Dobson framed evangelical grievance as civil-rights-style oppression to justify political fighting.

Evidence

Speaking in Montgomery, Dobson compared Moore’s civil disobedience to that of Rosa Parks: “We as people of faith are also being sent to the back of the bus.” It was then that Dobson sensed “a new level of disgust among the country’s seventy million white evangelical Christians,” and a new willingness to fight. Even at age sixty-seven, this was not a battle he was going to sit out. In order to protect Focus on the Family’s tax exemption, Dobson retired from his position as CEO of the organization so he could take up political organizing directly. — Kristin Kobes Du Mez, Jesus and John Wayne, 468

Categorization

• XREF: Dobson’s Rosa Parks comparison is a striking example of a dominant group adopting oppressed-minority framing — echoes themes in ‘The Defeat of the Spanish Armada’ about how groups weaponize victim narratives.
• SHARE: Dobson invoking Rosa Parks while leading an organization built on a siege mentality is exactly the kind of juxtaposition a scholar of evangelical politics would find striking.