On the Death of James Dobson

I woke up this morning and found out that James Dobson was dead.

It’s hard to even know what to say, when an evil man dies. As a Catholic, I’m supposed to say “May God have mercy on his soul,” and that’s sticking in my throat just now. My mother taught me not to speak ill of the dead, but this particular dead man committed the sin of scandal so many times that I feel I’d be sinning myself if I didn’t speak ill.

We are all sinners, but James Dobson is in a class by himself. He dedicated his entire life to hurting children and making them afraid of an angry God. He ordered parents to whip their toddlers with belts. He told them to hit children until they cried. He told them that the tears of tortured little ones were “cleansing.” That’s a wickedness that’s out of the ordinary: not striking out of anger, which is a terrible sin, but the even worse sin of striking in calculated cruelty, teaching others to do so, and claiming that that cruelty is pleasing to God.

James Dobson is responsible for a whole multitude of human beings raised Christian, who want nothing to do with the God of Christianity because they think that God is a wrathful tyrant who wants them to suffer.

They can see no goodness in the teachings of Jesus Christ, because the those teachings were used blasphemously to justify harming and traumatizing them. They don’t want to know God the Father, because the Father has been presented to them as a monster who delights in the suffering of his children.

Dobson is responsible for a whole multitude of traumatized adults who want nothing to do with their parents, because their parents tortured them. Many of those parents were already abusive and looking for an excuse to take their anger out on their children. But a number of them were compassionate parents to at first, and they were manipulated. Dobson spiritually abused those parents into thinking that their precious children would burn for eternity in hell, if the parents didn’t give them a taste of hell on earth. So they suppressed their better instincts and beat their children. And now their children hate them, and often those parents don’t even understand why. They are culpable for what they chose to do, but Dobson is the false prophet who led them to sin.

In addition to that, Dobson was a complete pervert with bizarre, abusive views on human sexuality.

Dobson opined that  boys shouldn’t ever provide childcare, because “The sex drive in boys is at its lifetime peak between the ages of sixteen and eighteen. Under that influence, children have been severely damaged by ‘good kids’ who meant no harm but who were enticed by curiosity to experiment and explore.” He believed males were just naturally doomed to sexually abuse others if left alone with them. He is one of the men responsible for sexual abuse victims who can’t shake the notion that they must have brought it on themselves somehow, because the abuser couldn’t help himself.

And his legacy is even more perverted than that, because in “Bringing Up Boys,” Dobson strongly recommended and gleefully shared excerpts from the work of Joseph Nicolosi. Nicolosi encouraged fathers to stop their sons from being gay by “break[ing] the mother-son connection that is proper to infancy but not in the boy’s interest after the age of three.” And one of the ways Nicolosi recommended doing so, was by a grown man taking his son into the shower and showing him his large penis.  As the theologian and advocate R. L. Stollar points out: “there is nothing inherently abusive about parents bathing or showering with young children. This is a common practice in many households throughout history and the world to enable parental bathing or showering, to save resources, and to teach proper hygiene. However, I also need to be clear: while family nudity is not inherently abusive, purposefully exposing your adult genitals to a child to encourage their sexual development is child sexual abuse.”

Dobson, then, was an advocate for the spiritual, emotional, physical AND sexual abuse of children. But he didn’t stop there. Dobson is also responsible for battered wives staying with their husbands, because he blamed them for their struggles. He told them they were often responsible for the abuse, and that it was always their responsibility to help the man stop. He spiritually abused them into believing that running away from a man who was battering them with his fists was a sin.

Dobson is one of the men responsible for a whole generation of people who think they’re good Christians, specifically because they believe in brutality and violence that are diametrically opposed to the Gospels.

They think that men should harm their wives, and the men and wives in turn harm their children, and that belief reflects all over society– rejoicing in harming immigrants, the poor, the homeless, and people who sin differently than they do. Even if he hadn’t specifically endorsed Trump all the way back in 2016, he is responsible for Trump’s personality cult among Evangelicals. Trump is a man in the very image and likeness of Dobson’s notion of God the Father.

The damage that James Dobson has done will take generations to undo.

Now he’s gone to get his comeuppance.

May God have mercy on his soul.

The first step in having mercy on a soul that twisted, will be to make him understand the agony he’s caused.

However badly that hurts, we have it on good authority that a millstone and being thrown into the sea would be better.

Mary Pezzulo is the author of Meditations on the Way of the Cross, The Sorrows and Joys of Mary, and Stumbling into Grace: How We Meet God in Tiny Works of Mercy.