Dobson built Focus on the Family’s huge reach through grassroots video and radio distribution

Evidence

In 1973, Dobson resigned from the American Psychological Association after it removed homosexuality from its list of mental disorders. Three years later, he took a sabbatical from USC and Children’s Hospital, and he never went back. He turned to radio to spread his ideas. His first show, a fifteen-minute program that aired on weekends, was funded by a Christian publisher that had distributed his early writings. Meanwhile, his “Focus on the Family” seminars were drawing thousands of attendees, and he began speaking across the nation. With two children of his own, however, Dobson feared making the mistakes of his own absentee father, and so he decided to retire from the speaking circuit—but not before agreeing to record one of his final talks. Produced by a Christian publisher and marketed to evangelical churches, his seven-part video series was compatible with the first VCRs. One segment of the series addressing distant fathers was packaged separately as a one-hour television special, Where’s Dad?, and Dobson sent a representative around the country to solicit donations from evangelical businessmen to fund its airing in local markets. This distribution model worked spectacularly well. By the early 1980s an estimated one hundred million people around the world had viewed the special. Dobson founded Focus on the Family in 1977, a parachurch organization dedicated to defending the institution of the family, and by the mid-1980s his half-hour daily show was playing on nearly 800 stations across the nation. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 189

Categorization

• XREF: This is live evidence for the book’s central thesis that consumer/commercial media infrastructure, not the pulpit, transmitted white evangelical identity. Connects to the stated reading purpose of identifying the cultural apparatus.
• SHARE: The Where’s Dad? donation-funded local TV distribution model — a one-hour special funded by evangelical businessmen airing in local markets, reaching 100 million people — is a nerdy media-history tidbit.