The Legacies of John MacArthur and James Dobson, Giants of the Faith

Pastor John MacArthur and psychologist James Dobson.

Both men passed away recently, but for decades their voices reached into homes, churches, and political debates, influencing how millions of evangelicals thought about faith, family, and culture.

In this episode, Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham looks back at the impact MacArthur and Dobson had on the culture in the past half century, not just among Christians, but all Americans.

And she speaks with some of the people who had a row seat to their ministries.

I'm Daily Wire, Executive Editor John Bickley with Georgia Howe.

It's Sunday, August 31st, and this is a weekend edition of Morning Wire.

In the world of American Christianity, few voices have echoed as profoundly as those of John MacArthur and James Dobson.

The influential pastor and the pioneering family psychologist, both towering figures in evangelical circles, passed away within weeks of each other this summer.

MacArthur on July 14th at age 86 and Dobson on August 21st at 89.

Their lives, marked by unwavering commitment to biblical principles, reshaped churches, homes, and even politics.

I would just like to ask the mayor as a privacy Catholic, do you believe the Bible is the Word of God?

Yeah, look, Pastor, I'm not going to get in a theological debate with you.

No, that's not a theological debate.

That's just a straight question.

Do you believe the Bible is the authoritative Word of God?

You cannot have a strong country without strong families.

That's the next generation.

Both men were pioneers in Christian radio, each launching programs in 1977 that would go on to reach hundreds of millions of listeners across the globe.

Dobson's daily broadcasts, focus on the family and family talk, offered biblical advice on marriage, child rearing, and societal ills.

How outrageous it is to me that boys and girls barely out of babyhood are already being introduced in some schools and some states to perverse adult behavior.

MacArthur's Grace to You provided verse-by-verse exposition of scripture.

Now, in Luke 8, 18,

you have the parallel passage to this, and there it is translated, take care how you listen.

So, that's what our Lord is saying.

You need to be a good spiritual listener.

Troy Miller, president of the National Religious Broadcasters, watched as their massive radio broadcasts eventually became podcasts.

He told me their effective capitalizing on new technologies had a ripple effect across the Christian media landscape.

This was the early days of my involvement with NRB.

Both of them were pioneers in the digital age, too, adopting MP3s right away in order to get things out and then moving into more and more digital platforms.

And now today they have probably two of the largest and most sophisticated digital platforms out there, especially the Grace to You Ministry.

It's just incredible how they blaze that way.

And that, not only with what they did personally, but that helped shape the path for a lot of other ministries out there.

They really stand on the shoulders of mass communications on these two giants.

Yet, though the two men were friends and had the same positions on life, marriage, and sexuality, they took very different tacks to influencing culture.

MacArthur avoided joining political coalitions, famously declining to sign the Manhattan Declaration, a 2009 statement that affirmed the sanctity of life and traditional marriage because of his doctrinal differences with some of the statement's authors.

Dobson, on the other hand, was not only one of the Manhattan Declaration's most prominent signatories.

In 1995, he founded the conservative policy group, the Family Research Council.

Miller said the difference came down to vocation, not conviction.

John MacArthur understood he was a pastor.

He was a shepherd.

That was

his primary calling in life.

And he understood that as a shepherd, that was his first calling.

And that his deepest desire was for people to understand the word of God better.

That's what his expository preaching and teaching, his commentaries, his books were all meant to get people closer to God through God's word.

Dr.

Dobson understood he was a psychologist.

That's who he was.

And that he was concerned about culture and where culture was going as a psychologist and somewhat sociologist.

So they took these two different approaches, but behind both of them was the biblical foundation.

That's what brought them together more than apart.

Was while they had separate approaches to things, the theologian, the psychologist, they both were grounded in very, very solid biblical beliefs and never wavered from those beliefs.

When politics threatened to usurp pastoral authority during the COVID era with government leaders ordering churches to stay closed, MacArthur didn't hesitate to defy those orders.

Whatever this virus is, it does not overpower First Amendment rights.

