Many readers have noted that, despite my book’s subtitle, How James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and Evangelical America are Winning the Culture, my posts so far have been about Dobson’s slipping grip on the Christian Right as evangelicals branch out beyond abortion, gay marriage, and returning religion to the public square. But the truth remains that Dobson is the most powerful Christian Right standard bearer that the movement has ever known. That’s because Dobson, unlike Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, or Ralph Reed, cultivated a huge following by dispensing family advice and helping people through crises in their personal lives—not by brandishing his political views. The same is true of Focus on the Family, the most powerful political organization in Christian Right history despite the fact that most of its work is not overtly political.

In 1977, while on sabbatical from the University of Southern California—where he’d gotten a Ph.D. in psychology and was, at the time, teaching in its medical school—Dobson launched his first radio show. Four years later, he expanded the 15-minute weekly program into a 30-minute daily format. Within a decade, the daily broadcast had been picked up by nearly 800 stations nationwide. “The majority of Christian radio programming at that time was pastors who would edit their preaching from a Sunday service and put it on the radio,” remembered Peb Jackson, who joined the Focus on the Family board of directors in 1977. “There weren’t many talk shows. There were shows with missionaries and about Church people doing things, but this was different.”

Dobson’s avuncular manner and his capacity for letting grown men break down with tape rolling were a sharp break with Christian radio’s customary fire-and-brimstone sermons.

To a no-frills evangelical radio culture inhabited by graying, out-of-touch preachers, Dobson brought all the professionalism of his medical CV to bear, interviewing contemporary Christian authors about the challenges of bringing up kids and leading happy marriages. But Dobson was no softy. Defying the affirmation-heavy tactics of the psychologists who were cropping up on television and radio in response to a generation of therapy-hungry baby boomers, he applied the same rules-based approach as Dare to Discipline, his first book. “During those years, psychologists were not prone to give answers—they were more prone to draw you out,” recalled Jackson. “Jim was never shy about giving answers. He did not hem and haw around with folks and say ‘Tell me how you’re feeling.’ He’d say, ‘Let me tell you what I think.’”

The subject matter, and Dobson’s practical approach, won him an overwhelmingly female listenership. He encouraged parents to talk to their kids about sex and sexuality before the onset of puberty. He opined that masturbation, a controversial subject among many religious Americans, “is not much of an issue with God.” And even as he was uncompromising on premarital abstinence, asserting that the harshest consequence of premarital sex is the “judgment of God in the life to come,” he stressed that it’s never too late to reverse course and become a “secondary virgin.” “His folksy style made listeners believe that he was their friend,” recalled former Focus on the Family chief operating officer Paul Nelson. “And they wanted to help him because of it.”

Dobson was intensely aware of that fact. Early on, he perceived that his broadcast, by connecting him to listeners every day, presented him the opportunity to win their trust and to help instill in them an orthodox Christian worldview that rejected the reigning postmodernism. “He was skeptical as to the lasting impact of just speaking once to any group,” said Jackson. “He was more interested in long-term relationships. That was why the daily radio show was a perfect medium. He is in your face every day, talking about the issues and values and he felt that happened over a period of time…. You could get people whipped up with music or by a great speaker, but he felt radio was transformational—transformational in helping people define their thinking on issues.”

Dobson had incorporated his speaking and media ventures as Focus on the Family in 1977, but his most important innovation came in 1979, when he hired five women to answer the letters that had been pouring in at a rate of more than a hundred a day in response to his radio show. Dobson’s fans were writing to him for two reasons. One was to order something from Focus’s growing repertoire of books, pamphlets, videos, and taped broadcasts that they’d heard or heard about on Focus on the Family. The other was to ask for Dobson’s advice on a wide array of topics. The letters asked about proper potty training techniques, how to confront a cheating husband, and countless other matters. By the early ’80s, Dobson was receiving thousands of letters a month. He’d hired more than 60 staffers to answer the mail, who came to be known at Focus as “correspondents.” The organization also hired a team of part-time Christian therapists to call troubled “constituents,” as Dobson called the people that wrote and called him and Focus.

Though Focus on the Family never required payment for its advice and advertised “suggested donations” for its products rather than firm prices, financial support was quick in coming. By 1987, the ministry had a roughly $34 million budget, more than Christian Coalition’s at its high point a decade later, and almost all from individual donors. By 1995, Focus’s budget topped $100 million. In contrast to donors who support charities like the Salvation Army or to ministries like Campus Crusade for Christ, donors to Focus benefited personally from their donations, by listening to Dobson’s show, having access to a warehouse of reasonably-priced Christian resources, and knowing someone was out there if they ever needed some free guidance. “People didn’t feel like they had to give a dime, and with that credibility, people would get on the mailing list and we developed this sense of communication,” said Jackson. “The idea was not just to be a resource for people to tap into when they listened to the radio show. We wanted to design a superstructure of assistance to people that went deep.”

To Dobson, the survival and growth of his organization depended on each individual who called or wrote to Focus getting speedy, customized help. Phone calls were to be answered in three rings. Answering services or automated phone attendants were out of the question. Letters were to be turned around in three days. Dobson reviewed constituent mail and built broadcasts around what was on his listeners’ minds. “It shocked people at times to realize [Dobson’s] need to satisfy the customer,” recalled Jackson. “He would find out if phone calls were not answered or mail wasn’t answered or if something was not promised or did not get to a person… With his own massive personality and effort, he kept everyone’s nose to the grindstone.”

With a line of best-selling books, a popular film series, a widely distributed radio show, and a rapid-response call and letter-writing operation, Focus on the Family had developed a full-blown evangelical media empire by the mid-1980s. The organization sent monthly letters and occasional fundraising pitches to each person who called, further cementing its relationship with constituents. By 1985, Focus had collected 700,000 names and addresses. A decade later, Focus cleared 2 million names. “The marketing was just incredible,” said Nelson, the former Focus chief operating officer. “I was always putting the brakes on, saying we have to be careful because we can sell a dog on [Dobson’s radio show]. I told Jim, ‘For crying out loud, you can go the mountain with some heresy and 100,000 people will follow you there, because the marketing was there.”

As the ’90s approached, Focus’s correspondence department wanted to study other big letter writing operations. The only similarly sized effort was managed by the White House, so Focus flew the White House’s letter-writing supervisor to its Southern California headquarters. “The woman was amazed at our system, that we were every bit as efficient as the White House,” remembered then correspondence department supervisor Diane Passno. “I felt good about that, because we were flying by the seat of our pants. We just knew we had to answer the mail. We didn’t know what we were doing.”

But Dobson knew. Unlike leaders of other Christian ministries, Dobson was so confident in pursuing his vision for Focus on the Family that he wasn’t afraid to hire business world executives into the top tiers of Focus management to see that it be carried out. “He has a confidence, sometimes even arrogance… he had such a belief in what he felt God had given him in both his purpose and his expertise,” Jackson said. “Jim had the uncanny ability that even when his fellow professionals were going in one direction and he had a belief in something that was counter, and he was the only fish swimming upstream, it didn’t make any difference... If everybody was on the same train in one direction, it almost made it more delicious for him to go in the opposite direction.”