God’s Plan™ Was Just A Eugenics Manual With Bible Verses

Vintage-style graphic featuring James Dobson on a retro television with a eugenics-era family propaganda poster and the caption: “Biblical values brought to you by America’s favorite eugenicist.” — Image created by Dall-E

Beth Moore said the quiet part out loud.

After years of front-line service in the Church of Male Fragility, she finally admitted that complementarianism—that tidy little theology that tells women to stay sweet, stay silent, and stay home—isn’t gospel truth. It’s a doctrine of man. Or, more accurately, a doctrine of white men with control issues and a historical allergy to nuance.

Moore has since backpedaled a bit (because you don’t just burn bridges in evangelicalism—you get disinvited from the potluck), but the veil slipped. And what we saw behind it wasn’t just patriarchy. It was eugenics in a Sunday hat.

The Dirty Secret in the Dobson Family Album

Focus on the Family wants you to know that eugenics is “pure evil.”
Which is fascinating, considering their entire theology was basically copy-pasted from a eugenics manual.

Before James Dobson built a $135 million evangelical empire out of purity culture, patriarchy, and fear of gay people, he was an eager understudy to Paul Popenoe—one of America’s leading eugenicists. This wasn’t a passing influence. This was mentorship. Popenoe didn’t just traffic in ideas about “better breeding.” He co-authored a study justifying the forced sterilization of more than 6,000 Californians, mostly poor, disabled, Black, Mexican, or Native American. He labeled them “waste humanity” and advocated rounding them up for manual labor.

Dobson, apparently, found this man’s thoughts on family inspiring.

Popenoe pioneered marriage counseling not to save relationships, but to ensure the right people—white, middle-class, heterosexuals—were reproducing at a healthy clip. And he was crystal clear that those deemed “unfit” should not. To drive the point home: Popenoe wrote the foreword to Dobson’s original edition of Dare to Discipline. It was later scrubbed, of course, once that eugenics glow-up became too awkward to explain in polite evangelical company.

Dobson didn’t just echo Popenoe’s ideas—he baptized them. Wrapped them in Bible verses. Sold them as “God’s design.” And evangelicals ate it up.

From God’s Design to Racial Panic

Let’s be clear: this wasn’t theology.
This was population control, dressed up in sanctified language and sold as divine order.

The Christian Right’s obsession with family values has always been about controlling who counts as “fit.” Their ideal family? White, straight, married, and monogamous—with just enough children to man the Chick-fil-A drive-thru and vote Republican by age 18. Everyone else? Viewed as either a threat to civilization or a mission field to be fixed.

It’s why Focus on the Family spun welfare stats into moral panic about Black families. It’s why they counseled against interracial marriage into the 1980s, not because they were racist—heaven forbid—but because mixed-race couples supposedly faced too many “marital problems.” It’s why women were told to have a “quiverfull” of babies, and gay kids were told to pray themselves straight—or suffer.

Underneath it all was demographic anxiety: the fear that white Christian America was being replaced. Feminism, LGBTQ rights, reproductive choice, racial equity—all threats to the fragile illusion of moral and cultural dominance.

Dobson didn’t whisper this fear. He blasted it. He called immigrants “illiterate” and “violent criminals” and warned that they would bankrupt America. His books questioned whether domestic abuse victims were actually innocent. He crafted a theology that had far more to say about managing a woman’s libido than preventing a man’s violence.

And it wasn’t just Dobson. The LaHayes cited Popenoe in their 1976 Act of Marriage manual. Focus on the Family’s messaging echoed his legacy for decades—dismissing climate concerns, opposing abortion, and viewing family planning as heresy unless it involved maximum reproduction by the “right” people.

Moral Authority on Mute

Focus on the Family and its offshoots now denounce eugenics loudly—when it suits them. They cry foul about “eugenic mindsets” when someone mentions climate anxiety or declining birth rates among Gen Z. They lament the rise in voluntary sterilizations post-Dobbs, painting it as a rebellion against God. But they never mention Popenoe, the architect of their ideology. They don’t wrestle with their founder’s history. They just pretend it never happened.

Meanwhile, their culture war rages on—against women, queer people, immigrants, the poor, and anyone unwilling to cosplay 1950s suburbia with a side of Jesus.

Beth Moore was right: complementarianism is a doctrine of man.
But let’s not stop there.

The entire evangelical framework around “family values” is a Trojan horse.
One designed to enforce cultural cleansing, sexual repression, and racial control—while singing hymns and selling books.

Amber Cantorna Wylde, daughter of a Focus exec, put it plainly:

“Popenoe’s racist, homophobic, patriarchal idea that healthy white people should be the Super Race … continues to influence millions of evangelicals today due to the global influence that Focus maintains.”

And she’s right. Focus on the Family doesn’t want families—they want control.
Control over who gets to marry, reproduce, preach, parent, or even exist.
All in the name of God.

But the fingerprints on their theology don’t belong to Jesus.
They belong to Paul Popenoe.