So we are meeting.

Phil Johnson, executive director at Grace T.U., says no one should have been surprised at MacArthur's stance during COVID.

The same goes for a letter MacArthur sent California Governor Gavin Newsom in 2022, calling him to repentance for using a passage in the Gospel of Mark to promote abortion.

Because for MacArthur, these were not just political issues, but spiritual issues.

He was always clear and made it clear that he's not opposed to political involvement by Christians.

And in fact, there are Christians who are called to all sorts of vocations, including.

politics or

the military or whatever.

We've never opposed any of that.

But the church as a whole needs to keep its focus on the gospel.

That was the only message he ever had.

And

I don't think anything in the COVID era changed that.

And in fact, the letter to Newsom is a classic example because he's addressing a political leader, sort of like John the Baptist did, with a very strong rebuke.

And yet, in it is a gospel appeal.

And that's just how John MacArthur thought and saw things.

And he never saw any contradiction between that and any other

position he'd ever expressed because I really don't think there was a contradiction.

But MacArthur's main focus remained on the pastorate, while Dobson used his academic credentials to gain a wider hearing in the realm of politics.

Political science professor Hunter Baker first met Dobson in the late 1990s when Baker was a young lobbyist in D.C.

Dobson, I think, is a very important figure.

When you think about sort of the evolution of the religious right or the sort of Christian conservative movement,

some of those early figures you think about are Jerry Falwell

with his moral majority and Pat Robertson, who worked with Ralph Reed on the

Christian coalition.

And both of those were significant.

both of those had impact, but I would argue that they were actually superseded in many ways, certainly in the 1990s by James Dobson.

So those two figures that I mentioned, Robertson and Falwell, those both were essentially pastor-preacher type figures, you know, to use the language of the time, televangelists, right?

And so they had their influence, but then comes James Dobson.

And Dobson, I don't, a lot of people don't realize this.

Dobson had been at the USC medical school.

He had had an appointment at the USC Medical School as a child psychologist.

He was there for 14 years, a very prestigious

sort of a position.

And he left that speculatively, right, to go into this ministry that he founded called Focus on the Family.

As we look back on it, he made the right move.

I mean, it grew into this juggernaut.

of a broadcast with millions of listeners.

And, you know, for those of us who were

sort of actively following the broadcast at the time, its influence was massive.

Without James Dobson, Baker told me, we would have a very different Republican Party today.

The place where I think he really had the biggest impact,

I've argued, is with regard to the pro-life movement and the Republican Party.

I think that people want to think of the Republican Party as it's always been, you know, this great pro-life party.

I don't think that's really the case.

Ronald Reagan was really the first one to decisively move in that direction.

But if you read books about Reagan, you know, Ken Katchigan's recent book is very good.

It's called Behind Closed Doors, and he was a speechwriter for Reagan.

And Reagan constantly wanted him to put the pro-life stuff in the speeches.

And Reagan's different advisors were constantly wanting him to take it out, right?

Tamp it down, resist Reagan on that pro-life stuff, right?

So that's the Republican Party that Dobson was dealing with in the 90s.

It was by no means a given that the Republican Party was going to become as strong of a pro-life party as it is today.

And in the late 1990s, Dobson, in his frustration, said, I'm going to leave this party and I'm going to take as many people with me as I can.

That was a threat that could not be ignored.

While Dobson's influence was most visible in the political arena, advising presidents, testifying before Congress, and inspiring a new generation of Christian activists, MacArthur's influence was felt more inside the church through the pastors he trained and sermons that shaped evangelical theology.

Thousands who grew up hearing his teaching and being educated at the seminary he founded, the Master's Seminary, took his model of expository preaching back to their own towns and states.

I became a Christian in 1971 and immediately began to look for a church.

As a brand new Christian, I didn't have any

knowledge of what to look for in a church other than one thing.

I wanted a church where the pastor would open the Bible and preach from it.

And in Tulsa, there weren't a lot of churches like that.

I finally found a small fundamentalist church where the pastor did just that.

