The Duggars, Lust, & Legalism

The Legalists Are Not Sending Their Best

Some on my list will be familiar with the Duggar family, the former reality TV stars known for their extremely large family of 19 children, whose fame took a tragic turn when their oldest, Josh, was revealed to be a sex offender. More recently, some of the younger Duggars, now adults, have started talking publicly about their experience. Jinger Duggar, now a member of John MacArthur’s church, has written a book and appeared on Allie Beth Stuckey’s podcast twice. And Jill Duggar was featured in a recent documentary on Amazon.

The documentary comes from a Left perspective and attempts to conflate the particular problems of the Duggars by smearing as child abusers a) all homeschoolers, b) Christians involved in politics, c) parents who utilize corporal punishment, or d) anyone with a large family. The Left is following a familiar playbook here, in attempting to smear conservative Christians as some sort of sex abuse cult. This follows years of investigative reporting along the same lines, despite evidence that churches are statistically safer than the general population¹.

But between Jinger’s interviews and the less propagandistic aspects of the documentary, enough interesting facts are presented to offer a reasonable commentary. In particular, the Duggars were followers of a fundamentalist guru named Bill Gothard, and the links between their problems and Gothard’s teachings are not incidental. I’ll break the problems into several categories, from broad to narrow: issues with fundamentalism and evangelicalism generally, with the Gothard movement in particular, and the Duggars’ own choices and situation.

Sheep Without a Shepherd

Beginning in the mid-1800s, there began to be a break in the orthodoxy of the more educated, higher-class churches and the more backwoods-type churches. The city-based, mainline Protestant churches began to question key parts of historical faith, including the resurrection, miracles, the afterlife, and biblical accuracy. The backwoods churches responded to this by organizing the fundamentalist movement to restore the fundamentals of the faith. One result of this divide was the loss of intellectual leadership the high churches had provided historically to restrain the backwoods churches from their own worst tendencies.

The Roman Catholic Church, in criticizing the Reformation, had charged that the Protestants were trading one pope for a thousand little popes. I think the Catholics were right that it was naive historically to expect that people could responsibly interpret the Bible for themselves. They would tend to gather around charismatic, largely unaccountable Bible teachers who would do it for them, instead of an institutional church to keep everyone on the same page.

This is why my convictions tend toward the Magisterial Reformation. I agree that the RCC had devolved into serious error by the time of Luther, but since the Bible is an unchanging document, a one-time revision (or more precisely, asymptotic) should be sufficient to right the church, and a general theological consensus had been reached by the mid-1600s among the Reformed churches of Europe. But the Reformation, once the cat of decentralized church authority was out of the bag, kept going.

American religion in particular did its best to prove the Catholics right. In a span of 50 years in the 1800s, Americans developed more sects with historically incongruous theology than any other Christian people: Mormonism, Adventism, Dispensationalism, Christian Science, Landmark Baptists, and Campbellism, to name just a few. For a few years, it seemed like any Yankee with a head injury was liable to start a new religious movement.

Most of the evangelical churches embraced Finneyism during the Second Great Awakening, transforming religious faith into a predominantly emotional experience and church services into theaters of manipulation for dramatic public conversion. This change tended to promote preachers known more for their charisma than any other quality. In the loosey-goosey ordination practices of the backwoods churches, ministers without orthodox theological training could develop cult followings and enormous influence.

Results attained in mass evangelism or charismatic influence became self-proving evidence of the actions of the Holy Spirit, that the men who attained these results were anointed of God. Such leaders could often get away with much private misbehavior. The lack of any instruction beyond the basic gospel in their congregations led to a general gullibility to the three major problems in evangelical churches that enable movements like Gothard’s: a tolerance of private revelation, literal interpretation of the wisdom genre of literature in the Bible, and general superstition.

