would be forced to conclude that what he called ‘perverted acts against children’ were endemic, not only among the proletariat of Paris, where he first studied hysteria, but also among the respectable bourgeois families of Vienna.”(3) 

Freud decided that intra-familial sexual abuse (incest) couldn’t possibly be as pervasive as his female patients from the upper and middle classes described. He eventually discredited these “hysterical” women, writing, “I was at last obliged to recognize that these stories of seduction had never taken place, and that they were only fantasies which my patients had made up.” As Herman writes, “Recognizing the implicit challenge to patriarchal values, Freud refused to identify fathers publicly as sexual aggressors.” In fact, he preferred to reverse course on his own findings rather than name the well-known secret that many psychologists, social workers, and police detectives know all too well: the shocking prevalence of father-daughter incest and acquaintance molestation, and the life-long consequences of this kind of abuse. 

Several decades later, Freud was almost glib in his attempts to cover-up what he had found. Writing in his textbook, Introductory Lectures of Psychoanalysis in 1933 he said: “Almost all of my women patients told me that they had been seduced by their father. I was driven to recognize in the end that these reports were untrue and so came to understand that the hysterical symptoms are derived from phantasies and not from real occurrences . . . It was only later that I was able to recognize in this phantasy of being seduced by the father the expression of the typical Oedipus complex in women.”

It’s hard to put into words the horror of what the “father” of modern psychotherapy did to our collective ability to name and face trauma in our families. Freud actively collected the stories of child sexual abuse and incest survivors and then promoted a theory that it was actually the children who desired their fathers. He buried the truth of what was happening in the homes of the well-connected and the powerful, and he set the course for over a century of psychologists trained to downplay and belittle the stories of child sexual trauma survivors, especially if they implicated the fathers in a patriarchal society. But he was not the first, nor was he the last, psychologist who would do this kind of work —the damaging work of obscuring the truth of who was actually hurting children, all while claiming to protect them. 

//

In the 1950s America was starting to hear more and more terrifying stories of children who had been sexually abused. The FBI responded by putting out posters warning children to stay away from strangers. The National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime in 1997 describes how “the primary focus in the literature and discussions on sexual abuse of children was on ‘stranger danger’—the dirty old man in the wrinkled raincoat. If one could not deny the existence of child sexual abuse, one described victimization in simplistic terms of good and evil.” This method was incredibly popular in the 1950s and 60s because it soothed the minds of the public. Sexual abusers were painted as outsiders and social pariahs, preventing society from investigating abuse perpetrated by those within their own trusted communities. (4) 

Over time, however, people slowly became aware of the truth that had been deemed unspeakable: the prevalence of intra-familial sexual violence. “By the 1980s child sexual abuse for many professionals had become almost synonymous with incest, and incest meant father-daughter sexual relations; therefore, the focus of child-sexual-abuse intervention and investigation turned to one-on-one, father-daughter incest,” wrote FBI special agent Kenneth Lannings. “We began to increasingly realize someone they know who is often a relative — a father, stepfather, uncle, grandfather, older brother, or even a female family member — sexually molests most children.” Slowly, society showed an increased awareness that most sexual abuse was not perpetrated by an unknown stranger, but by trusted adults in the lives of children.

With this understanding that abusers were often operating within plain sight, eventually the FBI added one more important category to their study of child sexual predators: acquaintance molestation. It became more and more apparent that there was a subset of serial child predators who sought access to children by seeking out respected positions in the community. The Boy Scouts, churches, sports leagues and more found themselves in the position of having to contend with a type of predator who sought out access to youth while being well-liked and well-known, and who abused large numbers of children if given the opportunity.(5)

But a true reckoning with this reality was cut short before it even gained widespread acceptance. In the 1990s cultural awareness returned to a focus on stranger danger, and alongside it,
Satanic Panic — a now-debunked conspiracy — which again shifted the focus from intrafamilial sexual violence and acquaintance molestation towards a stereotyped scapegoat. (6)

This turns out to be a common pattern regarding the issue of systematic child sexual exploitation: whenever people try to bring up the unspeakable reality of who is sexually abusing children, society reverts to beliefs that protect the powerful abusers who remain in good standing in communities. Like in Freud’s time, if abuse is most often perpetrated by prominent men who are at the center of a society, the systems in these communities will protect those in power. Instead of focusing on the family as a place of possible sexual, physical, and emotional violence against children, loud voices wove myths about stranger danger that caught on like wildfire: Satanic Panic, immigrants, drag queens, and queer folks. But the current statistics on the profiles of serial child sexual offenders paints a completely different reality than the one being constantly broadcast on FOX News. 

The statistics (from the 1980s on) have shown a different pattern: Most child sexual assault materials (CSAM, commonly referred to as child pornography) are made by the child’s biological father or stepfather. Only 1% of CSAM are made by someone who is outside of the home of the child. The average serial child sexual predator is statistically most likely to be male, married or formerly married, identifies as religious, and seeks out positions where they can be around children, including Christian churches. They are often people who are well-liked in the community, and they most commonly abuse the children of family and friends.(7) 

While these sobering statistics are well known to sexual crimes detectives, forensic psychologists and social workers — and have been for decades — the average person in America is not aware of these realities. In general society it is still considered taboo to identify that a married Christian husband and father is much more likely than a transgender person to sexually abuse children. Why is this? Is it simply because we find the truth so horrifying that it is unspeakable?

Or have there been people along the way who have done everything they can to hide the truth from us in order to protect those who abuse?

//

In 1985, Dr. James Dobson took on a very different role than he had previously as the mild-mannered family life advice coach of Focus on the Family fame. He proudly joined Ronald Reagan’s administration to be a part of an investigation into the dangers of pornography on American society. His one year serving on the Meese Commission on Pornography (named for then Attorney General Edwin Meese) was a story Dobson pulled out time and time again in his books, on TV interviews, and on his radio show. He alternately bragged about his important role in warning America about the dangers of pornography and bemoaned all the hours and hours of  “research” of viewing pornography that he had to undertake in order to serve his country properly.(8)

The entire Meese Commission on pornography is a fascinating subject in and of itself — examining issues of media access right at the dawn of the personal computer. First Amendment rights of free speech were under fire by religious conservatives, and liberals were worried that they would maintain and gain more power over the US. A member of the ACLU named Barry Lynn was doing his level best to garner media attention around the event and bring free speech issues to the forefront. James Dobson in particular hated Lynn, declaring that he was undoing all the good work the commission was undertaking. Lynn joined Dobson and the 10 other commission members at some of their field trips, including pornography shops and public hearings. 

