When Perfect Families Go Wrong

1,723 words

Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets (2023)
Directed by Olivia Crist & Julia Willoughby Nason

Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord: and the fruit of the womb is his reward. As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate. — Psalm 127:3-5 KJV

Reality ^[3] television ^[4] had been refined into an art form by the broadcast networks by the mid-2000s. Meanwhile, cable television had proliferated into a myriad of channels. Some of their putative purposes included university-level education in the fields of history, biology, and health. But it turned out that high-level history lectures or instruction on surgery didn’t draw audiences like lowbrow entertainment.

One such channel, The Learning Channel, morphed downwards into the “lurking ^[5]” channel. Its shows began to center on people with hoarding problems, dwarves ^[6], and fat people ^[7]. One such program was about the Duggar family of northwestern Arkansas ^[8]. The Duggars are a family of fundamentalists who have been influenced by the Quiverfull Movement, which encourages American Protestants to have large families in accordance with the Biblical passage given above.

The Duggar family became overnight celebrities after a photograph of them was taken at an Arkansas political event. Their reality show, 19 Kids and Counting, began airing in 2008. The show detailed the ins and outs of a large family doing ordinary things. The children were mild and obedient, while the parents, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, were always smiling. The family promoted wholesome sexual values, traditional sex roles, and Christian messages. From the outside looking in, everything was perfect.

However, things which glitter are usually not gold. It turns out that one of the Duggar children, Josh, had molested his sisters. After the scandal broke in 2015, more evidence of malfeasance came to light. Josh had several accounts through a (now defunct) website called Ashley Madison that connected married men and women who wished to have an affair. Josh had also paid a porn star for sex and had a large stash of child pornography.

These sexually reckless escapades caused the show to be cancelled in 2015. Josh was sentenced to 12 and a half years in prison for the child pornography. He represents only 5.2% of the Duggar children, however; all the others turned out well and remain celebrities online.

A documentary on the Duggar family and the wider movement of which it is a part was released in 2023. It is worth a watch. The Duggar family and their movement are mostly worth emulating, but the problem of Josh indicates that they are not perfect. Examining such problems and finding ways to reduce them can help to move the interests of the American Majority forward.

Fundamentalism vs. modernism

When England was under threat from the Spanish Armada in 1588, Protestantism was united against Catholic Europe. The Protestant powers — England, Holland, and Prussia — were then supreme in Europe. But eventually, the Protestants began to divide. This was not fully recognized until 1898, when British Protestants entered into a vicious war with Afrkaan-speaking ^[11] Boer Protestants in South Africa.

This war highlighted the differences between modernists and fundamentalists. To explain it simply, modernists don’t take the Bible literally while fundamentalists do — although ironically, fundamentalism is the result of modernity. Many Boers thought the world was flat due to the phrasing of some passages in the Bible, despite the fact that their ancestors who had navigated their way to Cape Town in the seventeenth century had understood that the world is round.

The Boers didn’t call themselves fundamentalists during the war, however. The term “fundamentalist” comes from an American Civil War veteran named Lyman Stewart ^[12]. He was a wealthy Presbyterian who sponsored the publication of a series of theological works ^[13] emphasizing the “fundamentals” of Christianity.

Fundamentalism wouldn’t have grown to the degree that it did were it not for the idea of continuous progress that had been endorsed by the modernists, and its discrediting due to the disaster of the First World War. Modernists were also involved in “civil rights,” so every race riot, mugging, or drive-by shooting had the potential to turn a modernist into a fundamentalist.

Homeschooling and the Institute for Basic Life Principles

The relationship between fundamentalism and “civil rights” cannot be emphasized enough. One of the goals of the “civil rights” activists was to integrate sub-Saharan Africans with whites in the schools. Integration was carried out across the South at the points of bayonets. It ultimately failed ^[14] due to low-level violence ^[15] perpetrated by the sub-Saharans, however. Whites then abandoned the cities they had built to the sub-Saharans and created new towns for the sake of “good” schools — i.e., mostly white schools.

A byproduct of white flight to the suburbs was the homeschooling movement. Homeschooling parents needed materials with which to teach. One of the organizations which provided them was the Institute for Basic Life Principles, which was founded in 1961 by Bill Gothard, a fundamentalist minister. Interestingly, 1961 was the year when the fruits of “civil rights” began to take effect, and its negatives in the form of crime became noticeable ^[18]. Gothard’s organization was therefore a natural response to this problem.

