Opinion Columnist
New York Times
June 13, 2023
In the summer of 1993, I almost joined a cult. For love.
It was the same cult featured in the current most-watched show on Amazon Prime, a documentary series called “Shiny Happy People.” It’s centered on the Duggar family and the teachings of a man named Bill Gothard. The Duggars, as many readers know, were the focus of a popular 2008 reality television show called “19 Kids and Counting” and its 2015 spinoff, “Counting On.” Gothard — the Duggars’ spiritual mentor — is less famous in secular America but far more consequential across evangelical America, where the influence of his movement continues today.
Most of the attention paid to “Shiny Happy People” will focus on the accusations of sexual abuse — some of them proven in court — surrounding the Duggars and Gothard. (The Institute in Basic Life Principles, which Gothard founded, has issued a statement in response to the documentary, calling it “misleading and untruthful” and claiming that it “mocks that which is good and moral in the most sensationalized way possible.”)
I’m going to address the issue of abuse below, but I also want to focus on a different question: Why are otherwise good, solid people attracted to movements like Gothard’s? How can they not see its controlling darkness?
My own story isn’t uncommon. If you lived in evangelical America in the 1980s and 1990s, you’d often encounter men and women who were deeply influenced by Gothard. When I was 24 years old, I was engaged to a woman I’d been dating for two years. She and her family followed Gothard’s teachings and attended events sponsored by the Institute in Basic Life Principles. She told me that she couldn’t marry a man who hadn’t attended its introductory course, the Basic Seminar. Just as important, as it happened, her father said he would not allow his daughter to marry anyone who refused to attend the seminar.
So I said yes. I’d give the seminar a try. For a week, I got up early and drove an hour from my small hometown to a packed megachurch in Louisville, Ky. It turned into one of the most important weeks of my life.
I grew up in a quite conservative church (as one friend joked, we definitely did not put the “fun” in “fundamentalist”), and I was accustomed to encountering strict families and strict teachings. But the teachings at the seminar were unlike anything I’d ever heard. In my church, we had learned to value modesty in attire. My Christian college, for example, regulated the length of skirts and didn’t permit any shorts on campus until my senior year.
The Gothard movement, by contrast, went so far as to teach that even otherwise modest outfits could contain “eye traps” for men that rendered the clothing morally insidious. This teaching placed an enormous burden on women to maintain the purity of men and created an environment where women would often blame themselves in the face of male predation. The actual material has to be seen to be believed.
My church taught that men and women should not have sex before marriage. The Gothard movement placed such a premium on virginity that his followers viewed any sexual activity before marriage — sometimes including even kissing — as a form of defilement, a permanent stain on your life.
Life was strictly regulated. All music with a rock beat, including Christian rock, was deemed spiritually dangerous. Men and women should not date, or at least not in the way most Americans do. Instead, young people could only “court,” which was a father-directed, father-supervised process that could be strikingly similar to arranged marriage, especially if both families followed Gothard’s teachings.
The beating heart of Gothardism was a combination of authority and superstition. One of Gothard’s keys to Christian life was something called the “umbrella of protection.” So long as the wife placed herself under the husband’s authority and the husband placed himself under Christ’s authority, then the family would flourish. Defying Gothard’s teachings, by contrast, placed you outside of this zone of God’s protection and rendered you (and your family) vulnerable to disaster, destruction and even death.
I sat through each session. I tried to be open, but I just couldn’t agree. The ideas in the books didn’t match what I read in Scripture. My parents taught me to value mercy and grace, and I couldn’t see mercy here, just power and control. I couldn’t join Gothard, and that ultimately meant I couldn’t continue my engagement. The entire trajectory of my life changed.
Even as I share this story, however, I’m uncomfortable. The details of Gothard’s teachings are so strange to so many people — especially to those who grew up outside of the evangelical church — that it’s easy to distance oneself, to watch with a sense of morbid curiosity about “those people,” those crazy folks who live lives we can’t understand.
