True Crime Tuesdays: Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets
Review Overview
Cult methodology
9Authoritarian patriarchy
9Survivors’ testimony
10Helen Archer | On 11, Jul 2023
When 17 Kids and Counting premiered on TLC in 2008, it was an instant hit. It followed the Arkansas-based, Independent Baptist Duggar family – father Jim Bob, mother Michelle, and their then-17 children (the programme would be renamed 18, then 19 Kids and Counting as Michelle gave birth to more children). It was sold as escapist, soothing television – a seemingly perfect family, run with a soft-spoken, apparently good-natured precision by parents whose organisational skills were seen as an inspiration. From the problems of cooking dinner for 20-plus people day after day to the full-time job of laundering so many clothes, middle American viewers seemed lulled into a slack-jawed stupor.
The programme became the Discovery Channel’s biggest – and most lucrative – hit, with several spin-off series, charting the weddings and births of some of its older offspring. But the show itself was cancelled in 2015, just one month after historic sexual abuse allegations against the eldest son, Josh, were made public. He was accused of sexually abusing five girls, including four of his sisters. These allegations had been circulating privately since 2003, and, according to this documentary, TLC and its parent company were well aware. All was covered up, not only by the family, but apparently by Discovery, who had knowledge of it even as they filmed his courtship of and marriage to Anna Keller in 2008 – A Very Duggar Wedding was screened in 2009, to a series-record audience of over 4 million.
It was always an alarmingly regressive show, even before the revelations of the sexual abuse and the involvement of the cult-like Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP), led by Bill Gothard. In this four-part series, directed by Olivia Crist and Julia Willoughby Nason, key members of the Duggar family and former friends share their stories, but so, too, do a number of survivors of IBLP. They describe the way in which, as one contributor says “everything about it sets you up to be the perfect victim”, starting more or less from birth. In this rigidly patriarchal system, ‘blanket training’ – in which you set a baby on a blanket with desirable items placed to the side, and hit the baby’s hands each time they reach for them – is the norm, in order to break any ‘rebellious spirit’; corporal punishment abounds – included is a deeply creepy clip of Gothard demonstrating how to spank a young boy ‘lovingly’, to an enthralled audience; and ‘buddy systems’ are put in place, whereby young girls have to parent their younger siblings.
But perhaps the most effective method of isolating and indoctrinating children is the hugely profitable ‘home schooling’ which was sold, multi-level-marketing-style, to parents. It denied children a proper education, all the better to immediately start working at one of IBLM’s many ‘programmes’, most of which seem to take the form of enforced labour, but some of which was their own form of military training. Their labour was unpaid – and so, too, were the Duggar girls who became adults while fronting their own reality shows. The money they earned was paid by TLC directly to their father, who continued to sign contracts for them far beyond their coming of age, thanks to the IBLP-dictated ‘system’, which made the father – or the oldest male present – the penultimate authority, just before God himself.
This is a culture whereby abuse flourishes, and so it did, all the while being touted as an ideal family set-up by TLC and the Discovery Channel, to an audience of millions. Jim Bob Duggar used national goodwill in order to advance his political ambitions; Gothard, meanwhile, sent young disciples to intern at the White House to lobby and spread the IBLP’s message of authoritarian patriarchy and control, under the guise of religion. By the fourth episode, the reality show which started in Arkansas soon has its tendrils in the American Senate, the Trump election, and the overturning of Roe v Wade – and IBLP’s decades-long mission to assume positions of power and influence in politics and the law in order to bring America back to a “truly Christian nation” seems scarily within their grasp. Although this must-watch documentary is, on the surface, about ‘disgraced’ reality stars, what it ultimately uncovers is even more alarming.