A child psychologist displaced pastors as the most influential evangelical leader

Evidence

Within a decade of the publication of Dare to Discipline, Dobson had established himself as an evangelical power broker. By the 2000s, Dobson’s radio show aired on around two thousand stations, reaching six to ten million weekly listeners. He had amassed a mailing list of over two million addresses, and his organization had launched its own publishing house, capitalizing on its efficient distribution system. By that time, the Southern Baptist Convention’s Richard Land would label Dobson “the most influential evangelical leader in America… . The closest thing to his influence is what Billy Graham had in the sixties and seventies.” That a child psychologist, not a pastor or evangelist, would in Land’s opinion surpass Graham’s influence testifies to changes within evangelicalism itself. As gender and “family values” moved to the center of evangelical identity, a man who dispensed advice on kids’ chores, potty training, and teenage sex ed could achieve celebrity status formerly reserved for pastors and evangelists. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 198

Categorization

• XREF: Core evidence for the reader’s central contest: shows gender/family-values advice became the organizing center of evangelical identity, displacing pulpit theology, and that the authority was built via consumer media.