A month later, twice-divorced Donald Trump announced his candidacy for president and soon afterwards, conservatives everywhere started acting as though the "purity culture" fad had never happened. Indeed, conservatives even started trying to push "You're the puritans now and we're the cool punk rock rebels who love free speech!" as a selling point for their opposition to holding people accountable for bigotry or sexual harassment. It didn't matter that it wasn't true, but it did matter that they understood it was a more appealing stance than "We actually just want it to be socially acceptable for people to be bigots."
But as "Shiny Happy People," the Amazon documentary series about Josh Duggar and his family, demonstrates, the far-right Christian movement that gave us purity culture and dominionism, that pushed for bills demanding that Creationism be taught in schools, that homeschooled their kids in hopes of maintaining full control over their lives and belief systems, is still very much with us. As prominently as the Duggars figure into the series, its real focus is largely on the way the Christian subculture they were involved with more or less created a breeding ground and a safe space for sexual predators — and on the way that same culture is still trying to take over.
The primary influence on the Duggars' belief system was and is Bill Gothard, a man who has also been accused of sexual harassment and assault. Gothard is the founder of the far-right Christian organization Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP) as well as the Advanced Training Institute (ATI), the homeschooling program used by the Duggars and other families like them — particularly those of the "quiverfull" variety (the ones who have as many children as possible in order to create a "quiver of arrows" for Christ).
The most famous of Gothard's teachings is the "Umbrella of Authority." According to this ever-so-helpful diagram, husbands are meant to be submissive to Christ, wives are meant to be submissive both to their husbands and Christ, and children are meant to be submissive to their mothers, fathers and also Christ.
Under Gothard's teachings, women are expected to obey men in every way. They are required to dress "modestly" in ankle-length dresses and not even to wear jewelry that might draw a man's attention to their body in any way. They are not allowed to flirt, they aren't allowed to cut their hair, and they must always have a pleasant, if vacant, countenance. In this culture, disobeying any of that is called "defrauding" — sexually stimulating men without being able, morally, to, uh, finish them off.
Here is an excerpt from an ILBP worksheet about the ways in which sexual assault just might be your own fault.
That same worksheet also explains to victims of sexual assault that being raped or molested isn't really a crime against them as it is a crime against God, because their bodies belong to God.
An especially prescient lesson from the Advanced Training Institute, titled "Lessons From Moral Failures In A Family," tells the story of a family whose son molested his younger siblings.
The young predator explained, in the lesson, that he was basically forced to molest his sisters because of how immodest they were as children, and because his parents let him change their diapers.
Modesty was a factor. It was not at the level it should have been in my family. It was not uncommon for my younger siblings to come out of their baths naked or with a towel. They would often run around the house for the next twenty minutes until my mom or sister got around to dressing them.
Changing my younger sisters' diapers when they were really young may not have been a big thing, but it really did not have to be that way (if we had only applied Levitical law). My younger sisters used to wear dresses often, but as they were young and not aware of modesty, they did not behave in them as they should.
It's worth noting here that one of the videos found in Josh Duggar's computer was of an infant being violently sexually abused and tortured. Is this because it was organically hardwired into his brain to want to watch that kind of thing or because he came from a culture in which even the bodies of infants were sexualized?
Another IBLP worksheet titled “Why Did God Let A Four Year Old Boy Be Molested By A Fifteen Year Old Neighbor?” explains why a four-year-old boy may be just as "guilty" as a neighbor who molested him.
1. To Teach him his responsibility to cry out to God.
In our fallen world with all its evil men and women, there will be attacks by a stronger upon a weaker. When this happens, the law of God is very clear that the weaker must cry out for help or he will be equally guilty. This principle is found in Deuteronomy 21:23, 24. When a ‘victim’ does not cry out or immediately tell his authority he will carry around a sense of guilt which Satan will then use for condemnation and further defeat. It would therefore be important for your son to confess his failure to do this and ask God to forgive him.
Another worksheet from IBLP's Our Most Important Messages Grow Out of Our Greatest Weaknesses includes a hypothetical question from a wife who wants to know if she should separate from her husband if he sexually assaults their children. It should not come as a surprise at this point that the answer is no. Rather, she should request that he stop molesting the children and this should work so long as she is holy enough herself. If it doesn't work, she's supposed to ask his parents to kindly ask him to stop raping the children, and after them, go to the church, and only to the law once all of that has failed.
That same worksheet explains to wives that they can't actually be victims of their husbands' "hostility."
There is no "victim" if we understand that we are called to suffer for righteousness. "For even hereunto were you called: because Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an ex-ample, that you should follow His steps.' | Peter 2:21 Christ was not a victim! He willingly gave His life for us. "By whose stripes you were healed…..likewise you wives.."* | Peter 2:24; 3:1 Christ's life teaches us how to suffer.
To be clear, these are not obscure, fringe beliefs. The IBLP has been massively influential in fundamentalist Christian circles and over 2.5 million people have attended Gothard's seminars.
The Duggars, like many others in this culture, also subscribed to the teachings of Michael and Debi Pearl, authors of How To Train Up A Child, a manual for Christ-centered child abuse. Both the Pearls and Gothard promote the idea that to "help" your children grow into good Christian adults, you must physically beat them into submission from infancy on. This idea that one's body is not one's own is not merely insinuated, it is drilled into followers at every opportunity.
While people from all walks of life can become predators, Josh Duggar didn't just happen — he was created. It wasn't even that he came from a sexually repressive culture and was "acting out," it was that he came from a sexually repressive culture where he was taught that people's bodies are not their own, that they should not be bothered by sexual assault, that he has authority over women, that if he molests someone it's really more their fault than his. This doesn't mean that he's not to blame, but it does mean there are a whole lot more like him.
The docuseries, unsurprisingly, features a number of women who were sexually harassed, abused, and assaulted as children and teenagers by people involved with this subculture — including by Gothard himself.
"Shiny Happy People" also gets into the effect that this Christian fundamentalist subculture is having and has had on American culture at large, and of the ways in which these people are actively working to take over our government and culture. They homeschool their kids so that they don't have any other outside influences, hoping to raise an army of Christian soldiers and legislators, they send them to civics programs and other lessons so that they know how to mobilize and run for office, they send them to places like Patrick Henry College, where they can get White House internships and influence politics that way, they take them to Congress to petition politicians to take up their causes.
The fact is, it's been pretty darned effective, between the growing population of Christian nationalist and tradwife influencers and the election of people like Madison Cawthorn to Congress. Sure, Cawthorn's predilection for sexual predation ended up getting him voted out of the House, but he was literally part of a group called Generation Joshua designed to encourage Christian conservative youth to work in politics.
The moral of this story and this docuseries, more than anything having to do with the Duggars specifically, is that the Christian Right is doing exactly what they accuse us of doing. They are "grooming" children to be vulnerable to sexual predators, they are "grooming" young men to be sexual predators, and they are trying to indoctrinate children in their belief system so that they can grow up and become politicians and influencers and use that power to take over the nation. They didn't just make one Josh Duggar by mistake, they are making an army of him.
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Bartender shot. Lea was about 15 drinks in the weeds when I asked to take a picture. I'm lucky she didn't throw a tumbler at me. Matthew Hooper
Donna Rose on her first pandemic birthday, we had fun.
