EXCERPTS: from the INTRODUCTION

My first interview with James Dobson was pretty much a fluke.

It was just after Election Day 2004, and the entire Washington press corps was scrambling to report the story of how white evangelicals had handed President George W. Bush a second term. My editor at U.S. News & World Report called me into his office on the morning after the election with an assignment to write about these newly branded “values voters.” I had forty-eight hours.

At the time, I was only marginally aware of Focus on the Family. I thought of it as a conservative Christian advocacy group, one of many such organizations. Still, it made sense for me to call and request an interview with its chief spokesman, James Dobson.

When the interview was granted, I wasn’t in a place to truly appreciate my good fortune. Only later did I learn that Dobson hardly ever talks to the mainstream news media, apart from occasional interviews with The New York Times. In the week after Election Day, dozens of interview requests poured into Focus on the Family’s Colorado Springs headquarters. Dobson would grant only three: to the Times, to George Stephanopoulos for the lead spot on ABC’S This Week, and to me. My secret? Dumb luck. It turns out that Michael Gerson—who was then serving as President Bush’s chief speechwriter—was a U.S. News & World Report alum and had penned a generous profile of Dobson for the magazine in 1998. Six years later, Dobson still had warm feelings toward U.S. News.

My telephone interview with Dobson lasted just over twenty minutes, during which time he made several bold proclamations. He told me that President Bush had made a mistake in his first postelection press conference, when he brushed aside a question about the apparent religious divide between largely evangelical “red” America and more secular “blue” America. Dobson said that Bush should have taken the opportunity to thank evangelical voters for reelecting him. He also laid out an ultimatum for the President and his Republican allies in Congress: They had “four years to deliver” on issues like curbing abortion rights and passing an amendment to the U.S. Constitution to ban gay marriage. If they failed, Dobson said, millions of evangelicals would stay home in the next presidential election.

In my story for U.S. News that week, I wrote about what a scary prospect that was for the GOP, since evangelicals had just delivered two of every five Bush votes. But what I didn’t know then was how potent that threat was coming from Dobson. I thought that activists with household names, like Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson, were still the most influential figures in the Christian Right. I had no idea that James Dobson had become the movement’s new standard-bearer, or that he was more powerful than either of them ever were.

It didn’t take long to find out. A couple weeks later, a U.S. News editor called with an assignment for a follow-up to my post-election article. With the continued public interest in the growing role evangelicals were playing in the nation’s political life, I was to identify the movement’s top political powerbroker and profile him or her. I phoned a few of the country’s most respected scholars on politics and religion, along with a few prominent Christian Right activists. All invoked the same name: Focus on the Family founder James Dobson. They told me that Dobson, having won his following by dispensing family advice on his daily radio show and through a string of bestselling books, was more powerful than any previous Christian Right leader because, unlike his predecessors, he was seen to be above the partisan political fray.

It was time to book a flight to Colorado Springs.

When I phoned Focus on the Family, however, Dobson’s press aide had bad news: Dobson was upset that I had taken up so much of his time for our earlier interview—some twenty-odd minutes—considering that only one quote of his wound up in my story. This time, my interview request was declined. Having gained brief entry into Dobson’s exclusive world, I was now locked out, along with virtually every other journalist in the country. On the phone with Dobson’s aide, I explained that my post-election story had been only one page long, and that I wanted to squeeze in as many evangelical voices as possible. The aide wouldn’t budge. I pleaded my case in subsequent phone conversations, but got nowhere. Finally, I drafted a two-page letter that began “Dear Dr. Dobson,” in which I resorted to flattery. I said that I was interested in speaking to Dobson because he had “unmatched” political influence in the evangelical world and was “uniquely able” to transcend evangelicalism’s denominational lines. I apologized for taking up so much of his time in our postelection interview. It was all sincere. Still, nothing.

But Dobson’s aide invited me to come to Colorado Springs anyway. He said I would get a tour of Focus’s eighty-eight-acre campus and that I could interview some of its thirteen hundred employees, including top executives. He basically said that I could interview anyone but Dobson. When I asked if it was OK for a U.S. News photographer to accompany me, he said taking pictures of most Focus employees wouldn’t be a problem, but that Dobson himself had a long-standing rule against being shot by press photographers. I had never written about a public figure who refused to be photographed. But those were the rules.

In mid-December 2004, I made my first trip to Focus on the Family headquarters. I interviewed about three-dozen Focus staffers, from executives on down. I toured Focus’s 75,000-square-foot warehouse, filled with Dobson’s pamphlets, books, DVDS, and CDs. I listened to phone conversations between Focus on the Family therapists and Christian women across the country who said their husbands were abusive or that their kids were taking drugs. I watched Dobson tape a radio interview with two authors on how parents could use foods like carrots and tube-shaped pasta to teach adolescents about puberty. Focus was not merely a conservative Christian advocacy group after all. It was vastly more diverse and complex. That’s what made it fascinating.

Still, no Dobson interview.

At the end of my second day in Colorado Springs, however, Dobson’s aide told me that he might grant an interview the following morning, my last at Focus headquarters. Representatives from Focus’s media relations department had been sitting in on all of my interviews with Focus staff, and thought my questions were well informed, and, more important, unbiased. I had passed a crucial test. The next morning, hours before my plane was scheduled to take off from Denver, an hour and half’s drive north, the interview was confirmed. This time, I went in with a full—or at least much fuller—appreciation of how much Dobson’s views mattered to tens of millions of American evangelicals. Many of the conservative Christian activists I’d talked to before arriving in Colorado Springs said they considered Dobson to be the most influential evangelical figure since Billy Graham.