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| Poster for the tv series "Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets", produced by Amazon. It is a family photo of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar and a huge number of their kids. All the people in the photos have their faces covered by smiley-face emojis, except for Jim Bob. Image source. |
[content note: Duggar family, Bill Gothard, mentions of abuse, mentions of victim-blaming of rape victims]
I watched "Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets", the 4-part documentary about the Duggar family, produced by Amazon. (Background information, in case you have no idea who the Duggars are: This is a family that had a reality show on TLC from 2008 to 2015, called "19 Kids and Counting" [actually originally the number was less than 19, they continued updating the name of the show as more kids were born] because there are in some weird conservative Christian subculture that doesn't allow birth control. The show was about how they live, how they manage such a large household. And also their weird quirky rules about how nobody is ever allowed to be alone with their boyfriend or girlfriend. [Actually, it's not weird and quirky, it's creepy and controlling.])
I'm ex-evangelical, so I was raised in an environment which has similarities with how the Duggars raised their kids- but they're fundamentalists, much more extreme than what I experienced. Still, a lot of ideas are very familiar to me- the emphasis on not having sex before marriage (or any physical contact at all, in the ideal case), treating obedience as more important than thinking for yourself, the idea that we already know all the right answers so there's no need to listen to anyone who believes differently from us, and how these kinds of environments are breeding grounds for abuse and coverups.
I like how the documentary included a lot of interviews with ex-fundies. These are people who were raised in that environment, and they really know what's what. (Just like I know what's what about evangelicalism.) They know that the reality is very different from the propaganda you hear from the movement's leaders. It wasn't about "let's gawk at these weirdos" like I've seen in some reality shows- it was about how this ideology has actual harmful effects on real people.
Here are a bunch of my thoughts about the documentary:
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Marrying a man who treats you better than you were taught was possible
Jill Duggar (one of the oldest daughters of the Duggar's 19 kids) is the main interview subject, spilling the beans about her family. Her husband Derick is there with her. She talks about how her father (Jim Bob Duggar) did not treat her like an adult, even when she was over the age of 18- he treated her like he controlled her life, and she couldn't make decisions on her own. He told all the kids to sign the contract with TLC for the tv show, without the kids understanding what it meant- and all the money for the show went to Jim Bob, not the kids- even though some of them were over the age of 18 when the show was being filmed.
In "Shiny Happy People", Jill and Derick talk about how they finally said no to Jim Bob. And how they got a lot of criticism for that, within their little subculture, because "not honoring your parents" is like the worst thing ever.
The way it reads to me is, as a child Jill was taught that her father controls her life, and then when she gets married, her husband will control her life in a similar way. She was taught that that's how it works for girls. That's God's design for the family. So then her father does all these things to control her life, and it feels normal to her.
And then she gets married, and her husband does NOT control her life like that. It turns out, her husband is a better person than that. He treats her like she is a person, and her feelings and desires matter. He treats her like she deserves better than the way her father pushed her around and expected her to participate in the tv show without being paid at all (!!!).
As a disclaimer, I should say that I don't know details about Jill and Derick's marriage. I could be wrong about this. But this is how it reads to me. He treats her so much better than what she was taught about how a husband treats a wife. And that's how she got the strength to realize the way her father controlled her life was wrong, and to finally say no to him.
I know something about marrying a man who treats me better than Christians said was possible. I was taught to view sex in marriage in very transactional terms- it's something I owe to him, and if I don't want to or can't have sex, for whatever reason, my hypothetical good Christian husband would say to me "well, you better figure this out, because you're not holding up your end of the marriage vows." And also, I believed "the husband is the leader, the wife has to submit." And even though nobody at church ever gave an actual example for what that looked like, even though Christians taught me that *usually* a couple makes decisions together, as equals, and only very *rarely* would the husband need to pull rank and say "okay well this is my decision and that's that"... I believed that my hypothetical good Christian husband would have the right to pull rank like that, and he would use it sometimes, and if I was mad about it then he would tell me I'm not being a good wife, and he would be right.
(It seems the Duggars were in a Christian subculture that was different in this regard- they didn't just pay lip service to the idea that "wives need to submit to their husbands", like evangelicals do; they really lived it out in horrifying, practical ways.)
