When Dobson updated his child-rearing advice in his 1992 manual The Strong-Willed Child, he extended his advocacy of corporal punishment to unruly household pets. Dobson described a confrontation between himself and his dog, Siggie (named for Sigmund Freud), over the dog’s reluctance to sleep in his designated area:
The ONLY way to make Siggie obey is to threaten him with destruction. Nothing else works. I turned and went to my closet and got a small belt to help me “reason” with Mr. Freud.
What developed next is impossible to describe. That tiny dog and I had the most vicious fight ever staged between man and beast. I fought him up one wall and down the other, with both of us scratching and clawing and growling and swinging the belt. I am embarrassed by the memory of the entire scene. Inch by inch I moved him toward the family room and his bed. As a final desperate maneuver, Siggie backed into the corner for one last snarling stand. I eventually got him to bed, only because I outweighed him 200 to 12!
To Dobson, children were to be treated no differently than dogs. Both were preternaturally prone to rebellion, so both should be “crushed” with violent force. Rebellious adolescents, though impervious to spankings and neck pinches, deserved heavy-handed punishment according to Dobson’s rules. The tumult on high school and college campuses “paralleled the decline in authority in the home,” he insisted. Because student radicals were beyond the reach of parental authority, Dobson outlined a ten-point plan that school administrators and law enforcement officers could use to induce their submission instead.
Dobson proposed sex-segregated dormitories, fining of student protesters, and the immediate termination of faculty members found guilty of “encouraging revolution.” He went on to endorse FBI director J. Edgar Hoover’s counter-subversion campaign against the campus left. “Juvenile justice must be designed . . . to sting the child who has challenged authority,” Dobson proclaimed.
The timing of Dobson’s manifesto was fortuitous for his career. On May 8, 1970, just as Dare to Discipline went to press, a thousand students gathered in front of New York’s City Hall to protest the massacre, four days before, of students at Kent State University in Ohio by National Guard soldiers. In a show of solidarity with the dead students, liberal Republican New York City Mayor John Lindsay ordered that flags be flown at half-mast.
Across the street from the protest, a battle line of two hundred burly ironworkers clanged metal pipes against the girders of an unfinished building and chanted, “Lindsay is a queer!” Then, NYPD officers stood aside and watched as the workers savagely attacked the students, chasing them onto the campus of nearby Pace University. There, the hard-hats continued their assault, brutalizing dozens of innocent bystanders with metal bludgeons. “I didn’t see Americans in action,” said one ironworker disgusted by the violence of his coworkers. “I saw the black shirts and brown shirts of Hitler’s Germany.”
Organizers of the assault, which became known as the “hard-hat riot,” were later revealed to have been instigated to violence by President Richard Nixon’s special counsel, Charles Colson.
A White House tape of May 5, 1971, captured the riot’s initial planning phase, revealing Colson’s role. “Chuck is something else,” says Nixon. H. R. Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, says, “He’s gotten a lot done that he hasn’t been caught at.” He goes on: “And then they’re going to stir up some of this Vietcong flag business, as Colson’s going to do it through hard hats and legionnaires. What Colson’s going to do on that, and what I suggested he do—and I think that they can get away with this—do it with the Teamsters. Just ask them to dig up their eight thugs.” “They’ve got guys who’ll go in and knock their heads off,” Nixon gleefully replies. “Sure,” says Haldeman. “Murderers. Guys that really, you know, that’s what they really do . . . regular strikebustertypes . . . and just send them in and beat the shit out of some of these people. And hope they really hurt ‘em, you know what I mean? Go in with some real—smash some noses.”
Two weeks after the White House organized the attack, Colson arranged a ceremony at the White House to honor its field general, Peter Brennan, president of the Building and Construction Trades and later appointed secretary of labor.
