Emotions: Dobson thinks you can't trust them

Analyzing a 1980 book by James Dobson for sketchy teaching on emotional health

Two weeks ago, I looked at The Four Spiritual Laws tract by Bill Bright (born 1921) and its teaching that you can’t trust your feelings. Last week, I examined The Spirit-Controlled Temperament by Tim LaHaye (born 1926) where he wrote that emotions are our enemies and some emotions are actually sins.

This weeks we are looking at another prominent author influenced by Bill Bright: James Dobson (born 1936).

Dobson wrote the foreword to Bright’s last book, The Journey Home, a memoir about his impending death from pulmonary fibrosis. In it, Dobson describes Bright as a beloved friend, mentor, and father-figure.

In 1980, Dobson published the book Emotions: Can You Trust Them? (Regal Books) based on earlier works from 1975. I think Bright’s influence is seen in the distrust of emotion Dobson presents.

Dobson mocks the “pop-psych movement” that “encourages us to get in touch with our feelings…to open up…to tell it like it is.” Instead he points to Scripture: “the greatest piece of literature ever written on the subject of love, the 13th chapter of 1 Corinthians, includes not a single reference to feelings.” (10)

Matthew Elliott wrote in his book Faithful Feelings, based on his dissertation, that some commentators erroneously claim that emotion words in the Bible do not actually mean emotion, and this is what Dobson is doing here. That chapter Dobson mentions is literally about an emotion: love.

Dobson sets up a reason-vs.-emotion false dichotomy, conflating Greco-Roman philosophy with biblical theology: “Reason is now dominated by feelings, rather than the reverse as God intended.” (10) He creates a fear of emotion, as I wrote a few weeks ago about Christian leaders trying to combat emotion with the emotion of fear: “nothing could be more dangerous than to permit our emotions to rule our destinies.” (11)

When discussing how to discern God’s will, he suggests a prayer such as: “I will do anything you require of me. Anything! I only ask that you convey your will in a definite manner that requires a minimum of reliance on my unpredictable feelings.”(128)

I want to give credit where it’s due. Dobson’s book is an improvement over LaHaye’s. Some of that is likely due to the developments in psychology between the 60s and the 80s. Dobson’s chapter on anger has some decent points. (I wrote “good” in the margins seven times!) He talks about the value of anger to protect us, the involvement of physiological systems and our fight-or-flight response, and that some anger can be righteous. He encourages emotional granularity—he points out that people say “anger” as a big bucket that actually holds many more specific sensations and emotions such as fatigue, embarrassment, frustration, and rejection. He opposes repression and supports healthy expressions of anger. He defines carnal anger as the wrong type of anger that makes us want to hurt another person or respond violently, and this is the kind of anger he calls sinful. I can get behind a lot of these ideas.

His incorrect teaching on anger and other emotions, then, is more subtle than that in LaHaye’s book, which can actually make it harder to spot and easy to accept without questioning it.

An undercurrent in Dobson’s book is an idea that women should quietly accept their lot in life and not make an emotional fuss about things. He tells the story of a woman who felt called to do evangelism. Even though she had four young children, she dared to leave the home to work in ministry. She left her children in the care of their father when she did this, and the results were “devastating…There was no one at home to train and love and guide the development of the lonely little family.” (Except the father?!?) Dobson says, “I suspect that she had other motives for fleeing her home, and Satan provided her with a seemingly noble explanation to cover her tracks.” Her sense of calling led her to disobey God in his mind. Of course in her mind, it seems that her emotions were driving her obedience to God’s call! This story implies that women cannot trust their intuition, their knowledge of their gifts and callings, or the emotions that accompany and drive these vocational decisions—women would be better off trusting rational men like Dobson to tell them how to follow God faithfully.

He goes more blatantly after women in another section where he writes: “the women’s liberation movement has spawned ‘consciousness raising groups’ across America, which generate intense anger in response to the issues which women interpret as insulting to their gender.” (95)

(Side note: I am currently listening to a recent podcast interview with Judith Herman, the author of the incredible book Trauma and Recovery, who coined the term “complex PTSD.” She is sharing in the interview about being part of those very groups and how they led to some of her most vital breakthroughs in understanding trauma.)

Dobson’s words belittle the very real injustices women have been fighting and the rightful anger that comes from such mistreatment. He repeats this sentiment when he says, “A Christian can be in greater spiritual danger when he has been a victim than when he was the aggressor. Nothing justifies an attitude of bitterness.” (105) Anyone familiar with addressing abuse in the church knows that the word “bitter” is often thrown at victims to shift the focus off the offender. Being more concerned with the “bitterness” (which is actually justifiable anger) of the victim than the aggression of the oppressor is a red flag of an unhealthy individual or system.

Elsewhere he encourages a young woman to go against the advice of her psychologist. She had been seeing the psychologist to deal with timidity, inferiority, and a nervous problem, but when she had to quit sessions because she couldn’t afford them, she wrote to Dr. Dobson. Her psychologist had encouraged her to talk with people who were causing her irritation. Dobson said, “what did the writer of this letter need less than an order to go home and bite everybody in sight? …she will soon be bearing a few teeth marks in return, which will hardly make her more confident!” So instead he advises the woman instead to “win their support.” This comes across as telling her to be nice instead of confronting what very well might have been damaging situations where she did need to learn assertiveness and setting boundaries. (97)

In another place, he encourages a woman to be more understanding of her emotionally distant father. He encourages her to see him as a man with a handicap, make excuses for his harmful behavior, and not expect anything from him. (99)

Women in churches are frequently given this advice about handling men: be nice, be pleasant, be quiet, don’t be assertive, don’t have expectations, deal with your own emotions, and don’t ask men to change. These are unhealthy ways of handling emotions for women as well as for men.

On the whole, I don’t want to throw Dobson’s book as far across the room as I do LaHaye’s, but that’s about the best I can say for it.

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