According to Lynn in his autobiography, “Dobson and (Catholic priest) Father Ritter were the most traditionally ‘religious’ members, often voicing their religious beliefs during business meetings.” Lynn goes on to write: “I was a little late to one afternoon session and found myself listening to a discussion, led by Ritter, of whether Michelangelo’s statue of David could be considered pornographic. By a narrow vote, the Commission decided the answer was “no.”(9) 

Publications like the Washington Post found this juxtaposition of serious religious men deciding on what was or wasn’t pornographic on the taxpayers dime almost hilarious. To Dobson, however, it was all business. "We often worked 11 or 12 hours a day with a 30-minute lunch break and a very meager meal served because of the tight budgetary constraints," Dobson says. "We received no compensation. I haven't even received a refund for my expenses for some of the trips. At one point they were $1,500 behind on paying me and not in a terrible hurry about it. Let me tell you, it was all give." But he also liked to bring up the process of having to watch, catalogue, and identify various kinds of pornography. "There is a desensitization process that takes place," says Dobson. "The human mind has an incredible capacity to adapt to whatever is shocking in the beginning."(10)

This would be a continued theme from this point out for James Dobson — the desensitizing and progressive nature of pornography. Dobson wrote and spoke often about how pornography incited a portion of the population to engage in incredible violence against women and children. The crowning moment of Dobson’s pet theory occurred in 1989 when he was granted the last interview with notorious serial killer Ted Bundy. Bundy, playing into Dobson’s theory, declared that pornography is what made him kill women. Dobson was thrilled, and sold exclusive videotapes (called Fatal Addiction) of his conversation with Bundy for a suggested donation of $25 to Focus on the Family. People close to Bundy and criminologists alike were all sceptical of Bundy’s deathbed confession. Bundy was a serial liar, so why believe him when it came to this point? But Dobson had no qualms about using this national tragedy to direct people to his work at Focus on the Family, where he said they were all about keeping children safe.

But if keeping children safe was Dobson’s true aim, why didn’t he use his large network and platform to educate and inform people about the realities of child sexual abuse? Why did he latch on to stories and narratives that blamed pornography (and eventually queer people) instead of encouraging parents to talk with their children about consent, bodily autonomy, and safe and unsafe adults?(11)

We know that Dr. James Dobson was aware of the true dangers facing children — serial child predators and intrafamilial incest — because this was one of the topics talked about extensively on the Meese Commission. In the section of the published report titled Child Pornography, they wrote: “this Commission . . . has devoted a very substantial proportion of its time and energy to examining the extent and nature of child pornography. Indeed, one set of the Commission's hearings was devoted almost entirely to the problem, while extensive oral and written testimony on the subject was received throughout the year.”(12)  

In one example, Lois Harrington, assistant attorney general of the United States, told the commission: “contrary to the popular stereotypes the child molester is not a stranger wearing rumpled raincoats passing out candy to children on street corners. He is a generally known and trusted and loved adult who has cunningly sought employment with children so he will have a steady source of victims. Many people who truly love children want to be their teachers and their coaches and their school bus drivers. But unfortunately, so do those who seek to exploit a child’s unquestioning love to satisfy their perverted urges.”(13) 

Mitch McConnell (yes, that Mitch McConnell), who testified as an expert on child sexual exploitation, made a point to identify the average profile of a pedophile to the commission: “He is most likely a middle-aged white male living in the suburbs, married, [and] has children. This type of person is usually reasonably well-connected. The typical child molester is not some shiftless bum in a trench coat.” McConnell, who made a name for himself in the area of child protection before being elected to Congress in 1985, suggested much harsher sentences for child molesters, be they strangers or family members, due to the prolific nature of these types of abusers. As he told the commission: “Let me say that the child molester is five times, I repeat, five times more likely to repeat the crime than any other criminal. Here we are talking about a criminal activity in which the rate of recidivism is much more pronounced than virtually any other area of crime.”(14) 

Dobson also heard testimony of a polygraph expert Detective William J. Phelps, who shared that he believed the sexual abuse of children was for many people, “the perfect crime,” in part because it was so underreported that there was a high likelihood of getting away with it. Phelps shared statistics that matched his findings: “The National Center for Child Abuse and Neglect showed that 1 out of 4 girls is sexually abused before age 18 and 1 out of 7 boys. The average age of the child abused was 11 . . . 80% of the abusers in the study were the child’s own parents.”(15)

Again and again the experts and victims who testified for hours in front of the Meese Commission focused in on the harms of child sexual assault materials, and the reality of who was creating these materials and sexually abusing children in the United States. Thousands of pages of testimony were submitted, and from FBI Detectives to feminist scholars to state senators, in the early 1980s there was a sense that the general population might finally be ready to have the conversation it had been dreading. Thanks to the feminist movement, abuses of all kinds were finally being addressed in the public square. As America struggled to think through the issues of pornography, free speech, the computer age, and child sexual exploitation, there was a sense of relief at finally looking at the issues in the light of day. 

So why do we find ourselves here, in 2025, with almost no conversation, research, or discussions on the wide-spread problem of intrafamilial sexual violence, father-daughter incest, or even acquaintance molestation? Why do the myths around stranger danger, queer people, and trans folks in bathrooms capture the public imagination in ways that do not match up to the reality of who is sexually abusing children in America?

Once again, we can look to popular psychologists for the answer. We can look to those who focused on replicating the patriarchal family in American society, and who did everything in their power to convince the American public that strangers were the real dangers to us all. We can look to the psychologists who heard the stories of harm, abuse, and incest repeatedly, and did nothing to stop it — and who in fact helped create the conditions where these abuses could thrive and flourish. 

