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!