Sarah D. Shearer

I just finished watching the Duggar documentary, “shiny happy people.”

My goodness, I have a lot of thoughts. So many in fact, that I have decided to dust off the old blog and pontificate for a minute. This topic is extremely near and dear to my heart because it has affected myself and so many people I love. What topic is that, you may ask, well, quite simply, it is putting conservative Christianity on the chopping block as the single cause for an entire generations’ demise, It is pointing to a large and varied movement and deciding that as a whole the entire movement was flawed and corrupt and that it is actually completely OK to blame all of your current adult problems on things that happened to you when you were children that may or may not have been intentional.

The documentary focuses on Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar and the training they received at Bill Gothard‘s Institute for basic life principles. I will begin by saying I did not grow up in this teaching, nor do I know very many people who did. So what I am saying has nothing to do with Bill Gothard and everything to do with Jim Bob and Michelle . The documentary focused on how they met and decided to have their family. After a miscarriage due to birth control, they were convicted and decided to leave the size of the family to the Lord.

This was portrayed to be a foolish act in the documentary, supported by hosts of commentary by people who never knew them saying that people in religious cults feel a need to populate the earth with their own warriors. I will pause and say there is a difference between trusting the lord with the size of your family, and having children as some sort of sick competition. I can’t speak to Jim Bob and Michelle’s particular motives, only from what they have stated themselves, that they wanted the Lord to bless their family and leave that size up to him and raise as many children as the Lord gave them to serve the lord. There are people who have children with both sets of motives, but they should not be put in the same category.

But— all of the commentators in the documentary will lead you to believe that it was sheer oppression and cult- like tendencies that drove them to this decision.

Do you guys honestly think that a woman who has birthed NINETEEN children did so completely without using her brain? Do you think she didn’t think about it, do you think she didn’t count the cost? Do you think she didn’t personalize that conviction for herself over that many years? Why is there room for liberal women to have a conviction not to have children and they are heralded as so in control of their own bodies. Is there not room for a woman to open her womb and still be seen as empowered? I have only birthed two children and I can tell you right now Michelle Duggar has laid down her life over the past nearly 40 years. Again, I’m speculating here, but rather than rake her over the coals, can we not just stop and honor a woman who has endured pregnancy and childbirth 19 times. I don’t know many people with that sort of dedication to their conviction.

Back to the story….to add insult to injury, not only do they decide not to prevent children, they stumble into Bill Gotthard‘s Institute for basic life principles which supposedly states that it can help keep your children from walking away from the Lord. Is this not what every Christian couple wants for their children? I know Lucas and I have spent many hours discussing all the things we can do to set our children on the right path. They feel this is a good fit for their family and decide to adopt the principles stated there. now, many of these things I believe are extra biblical, but not evil in and of themselves. I think much of the murky confusion that many millennials and people who have “deconstructed” experience is that they are still unable to separate what the Bible says, from what man says.

No, the Bible does not tell you you have to have your skirt to a certain length. You are not going to hell if your skirt is above your knee and you are not more holy if your skirt reaches the floor. But so often, rather than consider the skirt and maintain that modesty is very important and actually think that maybe dresses and skirts are a fantastic way to glorify the Lord, so many threw the whole concept of modesty out and say well, Jesus doesn’t care at all about the length of your skirt. You do what you want to do. Anything that has any sort of standard is legalism! And we vacillate to the opposite extreme as soon as we feel we have been oppressed in any way shape or form. A host of rules about skirt length and rock music is ridiculous on some level, but what I am asking is that critics look genuinely at Jim Bob and Michelle and see if maybe they wanted to protect their children from the truly evil generation. Was it too much? Probably so. Were they inherently evil? I don’t believe so.

The documentary also attacked the way the Duggers chose to homeschool their children, using the curriculum Bill Gotthard encouraged. again, I cannot speak to this curriculum. But the documentary strongly suggested that Jim Bob and Michelle refused to educate their children on true facts and only used this curriculum as a method of education. Like they were purposely dumbing down their kids and pulling them from the world. I don’t want my children to ever set foot in public school, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to educate them at all. I want to be completely in charge of their education. Does that make me the leader of my own cult? No it just makes me concerned parent.

Interspersed throughout the documentary were the voices of many people who are my age and older by about 10 to 15 years who feel they grew up in this “cult of Conservatism” and were uneducated because their parents chose to give them a Christian education.

Again, I stay in the camp that their parents were not trying to screw their children over. They thought, we want our children have a Christian education. We will pursue this path in the hopes that our children have a strong biblical worldview. Were there some errors? Yes. But I’d like to ask yet again, what parent has not looked back and considered that they did make mistakes, but can wholeheartedly say, we were doing our very best.