//

 As a part of the Meese Commission, Dobson penned a personal statement that addressed the issue of child pornography, writing: “I look back on this fourteen-month project as one of the most difficult, and gratifying, responsibilities of my life . . . sifting through huge volumes of offensive and legally obscene materials has not been a pleasant experience. Under other circumstances one would not willingly devote a year of his life to depictions of rape, incest, masturbation, mutilation, defecation, urination, child molestation and sadomasochistic activity.” He evidently was paying attention during many of the hearings, since he wrote: “fathers, step-fathers, uncles, teachers and neighbors find ways to secure photographs of the children in their care. They then sell or trade the pictures to fellow pedophiles.” Dobson then went on to describe in graphic detail some of the child sexual assault materials (CSAM) the commission was shown, positioning himself as a person who truly cared about women and children. (16) 

Interestingly enough, he also made his personal case against legalizing any kind of pornography he felt degrading by stating “For a certain percentage of men, the use of pornographic material is addictive and progressive…it is my belief, though evidence is not easily obtained, that a small but dangerous minority will then choose to act aggressively against the nearest available females. Pornography is the theory; rape is the practice.” This was a stance Dobson taught over and over again: pornography made people act out their violent fantasies in real-life. This narrative created an us/them framework, between the religious community and broader culture (including sexual liberation movements), placing the threat of sexual abuse outside of religious communities. The Commission, however, could not find substantial enough evidence to support this claim that pornography directly contributed to sexual violence.

One of the people who testified multiple times to the Meese Commission was FBI Special Agent Kenneth Lannings. As a part of his work to educate the US government on the realities of who was sexually exploiting and abusing children, agents like Lanning had to become experts in identifying the profiles of people who abuse children. He testified before the Meese Commission in 1985 on pedophiles and started by explaining that this is a group of people who collects images, artifacts, and any materials that justify their obsessions: “a lot of this stuff they save and collect to validate their behavior, as a part of their attempt to convince themselves and others that they are really good people . . . and for that reason, they often collect academic and scientific material.” Lanning then went on to make a startling assertion, theorizing that that there were pedophiles in the room as he spoke:

“It is for that reason why, that in this audience today, there are probably pedophiles . . . any time there is a public presentation about this, you can be sure pedophiles will come. Because they want to hear what people are saying about them or what behavioral scientists are saying about them — they collect this kind of material.”(17)

And Lanning turned out to be right. There was a pedophile, serving on that very commission, obsessed with the discussion of pornography and positioning himself as a beacon of moral authority and a champion of the heteronormative Christian family.

Within the year of the Meese Commission being published, commissioner Father Bruce Ritter, who had been in lockstep with Dobson throughout the proceedings, would be accused of sexually abusing at least 15 of the young boys he was in charge of at Covenant House.

The person to be worried about abusing children wasn’t a man in a trench coat, it turns out. But a man who was obsessed with appearing as a good and godly man, all while abusing the vulnerable children in his care.

Join our patreon for extra episodes, access to our discord community and to support this work.

Stay tuned for part 2 — on Father Bruce Ritter, James Dobson, and their refusal to take what they learned on the Meese Commission about keeping children safe from predators and instead created the perfect conditions for children to be exploited in religious authoritarian communities.

Many thanks to STRONGWILLED member Elizabeth Gonzales, who was able to access and photograph transcripts from the Meese Commission hearing at the National Archives and Records Administration.

Endnotes:

1.     Lanning, Kenneth. Child Molesters, a Behavioral Analysis. Updated 2010. P 4. Accessed here.

2.     Herman, Judith,Trauma and Recovery, p 1.

3.     Ibid, p. 14

4.      In 1997, the FBI put out information to combat the Satanic Panic era. In it, they write: “The FBI distributed a poster that epitomized this attitude. It showed a man, with his hat pulled down, hiding behind a tree with a bag of candy in his hands. He was waiting for a sweet little girl walking home from school alone. At the top it read, "Boys and Girls, color the page, memorize the rules." At the bottom it read, 'For your protection, remember to turn down gifts from strangers, and refuse rides offered by strangers."

5.     Some organizations – like the Boy Scouts of America -- did contend with the prevalence of acquaintance molesters, often as the result of lawsuits, while others have ignored this reality.

6.     Satanic Panic in many ways originated with the book Michelle Remembers written by a psychiatrist who married his former patient. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michelle_Remembers

7.      For more on these statistics, see our interview with R.L. Stoller.

8.     Meese went on to have a cozy relationship with various conservative Christian political movements, serving as a trustee of the Heritage Foundation from 2017-2024

9.     Lynn, Barry, Paid to Piss People Off: Porn (Book 2) p. 39.

10.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1986/06/07/descent-into-the-world-of-porn/f1b783a9-93cc-4911-89b4-3e367748b4b8/

11.  We know one reason why Dobson and other Religious Authoritarian Parenting experts did not teach about consent or bodily autonomy is because that would negate the entire structure of corporal punishment. For more on this topic, please see Chapter 15 of the STRONGWILLED project entitled A Recipe for Abuse

12.  Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography Final Report Part 1 (1986). P. 405 Accessed Here.

13.  Transcript of proceedings United States Department of Justice Meeting of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography Volume II. Washington DC, June 19th 1985. P. 12

14.  Ibid, Pp. 56-57

15.  Transcript of proceedings United States Department of Justice Meeting of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography Volume II. Miami, November 19th 1985 p. 284.

16.  To read more, see Dobson’s personal statement, page 76 of part 1 of the Meese report

17.  Transcript of proceedings United States Department of Justice Meeting of the Attorney General’s Commission on Pornography Volume II. Miami, November 19th 1985 p. 236

Ding Dong the Witch is Dead

Dr. James Dobson has died at age 89. Why are the victims of his methods celebrating?

Yesterday morning, on August 21st, I woke up to the news that Dr. James Dobson — who we credit with starting the modern Religious Authoritarian parenting movement here in the US — had died.

My social media feeds slowly filled with exvangelicals who were rejoicing at the news — but after the initial euphoria, there was a quiet sadness in our reflections. Yes, we are happy that a man who caused so much harm is now dead. But what does this mean for us, today? How does this undo the damage this man wrought — now just in our childhoods, but for American politics in general?

I don’t have all the answers to these questions, but his death is as good of a time as any to name the harms he perpetuated in the name of Christianity on millions of innocent children. So to that aim, today I am writing this short post that summarizes some of his harmful beliefs that we have written about in our 15 published chapters (you can read them all here).