Pope Gothard

Bill Gothard ran an organization called IBLP, the Institute of Basic Life Principles. On a surface level, much of what he taught seemed reasonable. Christians should avoid debt, start businesses, treat children as a blessing, not a curse, and seek to insulate themselves from the culture. Beneath the surface, Gothard exploited every weakness of theologically-thin evangelicalism. His father had evangelical street cred as the leader of the Gideons and sent his son to Wheaton College. Gothard himself is an extremely polished and skilled public speaker, radiating a sense of peace and contentment that makes his teachings seem eminently reasonable.

He claimed to have direct revelations from God. He declared, for example, that Cabbage Patch Dolls were invented by a warlock who infected each doll with a demon. Now in his 80s, he believes that God has revealed to him that he will live to 120 years, and now teaches a special form of meditative prayer that God also revealed only to him. Since his ouster in his 70s from IBLP over sexual misconduct allegations, he has written 26 books on various aspects of Christian life and successfully defended lawsuits with aggressive and shrewd litigation strategies. He’s a person of extraordinarily high energy and cunning.

The primary error of Gothard’s teaching is an attempt to take wisdom literature of the Bible, such as Proverbs and the Sermon on the Mount, and apply it literally to Christian living. For evangelical families reeling from the cultural revolutions of the 1960s, he offered easy, formulaic answers in the 80s and 90s, before the collaborative power of the Internet could apply much scrutiny to his organization or teaching.

He combined bad interpretation with fear-based superstition. His primary concept of “umbrellas of protection, ” that God provides authorities in our life to protect us, is statistically true. That’s the nature of wisdom: it’s statistically true, but not always. In general, parents are wiser than children. But when wisdom is taught as an absolute, and deviations from it are seen not as natural consequences but rather as divine punishment or demonic influences, all sorts of abuse are enabled.

Gothard would tell anecdotes of rebellious children or wives being struck down with cancer, for example, and say that any breach of authority created a hole in the metaphorical umbrella that would allow Satan special supernatural ability to afflict those outside its protection. He taught that suffering under unjust authority was evidence of God’s blessing, rather than acknowledging legitimate countervailing authorities, such as law enforcement, that might interpose themselves against abusive authority.

Gothard himself also demonstrated the general gullibility of evangelicals. Gothard is and was single and has never married or had children, yet people accepted his parenting advice largely without questioning his lack of practical experience. Some would send their teenagers to remote “training centers,” supervised by this unmarried weirdo, where they would be vulnerable to abuse, simply trusting Gothard and his organization. Gothard would encourage the students, young teenagers, to do crazy things like sign a 10-year pledge to not marry and continue serving in his “ministry.”

I would guess that many if not most families in the Gothard movement were smart enough to ignore some of the more extreme teachings. The documentary features Jim Holt, Jim Bob Duggar’s former best friend, who was involved in the group. Holt strikes me as a reasonable person who probably didn’t let his common sense in raising his children be overridden by legalistic formulas. Perhaps he was able to take what was useful and reject the rest. As Holt says, the families in IBLP were generally “good people.”

Abuse & the IBLP

Others, however, experienced significant trauma, as abusive parents found a rationale for their twisted anger and exploitation. The documentary features many of these children, some of whom have rejected their faith and others permanently scarred. Understandably, their bitterness would in some cases spread to conservative Christianity in general, which in many quarters unfortunately tolerated Gothard because of his popularity and applied little scrutiny to his weird and untenable teachings.

One question is whether the teachings of IBLF were the fundamental cause for the abuse, or if these were sick people who would have abused regardless of their participation. I think the latter is probably the case, but abuse under the name of religion is worse, in that it associates what should be someone’s ultimate comfort as party to the abuse, and makes abuse less comprehensible to the victim. In that sense, the IBLF and the evangelical church that tolerated him more broadly have some responsibility.

There is a strain of pietism and naivety endemic in many churches, particularly around divorce, physical, and sexual abuse. Let’s say there’s a situation where a spouse is physically abusing members of the family. In many quarters of fundamentalist piety, the Biblical exceptions to divorce for abuse/abandonment and adultery are quietly evaded.