Bill Gothard is from a family of ministers from northern Illinois, and has mixed European ancestry. He is an assimilated member of the American Majority ^[19], but is not an old-stock American ^[20]. Many people who had Puritan ancestors ^[21] settled in northern Illinois. Gothard is noticeably influenced by Puritan folkways. One of his ideas on parenting is that of “breaking the will” of a child.

In his book about British folkways in America, David Hackett Fischer wrote that the Puritans ^[21] understood that the

first and most urgent purpose of child rearing was what they called the “breaking of the will.” This was a determined effort to destroy a spirit of autonomy in a small child — a purpose which lay near the center of child rearing in Massachusetts.[1] ^[22]

“Breaking of the will” works in the short term, but it runs the risk of raising children who will grow up without the ability to use their freedom wisely. In my own life, I’ve seen young people who grew up in restrictive homes fall apart when they get to college. The young women seem to be the ones who have the most trouble. Some fell pregnant to the first “bad boy” they met, some developed eating disorders, and others flunked out of school or otherwise failed to become independent and had to return home for several years. This isn’t to say that promoting traditional values is a bad idea, but one needs to understand that gradually increasing freedom for the child is a necessary part of child rearing.

The Institute of Basic Life Principles encourages large families and sexual morality among its members. Women are expected to dress modestly. Sexually reckless behavior is frowned upon. Although sexually reckless behavior is exactly what brought down both Josh Duggar and Bill Gothard. This happened to Josh in part due to the repressed environment in which he was raised, coupled with the money and fame he had achieved. Bill Gothard’s story is slightly different, however.

Bill Gothard has never married. He also had a large following. Any man who makes a career out of public speaking befoe large audiences becomes attractive to women. He also made a point to surrounding himself with young women from his movement, and engaged in illicit sexual activity with them. This activity seems to have fallen short of intercourse, but it was enough to cause scandals. One such scandal broke in 1980 and another in 2014. Gothard survived the first scandal, but not the second.

Bill Gothard had gained access to these young, obedient women because he convinced their parents to allow them to work for him while being unsupervised. Any situation where a prominent man has access to young women without any outside control runs the risk of such a scandal. The only way to avoid it is to avoid the situation in the first place.

Former members of the fundamentalist movement are featured in the documentary. We learn of a woman who married young to an equally young man; the marriage ended badly. The ideas about marriage within the movement are generally good, however. Parents, who have more experience, should definitely be involved in monitoring their children’s courtships, but this approach runs the risk of leading to a bad pairing should the parents encourage their children to marry when they are still too young. Marriage is a tricky business, and it is probably best for young people to date as many different people as possible before marriage.

The Institute of Basic Life Principles also recruits young men to work hard in building facilities, and maintains a “paramilitary” arm consisting of young men who exercise, go camping, and conduct close-order drill together. This is depicted in a negative light in the documentary, but hard work is a necessary experience to have while growing up, and the discipline involved in physical exercise and working as part of a team with other men is likewise rewarding in the long term.

Evolution in action

What one sees in the Duggar family is evolution in action, even if, ironically, fundamentalists don’t believe in Darwinism ^[23]. The Duggars’ fundamentalism has made them evolutionarily successful: They have many children, and their children are having children.

Bill Gothard’s influence led to a positive trend in the American Majority, where fundamentalist families are growing through increasing birthrates. This is the same way that the New England Yankees expanded westward. They tried to convert the Indians — and more recently, Latin Americans — to their way of thinking, but their ultimate success came as a result of having more children.

Political Christianity

Both the Institute for Basic Life Principles and the Duggars have much that is worthy of being emulated and admired. Roe v. Wade ^[24], the Supreme Court case ^[25] which legalized abortion, was likely overturned ^[26] in part because pro-choice supporters ^[27] either failed to have children or were aborted.

Victory in the war of the cradle is ultimately an effective strategy. This documentary doesn’t really discredit the Duggars and their ethos, but it does expose their potential pitfalls.

Note

[1] ^[28] David Hackett Fischer, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 98-99.