1. He pioneered the modern Religious Authoritarian Parenting movement.

Dobson built a marriage and family empire on his parenting methods he popularized in a series of televised lectures (and then later books) called Dare to Discipline and the Strong-Willed Child that were seen by 80 million people (1/3 of the US population) by the 1980s. Despite being a child psychologist in a time when the experts were warning people of the long-term impacts of corporal punishment and advocating for emotional intelligence, Dobson did the opposite of what was good for children, and he was clear that he disregarded the psychological research available to him, in favor of his interpretation of the Bible . He encouraged a generation of parents to spank their children early and often, equating it to being a Bible-believing Christian. He has been very upfront that his parenting methods had political aims, as he was incensed by the civil rights movements, feminism, and the protests against the Vietnam War erupting in the United States in the 1960s. In order to “take America back” he believed children needed to be disciplined into immediate obedience to authority. Thus, the modern religious authoritarian parenting (RAP) movement was born.

2. He taught parents that little children were sinful, manipulative, and that their wills needed crushing.

Dobson took the Christian doctrine of original sin and used it to convince parents that they must hurt their children in order to save them. In reality, his aims were to create children who were easily controlled and who would immediately comply with “godly” male authority the rest of their lives. The way he writes about children in his books — especially toddlers — makes it clear that he detested (disobedient) children and loved insulting them (calling them dictators, manipulative, and sinners). He taught parents to view their children as sinful as fully grown adults and demonized normal developmental milestones and neurodivergence as willful defiance that could only be corrected by ritualized punishment.

3. He taught parents how to abuse their children in a ritualized manner.

Dobson, with his soft-spoken radio persona, assured parents over and over again that his methods would leave no long-lasting damage to children. He taught that if parents hurt their children in a calm manner, than it wasn’t abuse. He advocated for parents to tell their children they were being punished for their own good, use wooden implements to strike their children on the buttocks over and over again and to ensure that it inflicted pain, and then force the children to repent, say thank you for the abuse, and hug the parents afterwards. Dobson claimed this method would lead to a life-long close-knit family dynamic where the children would always be grateful for their chastisement and would grow up to replicate these methods with their own families. In reality, he was setting children up for a lifetime of equating abuse with love, and being forced to be grateful for it. Research clearly shows that corporal punishment, no matter how “calmly” it is administered, impacts both the brain and the nervous system in detrimental ways. Not only that, but his enthusiastic support for corporal punishment led to countless instances of abuse in families, including sexual abuse.

4. He learned everything he know about marriage and family counseling from a known white supremacist eugenicist.

Dobson got his start after college as the assistant to positive eugenics guru Paul Popenoe (who inspired some of the policies of the Third Reich). You can read more about this connection here, but Popenoe was the father of modern marriage and family counseling in the US, where he worked to help white women remain married to white men and have lots of children. Dobson become focused on how to raise the children of these families in such a way where they would replicate the white, conservative, patriarchal values he was obsessed with, which is where his parenting methods came into play. Despite being an atheist, Popenoe even wrote the forward to Dare to Discipline, praising Dobson’s “Bible-based” methods. For many of us who grew up with these RAP metohds, we had no clue we were pawns in a positive eugenics movement aimed at keeping power within white, male, conservative hands.

5. He was one of the most influential far-right political lobbyists in American history.

It’s hard to adequately convey how many pieces of legislature or policy in the United States have been impacted by Dobson’s political lobbying career. While he never ran for office, in the latter half of his career he became obsessed with creating organizations that would implement on a state and federal level his white supremacist patriarchal ideology. He viewed himself as the savior of white patriarchal America, and was a ceaseless advocate for anti-LGBTQIA+ and anti-trans policies in particular. If you look at the organizations that are on the board of Project 2025, for instance, almost 1/3 of them either started by or were supported by James Dobson. We hope that journalists and historians will research this particular element of Dobson’s life and make it more public.

TLDR: Dr. James Dobson was a known animal abuser, child abuser, bigot, racist, misogynist who made millions (tax-free!) off of his right-wing white supremacist empire.

And millions of us are left to pick up the pieces after being punished constantly in childhood for having normal developmental responses or any kind of emotions at all.

There is no way to convey in this short post the amount of harm he has done or the scale and scope of those affected. For more information on these methods, how they targeted specific developmental stages, and how they lead to estrangement within families, please see the rest of our work.

For everyone who survived these methods and is reading these words today, I want to tell you: you are not alone, and your strong inner will is a beautiful part of you. We do this work at STRONGWILLED because we want the survivors of Dobson’s RAP methods to find solidarity with others and also do the deep work to build up our connections to our bodies, ourselves, and our own autonomy.

As we celebrate the death of a dangerous and damaging person, we are also celebrating ourselves. We are here, despite everything. And we will continue connecting to our strong wills and resisting religious authoritarianism wherever we might find it. And we are grateful to be doing this work in community with you.

5 Myths about Rifts Between Exvangelicals and Their Parents

“Don’t cast aside family members and lifelong friendships. Politics is not worth it, and I think if we follow that principle, we’ll heal the divide in this country.”

-J.D. Vance1

Political rifts in families are not new and they have the potential to slowly — or rapidly, ferociously — undermine the safety and connection in a relationship. While political is an easy term to throw around these days, perhaps ideology is a more accurate way to describe the all-encompassing oppressive worldview of people like white evangelicals. So why isn’t this talked about more often? What happens when parents hold different — and damaging — political ideologies rooted in the oppression of others?

By and large, family therapists in the United States have tried to find ways for parents and their adult children to maintain connection despite political, religious, or other differences.

