In the mid-’80s, Dobson became an adviser to President Ronald Reagan and joined the administration’s Commission on Pornography. Gilgoff wrote that, by 1987, Focus had a yearly budget of $34 million, with most of its funds coming from individual donors. By 1988, the year I was born, Focus was receiving “150,000 pieces of mail a month, almost all addressed to Dobson and mostly from fretful mothers and wives,” and Dobson’s profile would only grow from that point on. In 1989, he interviewed Ted Bundy, who said that porn had turned him into a serial killer.
During the 1990s, Dobson was a fact of Evangelical life. Everyone in my small universe listened to him on the radio, or at least knew of him, even if they didn’t follow his advice to the letter. On car rides, we’d tune into Adventures in Odyssey, a Focus radio drama for children. One episode introduced me to Dungeons & Dragons, which it called Castles & Cauldrons and which could supposedly summon evil spirits. Though Dobson didn’t host every broadcast his ministry produced, he was enough of a presence that I can still hear his voice if I think about him now. He spoke the way he wrote, with an even tone that could lull you into quiet agreement. Then he’d slap you across the face with a sinister observation. Husbands ought to romance their wives, he wrote in What Wives Wish Their Husbands Knew About Women, but wives should also know their place. “How many wives have ‘let themselves go,’ waddling around on massive rhino haunches and looking like they had spent the night in a tornado?” he wrote.
According to Dobson, God made man a despot. A father’s children could not flee him, and neither could his wife. As a child, I knew I had no way out, and as long as I listened to Dobson, I could never find one. I figured that I’d die young, unless I got Raptured. Either I would kill myself or someone else would do it for me. A woman named Laura once wrote to Dobson because her husband had “loosened three of her teeth” and cut the inside of her lip. “I really thought he was going to kill me!” she recounted, but Dobson told her that because she was a Christian she could not get divorced. “Our purpose should be to change her husband’s behavior, not kill the marriage,” he wrote. Marriage was not a relationship but another battle of wills, and Dobson knew who should concede power to whom.