And then I married Hendrix, who is not a Christian, and he doesn't believe any of that nonsense. It's like, he truly cares about me and loves me, rather than treating me like I owe him. The most striking example of this was when I was in the first trimester of pregnancy, throwing up every day, and feeling way too sick to even think about having sex, he was so compassionate. He brought me water, he cooked for me, he got up in the middle of the night with me when I was sick, etc. I couldn't believe it- Christians had always told me that if I'm not having sex frequently enough with my husband, then my husband simply isn't capable of loving me and being a decent human being. (Don't be surprised if he cheats on you, Christians said.) I couldn't believe it. It was like, Hendrix's love wasn't dependent on the sex that I "owe" him. Instead, he loves me as his wife, and he recognized that I was going through a really hard situation, and he wanted to help me.
I couldn't believe it.
Like, imagine a man actually having empathy when his wife is sick or in pain, rather than his only concern being about getting the sex he is "owed." Christians told me this was impossible.
(Conservatives are always claiming that "feminists hate men." I leave it as an exercise to the reader to determine which of these ideologies "hates men": "men were made by God to be fragile and sex-obsessed, not capable of respecting women who are dressed immodestly, not capable of loving their wives if their wives aren't giving them enough sex" or "men are better than that, men are fully capable of being decent human beings (regardless of what women are wearing) and we should hold them to that standard.")
And I wonder if this happens to a lot of girls who grow up in conservative Christian environments. We're taught that when we get married, our husbands will have these powers over us, and we're obligated to follow these rules for him. And then, if we marry a man who abuses us, we feel like it's totally normal. And if we marry a man who is a decent human being, we're shocked, because we really believed men weren't capable of being that good.
Contrast this with Anna Duggar, the wife of Josh Duggar. Josh is the oldest child of the Duggar's 19 kids. Several scandals about Josh have made the news- he sexually abused several of his sisters when he was a teenager, he had an account on "Ashley Madison", a website for married people who want to have affairs, he [allegedly] had an affair with a sex worker (Danica Dillon), who says he was so rough and violent it felt like she was being raped, and also he was arrested for possession of child porn, and is now in jail.
And "Shiny Happy People" discusses how women in that subculture are taught that you can't divorce. You just can't. It's just not an option. People wonder why Anna Duggar doesn't divorce Josh- well how can she? She's been taught her whole life that this is just how men are, and that a wife is obligated to stay with her husband, no matter what he does. Let me emphasize this again: All these things that Josh did, the cheating, the crimes, all of it, this is the behavior that women are taught to expect from their husbands, in that culture. This is just how it works. This is normal. Your husband fails you and mistreats you, in so many ways, and you have to continue to stick with him, love him, submit to him. That's what marriage is. That's what girls are taught in that culture.
Josh Duggar is kind of an extreme example, and I think most evangelical Christians I've met would say divorce is allowed if your spouse cheats on you, but my point is, women are taught to expect this kind of bad behavior from men. Like this is normal. Like every man could potentially do things as bad as what Josh Duggar did (perhaps the wife is to blame for not having sex with him frequently enough?), and that's just how men are.
If I married an abuser- if I married a man who said to me "I don't care if you're in pain, I have needs, so you have to find a way to have sex anyway or else you're a bad wife"- I would have thought that was completely normal. Somehow I got lucky, and I have a non-Christian husband who is a better person than that.
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Bill Gothard
I'm glad the documentary went into a lot of detail about Bill Gothard and his teachings and the cult built around him. (Yeah, it really is a cult.) The Duggars are not just one weird family, they're part of this larger subculture, influenced by Gothard's teachings.
I grew up evangelical, and I was not in Gothard's subculture at all. I had never heard of Bill Gothard, in my 20-some years of being evangelical. I had never seen his ridiculous umbrella diagram, clearly drawn by someone who doesn't understand how umbrellas work. And some little cultural markers, like the way Michelle Duggar (the mother of the 19 kids) uses the term "defrauding" to talk about women who are dressed "immodestly." As an evangelical, I had never heard that referred to as "defrauding" (ie, a woman is defrauding a man by causing him to have sexual desires that can't be fulfilled, what on earth). We called it "causing him to stumble." A lot of small cultural markers like that weren't the same as what I experienced.
So, fortunately, I wasn't in that specific weird Christian subculture at all.