While they may technically say these exceptions exist, for victims to escape abusers, the slant of all their teachings is towards forgiveness and restoration of the marriage. The victim is often encouraged to forgive and not utilize the option of divorce or is counseled that they are forbidden to remarry if they do so. Voices as mainstream as John Piper endorse this view. It’s as if they see the formal declaration of a marriage’s termination as worse than the acts that terminate it convenantally.

This position is combined with a naive view of repentance and restoration. If an abuser can hold it together for a few months, and say the right things, often authorities will declare them restored. Part of this is driven by a false equivalency of sins based on misinterpretations of the Sermon on the Mount. If lust is the same as adultery, who are we to judge someone who actually crosses the line versus everyone who has an inappropriate thought?

I’m more of a cynic and pragmatist. A more realistic view in these situations is to accept that some people are “damaged goods” from a human perspective. We can acknowledge that everyone has sinned without saying all sins are the same. It’s as if some evangelicals, in making this false equivalency, are too dense to understand the concept of a number line and commit the old fallacy of forcing discrete categories on continuums. Just because all numbers are negative doesn’t mean that all are equally negative. Negative one million is less than negative one thousand, and to acknowledge such is not to question the concept of zero and the existence of positive numbers.

There are acts so cruel or disgusting that there’s probably no restorative hope anyone should be called to rationally rely upon for the person involved to reform themselves successfully, with or without religion. The psychological literature tells us that sociopathy is more or less a hopeless cause.

Once a spouse in a marriage, particularly a parent, proves themselves to be abusive and crazy and gives cause for divorce, divorce ought not to be seen as a last resort but simply as a neutral, free choice, subject to considerations of wisdom. But what all too often typically happens is pietistic guilt trips to forego this legitimate option even when it might be the best course of action. In Gothard’s cult, this extended to superstitious fears of divine or demonic retribution if a family exited their abusive “umbrella of protection.”

Most churches today, it must be admitted, are too eager to endorse divorce in many situations. The specific critique here is of the relatively small fundamentalist sects of which the Duggars were the most prominent members. While I can critique aspects of fundamentalism generally, many of the Duggars’ problems were their own particular choices.

The Duggars

In the documentary, Jim Bob’s friend, Jim Holt, reveals that Jim Bob was aware of sexual behavior problems with his minor son before the reality show ever started. So having this problem in his household, he proceeded to do the show anyway, even as Holt warned him that Josh’s problems would inevitably come out and ruin their family’s public reputation, and subject his victims to one hundred times the pain than if they had remained private citizens instead of public figures. Holt was particularly offended that Jim Bob encouraged a courtship between Josh and Holt’s daughter, without disclosing Josh’s behavior towards his sisters.

Jim Bob strikes me as an incredibly gullible person who is energetic but not smart enough to handle complexity. His religion, like Gothard’s cult, is formulaic. So instead of seeing his son as someone who needed to be separated from the family and subject to years of intense intervention, and perhaps that having more children (when he already had 14+) was unwise because he was already inadequately supervising his son, he simply assumed that simple evangelical methods of prayer, apparent repentance², and marriage would be sufficient to solve his son’s problem.

Likewise, Jim Bob saw the TV show as a “ministry opportunity,” not a huge outlier risk in exposing his children to fame and invasion of privacy when they were too young to meaningfully consent. His lack of sophistication was also apparent from his business sense. The Duggars were TLC’s #1 show, and eventually the #1 reality show nationwide, yet his contract at one point paid the entire family a mere $800,000 a season, well below the compensation of other reality TV stars of equivalent fame. The Kardashians, for example, had lower ratings and the top two stars were earning over $4 million per season, each. The Duggars made obscene profits for TLC, building the base of a cash horde where Discovery, Inc. would go from being a minor cable player to merging with Warner Brothers.