He opened the Bible and preached from it.

And

he baptized me the first Sunday I came.

And

then I went off to college and all that.

And people would often ask me, what church do you recommend in Tulsa?

And I didn't have any recommendations because there just weren't a lot of, they were either charismatic churches.

Of course, that was, you know, Oral Roberts University and the home of practically every famous televangelist somehow links back to Tulsa.

So lots of charismatic churches and lots of Southern Baptist churches, and none of them were known for biblical preaching.

And so I

couldn't recommend any of the churches that I knew for years.

But if you asked me that today, I could give you five or six churches in the Tulsa area that are pastored by men who are capable expositors, and that's what they do.

All of them are connected somehow to John MacArthur, the Master Seminary.

And

that's just one city that I think the whole country has benefited from the men who've been sent out out from the master's seminary and men who've been influenced by people who've been influenced by John MacArthur.

One of those men is Johnny Artavanis, the 32-year-old Nashville pastor studied under MacArthur, and he says that MacArthur's impact on his ministry has been immeasurable.

One of the key lessons he told me MacArthur taught him runs counter to what many megachurch pastors argue today, which is that Christians should be careful not to pick too many cultural battles.

One time someone said, like, hey,

how do we pick our battles?

And, you know,

he said, you pick every battle where God's word is at stake.

And I remember I was kind of listening for the answer, you know, what's he going to say?

Because people talk about finding the right hills to die on and picking your battles.

And there's truth in that.

But they said, well, how do you pick your battles?

And he says, I pick every battle.

where gospel clarity and biblical authority is at stake.

And I remember that being a moment where I was like, yeah, yeah, you don't, you don't dismiss anything that's

that begins to deteriorate or diminish the clarity of what's in God's word.

It was likely because of his unwillingness to mince words where biblical clarity was at stake that at news of MacArthur's death, many compared him to another preacher known for directness who looms large on the stage of history.

someone with whom MacArthur happened to share a birthday, Charles Spurgeon.

Both were known for their doctrinal convictions, a reformed soteriology, which just means that they affirmed the reality of God's grace and salvation, meaning it's not something we earn, but salvation from beginning to end is all an exhibition of God's grace.

Both are similar, probably, in the reality that they both fought off the liberal drift of their day.

Spurgeon was known for, you know, the downgrade controversy where at the time the union was drifting in regards to the inerrancy and authority of God's word, but also just the reality that there was no final judgment was being propagated in his day.

And he kind of stood staunch against that.

And in MacArthur's day, it was, you know, he's known for kind of the lordship debate that, hey, you can't call Jesus your Savior without calling him your Lord, meaning that it was a rejection of cheap grace.

And so both were known for preaching, but for standing firm on issues of doctrinal clarity and then also just for their immense productivity.

Dobson, too, was unafraid of earning the ire of, let's say, the more accommodating evangelical world if it meant standing on principle.

You'll see a lot of people kind of my age saying, well, you know, Dobson was really great in the beginning and he had a lot of useful things to say about raising your children.

And then he became a culture warrior and then he became immersed in politics and, you know, as though he sort of spoiled the whole thing.

And I really disagree with that.

And i i think it's because we just don't treat abortion the same way we do some really fundamental justice issues what if the issue had been something like slavery or segregation would we say well and then he spoiled it by getting involved in opposing segregation no we would never say that right uh but i think that the life issue is sort of of that equal kind of fundamental importance uh with regard to how we treat human beings as johnson told me neither man was afraid of a fight if it was a fight for truth they were both trying to uh you know sort of stand astride the the progress of history and say wait a minute uh and and question

what progressives people who think of themselves as progressives wanted to do because they could see that a lot of progressive thinking is actually destructive.

And so they fought that.

One chose the pulpit, the other chose psychology.

One kept his distance from formal political movements, the other founded one.

But John MacArthur and James Dobson both left their mark on American Christianity, reminding their followers that biblical truth must always be the foundation of a Christian's worldview.

That was Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham, and this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.