Even if you don’t closely follow the religious right, you probably know who the Duggars are. They presented themselves to the world as a wholesome, devout family that also happened to have a huge number of kids. They starred in their own reality show, which was a hit. It made Christian patriarchy seem normal, relatable, even aspirational.
But beneath the surface, the Duggars were covering up an ocean of secrets and lies. Their exposure, and their downfall, is the subject of “Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets“, a four-part documentary on Amazon Prime. It blows apart the Potemkin-village façade that the Duggars presented to the world and reveals what was going on when the cameras were off.
I’ll be doing an episode-by-episode review of the series. This column will cover the first episode.
The rise and fall of the Duggars
Jim Bob Duggar grew up Baptist, but his childhood religion wasn’t as extreme as he later became. In fact, according to the documentary, both his parents and his wife Michelle’s parents disapproved of the course they took.
He married young (he was 19, Michelle was 17). After they had their first child, he had a religious awakening (about which more later) which convinced him that it was God’s will to stop using birth control and to have as many kids as possible.
He got involved in conservative politics and served as an Arkansas state legislator. In 2002, he ran for U.S. Senate. He lost the primary, but caught the eye of the Discovery Channel. Discovery produced a documentary about the Duggars, who at the time had 14 children. It did so well that they made several sequels, then a full series: 19 Kids and Counting, which began airing on TLC in 2008.
The Duggars’ show was a huge hit. Christian televangelists had their own networks, but they were siloed, mostly speaking to other Christians. The Duggars were the rare case of a conservative Christian perspective breaking out into mainstream stardom. Their cousin Amy King asked them why they were willing to be on TV when they didn’t even have a TV in their own house. Jim Bob answered, “This is a ministry.”
Besides evangelizing for their perspective, the Duggars benefited more directly. The show paid several hundred thousand dollars for them to move to a bigger house and remodel it. Josh Duggar, the oldest child and Jim Bob’s heir-apparent, was poised for fame in his own right and a profitable career in conservative politics.
But the facade came crashing down in 2015. That year, a celebrity magazine discovered that Josh had molested his own sisters as a teenager. Jim Bob and Michelle had known for years, but had covered it up to protect the family brand. Later that year, it also came out that Josh, who was married, had an account on Ashley Madison, a dating site for people seeking to cheat on their spouses.
When Josh’s misdeeds became public, the Duggars’ show was canceled. By this time, the statute of limitations had lapsed, so he couldn’t be charged. However, justice caught up with him a few years later when he was convicted for possession of child pornography. In 2022, he was sentenced to twelve years in prison.
What the Duggars knew and when they knew it
Just as with every corrupt Catholic bishop, the coverup multiplies the original crime. Episode 1 of the documentary features an incredibly damning interview with Jim and Bobye Holt, who were among the Duggars’ closest friends. Josh was their first daughter’s boyfriend. The Holts gave permission for him to “court” her, in line with both families’ Christian fundamentalist beliefs.
The Holts found out in 2003 that Josh had molested his sisters. When they confronted Jim Bob, he admitted that his original plan had been for Josh to confess only after he’d married their daughter! (Left unstated, but heavily implied, is that this was the Duggars’ way of getting their predator son out from under their roof and making him somebody else’s problem—just like the bishops who shuffled pedophile priests to out-of-the-way churches.)
Jim Holt pointed out the crushing hypocrisy of this. In the Arkansas legislature, Jim Bob had sponsored a bill to create the Arkansas state sex offender registry! His son should have been on that registry under the law he passed.
He urged them to turn Josh in, and they did. They took him to the police, where an officer—who was also a family friend—heard Josh’s confession, told him not to do it again, and sent him home without charges. It’s never fully clear if this was a fortunate coincidence for Josh or if the Duggars had a hand in orchestrating this. That officer, Joseph Hutchens, was later convicted of child porn offenses himself.
Sidenote: Although the documentary makes Jim Holt seem like the voice of reason, he’s not. His beliefs, in all important respects, are the same as the Duggars. He served as an Arkansas state legislator alongside Jim Bob, where he was best known for a failed bill that would have prohibited public schools from teaching evolution as fact. He’s also anti-choice, anti-Obamacare, and anti-immigrant.
Also, more recently, his wife Bobye and their son Samuel both filed restraining orders against him arising from some unknown family dispute.
Why people watched the Duggars
Sociologist Danielle Lindemann says that reality TV is a fundamentally conservative medium. It’s a fishbowl world where viewers always know what to expect and their assumptions are never challenged. Even shows that focus on sleaze and scandal show people performing their gender roles in familiar, accustomed ways. In that sense, it’s comfort food.
The Duggars were a case in point. Some viewers tuned in out of morbid curiosity, to see how they handled basic logistics with such a large family. (The unsurprising answer is sexism and parentification. The older Duggar girls were treated as combination nannies and maids. They were expected to do the household chores like cooking, cleaning and laundry, as well as bathing and dressing their younger siblings.)
However, what gave the show a more enduring appeal is the squeaky-clean, throwback image it presented. On camera, no one fought, no one acted out and no one rebelled. The family was loving and tight-knit, the parents were gentle but authoritative, and the children were well-behaved and eager to please.
Sexism aside, we shouldn’t underestimate the drawing power of this idea. It hearkens back to a semi-mythical, 1950s-sitcom era when life was simple and harmonious and everyone’s role was well-defined. Millions of people feel nostalgia for this time, even though the reality was never as idyllic as the sitcoms.
The man behind the throne
The éminence grise of the Duggars’ fame is a Christian preacher named Bill Gothard. Gothard is the scion of an evangelical dynasty (his father ran the Gideons Association) and founder of a group called the Institute in Basic Life Principles, or IBLP.
IBLP presents itself as a source of friendly guidance on marriage, family and finding purpose. In reality, it’s an ultraconservative fundamentalist group. It preaches a patriarchal worldview where women must submit to male authority. Most of all, it teaches Quiverfull theology: that Christians should have as many children as they possibly can.
Homeschooling is the crux of this project. Christians are supposed to raise their children in a bubble of indoctrination, isolated from secular friends or any outside sources of information, so they’ll grow up to be ideological clones of their parents. Their goal is to outbreed everyone else, to conquer democracy through sheer numbers and make their beliefs the law of the land.
Jim Bob Duggar attended IBLP seminars and became an enthusiastic convert to Gothard’s theology (the religious awakening I mentioned earlier). In return, the Duggar family were ambassadors for Gothard’s teachings. That’s the worst of the harm they inflicted, because Gothard’s teachings are a cancerous brew of coercion and violence. As one interviewee says, it’s a “pandemic of abuse that is happening everywhere this culture touches.”