TLC effectively negotiated him down by agreeing to his demands that they not censor his faith expression in the show. Jim Bob was too naive to see that TLC needed him more than he needed TLC. When someone’s that bad with money, allowing his Arkansas lawyer buddy to negotiate instead of hiring a real talent agent who knows entertainment industry comparables, it’s easier to understand how he might get caught up in a legalistic cult and think having camera crews invade every aspect of their minor children’s life was no big deal. Jim Bob’s “can do” enthusiasm and lack of reflective thinking would make him a great general manager for a Ford dealership in rural Arkansas, but became tragic when dealing with big money and big problems.

Burdens Grievous to Be Borne

A key question raised by the Duggar saga is whether there are ideas or practices particular to fundamentalism, or evangelicalism more broadly, that make their cultures sexually dysfunctional. I believe that’s possible because of an elevation of unfalsifiable Scripture interpretation over the Book of Nature, entailing a willful naivety about how sexuality works.

I want to be careful in the arguments I make below, for two reasons. First, I want to be careful about proving too much, and second, I don’t think the Duggar family’s religious practices are the efficient cause of their eldest son’s problems. Out of 19 kids, there’s bound to be one bad seed or two. Their response to the situation was deficient, but I don’t think it’s fair to blame them, at least beyond some degree of negligence, for the initial acts.

All that said, I think there are aspects of fundamentalist doctrines on sexuality that cause more issues than they solve. A bad theology of sex can lead to all kinds of unexpected problems.

A big reason I’ve never considered Catholicism seriously is because of the Church’s stance on unmarried, celibate clergy — one way I like to make decisions is to focus on a particular absurdity to save myself the time of doing a full analysis. Insisting on unmarried clergy — and look, I don’t care if it’s official dogma or a practice, it’s been going on for over 1,000 years now — is asking for the church to be run by a majority of sexual hypocrites, and entirely by people who have no experience of family life. This is because the spiritual gift of true celibacy is so rare, and the number of quality, conservative men who could bare-knuckle a life of it is so few, that there are not a sufficient number of good men to staff the church. It is such a dumb policy that I cannot possibly believe a church that holds to it to be infallible, hence I can’t be Catholic.

A smaller absurdity exists in evangelical sexual theology, likely going back to the earliest church fathers. My thesis is that European cultural practices of monogamy, all good things, are over-spiritualized to the point that normal sexuality is declared, in its essence, fundamentally sinful.

Much of the problem, in my view, rests on a misinterpretation of a portion of the Sermon on the Mount, where Christ declares, that lustful desire is adultery of the heart³. This is of course absolutely true, but in practice taken way more literally than other parts of this same passage. We don’t see Christian teachers recommending people gouge out eyes or cut off hands, and no one seriously equates, in practice, name-calling to murder. The point of the SOTM is to combat self-righteousness. It does not mean that calling someone a fool is the same as murder, nor that lust is the same as adultery.

J.D. Vance, in Hillbilly Elegy, talks about the good work many fundamentalist churches do in the areas of drug recovery and addictions. When a church serves populations with low baseline levels of self-control, an absolute prohibition on substance use, say alcohol, can be highly functional. A person with a predilection for alcoholism, if they never touch alcohol, can be completely free, as alcohol is not necessary to human life. The problem is when this approach is applied to natural, necessary desires that must be moderated, such as food⁴ and sex.

The Duggars tried their hardest to apply the teetotaling mindset to sexuality. The fundamentalist template for sex seems to see humans as small-brained, monogamous birds who imprint on a mate for life and never have eyes for anyone else. They seem to believe that if someone ever feels, or causes someone else to feel, an involuntary attraction to anyone else other than their future spouse, they’re committing a grievous, almost unforgivable sin.

The girls had “codes” to alert the boys when a woman on TV might be inappropriately modest⁵ in their view. Elaborate purity standards equating kissing to sex and skirts too short to prostitution sent a message to the young teenagers: to be accepted, you have to pretend and be a hypocrite. You have to pretend that you’re never going to be attracted to a person other than your eventual spouse and that you’ve never had an inappropriate thought.

