Shiny, Happy Gothard
My TV viewing habits are strange. I’ve never watched a reality show like Survivor or The Amazing Race. I refuse to watch Cable-TV news stations like FOX, MSNBC, and CNN. I’m allergic to so-called religious broadcasting and outside of some curiosity about Jim and Tammy Bakker almost 40 years ago, I’ve never watched outlets like the Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN). Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death has framed my understanding of television.
So, when a friend texted me last week and suggested that I watch the new documentary about the Duggar family, Shiny Happy People, I thought it was worth a look. I had heard of the Duggar family but like all reality TV, I ignored them. I may have seen them once or twice on The Today Show but a story about a family with 19 kids struck me as unrealistic at best and bizarre at worst. I mean, if a couple wants 19 kids, I’m OK with that as long as they can support their family economically and give their kids a good education so that they can get good jobs and flourish as human beings. And to be honest, I wondered how a couple could send 19 kids to college or trade school to get the intellectual or vocational training they need.
To my surprise, the Duggar reality show was not so much about their family per se as about their claim that all of us should have large families like them. Having large families is God’s will and hence we should reorder our lives and our churches to propagate them. The source of this claim? A guy named Bill Gothard, a single man who claims to have cornered the market on Christian marriage and Christian families.
I had heard of Gothard before. In the late 1970s, I attended his week-long Basic Youth Conflicts (IBYC) seminar at the Long Beach (CA) Civic Auditorium. Over 9,000 people packed the place all listening to Bill Gothard, a short man wearing a drab blue suit with an overhead projector. As he spoke, the audience busied themselves writing notes in big red binders distributed by IBYC. The social pressure to accept his ideological teachings about Christianity was overpowering. The former Southern Baptist turned Anglican writer and speaker Beth Moore put it this way. “I didn’t realize how much influence that whole Gothard movement had on my church and on my social circles until watching those…episodes. I didn’t realize that’s where the umbrella talk all came from. I didn’t realize that’s where saying parenting stuff like ‘first time every time’ came from.” Gothard led these seminars throughout the United States and Canada with thousands attending at each location, and the thousands of “alumni” made sure that Gothard’s teachings became known in evangelical and fundamentalist congregations across North America.
Authority/Submission as Ideology
The key words in the Gothard schema are “authority” and “submission.” For Gothard, the Bible presents an ideological system where right relationship with God can be found only when an individual is in submission to authority. Hence, the Christian family is viewed as series of hierarchical “umbrellas” where the husband is the dominant force in the family. Men submit to God. Women submit to their husbands. And children submit to the wife who is responsible for managing the daily affairs of the household while the husband earns a living for the family. In society, citizens are required to submit to law enforcement; workers to their bosses; and congregants to their pastors. A society functions well only when individuals understand and practice the roles of authority and submission.
The Bible is drawn upon to support this tight system of authority and submission, despite the fact that Bible verses cited are mostly taken out of context with little understanding of what the biblical writers actually said. To top it off, the Gothardian ideology draws upon an ideology called Reconstruction. Reconstructionism views Old Testament civil law as binding on Christians even though the New Testament teaches that the Old Testament law has been fulfilled by life, death, and resurrection of Christ and we now live under what the prophet Jeremiah described as “the new covenant,” a covenant shaped by God’s grace expressed through Jesus Christ.
The second time I heard Gothard was at a “pastors conference in Greensboro, NC in 1985. This time, Gothard had something new to teach his followers. It was not enough to follow the system of authority/submission that he laid out in those big red notebooks. Now, Gothard wanted the pastors (all of whom were men since Gothard thought evangelical women pastors were an abomination) to start having bigger families. Families with ten or more children were held up as examples. There was even talk of how men could reverse vasectomies if they were unfortunate enough to have had one. It was a bizarre day.
My second trip to a Gothard event came about five years after the first major sex scandal embroiled the IBYC ministry in 1980. Gothard’s brother Steve had been caught in sexual relations with several minors at an IBYC center and while he was removed from the ministry, his brother Bill Gothard banished him to one of the organization’s campus buildings in Minnesota. After all of this, I dismissed Gothard (though I continued to warn others of what I saw as dangerous teachings), and he fell off of my radar screen. So, it wasn’t until a few months ago that the connection between Gothard and the Dugger family started to become clear.
“Shiny, Happy” Nightmare
The original Duggar series ran for a long time on the TLC Channel up until 2015. It portrayed a large, happy family where everyone worked together and coexisted well with each other. The reality was far uglier. The Duggar’s failed to educate their children, especially the young girls who were expected to get married at a young age and have large families of their own. Education was home-school only and with IBLP approved curricula. (The IBYC changed its name to the Institute for Basic Life Principles (IBLP) in the 1980s.) That curriculum was woefully lacking and did not prepare young men or women for college or careers. Marriages were arranged through a complex system of courtship, and women existed in a patriarchal system that allowed them no independence whatsoever. In fact, women were considered under the “authority” of their fathers even as young adults, and marriage represented a transfer of authority from their fathers to their husbands.
Yet the authority/submission dynamic was slippery, and it opened the door for all kinds of abuse in the Duggar family and the Gothard/IBLP organization. There’s no need to describe all of that here. Shiny, Happy, People tells the whole sordid story and as hard as it is to watch, I encourage you to do so. Recasting the Bible as a story of authority and submission distorts its message. The Bible’s message is one of sin and grace. All of us, men and women alike, have been created in God’s image (see Genesis 1:26-28) and while the entire human race has fallen into sin (Genesis 3), the biblical story is all about God’s grace for us expressed through Jesus Christ.
The Bible’s relational dynamic is not based on authority/submission. As Ephesians 5:21-33 makes clear, submission is seen as mutual; “submit to one another out of reverence for Christ.” Marriage is a partnership where husbands and wives submit equally to Christ and to one another. No umbrellas here.
And no umbrellas in church, either. Of course, we have leaders in church and as followers of Jesus, we’re to listen to our leaders and encourage them in their work. But in the Bible, Christian leaders are not power brokers but servants. Jesus makes that clear in his own ministry. Yes, Christian leaders have power, but they are to use that power as a servant of Christ and of God’s people.
What I found especially sad about Shiny, Happy, People are the stories of people burned by the Gothard system who have lost their Christian faith. They were fed a deeply distorted almost-cultic understanding of the Christian faith, one that stripped them of their humanity. But God doesn’t do that. Instead, he sends Christ to restore our true humanity.
I happily describe myself as a Christian humanist. By that I mean God’s desire that all of us should flourish as human beings in the world and reach our God-given potential. We can do that in a variety of ways if we are following Christ. Following Christ is not about finding your place in a distorted reality of authority and submission. It is about what the Apostle Paul describes as “union with Christ” in Romans 6, about learning to follow Jesus amidst the hopes, joys, and struggles that we encounter in our daily lives. I hope that the Duggar family can find true freedom in Christ.
The documentary “Shiny, Happy People” can be found on Amazon Prime. It’s a four-part series; each episode an hour long. As with all television, it should be watched with a critical eye. For example, in episode four they try to link all evangelicals with authoritarianism and a desire to control others politically and theologically. That is a huge stretch and one that lacks evidence. While it may be a popular opinion on the political left it is a gross generalization. Having said that, I don’t doubt that the Gothard movement has political aims given that it is a Reconstructionist movement at heart. And yes. I did trash my big red Gothard notebook many years ago.