By the summer of 1973, Colson was preparing for his trial for obstruction of justice. With the prosecution preparing its case against him and the press corps homing in on his role in the Watergate break-in, Colson knelt on the floor with his friend Raytheon CEO Tom Phillips. While Colson fought back tears in an embarrassed state of silence, Phillips prayed for his soul. Driving through Washington afterward, Colson suddenly began to cry “tears of release.” “I repeated over and over the words, Take me . . . ” Colson wrote in his best-selling memoir, Born Again. “Something inside me was urging me to surrender.” Soon after, Colson sought out Dobson and Francis Schaeffer as prayer partners.
When Colson finally came to Jesus, he became America’s best-known born-again Christian, lending exposure to a cultural phenomenon erupting below the radar of the mainstream press and secular America. In the Washington Post, columnist Nicholas Von Hoffman mocked his conversion as a cynical ploy, panning it as “a socially approved way of having a nervous breakdown.” While Colson appeared to remove himself from politics, he quietly planned a strategy to regain his former influence.
After serving seven months in prison, Colson returned to convert the godless criminals he encountered there. In 1976, he founded Prison Fellowship, now a multimillion-dollar organization that operates with public funding in several states and 110 countries. The hundreds of thousands of inmates who have enrolled in Colson’s InnerChange Freedom Initiative—motivated by coercive enticements such as extended visits with family members and access to musical instruments and better food—are promised by official program material that they will be transformed “through an instantaneous miracle.”
Colson read R. J. Rushdoony with avid interest upon his release from prison, and he was among the first evangelical leaders to latch on to Schaeffer’s anti-abortion crusade. His 1995 science fiction novel Gideon’s Torch revealed his radical passions. The book follows a heroic band of Christian guerrillas who must stop the National Institutes of Health from harvesting brain tissue from aborted fetuses to cure AIDS, a plan funded by Hollywood liberals. To do so, they launch a righteous killing spree of abortion doctors, eventually firebombing the National Institutes of Health. Not surprisingly, Gideon’s Torch became a recruiting tool for those wishing to realize its fictional narrative. It has been excerpted at length on the website of the Army of God, a radical anti-abortion group responsible for the killing and bombing of abortion providers.
When Dobson first entered public life, his understanding of politics was amateur at best. Colson became his counsel, providing him with high-level Republican contacts and help devising a strategy to transform his growing flock into an influential political bloc. Colson could never have fulfilled the strategy on his own. Indeed, no figure in the burgeoning evangelical movement shared Dobson’s psychological understanding of his audience on an intimate level. Only Dobson recognized events such as the hard-hat riot as integral parts of a gathering backlash against liberalism. His advocacy of corporal punishment was carefully intended to channel the violent backlash in the streets into a coherent grassroots movement with himself as its guru.
Dobson’s teachings resonated on a profound level with the backlashers. By 1976, Dare to Discipline had been reprinted eighteen times and sold over a million copies. His success propelled him into the rapidly expanding evangelical broadcast industry. Dobson’s new radio show and ministry, Focus on the Family, became immensely popular as well. Now, the followers eager to implement his harsh methods had grown into a belt-wielding army of millions. Corporal punishment was back with a vengeance.
Philip Greven, a professor of history at Rutgers University and a leading expert on Protestant religious thought, is one of the few researchers of American conservatism who has recognized the impact of corporal punishment on the sensibility of
movement members. In his incisive book Spare the Child: The Religious Roots of Punishment and the Psychological Impact of Physical Abuse, Greven analyzed Dare to Discipline in detail, concluding that Dobson’s violent child-rearing methods served an underlying purpose, producing droves of activists embarked on an authoritarian mission.
“The persistent ‘conservatism’ of American politics and society is rooted in large part in the physical violence done to children,” Greven wrote. “The roots of this persistent tilt towards hierarchy, enforced order, and absolute authority—so evident in Germany earlier in this century and in the radical right in America today—are always traceable to aggression against children’s wills and bodies, to the pain and the suffering they experience long before they, as adults, confront the complex issues of the polity, the society, and the world.”