For teenage boys in particular, this is almost if not impossible. Human development is so designed that puberty starts before the mind is completely mature in its adult capacities for self-control, and hormones undermine rather than enhance the accumulated self-control of late childhood. In educational contexts, I will often show this chart of objectively measured impulse control by age:

Teenagers lose impulse control due to sex hormones and do not fully recover their ten-year-old levels of self-control until 18-19 years old. If your mental model of teenager development is linear, you are going to be sorely disappointed by reality.

Now, boys absolutely need to be socialized to not be pigs, but if the focus is on there’s something wrong with you rather than you need to express this appropriately — a question of manners, not morality, like how other involuntary body functions are treated — it can lead to a “what the hell” effect. The honest, strong men will leave or rebel against such an environment as too restrictive, and the dishonest, sneaky males will just hide it.

Of course, now 90s and 00s purity culture looks quite quaint. Fundamentalists were worried teenagers might get together in real life and make a baby when 30-year-olds are struggling with that today! If a teenager doesn’t have a porn problem but is a little too distracted by a real-life girl in tight pants, that’s a big win in the current environment. If he’ll go chat her up on top of that, it’s a Gen Z trifecta: like girls in general, be attracted to a girl in real life, go talk to the girl.

We Need Better Legalists

It’s tempting to think that if people took Gothard’s crazy schtick seriously, perhaps what we need is a better kind of legalist. I could imagine giving people reasonable rules more aligned with reality, but then I consider all of the exceptions and caveats necessary to make any set of rules work. There are always exceptions and specific circumstances that make good advice-giving a dialogue not appropriately scalable to a one-to-many media company like Gothard’s.

One of the appeals of Gothard’s cult is he gave specific advice. This is pretty common in fundamentalist churches too, where the pastors often speak extemporaneously about what people should specifically do. It’s less common in more theologically robust churches because pastors restrict themselves to Scripture. That’s generally a good thing, but it can leave things too vague for people looking for specific answers. But often it is those most cautious from wisdom about giving advice who most need to give it.

This is a hard riddle to solve. Charlatans like Gothard will always be better marketers because of their certainty and formulaic approach. If it was easy to find and obvious, it wouldn’t be wisdom.

Duggar Outcomes

It’s easy to criticize people like the Duggars from an upper-middle-class perspective, but I’m reminded of the old saying to critics: “I like the way I’m doing something to your way of not doing something.” I grew up in a largely Christian, working-class milieu in the rural American South. The people I knew were sincere Christian people with conservative values. Today, their extended families are largely wrecked with drug addictions, lazy kids who won’t work, and of course the omnipresent obesity.

While they meant well, they sent their kids to public schools, and they allowed cultural trash into their homes from cable and the Internet. The ones who escaped this were those few working-class people, like the Duggars, who reacted early to the first signs of degeneracy in the post-1960s culture and took up homeschooling, rejected the cultural products of Hollywood, and essentially seceded from the surrounding society⁶.

Their daughter Jinger, who moved in a more Reformed direction, is careful to respect her parents where she can. She has not lost her faith, and no one, so far, is addicted to drugs or refuses to work. The families caught up in the Gothard cult largely didn’t have the money to move to a nice suburb with higher-quality peers, nor did they have the strange upper-class ability to ignore the harmful parts of the culture and moderate bad behavior, at least for a time until woke fundamentalism defeated functional liberal hypocrisy. They are literal-minded, uncomplicated, all-or-nothing people, and Gothard’s seemingly simple answers offered them an off-ramp from the culture in the pre-Internet era when alternative answers were hard to find.

For his part, Gothard continues to deny all responsibility, and in typical fashion, uses claimed private revelation to attack his critics, including the comfort Jinger Duggar found in Calvinism.

Things are better than they used to be. In the era when Gothard emerged, the largest Protestant body, the Southern Baptist Convention, had yet to consolidate the late 70s, early 80s victory of conservatives in the denomination. The tireless work of Al Mohler in purging liberals from its flagship seminary had barely begun, and today instinctually conservative evangelicals are much more solidly theologically grounded than in the mid-80s.