For example, Karl Pillimer, PhD, author of Fault Lines, a book about family estrangement, has said:

“If the prior relationship was relatively close (or at least not conflictual), I think there is evidence that many family members can restore the relationship [around political differences]. It does involve, however, agreeing on a ‘demilitarised zone’ in which politics cannot be discussed.”2

Kathy McCoy, Phd author of, We Don't Talk Anymore: Healing after Parents and Their Adult Children Become Estranged wrote: “Relationships are precious. Political crises pass. It's the love in our lives that needs to be treasured and nurtured,” suggesting an approach where, “I don’t want to know your political beliefs and I won’t tell you mine…I just want to focus on love and peace and the memories and beliefs we do share. Nothing else is truly important.”3

And just after the 2024 election, heading into the holiday season, Kimberly Horn Ed.D wrote in a PsychologyToday article:

“Protect your peace by steering discussions toward shared interests or holiday traditions…Politely request upfront that the family agree to keep politics off the table...If someone brings up a contentious topic, redirect the discussion to something neutral or joyful, such as reminiscing about past holidays, sharing funny stories, or talking about plans for the new year.”4

These all reflect a cultural bias, a version of “blood is thicker than water,” based on the belief that it is better to focus on good memories, shared “love” and relationship rather than materially harmful ideologies. This bias in effect makes a cultural value judgment promoting the idea that biological ties are more important than politics when it comes to healthy, safe, and secure relationships. For so many children of religious authoritarian parents, the cultural discourse that is biased towards biological ties adds to the confusion as they try to sort out what kind of relationship they want with their parents — or if they want one at all. Many of us have a voice in the back of our minds, asking us: Are you really going to let politics get in the way of your relationships?

But to prioritize “unity” over politics preserves the status quo and supports existing power structures. This mindset not only downplays politics’ impact on marginalized groups but also allows those who “don’t let politics get in the way of relationships” to feel morally superior while actively upholding oppressive systems.5

There’s also an element of emotional gaslighting that arises with the idea that politics don’t have to impact your relationships. It’s a confusing message because for most of us, politics very much do impact our relationships. As much as we might wish otherwise, ideologies and their political implications inevitably shape relationships and society as whole. Pretending politics can be set apart from relationships demands compartmentalization, leading to internal conflict and a denial of the real impact. Trying to exclude politics from personal connections creates emotional and mental dissonance that contradicts the reality of our lived experience, and it always ends up benefiting those who are abusing and oppressing others in an unjust system.

When it comes to the conversation about estrangement and politics, at least in the context of white evangelicalism, there are five common myths that we regularly come across:

Myth #1: The United States does not have a totalitarian problem.

Discussions about estrangement and family rifts often overlook the profound influence of high-control religion and its totalizing nature on family systems in the United States. We have not, as society, recognized that large portions of the US population hold a robust totalitarian ideology, and that this ideology impacts all arenas of a person’s life6.

Totalitarianism is often talked about in the context of governments, but on an individual level it is a worldview/ideology that is concerned with taking over every single element of a person’s life. It aims to rule not just the outward behaviors of a person but the inner world as well — policing people from without and from within (often utilizing terror7). At STRONGWILLED, we believe white evangelicalism is a totalizing worldview and we focus on just one element of it here: namely, parenting methods. In this evangelical world, parenting methods were rigidly geared toward raising obedient children that would take on the worldview of their parents. But parenting is only one aspect of the all-encompassing control that white evangelicalism enacts on its members. Every element of their life is connected to their beliefs about themselves, God, and the world.

Here is a 4 minute long video that explains how totalizing an evangelical worldview is — from Focus on the Family itself.

From the video:

“One of the effects of a comprehensive and systematic Biblical worldview is that you are not as easy to fool. The effect we want to have on people is that they have that ability to discern and to be able to fend off those lies and illusions that bombard them in every corner of life.”

“I guess in the end what we are really after is that we will see God’s people hunger after him. That they will continually be formed more and more to the image of Christ. And what that means is, when He weeps, we weep. What He calls evil, we see as evil. What He calls glorious and good, we see as glorious and good.”

The effect of these stated goals is that any information conflicting with Focus on the Family’s ideology is preemptively framed as deceptive, dangerous, or evil. By positioning their “Biblical worldview” as the ultimate safeguard against being “fooled,” they use a rigid framework where those who accept their teachings are deemed discerning and wise, while those who question or challenge them are seen as misled, deceived — or evil. This framing discourages critical engagement with outside perspectives, making it difficult for followers to entertain alternative viewpoints without feeling they are compromising their faith.

This demanded loyalty to a “biblical worldview” has a huge impact on family dynamics: white evangelicalism’s totalizing ideology operates as more than just a set of beliefs — it functions as an active force within the family structure, an invisible yet dominant participant shaping relational dynamics. Often, it acts as a triangulating presence, pulling family members into alignment with its values and creating loyalty binds that prohibit parents from truly engaging with their adult children. When this influence goes unrecognized, common advice about reconciliation or boundary-setting fails to address the deeper systemic pressures at play. Understanding estrangement within this framework requires acknowledging not just individual conflicts but the ways in which totalitarian ideology itself structures family roles and power, and limiting open dialogue and options for reconciliation.

Myth #2: Politics are not personal.

Following the 2016 election, I (Krispin) spent an evening with an extended relative that I hadn’t seen in a couple of years. We’d grown up together, but despite living near one another, didn’t find many occasions to spend time together. We caught up quickly on jobs and family, and soon found ourselves talking about politics.

At that time, I was connected with our refugee neighbors, and the Muslim Ban was impacting these friends. My relative wanted to debate the merits of the ban, and talk about the “pros and cons.” He was a big fan of the current president, and talked in broad sweeping statements about policy on the world stage, while I pleaded with him to grapple with the stories of suffering people hoping to escape war and find safety for themselves and their families.

At the end of the night he said, “This was really fun, we should do it again some time. I really enjoyed the back and forth and hearing both sides.” It didn’t feel fun to me at all. Having a theoretical debate about people that are actually suffering was not my idea of a good time, and I decided that night that it was not a relationship I wanted to continue to invest in.

To me, reducing groups of people to political talking points felt dehumanizing and deeply unsettling, and I couldn’t ignore that aspect of the interaction. (Even as I pointed out this dynamic to my relative, I was only met with more “logic” and theoretical situations). Political ideologies centered on dehumanizing others are personal and to pretend otherwise for many of us requires the suppression of our core values. This constant repression will inevitably impact our relationships and connections with others, and can even impact our relationships with ourselves.

If you are someone with a marginalized identity in the US today, you already know the truth of this in your bones. If you don’t — we hope you can listen to those of us who are telling you that political ideology is incredibly personal, and to pretend otherwise is to protect an oppressive system.

