Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, June 18, 1990 TAG: 9006180047
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: The New York Times
DATELINE: POMONA, CALIF. LENGTH: Medium
He heads no church.
His professional training is in the field of child development.
But millions of Americans now look to him for spiritual and, sometimes, political guidance.
He has emerged as one of the country's most influential religious figures, a man the Rev. Jerry Falwell has called "the rising star" and future leader of the Religious Right.
How Dobson, 55, came to acquire such status is the story not of his calling sinners to repentance, but of his counseling parents on toilet-training and spouses on mid-life crises.
Like an old-fashioned machine politician who earned immigrants' votes by responding to their economic needs, Dobson gets his followers' religious, political and cultural loyalty by responding to their anxieties and offering advice.
For him, the machine is the radio - his programs are heard on 1,450 stations in the United States and overseas - and a staff of 700 people who answer the phones and deluge of mail seeking advice.
So well has this machine served Dobson, a former professor of pediatrics at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, that only the Rev. Billy Graham was ranked higher among influential conservative church leaders in a survey last year of Protestant denominational clerics.
With such momentum behind him, there is repeated speculation Dobson might run for office one day. But he denies all political ambitions.
He says he does care passionately about the future of the family, a passion that has led him to promote what he calls traditional family values.
In January 1989 he made national news with a videotaped interview in which the murderer Theodore Bundy, hours before going to the electric chair, said "hard-core pornography" had started him on the road to crime.
Dobson is a determined opponent of abortion and was a featured speaker at the anti-abortion rally in Washington on April 28.
But his following does not stem from these widely publicized events.
Instead, it centers on the efforts of Focus on the Family, the organization he heads here in Pomona that has an annual budget of nearly $60 million.
"Radio is very intimate, more intimate than television," the tall, sandy-haired psychologist said. "Television is performance. Radio is a conversation. People write you like a brother, uncle or friend."
In fact, listeners send him 200,000 letters a month, and make more than 1,200 telephone calls daily to his organization's toll-free phone number.
Many are looking for further advice on the down-to-earth topics discussed in the broadcasts.
Among these topics are eating disorders, learning disabilities, midlife crisis, spouse beating, child abuse, workaholism, family finances and sex education.
In response to these requests, Focus on the Family ships out 52 million pieces of literature and more than a million cassettes a year.
The organization's two main-frame computers contain information on two million correspondents.
Dobson has also fashioned a sophisticated apparatus to provide emergency help or special computerized responses to writers who demand more individual attention: an average of 10,000 often heart-wrenching letters a month.
"Through this department we are watching the unraveling of a social order," Dobson said. "Five years ago people wrote us about thumb-sucking and bed-wetting. Now they're writing about wife beating, child abuse, manic depression, suicide and satanic cults."
Today, of the 10,000 letters a month that require special treatment, about 1,000 are emergency cases, containing threats of suicide, fears of violence or marital breakups.
Nineteen California-licensed family counselors try to phone these people immediately.
They are equipped with computerized lists of therapists and other sources of assistance throughout the nation.
Mail that is special but less urgent goes to 60 staff members familiar with more than 1,000 prototype letters approved by Dobson.
The topics begin with aging, abuse and abortion and run to the end of the alphabet.
Using key words like "rejection," "infidelity" and "custody," a correspondence assistant can also frame a more complicated reply, picking out pertinent paragraphs from different prototypes and sending or recommending books, tapes or other resources from an index of materials.
The organization tries not to schedule several broadcasts on topics such as incest or child abuse close to one another because staff members' morale drops and they fall behind in replies.
Dobson draws no salary, relying instead on royalties from his 11 books and compensating the organization for the help his broadcasts give in promoting their sales.
Asked why the problems are so much worse nearly a decade after a conservative president and his administration began backing much of Dobson's agenda, staff members of Focus on the Family said the society is still suffering the cultural consequences of 1960s permissiveness.
by CNB