But the infliction of pain on young children, social deviants, and other weaker beings is only one half of a binary solution Dobson has prescribed to his followers for curing America’s social ills. As Dobson has consistently made clear to his flock, they must first purify their own souls of sin before striking out, literally, to purify the land.
Dobson’s self-purification process, adapted from his father’s Nazarene faith, compels his followers to confess their darkest transgressions before pleading for forgiveness. Finally, to attain what Dobson and others in the evangelical culture call “holiness,” a permanent state of spiritual perfection, followers must submit their individual wills to the order of a higher power—either God, or men of God such as Dobson. Every sinner who submits must be convinced that, as Dobson has insisted, “Pain is a marvelous purifier.”
Dobson’s emphasis on pain, simultaneously inflicted on weaker beings and the self, reflects the sadomasochism at the core of his philosophy. As Greven noted, books such as Dare to Discipline that urge parents to beat their children are hardly distinguishable from S&M manuals such as Larry Townsend’s “The Leatherman’s Handbook,” which advise men on erotic techniques of “discipline” and “punishment.” The principal distinction between the two is that the methods Townsend advocates are applied to adults who have chosen to participate, whereas Dobson’s techniques are wielded against the wills of small children.
“Wherever children suffer from painful physical punishments and humiliating submission to more powerful authorities, sadomasochism will be present,” Greven wrote. “Sadomasochism is thus one of the most enduring consequences of coercive discipline in childhood.”
Erich Fromm, in his book Escape from Freedom, insisted that sadomasochism was more than a sexual kink. It was, he claimed, a defining characteristic of the authoritarian personality, finding its most dangerous expression in the political sphere. “The essence of the authoritarian character,” Fromm wrote, “has been described as the simultaneous presence of sadistic and masochistic drives. Sadism was understood as aiming at unrestricted power over another person more or less mixed with destructiveness; masochism as aiming at dissolving oneself in an overwhelmingly strong power and participating in its strength and glory.”
Dare to Discipline and several of Dobson’s subsequent tracts are little more than how-to guides for the cultivation of sadomasochists. As Dobson’s own personal history shows, many of those raised on a steady diet of corporal punishment demonstrate a tendency later in life to reenact the painful experiences familiar to their childhoods, through either radical-right political activism or cruel interpersonal behavior, or both. The appeal of illicit, even macabre sexual behavior to some social conservatives—a trend that has produced no end of colorful scandals—further reflects their sadomasochistic tendencies.
The sadomasochism that is latent in so many figures of the new radical right is often activated by a traumatic personal crisis. As Fromm explained, “Both the sadistic and the masochistic trends are caused by the inability of the isolated individual to stand alone and his need for a symbiotic relationship that overcomes this aloneness.”
Many of those who once crumpled to the breast of a parent after a thorough beating have found themselves prostrate at Dobson’s feet later in life. Only through Dobson have they been able to fulfill the urge to simultaneously give and receive pain, an urge that they developed during infancy. Thus it is hardly a coincidence that some of the worst, most sadistic serial killers America has known have been granted redemption by the leader of Focus on the Family, who has time and again inserted himself as their father confessor and counselor. No matter how malignant their sins might have been, once they confessed them to Dobson and submitted to his rigid authority, they were welcomed with open arms into “The Family” and were assured of eternal salvation.
PART TWO
Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.
PROVERBS 16:18
CHAPTER 7
SATAN IN A PORSCHE
The 1980s brought new opportunities—and new dragons to slay—for James Dobson. With the Reagan administration, Dobson was able to establish a foothold in Washington. His closest White House ally was Gary Bauer, the elfin undersecretary of education who used his post to limit funding for public schools, which he blamed for eroding the country’s moral character. A born-again Baptist reared in Kentucky, Bauer became an informal liaison between Reagan and the Christian right, the first person to serve in a position that became a regular job in succeeding Republican administrations. He regarded Dobson and his “pro-family” image as a special asset to the White House, especially as it battled the perception that Reagan’s economic policies favored the very wealthy against the interests of working families.
