This Webworm deals with religious trauma. Please take care when reading and listening. I will note that the audio portion is handled gently by my guests Michael and Shane.
Hi,
I usually like to have my thoughts a little more organised before I send out a Webworm, but this is sort of a work in progress. And to be totally honest — I’m really hoping you can help me make sense of it in the comments.
Ultimately, I think today’s newsletter is about a lot of the stuff I bang on about here on Webworm.
About how so much of Conspiracy theory culture is tied back to ideas popularised in Evangelical Christianity. How my old school made gay kids feel like pieces of shit. How Arise church abused hundreds of interns. How that Creed concert I went to was full of Christian Nationalists.
Why the anti-mandate movement during Covid was driven by conservative Christians.
Why so many don’t give a shit about the genocide in Gaza.
Why we’re obsessed with how we punish criminals.
Why I am so terrified of dying.
The Satanic Panic.
Over the last few months I’ve become obsessed with an evangelical Christian organisation called “Focus on the Family”.
Focus on the Family was founded in 1977 by Dr James Dobson. It describes itself as a church — which was handy for tax reasons — but it was basically a deeply Evangelical Christian organisation that said it was there “to help build strong families”.
Its founder James Dobson was a child psychologist, and positioned himself as an expert in how to raise good Christian kids. For parents in America panicking about how to raise children — why wouldn’t they turn to a Godly child psychologist?
His main thing was raising compliant, indoctrinated children — mainly through physical punishment in the form of smacking, and a deep-seated fear of hell (a real place).
This was happening at a time in America where physically disciplining your kids was no longer seen a good thing to do anymore. Thankfully, Focus on the Family was there to say “No, it’s cool, definitely keep hitting your kids.”
Negative emotions were to be suppressed. Guilt was the main currency in town.
By the mid-90s, Focus on the Family was a multimedia empire which had radio shows on over 7000 radio stations, magazines, videos, camps, and a really big mailing list. Dobson leveraged the newsletter like no-one else — and their annual budget reached around $100 million.
Dobson wrote over 30 parenting books with titles that haven’t aged very well. His most famous one came out in 1970 and was called Dare to Discipline. He wrote a handy book for men called What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women. He wrote another one about raising kids called The Strong-Willed Child, which was essentially about how to break the will of a child.
I have copies of most of them. They’re all terrible.
Dobson’s heroes weren’t great. The forward to Dare to Discipline was written by Paul Popenoe, a noted eugenicist whose published work was widely praised by the Nazi government.
To make sure Christian families didn’t need to watch secular entertainment, Focus on the Family made their own entertainment. Adventures in Odyssey was the big one — around 1000 episodes which mainly went out over the radio, but also came animated on video cassettes.
A lot of the messaging from Focus on the Family was around sex and sexuality — mainly, not to have sex until you’re married to someone of the opposite sex. And definitely don’t be gay. Gay is very, very bad.
Why am I rabbiting on about this?
James Dobson is this incredibly powerful man that we don’t really talk about.
Ronald Reagan appointed him to an advisory committee for juvenile justice, and throughout the 80s he influenced policy in all 50 states. He was the reason so many Christians voted for George Bush, and later — Donald Trump.
While Focus on the Family’s 501c3 status means it couldn’t lobby — they set up an affiliate group called Focus Family Alliance, which can. With revenue of close to $100 million a year — it spends most of its time lobbying against gay rights, trans rights and abortion to this day.
I’m not sure I can get across how powerful Dobson was to the fabric of America — and how powerful his organisation still is.
The only person granted an interview with Ted Bundy before he was executed? James Dobson. Why? He was powerful. He had an audience. And he used that interview to argue that Ted Bundy did everything that he did because he sinned and watched porn. I am not joking.
Today, I released a podcast episode of Flightless Bird about Focus on the Family. You can listen to that if you like — but that’s entirely optional.
Really today on Webworm I wanted you to share a conversation between two New Zealanders raised by parents who embraced Focus on the Family.
Because Focus on the Family travelled far beyond America. It went global — and during the 80s and 90s in particular, millions of kids were raised in the ways of Dr James Dobson. There would have been a few of his books on my own family’s shelf growing up.
Michael Frost and Shane Meyer-Holt are my friends, and run a podcast called In The Shift, in which they discuss coming to terms with exiting a very specific breed of Christianity. They are still Christians, just not the type you find at the churches I tend to write about.
Hearing them discuss Focus on the Family was fascinating to me, and I hope it’s fascinating to you, too. Loads of churches in New Zealand brought into this style of parenting to various degrees — because they thought it was good advice.
I get it. Parenting is hard. Dobson knew this — and he exploited it.
Something Michael said towards the end there really hit me like a tonne of bricks.
He talked about what it meant to grow a generation of compliant, emotionally stunted kids. And what that means when a country like America comes under the leadership of a figure like Donald Trump — a man who professes to be a Christian.
He talks about how powerful James Dobson was, and what he and Focus on the Family ultimately achieved:
“It worked for growing very unhealthy, very compliant people.
And if I hadn’t started asking questions at some point about the system I was in, and if it hadn’t unraveled — I think now with what I see going on in the world, I would have been really well shaped for authoritarian political leaders.
Especially ones with religious undertones or appealing to religious ideology. Because that was just the whole package. That was kind of how it worked: this very hierarchical kind of system of behavior that that we were being shaped into — and it was very effective.”
This is a statement echoed by DL Mayfield, an author I’ve also been speaking to about Focus on the Family. They have their own newsletter, Strongwilled:
“This is my big thing. Dobson was a child psychologist, right? Who was obsessed with replicating patriarchal authoritarian political structures within the home. He eventually is one of the most prolific political lobbyists in American history. So he’s had both careers. And I think they’re intimately connected — because I believe parenting is political.”
The pieces all start to fit, but I just don’t know what the fuck to do with it.
So: I’m curious if any of this is new to you. Have you ever heard of Dr James Dobson? Were you raised with any of this stuff? Were you a parent who read the books? Who remembers Mr Whittaker and Whit’s end? How about VeggieTales? Did you watch Dobson’s interview (about the dangers of porn) with one of America’s most well known serial killers? Are there any women out there who loved What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women? Does all of this sound totally normal to you, or crazy?
David.
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