Many evangelical teenagers were exposed to “worldview” indoctrination sessions at their churches, youth groups, and special conferences (or simply in the curriculum their parents used at home)

Myth #3: We can find a way to come to a common understanding.

Lots of therapy content about reconciling political differences includes suggestions of active listening, empathy, giving one another the benefit of the doubt, and finding common ground where you can. This might work in some communities, and we’re not all-out disregarding the need for dialogue around important issues. However when it comes to a totalizing ideology like white evangelicalism, it simply does not work this way.

While there might be intentions on all sides to listen and engage, for people within a totalizing worldview, whenever an idea comes into opposition to doctrine (or the politics associated with the religion), it cannot be considered. If you grew up in evangelicalism, you know personally what it is like to listen intently to an “outsider's” views — all the while, filtering the information through “what the Bible says,” only agreeing with that which doesn’t conflict with your worldview. In this way, there’s an unspoken premise that says: “I can listen to you, take in your perspective and possibly agree with you — so long as it doesn’t conflict with my conservative reading of the Bible or what my religious leaders tell me is true.” And without naming this aspect of the conversation, engaging with those in this totalizing worldview can feel like running in circles.

For some of us, you might have conversations that move the needle slightly with your parents or others on certain issues. But more than likely, you will eventually hit a brick wall when your ideas of equity and justice conflict with their notions of biblical truth (“Truth with a capitol T”) or God’s ways (“The Bible says it, I believe it, that settles it.”) Unfortunately, many of us have spent countless hours engaging in conversations trying to come to a common understanding on issues like systemic racism, climate catastrophe, LGBTQIA+ equality, trans rights and more, while our parents or other loved ones not only disregard us but are unable to even listen and engage with any conversation that threatens their sense of self and worldview.

We find it best to take people at their word: when they say that they believe the Bible (the conservative patriarchal interpretation they’ve been given most if not all of their adult lives), above all else, it’s pointless to try to change that view. Perhaps you’ve seen proof of this: when progressive Christians cite the Bible or Jesus’ words in an attempt to prompt conservatives to reconsider their beliefs, these conservatives dismiss it as “liberal propaganda” if it challenges their conservative Republican politics.

Although it is incredibly painful, we need to believe people when they tell us they will choose their ideology over us and other marginalized peoples. But the positive news is that once you have accepted the totalizing element of conservative Christian ideology you get to decide how you want to interact in a relationship with someone who holds these oppressive religious and political beliefs — without expecting that they will ever change.

An insert from the Worldview Academy workbook. The path was always to start by molding the individual as a child/teen, with the ultimate aim of controlling the civil government according to God’s laws

Myth #4: Avoiding the topic of politics is the solution.

As mentioned above, many therapists have suggested focusing on points of connection rather than politics as the solution to our current situation. In that same vein, this Focus on the Family article suggests that parents deal with relational rifts by expressing their opinions less, and focusing instead on spending “neutral” time together, like going out to dinner. It seems this has been a common approach for many conservative parents and their adult children (and grandchildren): simply withhold their views and pressure everyone to gather together and pretend that everything is fine as a show of normalcy and having a “healthy” family.

But for many adult children, their parents being suddenly silent on politics doesn’t actually change anything. If the conservative parent has spent decades investing in anti-queer, capitalistic, and white supremacist ideology — whether listening to Rush Limbaugh or through countless Bible study groups soaked in this type of rhetoric — the adult child knows their real views intimately. In fact, this is exactly what makes evangelicals tick — the constant need to evangelize, or to make others know that their worldview is the only one that is true.

To make it concrete, let’s focus on one particular example common in our STRONGWILLED community: For most queer adults who were raised with religious authoritarian parenting methods, there is a deep pain of having a parent who believes your gender expression or sexual identity is sinful and something to be cured. That pain is not erased by your parents simply not talking about it, or by ignoring the reality that your parents voted for the rights of LGBTQIA+ people to be restricted across the nation.

Avoiding politics altogether often turns into a way to help conservative parents not feel discomfort by having the “goodness” of their worldview challenged. It allows them to spend time with their adult children, pretending that they are loving, kind people, never having to face the actual impact that their politics and religious ideology has had on their adult children and other marginalized populations.

For many RAP survivors, their childhoods were shaped by intense worldview indoctrination. Simply asking people to ignore this reality for the sake of “unity” doesn’t actually work.

Myth #5 Everyone’s allowed to have their own viewpoint and beliefs (and stay in relationship).

Lastly, there is a cultural assumption in the US that freedom of thought means that everyone can hold their own beliefs — without it impacting their relationships. At least, that’s often what both these family therapists and Focus on the Family believe. It’s also the message you’ve probably gotten too.

It’s not fair to ask someone to give up their religious beliefs.

We have to be able to agree to disagree.9

Can’t there be space for different opinions?

It’s controlling to ask someone to change their political beliefs.

These are problematic statements in general, but when they are coming from people who have loudly and proudly insisted on their totalizing worldview for decades, they especially fall flat. White evangelicalism teaches people that believing its doctrine is the most important part of life, and that a person should be able to hold its doctrine without recourse. But what does this actually mean?

This means asking adult children to keep someone in their life who actively works against their well-being and the well-being of people they care about. It means allowing someone into your life who thinks you or the way you navigate the world is inherently bad or broken. It means overlooking a large point of pain: to know that your parents think your relationship, gender expression, or concern for marginalized people is wrong and bad. It means repeating the patterns of childhood, where you are shamed or punished for being your true self, and all of your energies go towards upholding the worldview of your parents as “good” or “correct” — either explicitly or implicitly.

Close relationships are supposed to be places of refuge, safety, and belonging, where you can be yourself without fear of judgment. Trying to make a space that feels relationally close while maintaining everyone’s conflicting ideology doesn’t actually create the safety we crave. It creates emotional dissonance and internal confusion.

Yes, your parents are free to believe what they want to — and to live with the natural consequences that arise from those beliefs. When people make the decision to put up relational boundaries with their family members, it is almost never a sudden decision. Instead, it is an often agonizing unavoidable consequence of being in a relationship that constantly erodes trust and connection. When your parents have a totalizing worldview where they have to hold certain views on groups of people or parenting methods, it is unreasonable and unrealistic to think that their devotion wouldn't impact their closest relationships.