But, there were things about it that felt familiar to me. The idea that everyone just needs to follow the rules that God gave, and then everything will be perfect- nobody should be questioning or thinking for themselves. Having very different rules for girls than for boys, which teach girls that they can't expect boys or men to have any self-control- if a boy does sexual things to you without your consent, it's not rape, it's your fault because you should have known boys are just like that.
If someone would have shown up at my church, when I was growing up, and tried to teach that ridiculous umbrella diagram, would people have stood up and said "this isn't right" or would we have gone along with it because it's similar enough to the sorts of things we believed?
We clearly weren't as "extreme" as what Gothard was teaching, but was there any explicit line between us? Was there anything that fundies were teaching, and evangelicals would take a stand against, and say "no, we do NOT believe that, we strongly believe THIS other thing, which contradicts that"? Like... we would have felt like it was really weird that they required all the girls to wear long skirts all the time, we would have gotten a really weird vibe because of little things like that, and we would have viewed them with suspicion or mockery as a result, but... but what was the real difference?
I've mostly heard evangelicals say they disagree with fundies because "that's too extreme", which doesn't feel like an actual reason to me. If you really believe something, then shouldn't you believe it to the most extreme point you can? If you don't take it to the most extreme point, it must be because you have another belief which pushes back in the other direction, and you come to a sort of common-sense balance between the two. Well, what's the other belief? For evangelicals, it felt like there wasn't a competing belief, it was just, like... fundies were too weird. We didn't want to be that weird.
(Or perhaps evangelicals would make the argument that fundamentalists are "legalistic"? For example, we both believe women have to dress "modestly", but fundies make it into explicit rules about the exact length of girls' skirts, and that's wrong because it's "legalistic." And evangelicals would say we should follow the general idea of modesty but not make it into specific rules like that. Letter of the law vs spirit of the law, that kind of thing. This argument does not convince me either.)
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Blanket training
Well, I had read about blanket training before, on ex-fundie blogs, but that was years ago, before I had a child. And now, hearing about it now, oh it's so much worse.
Blanket training means you take your baby, who is just old enough to crawl (maybe 6-12 months old) and you put them on a blanket on the floor. And when the baby crawls off the blanket, you hit them. !!!! OH MY GOD! WTF! You hit your baby. OH MY GOD. And in this way, you teach the baby to just stay on the blanket, and then you can get things done without worrying about the baby getting into trouble.
WTFFFFFFF
I'm a mom now. I have a little kid. And when he was learning to crawl, I was so happy to see it. He was learning, he was active, he was exploring the world, developing new skills. I wanted to encourage and teach him. I wanted him to grow and learn and accomplish all of his goals. (Except when they were like, unsafe things like falling off the bed or something.)
The idea that a baby would be trying to learn and explore, following their natural curiosity, and then somebody hits them to make them stop- oh, that's awful. I just... that's so wrong. That's so terrible.
And it's more than that- the Duggars follow Michael and Debi Pearl's teaching about "training" your child- which is basically hitting the child any time they're not 100% immediately obedient. And if the child shows any kind of negative emotion about something the parent is doing (for example, hitting the child), that's also disobedience, and you should hit the child for that.
I've heard ex-fundie bloggers say if you ever see a family with a huge number of kids in public, and the kids are so extremely well-behaved, and everyone is like "wow your kids are so good!" it's because the parents are hitting the kids at home SO MUCH. Like, the amount of violence required to completely crush a child so that the child wouldn't dare to be anything other than "perfectly well-behaved", that's how much they're hitting the kids at home. It's horrifying.
There was a line in "Shiny Happy People" (episode 2) that said, "The audacity of Jim Bob Duggar to say, 'I've got my family under so much control'- they were that secure they could keep their secrets, with a camera crew, and that their kids were not gonna betray the truth. I cannot believe that he got away with that."
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TLC
Jill and Derick talk about how the contract with TLC (to produce the tv show) was extremely exploitative towards her. The kids did not get paid at all; all the money went to Jim Bob. Even though some of the kids were legal adults at the time the show was filmed.
In particular, Jill talks about when she was pregnant, and TLC was asking her about arrangements for a camera crew to come to the hospital with her when she gave birth, and she and Derick said "no, we don't want you guys there at all." (Previously, Anna Duggar had had a bad experience with the camera crew being there when she was giving birth.) But apparently the contract said they had to. Eventually they agreed that Jill and Derick would set up their own cameras to record the birth, with no camera crew.
