James Dobson Is Dead, Was A Monster

James Dobson was a nasty dude. He liked to beat children and dogs with a belt and to rain misery and punishment on the vulnerable; we know all of this about him because he said as much in public, repeatedly, over a long and rancid public life. He enlisted a whole bunch of Ideology—patriarchy, social conservatism, utterly fake upside-down Christianity—in service of those basic motivations, not only to justify his own appetite for and personal acts of sadism and domination, but to cast punishment and predation as far out into the world as he could manage. He studied psychology and the Bible so that he could borrow their authority and instrumentalize them to do widespread cruelty more effectively. He was oriented to evil, at vast scale, by continual lifelong choice. It was his calling, and he made it his job.

What a guy like James Dobson does, and what James Dobson did for his whole adult life, is offer people—white men primarily, but not exclusively—a rhetorical framework for doing evil and feeling good about it. Stand right here and look exactly there, he said, and psychology says it’s OK for you to beat your children, that when they cry for more than two minutes of the beating, it is because they are bad and not because you are hurting them; you should beat them harder for crying until they stop. Stand right here and look exactly there, and tradition says your wife should have no will of her own. Stand right here and look exactly there, and love of country says society should press its boot onto the poor and marginalized and crush them until they die. Didn’t you always hate them? Sure you did. Religion says right here that you are right to. He blew softly on a stupid and seething population’s resentments, its will to power, its lust to punish those who complicate their desires by having lives of their own, and watched those appetites stick up like the hairs on your arm, or glow like charcoal in a fire. It feels good. He tempts you with the promise that every cruel, fearful, punitive impulse you have aligns with The Way Things Are Supposed To Be, and that it is even your grim duty is to indulge them. In this respect, James Dobson was very much like Satan.

In American society, there is a lot of money and power in the business of being very much like Satan. Dobson became one of the most important figures in American conservatism in the 1970s; through his organization Focus on the Family, which he ran for nearly 30 years, Dobson exerted huge influence over the tides of American right-wing evangelical Protestantism as the latter exploded into perhaps the most powerful force in the country’s religious life and politics. The Family Policy Alliance, which he founded in 2004, only made formal the vast lobbying power Dobson and his media machine already exerted within Republican politics. In this way Dobson warred against virtually every concerted movement in his lifetime working toward making this country kinder, more just, more equitable, or more merciful. He also fought against efforts to protect the environment and responsibly steward the world’s natural resources, because he was a nasty guy motivated by the thrill of doing evil with impunity and for no other reason whatsoever.

Anyway, he is dead now. He died on Thursday in Colorado Springs, at the age of 89. The world is a much worse place as a result of his life’s work; it would be a better place had he never been born. If he did not want people to rejoice at his death, maybe he should not have spent an entire lifetime working for and justifying their pain and suffering. He preached that there is a hell, and that the wicked go there. He lived his life as though he did not believe it, or anything else.