The next conviction the documentary attacked was the way the Duggers approached marriage. Rather than using any number of their adult children who are happily married, they chose to make Anna Duggar the poster child. The one who has experienced the most trauma and pain due to Josh’s conviction and imprisonment. They retrieved old film from her courtship with Josh, and really made a laughing stock of the whole concept of courtship. As if to say see what happens when you have chaperones and don’t kiss before marriage? Your husband turns into a pedophile and ends up in prison. The whole thesis of the film is that conservative Christianity, commonly referred to as a cult in the movie, produces pedophiles like Josh Duggar. This is simply untrue.

It is libel in my opinion to make the assumption that well-meaning home school, large families produce criminals more than anything else. Does it happen? Yes. unfortunately it does happen sometimes . But why aren’t we looking to the far left in absolute horror at the nut jobs they are churning out on the altar of “choosing their own gender? With their stated premises, it would be just as easy to say that liberal heathens produce child groomers at the same rate that conservative Christians do.

But I digress….

Anna Duggar is painted to be a weak, uneducated, thoughtless woman who is a baby making machine and has no thought for herself, merely because she has chosen not to divorce her husband. While no one should fault her for if she chooses divorce, she should be respected for her immense convictions in light of everything she has been through. Again, like Michelle, how can you assume this woman who has literally been through hell, has no brain or common sense to herself. Do we honestly think these women are so oppressed they have not internalized any of their own convictions and decided to act themselves? Why do snarky onlookers assume that women who have strong convictions about marriage and child bearing are completely dominated and spineless? Is there no room for a woman who has decided these things for herself without being pressed into it? In a society that loves to exalt women as free thinkers, why are the only free thinkers allowed to be liberal women? Why can we not look at a homeschool mom wearing a dress & carrying six babies, and think that she must not have a brain of her own?

I think the main thing I am trying to say here is that YES it is very dangerous territory to ascribe legalism to these principles and say that you are more or less holy if you do certain things. I do agree that much of what the Duggers experienced tended toward legalism, but what the documentary fails to acknowledge, and I believe purposefully, is that there is also room for true conviction on certain topics. Not everybody who lives differently is doing so out of a legalistic mindset. Often times they are doing it because they believe it is what’s best for them and their families and the Lord has them on a journey and maybe one day many years later they will look back and realize they have evolved and learned from their ways. But how much better to air on the side of wanting to please the Lord and veer too far, than completely throw away all restraint and propriety and have no standard whatsoever for your family? again, I truly believe that Jim bob and Michelle Duggar were doing what they thought was best for their children, and a huge majority of their children have turned out well and are walking with the Lord. Do they get no credit for this? Are they to be burned at the stake because they screwed up in a lot of ways? I do not think that is fair for them and here is where it gets more personal. I do not think it is fair for many of the parents of people I grew up with.

While I did not grow up in a denim skirt only/ Bill Gotthard environment, I did grow up in a conservative Christian church and homeschool organization. Now, as a parent, I have so much more mercy for our parents. they were doing what they thought was best at the time. Maybe there was too much strictness. Maybe they were too many rules. Maybe purity culture had its flaws. But if you use your brain that maybe you went to some liberal arts college with and got a sociology degree, can’t you see that our parents were trying to save us from getting hurt?

They wanted us to avoid many of the mistakes that they made themselves. They saw boundaries and rules as a protection and a covering for their teenage children and thought gosh, we would love to them to avoid the pain of sex outside of marriage. We will institute rules around dating. They saw the pain that can come from a woman who dresses immodestly and so they tried to enact modesty standards. they rightly saw much of the wickedness in entertainment and limited what we were allowed to watch. And you know what. I think they were right on most of that even if I never got to watch a ton of movies.

Any 32-year-old sitting in therapy, spouting out the traumas of their conservative upbringing, really needs to stop and consider if the words that you’re using are too harsh. People throw around the words like cult and trauma very easily and I think it’s a huge disservice to people who are actually entrenched in cults where they will be killed or excommunicated if they try to escape.

Conservative Christianity isn’t a cult. It’s a way of life and full of error because it’s full of humans, but to ascribe the amount of trauma that these people do to their parents and their upbringing is just wrong and sad and unwarranted in my opinion.

You grew up in a big family. You had to wear dresses. Your parents were strict. You wore a purity ring. You were (gasp) told you should pray for your future husband and not have sex with other men. You Couldn’t wear a two piece swimsuit. Cry me a river. Yes there are people who endured abuse!! I agree with this. But let us NOT blame conservative Christianity as a whole for the errant ways of some twisted people.

Is there not any part of you that can look a little deeper, use your brain and realize that your parents were just doing what they thought was best at the time. they read the Bible and applied it how they could. If these grown adults could step inside the minds of their parents, and maybe they could if they were the parents of something beside a dog or a plant, they might see two people who were actually a lot younger once, probably the age these millennials are now. They would see a couple honestly trying to do their best and failing along the way.

I am genuinely so sorry to so many parents I know who have been vilified for doing what all parents do, make mistakes and try their best along the way. I know Lucas and I will do the same thing in many ways and I hope to God that my children can see one day that we were just doing our best.