Welcome back, everybody, to You Have Permission, the show that aims to take both Christianity and the modern world of science and culture very seriously.

I'm Dr. Dan Koch, licensed therapist.

And I am joined today by Emily Maynard, licensed therapist, working in California, primarily with anxiety,

trauma, and religious issues. So a lot of clinical overlap between the two of us. Emily,

thank you for being here. Hey, thank you so much for having me. One of my listeners, Bridget, gave me

your name when I put up an Instagram story saying, who should I talk to

about James Dobson? And I got literally 75 messages back from people. And it took me like a week

to go to have the wherewithal to read through them all. I had to like have enough mental

energy. And I looked you up and I was like, oh shit, perfect. So I'm really excited for this conversation.

Thank you, Bridget.

A little background here.

So as listeners probably know, Dr. James Dobson passed away a few weeks ago.

And I was thinking about, you know, I did a little 30 minute kind of solo mini episode a couple weeks ago about his death and legacy,

specifically talking about him as a psychologist in the context of the broader psychological

movement. And in that conversation, I came up with sort of seven places that he had broken

with mainstream psychology. We'll probably talk a little bit about that as we go here today,

but we're going to assume that people have already listened to that.

But one thing I said there was he was extremely influential in evangelicalism. And I've run this by a few people since.

I would put his overall level of influence somewhere between Rick Warren, who wrote the purpose-driven life and helmed Saddleback Church

in Orange County, one of the biggest churches in America for many years, and Billy Graham.

He's not as influential as Billy Graham. Maybe there's nobody other than C.S. Lewis, the famous

Anglican evangelical whisper. There's maybe nobody as influential as Billy Graham, but Dobson's not far off.

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