Shiny Happy People

My father reached for my mother’s hand in the War Memorial arena in Rochester, N.Y. The year was 1982. Onstage, morality and faith guru Bill Gothard gave them rules for protecting their sexual purity. Their fingers locked just before intermission. After the break, my mother had gotten up and moved to the other side of the stadium. What is it? my dad wondered. My breath?

It wasn’t. Bill Gothard preached the “six-inch rule” between unmarried people, warning women in the room not to “defraud” men by leading them on. My mother, a punctilious Baptist girl, heeded his words.

“Well—what happened after that?” I asked my dad on the phone after finishing the four-part docuseries Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets, on Prime Video, which follows the Arkansas family who starred in 19 Kids and Counting and exposes their connection to Gothard. The series indicts Gothard not just with legalism but with narcissism, cultism, and serial predation. I had heard my parents joke about that day in Rochester with Gothard, but I hadn’t thought he was that bad.

“We burned his books,” my dad said on the phone, a tidbit I’d never heard before. “They felt like the Mormonism I grew up with. All, what can I do to get to God? No grace.” My dad became a Christian in juvenile detention a few years before the Gothard conference. Jesus offered a solution to his lifelong inability to “be good.”

Shiny Happy People shows that many parents tragically did not make the same choice mine did. Gothard’s Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP) started during the cultural upheaval of the 1960s when panicked disciples wondered whether it was Christian to have long hair, wear jeans, and much more. Shiny Happy People includes interviews with Duggar family members and ex-members of the Gothard movement.

These people exhibit deep wounds from the stringent and punitive rules set out in Gothard’s academies, conferences, and “Wisdom Booklets.” 19 Kids and Counting, the TLC show that followed the Duggar family from 2008 to 2015, seemed warm-hearted and comforting: Watch a gigantic evangelical family make casseroles, find love the godly way, and have babies. But this docuseries argues it really just exploited 19 beautiful faces to promote Gothard’s insidious, abuse-laden movement. And those faces, apparently, were neither paid for their labor by their parents nor given a choice in their involvement, even as adults.

The docuseries is a three-hour commitment, and not an easy one. It hurts to watch. But shouldn’t it?

By necessity, the docuseries includes discussions of childhood sexual abuse and, by choice, includes expletives. It forces viewers to see the pain that has caused some abused people to abandon the faith, but the series never claims that apostasy is the correct path.

Shiny Happy People shows us a movement built on an “umbrella” authority structure, where the husband rests under the authority of Christ, the wife under the authority of her husband, and the children strictly under the authority of their parents. To many Christians, this sounds reasonable, until abuse begins and children and wives—systematically trained by IBLP to obey without questioning—find themselves without resources to report their own mistreatment.

Some aspects of the docuseries feel sensationalized, and it paints the homeschool community with broad brush strokes. Viewers with no homeschooled acquaintances might be tempted to assume all homeschoolers are funneled into extremist philosophies and subpar education, but by and large the Christian homeschooling community is healthy, loving, hospitable, and open.

Gothard and the Duggar lifestyle attracted people with old-as-sin promises: If you follow all my rules, nothing bad will happen to you. It lived in a world with a book of Proverbs but without a book of Job. It lived in a world where every Christian family could and should follow precisely the same lifestyle. But that’s not God’s world. God’s world contains a providence kinder and better than the systems we build to outrun our own vulnerability.