How James Dobson’s leap of faith helped reshape Republican politics

Dr. James Dobson left a 14-year career on faculty at the University of Southern California Medical School to embark on a far more speculative quest to combat progressive influences on family formation and the rearing of children.

It was an unusual choice for a man born to a generation that prized security and institutional membership. After decades of successful organization, audience building, book sales, and political influence, Dobson accurately perceived the opportunity before him when he made the leap.

Of all the evangelical attempts to participate in America’s mass media culture, Dobson’s projects may have been the most successful.

But it was more than an opportunity to be successful that Dobson grasped. It was the chance to contribute to the common good, to demonstrate obedience to God, and to speak prophetically to the nation and the world.

Spiritual guide

Dobson was known primarily as an expert on family and the raising of children. His early work made an impact as a kind of counternarrative to the tradition-busting, more permissive views of Dr. Benjamin Spock (not the one from “Star Trek”).

His influence, however, grew far beyond the realm of family even as the umbrella organization of the work was and still is called Focus on the Family.

Dobson was also a true spiritual guide and encourager for Americans of all ages. Young people listened to stories encouraging virtue and Christian faithfulness on Focus on the Family’s outstanding “Adventures in Odyssey” series.

Millions of adults listened to the radio broadcast Dobson did with a series of co-hosts. While his broadcasts often focused on advice for raising children or for building a flourishing marriage, he also platformed Christian testimonies and effective Christian advocates and ministries. Being featured on his broadcast could lead to an explosion of interest and support for an organization such as the still-flourishing Summit Ministries.

Of all the evangelical attempts to participate in America’s mass media culture, Dobson’s projects may have been the most successful.

Faith in motion

Someone who preceded Dobson in changing evangelical thought was the missionary turned author and filmmaker Francis Schaeffer.

There is a kind of narrative some Christian academics promote about Schaeffer, which is that he was on the right path until he began to engage in political activism. It is certainly the case that, as Schaeffer aged and experienced more influence, he felt the need to use it for political ends.

A similar narrative is applied to Dobson. After his death, many people demonized him. But others argue that he had the right ideas early on, only later succumbing to the temptation to get involved in politics and the culture war. But I think those narratives about Schaeffer and Dobson are wrong.

Schaeffer wrote mostly about Christian theology and worldview more broadly until 1979, when he made the film and wrote the book “Whatever Happened to the Human Race?” in conjunction with C. Everett Koop.

Schaeffer and Koop — a pediatric surgeon who would eventually become the most famous surgeon general in United States history — toured together to promote the film, answering questions from audiences in an effort to appeal to American consciences and stop the killing of unborn children by the millions unleashed by the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision.

There is little question that taking on abortion drew Schaeffer more deeply into American politics and into alliance with Republicans.

Turning point

It certainly didn’t have to be that way.

Schaeffer was hardly a libertarian or someone predominantly concerned with limited government. Instead, he had natural sympathies with workers and was a kind of environmentalist. The life issue drew him further to the right because that was the way the issue evolved. Early on, politicians such as Al Gore, Teddy Kennedy, and Jesse Jackson had pro-life sympathies. At the same time, there were plenty of pro-choice Republicans.

But over time, the American political binary did its work.

Ronald Reagan declared forcefully for the pro-life cause even though his own advisers often tried to tamp down his support. Nevertheless, the life issue became a Republican issue. As it did so, it gained purchase with figures like Schaeffer and the previously progressive Richard John Neuhaus, who found himself surprised that commitments to civil rights and opposition to war violence in Vietnam did not translate into determination to protect the unborn.

Dobson also found himself powerfully committed to protecting the child in the womb. That issue, more compellingly and powerfully than any other, drew him into the political fray. Early on, he would make noise about liberal sympathies exhibited at the White House Conference on the Family. But it would be abortion that really pulled Dobson into the political limelight.

Dobson’s threat

There was a time when many Republicans considered the pro-life issue to be a liability, as, for example, various Reagan handlers pushed hard to prevent him from centering the life issue in his speeches.

And after hoping desperately that Republican nominees to the Supreme Court in the 1980s and early 1990s would lead to the overturning of Roe, pro-lifers were badly stung by the Planned Parenthood v. Casey decision — co-authored by three Republican appointees — that cemented Roe’s status.

The dealmaker knew this was one deal he had to make.

GOP pro-choicers likely hoped that would be the end of the matter. It wasn’t. Battles over Supreme Court nominations continued with ferocity, including the bizarre debacles we witnessed in confirmation hearings for nominees from Robert Bork to Clarence Thomas to Brett Kavanaugh.

Dobson was one of the major reasons the Republican Party did not abandon pro-lifers and relegate the issue to the margins. In the late 1990s, Dobson proved just how serious he was when he threatened to leave the Republican Party and to take as many people with him as possible.

The threat was impossible to ignore and resulted in a decisive shift in political gravity.

When faith leads

The Republican Party became a pro-life party virtually full-stop. Notably, the one Republican star who thought he could safely stay pro-choice was Rudy Giuliani. But he failed, as his 2008 presidential campaign proved. In 2012, Mitt Romney ran as a pro-life candidate, which he didn’t do in 1994. And in 2016, even Donald Trump, who had never pronounced himself to be pro-life, made the turn and subsequently won the nomination. The dealmaker knew this was one deal he had to make.

Dobson’s eventual support of Trump in 2016 and beyond is often used as proof that Trump forced conservative evangelicals into a position of deep and unjustifiable compromise. After all, they repeatedly criticized the philandering of then-President Bill Clinton in the 1990s only to look past the alleged same behavior by Trump.

But I think we’re telling the wrong story.

The simple truth is that Dobson helped bend the will of the Republican Party in the direction of opposing abortion reliably and consistently. And when Trump finally declared himself pro-life, it was he — not Dobson — who found himself in a new substantive policy position.

We all know how the story ended. Roe was finally overruled. Abortion returned to the moral and democratic consideration of the American people. And I would argue that Dobson got far more than he gave and with the highest stakes on the line.

People mocked Dobson’s hope that Trump had become a kind of “baby Christian,” but it reflected his own desire to believe in the possibility of redemption and a changed life.