Yes, white evangelicals who gladly support an authoritarian leader can hold whatever views they want. And just like all other actions in life, it will have consequences.

(the “wizard” is anyone who does not have a Biblical worldview)

//

Everyone has the right to determine how they handle ideological divides with family members, and there is no singular “correct” way to address them. You might choose to engage in ongoing dialogue, or you might decide that continuing a relationship under these conditions is emotionally exhausting or even harmful. You might decide that it’s worth maintaining some level of connection, while acknowledging to yourself that the relationship will not feel close or supportive. You might have a direct conversation with family members about how their ideology has impacted the current political moment, and how it impacts you and the people you care about. However you choose to respond, it’s important to acknowledge that politics deeply impacts relationships, and ignoring that reality comes at a cost.

What is Religious Authoritarian Parenting?

First of all, let’s start with a few questions to reflect on:

• As a child how important was obedience to your parents / caregivers? 

• What was your relationship to the term “strong willed” in childhood? 

• Did your parents make obedience to God / a sacred text an important part of their parenting philosophy?

• Have you made major life decisions in order to avoid upsetting your parents or to keep them happy? (marriage, having children, where you live, regularly attending religious services)

• Do you avoid telling your parents about your political views because of the conflict it creates?

• Do you struggle to be assertive or set boundaries with authority figures? 

• Do you find it difficult to know your own life goals (or even preferences, like where you want to go to dinner)?

• Do your parents criticize you (implicitly or explicitly) for being too permissive with your children?

• Have you or are you currently debating going low- or no-contact with your parents due to their inability to respect your opinions, boundaries, and life choices?

If you answered yes to any of the above questions, you may have experienced Religious Authoritarian Parenting. 

What is Religious Authoritarian Parenting?

Religious Authoritarian Parenting (RAP) is an approach to childrearing that prioritizes obedience to authority over all other aspects of childhood development, utilizing religion as further confirmation of the role humans play in submitting to authority. The goal of religious authoritarian parenting is to raise children who grow into adults that automatically submit to any authority that their parents consider to be God-ordained. This includes religious leaders, religious texts, husbands (in the case of women), and other approved authority figures like the police, government, teachers, and employers. Parenting practices revolve around developing a child’s desire to submit to authority, with a myriad of consequences (including corporal punishment) if the child does not obey immediately.

While healthy parents often teach obedience until their children are developed enough to make their own decisions, the goal of religious authoritarian parenting is to prevent the development of self-autonomy or individuality from happening at all. It aims to ensure that children remain within the religious hierarchical structures from childhood to adulthood, as parents transfer their authority to religious and government authorities. It’s based on the idea that humans, no matter their age, are untrustworthy and evil and require dominance by a deity. This deity uses the government, religious leaders, or family members to control humans, lest they engage in “self-will.”1 This style of parenting is designed to prime a child to stay within the religious community, to submit to the hierarchy of that system, to obey the norms of the community, and to continue on in those values and political identities for life. 

Who were the Religious Authoritarian Parenting experts?

The STRONGWILLED project focuses on the time period in American publishing when Religious Authoritarian Parenting methods began to be both popular and widespread (approximately from 1970—present). While there are too many authors to name in this introduction, some of the biggest and best-selling names in this genre include:

• Dr. James Dobson (founder of Focus on the Family, political lobbyist, and author of books like Dare to Discipline and The Strong-Willed Child

• John MacArthur, non-denominational pastor and author of books like Successful Christian Parenting

• Bill Gothard, founder of Institute for Biblical Life Principles (IBLP) a patriarchal fundamentalist group

• Debi and Michael Pearl, authors of books such as To Train up a Child

• Ted Tripp, author of Shepherding a Child’s Heart

The common link between these authors (and the myriad of copycats they spawned) is a patriarchal Christianity that was interested in helping parents raise children who would know their place in the God-given hierarchy of society. 

While we are most familiar with white evangelicals, religious authoritarian parenting can occur in any hierarchical religious setting, and people from other faith traditions may recognize these similar dynamics in their upbringing2. 

This book went on to sell over 2 million copies (and is still being sold). According to Dr. Dobson, a series of parenting lectures he filmed on his discipline advice have been seen by over 80 million people in the United States during the 1970s and 80s (which was 1/3 of the population at the time). Notice the balance between “love” and “control”—the perfect image for RAP.

This book went on to sell over 2 million copies (and is still being sold). According to Dr. Dobson, a series of parenting lectures he filmed on his discipline advice have been seen by over 80 million people in the United States during the 1970s and 80s (which was 1/3 of the population at the time). Notice the balance between “love” and “control”—the perfect image for RAP.

The Goals of Religious Authoritarian Parenting

RAP aims to form the kind of adult a child grows up to be, seeking to hold long-term influence over the child. There are four common areas that religious authoritarian parenting targets:

• Unquestioning Obedience to God-ordained Authorities. For religious authoritarian parents, home is the training ground to develop obedience and submission to other authorities that the religious group deems God-ordained. Those raised in RAP homes may find themselves submitting to authority figures in a way that feels subconsciously automatic (“fawning” is the term developed by trauma therapist Pete Walker in his book CPTSD: From Surviving to Thriving)3. This was the goal of religious authoritarian parenting: to develop an automatically submissive response to authority.
  
  

• Acceptance of Hierarchical Roles. RAP often has a focus on ensuring that children adopt roles that their parents want them to fulfill. Lindsay Gibson, author of Adult Children of Emotionally Immature Parents calls this “role coercion”. These roles often include heteronormative gender roles in the nuclear family, like expecting that a child assigned female at birth will grow up to be a submissive wife and mother. Role coercion also often includes religious role expectations (church-goer, regular temple-attender, missionary). There are other roles that religious authoritarian parents may push, including where to go to college (usually a religiously-affiliated institution, or perhaps attending close to home) or what career field their child chooses. The role coercion that occurs in religious authoritarian parenting often seeks to suppress queer sexuality or gender expressions, and instead puts primacy on creating a heterosexual patriarchal nuclear family that raises their children within the religious tradition.
  