For those hurt by Gothard, or fundamentalism more generally, and concerned about the harms of “unaccountable men” leading cults of personality, I would suggest that this is a strength of the conservative Presbyterian churches, like the PCA. Congregational government is often a dictatorship in practice and Gothard types who hear voices and claim God told them something get shut down quickly by grumpy, pipe-smoking Reformed elders, and if they don’t, the broader, regional body of governing elders will. What’s lost in charisma among the “frozen chosen” is offset by an almost complete absence of crazy. In an imperfect world, one must pick one’s poison.

1. This of course doesn’t relieve individual churches or ministries of the responsibility to act when abuse happens.

2. I’m in murky theological waters here, so I’ll better clarify my position. I think in situations like sexual abuse, there is of course a possibility of true repentance for the perpetrator. However, the incentive structures for fake repentance are so high, and our ability to detect true repentance so poor, that no one should be called to accept their repentance by trusting such a person ever again, and the people advising them, particularly religious authorities, are in my opinion accessories to any future acts if they pressure the people involved to accept the person’s repentance at face value. Some acts should have lifelong consequences that never expire, hence “damaged goods.” This is especially true for acts that, in a more just society, would be capital crimes.

3. I’m not sure moderns can properly imagine this passage, given the evangelical propensity to read the Bible as a horoscope instead of in context. Christ probably wasn’t referring to physical lust here, as there wasn’t anything to see, which is why I tend to interpret the Greek as coveting another man’s wife, as both the Greek “lust” and “woman” are in other places interpreted as “covet” and “wife,” respectively, and the reference to adultery only makes sense universally if it referred to a married woman. There weren’t women in ancient Judea walking around in yoga tights or low-cut tops, and Peter wasn’t having to avert his eyes from women in swimsuits laying out at the beaches of the Sea of Galilee when coming in from a fishing expedition. Those paintings of Mary dressed like a nun with just her face showing — that’s how all respectable women dressed in public through the medieval era. The world was dangerous, people were poor, and the state couldn’t afford to have police to keep the peace (the first police forces were formed in 19th-century London). We see in the Parable of the Good Samaritan how dangerous life was for traveling men and of course, the risks to women would have been greater. When out in public, you did your best to avoid any unwanted attention. I’m not advocating a return to this modesty standard, as Europe was able to create, through its process of self-domestication, a society with enough male self-control, and rich enough to police, kill, or imprison the males who didn’t, that women didn’t have to dress like nuns. It’s a fragile state of affairs, though, as we import populations with lower levels of male self-control.

4. In the case of food abuse, most fundamentalist churches are completely silent and in denying themselves a portfolio of moderate pleasures, like alcohol, end up with massive levels of obesity as people use food as a drug of abuse. Their reliance on Biblical literalism makes this difficult when the Bible is largely silent on overeating since fat people didn’t exist in ancient times except among the very wealthy. Plus preaching on obesity is extremely awkward and dangerous. Preaching on lust is less so since it’s not obvious who has a problem. I think the two problems may be weakly related. As extreme obesity makes people less attractive to each other on average, the substitute good of fantasy becomes relatively more appealing.

5. I don’t get very worked up about the modesty debates. Unless one seriously advocates for a return to nun-like modesty (see footnote #2), everyone’s position is essentially culturally relative. And I think temptation functions somewhat like a massive parallel electrical circuit. As long as someone dresses somewhat more modestly than average, whatever that happens to be, they are not significantly contributing to the overall level of temptation. Plus, it’s not realistic to expect people to dress like Jane Austen characters in less temperate climates.

6. The 1980s Moral Majority was right about almost everything, even if they were dismissed because of their Southern accents and backwoods manner. Whether Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Sr., or Bill Gothard, it’s clear that everything they diagnosed about the slippery slope of the culture came true, even if, particularly in Gothard’s case, the prescriptions were harmful.