Dobson’s Focus on the Family was in the midst of a rapid expansion fueled by the popularity of a new form of media technology: the VCR. Dobson was a natural on camera, and through the magic of home video he invited himself into millions of homes across the country. A short video Dobson produced in 1981 titled “Where’s Dad?” urged career-obsessed fathers to spend more time at home with their children; it remains one of the most effective and profitable vehicles for his message. In the first three months after the video’s release, Focus hired 200 new staffers to keep pace with the demand for literature related to its recommendations. Today Focus claims that more than 100 million people worldwide, including many on U.S. military installations, have seen “Where’s Dad?”
But the VCR was a boon to the Dark Side, as well as to the children of light. Cheap home-recording technology enabled the adult film industry to reach an endlessly expanding mass audience. Porn patrons no longer needed to sneak away to seedy urban red-light districts to get their skin-flick fix; now they could watch their favorite Vanessa Del Rio epics or Long Dong Silver adventures from the comfort of their Craftsmatic adjustable beds instead. The prospect of porn playing well in Peoria piqued Dobson’s indignation and imagination. In his book Children at Risk, he warned that the viewing of obscene material would inevitably lead to “sex between women and bulls, stallions or boars.”
Few organizations kept statistics on pornography addiction rates during the 1980s. But a wealth of data collected since then suggests that porn has been a particularly pernicious problem within the evangelical community. ChristiaNet.com, an evangelical anti-porn group, found in a 2007 survey that 50 percent of evangelical men and 20 percent of evangelical women are addicted to pornography; 37 percent of evangelical pastors who responded to a 2001 survey by Christianity Today magazine called porn addiction a “current struggle.” And since Focus on the Family opened a counseling hotline for troubled pastors, at least 25 percent of calls have come from clergymen struggling with porn addiction. “I tell [my clients], ‘God does not make perverts, and God is your physician,’” said Simon Sheh, an evangelical counselor affiliated with Focus on the Family. “‘He healed me. He can heal you, too.’”
Dobson recognized early on the extent to which his followers addictively consumed demon porn. In 1986, at Dobson’s urging, the Reagan administration created a national commission on pornography chaired by Attorney General Edwin Meese
, a member of Reagan’s original California entourage and an ally of the religious right. Supported with $1.5 million in federal funds, the commission was headed by Alan Sears, a close friend of Dobson’s who simultaneously chaired the Resolutions Committee of the Southern Baptist Convention, which was now under the control of its right wing. Wearing his SBC hat, Sears promoted a church resolution congratulating the Meese commission, while killing another that would have condemned apartheid in South Africa. Sears was joined on the Meese commission by Dobson and nine fellow anti-porn crusaders, only two of whom were women. Together, they convened a marathon of public hearings in cities across America, hoping to build a compelling case against the scourge of smut and sin.
The public hearings of the puritan tribunal quickly turned into burlesque. The commissioners meted out indignant tongue-lashings to porn actors and producers, and they elicited plaintive testimonies from prominent opponents of pornography. But strange bedfellows vaulted onto the stage. Andrea Dworkin, a feminist radical with a shock of frizzy hair, highlighted one hearing in New York City. Once an abused wife, Dworkin proclaimed in one of her polemical books that, “men will have to give up their precious erections.” Like Dobson’s followers, she had projected her personal crises into the political sphere.
Dworkin testified before the commission about a sexual practice she described as “skull-fucking,” a pornographic paraphilia “apparently brought back from Vietnam.” “These are films in which a woman is killed and the orifices in her head are penetrated with a man’s penis—her eyes, her mouth and so on,” Dworkin went on. Rather than producing any evidence that such horrific films existed, Dworkin assured the panel that her “information comes from women who have seen the films and escaped.” Dworkin’s animadversions reduced one commissioner to tears.
Republican Gomorrah Page 7