TLC used that footage, and the episode about Jill giving birth was one of the most popular ones. But Jill says she did not get paid at all for that. Jim Bob got paid.
And, the documentary says, the wedding episodes and birth episodes were the most popular ones. In other words, the women of the family were the ones bringing in the viewers and the money. But Jim Bob is the one who got paid.
It's really outrageous, what TLC did during the filming of this show. You have this extremely patriarchal subculture, where of course the money goes to the dad, of course it doesn't go to the mom or the kids, of course not, that would never even occur to anyone. And the kids (even the ones over the age of 18) aren't allowed to make their own choices about if they want to sign a contract, if they want to be in the show or not- no, of course not, of course your dad is the one who makes those decisions for you, no one in that subculture would even think that it could be any other way.
And TLC just kinda goes along with it. Did they not realize that these kids didn't have a real choice? Did they not realize that even though Jill signed the contract, that doesn't mean she had an actual choice? Or did they just not care?
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I'm glad to see some of the kids getting out
I'm glad to see Jill speaking out about the way her parents treated her. I'm glad to see she's wearing pants and she has a nose ring, and a husband who believes she matters as a human being.
Jinger (another one of the daughters) has also gotten out. She is also married- it seems to me that for women in these kinds of patriarchal subcultures, marriage can go two ways: Either you marry a man who treats you better than you thought possible, and with his help, you're able to break out of that ideology, or you marry a man who buys into all of that abusive teaching, and you immediately start having babies, by the time you figure out your husband is awful and you need to leave him, you have 5 kids, and you have no education, what can you even do? You're trapped.
Anyway, glad to see Jinger got out. And she has written a book called Becoming Free Indeed: My Story of Disentangling Faith from Fear [affiliate link]. I'm kind of interested in this book (lol I have such a huge pile of unread books already though). But, as far as I know, Jill and Jinger have moved from "super conservative Christian fundamentalist cult" to "average conservative evangelical Christianity." Like, don't misinterpret this and assume they don't have terrible opinions about queer people, for example. (I could be wrong about that- I would love to be wrong.) As far as I know, they are still conservative Christians, but closer to the evangelicalism I'm familiar with, rather than the "extreme" version they were raised in.
But anyway, good for them, I'm happy for them. I hope more of the kids are getting out of that abusive ideology.
And I hope Anna can get out too.
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Conclusion
"Shiny Happy People" is a documentary series about the Duggar family. It is very well-done. It shows how the Duggars aren't just one weird family; they are part of a whole subculture, influenced by Bill Gothard's teachings. The documentary includes interviews with many people who grew up in that environment and are now speaking out about how harmful and abusive it is. This needs to be exposed, and I hope people trapped in that ideology can break free from it.
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"... there is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known. What I tell you in the dark, speak in the daylight; what is whispered in your ear, proclaim from the roofs."
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Related:
He Just Loves Me (a post about Sex, Pregnancy, and My "Wifely Duty") (Google put this behind a "Sensitive content warning", I guess because I included the words "vagina" and "penis" in this post, but it's not like it's more explicit than anything else that's been written about one's "wifely duty." This "wifely duty" thing is literally rape culture, literally marital rape, and I see it promoted by Christians everywhere, but somehow they don't get slapped with a "sensitive content warning.")
My posts from 2015 about Josh Duggar sexually abusing his sisters:
Josh Duggar's "Sin" Doesn't Matter Because Being Pure is Really Hard
Josh Duggar and His Victims are "Damaged Goods"
Josh Duggar's Real Victim Was God (So It's Okay)
Also this blogaround from May 2015 and this one and this one from June 2015 have a bunch of links.
Also, Libby Anne's posts about the Duggars. (These cover A LOT more than just the 2015 scandal.)
Libby Anne knows what's what. She knew what was what all the way back in 2012: Carefully scripted lives: My concerns about the Duggars
(And the link roundup I posted here has a bunch of Libby Anne's posts about the 2015 scandal with Josh Duggar.)
The Slacktivist also has a 2015 link roundup on Josh Duggar: The Duggar Family Scandal: A reader
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