When I went to the Gothard seminar, I didn’t see strange people. I saw people seeking community and certainty in the most important relationships of their lives. In fact, the families at the seminar were so mainstream and so numerous that I worry that the word “cult” communicates something more fringe than it truly was.
They loved God, and they wanted to learn how to serve him better. They loved their spouses and children and wanted to make sure that their marriages were healthy and their children thrived. Many of them came to the seminar facing serious challenges. Their marriages were in trouble, or there was conflict with their kids.
They found community in the people who flocked to the churches like the one I visited in Louisville. Certainty, however, was elusive. The formulas they received from Gothard seemed to work for some, didn’t work for others, and deeply damaged many, many people — especially women and children. The Duggars are a prime example. As the Amazon series recounts, even as the Duggar parents, Jim Bob and Michelle, were enormous celebrities in Gothard-world, extolling the virtues of his vision, they were concealing terrible secrets about their family.
Their oldest son, Josh, had molested four of his sisters. Later, he admitted to cheating on his wife. And now he’s in prison for possessing child pornography. The Duggars weren’t the model family they were presented as. They were in crisis. The Duggars’ guru, Gothard, was also disgraced. He has faced dozens of accusations of sexual misconduct — he denies them — and in 2014 he resigned from the presidency of his ministry.
But that’s not the extent of the darkness. Gothard’s teaching didn’t reach just the millions of Christians he claims have attended his seminars. Because he spoke to the most motivated and dedicated cohort of evangelicals in America, his teachings spread deep into American churches. Gothard’s concepts became part of the fabric of evangelical life even for people who’d never heard of the Basic Seminar.
In 2021, my wife, Nancy, and I published a report detailing years of horrific sexual abuse at one of the largest Christian camps in America, Kanakuk Kamps. The camp’s chief executive, Joe White, wrote that the “greatest journey of my life” began at a Bill Gothard conference in 1974, and many of the teachings at the camp mirrored the marriage and purity teachings in the Gothard seminars. A predator named Pete Newman exploited such teachings to gain access to countless young boys. White supported and promoted him even after receiving repeated reports of Newman playing games in the nude with kids.
With authority so central to Gothardism (and so many other fundamentalist movements), the quest for certainty turned into a quest for control. The explicitly patriarchal structure fed the will to power in troubled men. Failures in the family would lead to tighter controls, more rules, and an enormous amount of guilt and shame. After all, the principles Gothard taught were supposed to work. At the seminar I attended Gothard even taught that following his principles would make a young woman more beautiful. Obedience would improve her “countenance.” If a family struggled, the principles weren’t wrong — they were.
A healthy church can provide community. But it must also teach its members that certainty is elusive, humility is essential to the Christian faith and the will to power is antithetical to the example of Jesus. Otherwise, America’s conservative Christian communities will continue to face different versions of the same rigid fundamentalism. They’ll be tempted to follow more gurus like Bill Gothard.
The quest for certainty and control can tempt people of every faith and no faith. In religious circles it can manifest itself in ways that look strange to secular eyes, but I’ve seen people from all walks of American life and all ideological perspectives fall for gurus and fads. Life is hard, and we want answers — even, perhaps especially, where answers are impossible to find. We crave control, even when attempts to establish control sow destruction in our loved ones’ lives.
The Apostle Paul stated a universal human truth when he declared that “we see through a glass, darkly.” We can know things only “in part.” The Gothard movement and movements like it reject that sense of doubt. They purport to reveal all the deepest truths and answer all our most difficult questions. Yet no person possesses such wisdom. And if there is one lesson we should take from “Shiny Happy People,” it’s this: When people claim to personally light the path and clear away the darkness, you know they are leading you astray.
David French is a New York Times Opinion columnist. He is a lawyer, writer and veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He is a former constitutional litigator, and his most recent book is “Divided We Fall: America’s Secession Threat and How to Restore Our Nation.” @DavidAFrench
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/13/opinion/shiny-happy-people.html
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