  

• Acceptance and Replication of Political Values. It’s normal to teach children values like honesty, integrity and kindness. However RAP has a focus on ensuring that children grow up to hold the same political values as their parents, often including homophobia, patriarchy/misogyny, and other values that marginalize certain groups. In white religious communities in the US, Republican politics are often emphasized to the point where it becomes hard to discern whether or not RAP is about religion or if it is actually about a political framework. RAP seeks to raise children that view the world identically to their parents, rather than developing their own identity and conclusions about the world.
  
  

• Acceptance of Life-Long Parental Influence.  Religious authoritarian parenting doesn’t have an expiration date, as it aims to ensure that parents hold significant influence over their children even into adulthood. In evangelical circles (which we’re most familiar with) there is slight variation: Bill Gothard and John MacArthuer both taught that parents always hold an explicit authority in their child’s life, even into adulthood. Others, like James Dobson, encouraged parents to create a psychological dynamic during childhood and adolescence that would set the child up to defer to parents no matter their age. 

RAP’s Use of Spirituality/Religion

Regardless of the specific faith tradition, religious authoritarian parenting uses religion or spirituality in similar ways to produce submission in their children. Children are taught that their parents are an authority instituted by God, therefore when children obey their parents, they are obeying God (and, perhaps put more succinctly: when they disobey their parents, they are disobeying God). Children are taught that they are sinful and need an outside and external force to make them “good”. Most religious communities that encourage this parenting style have a belief in hell, which serves as an extra layer of control to encourage children to submit to parents. Children learn to squash their own autonomy and submit to their parents as a way of learning to submit to the God they are dependent on for salvation.

Our Thesis: Religious Authoritarian Parenting as a Political Movement

It is our belief at STRONGWILLED that religious authoritarian parenting wasn’t just a trend that dominated much of the religious parenting books in the United States from 1970 on. At its core RAP is a political movement designed to create people who would be responsive to authoritarianism and authoritarian leaders. Hoping to consolidate and maintain white, hereteo-normative, patriarchal power structures that privileged Christianity, the religious authoritarian parenting movement began to teach parents how to raise their children in a world that was increasingly pluralistic and moving towards social progress for minority groups, including Black people, women, immigrants, and the LGBTQIA+ community.  The purveyors of this kind of parenting set out to specifically instruct caregivers to raise children who would learn about and embrace their God-given roles in a hierarchical society, and to never imagine “rebelling” the way that young people did during the 1960s4.

It’s no surprise that after half a century of intentionally teaching parents in religious communities to parent with these authoritarian parenting practices, 2024 is seeing a rising wave of authoritarianism across the globe, with the United States leading the way. As people pontificate about why so many people are being drawn to authoritarian leaders and the fear tactics they use to shore up power, it seems that many are overlooking this important and profoundly influential element.

During the second half of the 20th century, conservative leaders taught parents to create an authoritarian home where obedience to authority was the most important aspect of child rearing, priming children to grow into adults who would seek and support authoritarian political leaders5. Religious authoritarian parenting was a wide-spread movement that has wielded incredible political power. Not only that, but RAP methods have also led to long-lasting psychological impact among the millions and millions of children who grew up in an authoritarian family environment. While the parents who bought into religious authoritarian methods were promised a legacy of happy families full of well-behaved kids, the reality is that many of us who grew up in these households struggle with symptoms that match CPTSD: anxiety, depression, an increased risk for suicidality, and mental and physical health disorders, not to mention strained relationships with our caregivers. In future posts, we will unpack the personal impacts of these parenting methods, but for now we will focus on what the stated goals of these parenting methods were.

Parenting Styles & Terms

For the purposes of this project, we recognized we would need to be precise about the parenting philosophies we wanted to unpack. The various terms offered by parenting experts — permissive, authoritative, and authoritarian — didn’t quite seem to fit the lived experience of so many people. So, after years of research, we here at STRONGWILLED created our own term, and we would be curious to know if our definitions and terms fit your lived experience. We use the term Religious Authoritarian Parenting because it is rooted in the political philosophy of authoritarianism: the belief that individuals should submit to the (often God-ordained) authority of society, rather than engaging in personal freedom and individual autonomy.

The purveyors of religious authoritarian parenting — people like Dr. James Dobson, John MacArthur, Bill Gothard, Gary Ezzo and more — always insisted their methods were authoritative and not authoritarian6. We, however, disagree. We believe that RAP is most similar to intrusive parenting, a term used by Brian K. Barber and other scholars to describe parents that use methods to gain psychological control over their children. We’ll be writing later articles about the different types of parenting (permissive, authoritarian, authoritative), and where RAP fits in that framework.

Defining religious authoritarian parenting is just the beginning of naming its long-term impacts, both on political systems and on the individual level. We have a vested interest in not letting religious authoritarians be in charge of political systems, and we are interested in healing from the long-term impacts of having our autonomy and self-will disciplined out of us at key developmental stages. In the coming weeks and months we will release our content on the history of RAP and deep-dive into some of the main purveyors of this philosophy, as well as create community resources and discussions for people to begin the process of healing and reclaiming autonomy. Our hope is that together we can shape this project into a resource that is educational and collaborative. 

To that aim, we believe that the most important aspect of understanding the impact of Religious Authoritarian Parenting is hearing the voices of those who grew up under these parenting practices.

Were you raised with a RAP principles?

Understanding whether you were raised with this parenting style and how it impacted you often requires some reflection. We’ve found that the signs of RAP can be seen both in childhood and in adulthood. Let’s go back to some of the questions we posed at the beginning and take some time to sit with them:

• As a child what was your relationship to the terms “strong willed” or “obedient” in reference to yourself/ your siblings?

• Have you made major life decisions in order to avoid upsetting your parents or to keep them happy? (marriage, having children, where you live, regularly attending religious services)

• As a child, did you often feel nervous around one or both of your parents? Do you feel nervous around them today?

• Do you avoid telling your parents about your political views?

• Do you struggle to be assertive with authority figures? 

• Do you find it difficult to know your own life goals (or even preferences, like where you want to go to dinner)?

• Do you have to protect your parents from your feelings?

• Do your parents criticize you (implicitly or explicitly) for being too permissive with your children?