Jinger, Jill, and Jesus
What if the problems aren’t only on TLC? What if they’re right here, in our churches and homes? What if a lot of us need less purity and more gospel?
Gentle reader,
I can’t look away from the Duggars.
Part of it is just me rubbernecking, reality television the semi-sanctioned freak show of our time, but part of it is a professional interest in the thing: the way the family succeeded in portraying themselves as purveyors of Christian values, the reactions when the whole thing fell apart.
And part of it is that I’m a mama, and when my oldest child was younger, we’d sometimes watch episodes of whatever Duggar show was airing. My girl found them fascinating—like life in some never-ending church camp—and I felt tender towards those kids on the television set.
I still do.
Today’s post is about Jinger’s and Jill’s stories, which the two women have recently released as books. Jinger’s is Becoming Free Indeed: My Story of Disentangling Faith from Fear (Thomas Nelson, 2023, 238 pages) and Jill’s, Counting the Cost: A Memoir (Gallery Books 2023, 287 pages). Below, I’ll abbreviate the book titles as BFI and CTC to identify quotations.
Jinger’s book is theological, outlining differences between the good gospel of grace and what she learned as a child from Bill Gothard and the IBLP (Institute in Basic Life Principles) and her parents. Jill’s book is a coming-of-age story, a spiritual journey in which she tells of the painful process of learning that she could disagree with her parents. Both women remain conservative Christians, but both also now see the way they were raised as a harmful distortion of Christian faith.
Covers for Counting the Cost and Becoming Free Indeed
I want to treat their stories with respect, as delicate things, honoring Jill’s and Jinger’s courage in speaking publicly against authoritarian parents. So, I won’t be offering any critiques of their books. Instead, I want to think about both as stories which try to tell the truth about something that, sadly, is not so fringe, not a freak show, but all too typical of distortions in American Christianity.
I’ll group these distortions under two big headings: gnosticism and legalism.
Christianity distorted by a gnostic view of the world and of bodies
I’ve written, here, about gnosticism in the complementarian teaching of John Piper. We see something similar in Duggar Christianity, also an authoritarian patriarchal system. I’m using the word “gnostic” to describe a tendency to think about the world and materiality as evil, sinful, and problematic, which tendency should be countered by the Christian teaching that God made all that is, including the world and our bodies and called it good. More, Jesus made the human body his own when he came into this world God loves, and this world and our bodies will finally be redeemed.
We see a gnostic assessment of bodies in Duggar Christianity. Jill remembers her mother putting on music, and she tells us how she felt the danger that any movement resembling dancing would cut the music off. Jill remembers Michelle’s repeated warning. “‘We need to be very, very careful about the way that we move our bodies,’ Mom would say” (CTC).
The Duggar kids were taught to yell a code word, “Nike!,” if they saw a woman dressed in a way they deemed immodest. “Whenever it was called out,” says Jill, “everybody immediately looked at their feet. Nobody hesitated. Especially not the boys” (CTC). Bodies, here, seem to be reduced almost entirely to sexuality, which is deemed dangerous. The goal of policing the body’s movement and coverings is to keep sexual feelings at bay, and the Duggars were policed in this way as very young children, when they had no understanding of sexuality.
My heart goes out to Jill when she describes her reaction to the public unveiling of the fact that she was abused by her brother:
“I wanted to go hide under a rock. I had spent my entire life being taught that modesty was so important and that it was my responsibility as a godly woman not to behave or dress in a way that would cause any man to have impure thoughts. And now the whole world was able to read about—and imagine—what happened to me. I felt naked, ashamed, humiliated. I was being paraded through the streets, my sexual abuse being served up as nothing more than entertainment” (CTC).
The policing she’s endured means she can’t process the abuse as sin against her and a violation of her person, beloved of God and good in body and soul. Instead, she experienced the public accounting of the abuse as forced immodesty, drawing attention to her body. I imagine many victims of abuse would feel this way to some extent, but it’s heartbreaking to see how Jill was not allowed to see that abuse, and not the body, is the evil at work here.
In addition to a gnostic view of bodies, Duggar faith also has a gnostic view of the world. Ancient gnosticism had two main features: 1) denigration of the body and 2) an elitist understanding of the gnostic in-group as special and in-the-know, unlike the seedy world at large. Against this second aspect of gnosticism, Christian faith again insists on the goodness of the world as created by God as well as on the public nature of the gospel. Christianity is not for a special in-group; it is for the world, for the nations.
But the Duggar children were taught that the world was other and dangerous, a cesspool they were well rid of in their seclusion. Perhaps this is part of the reason they won’t see evil for what it is, when it arrives in the actions of one of their own. Evil is supposed to be out there, in the world, not in the Duggar home. Jill’s description of her father’s teaching is telling:
“he was able to capture our imaginations by breaking down the challenges ahead of us into simple, binary choices. ‘You’ve got the world over here,’ he would say during Bible time, holding his left arm far away from his body. ‘And then,’ thrusting his right hand far out in the other direction, ‘Christianity is over here. There’s a line between them. Do you want to get as close to that line as you can? Do you want to walk so near to it that you might possibly be pulled into the world? Or do you want to steer as far away from it as you can get?’” (CTC).
Jill describes her feelings as a young adult; “I didn’t have any intention of leaving home or trying to make a life for myself on my own. Why would I? The world was dangerous and full of peril” (CTC). As Jill opened up to the world, she and her husband made a decision which had been presented to her in childhood as the height of foolishness and a sure sign of ungodliness. They sent their kids to public school.
“The more we had talked and prayed…, the clearer the issue became for me: IBLP had put a lot more energy into teaching me to fear the world beyond its doors than it had put into teaching me to trust God and discern for myself how to reach a good and wise decision on any given issue” (CTC).
Learning to see the world without condemnation is a fairly major theme for Jinger too, who narrates her spiritual journey as one away from us vs. them certitude. She says, “I was obsessed with outward performance and judged others who didn’t follow the same rules I did” (BFI). Jinger describes herself as floundering when she first encountered people who didn’t follow her family’s rules but were good people and people of faith. As she opened up to the world, she came to understand her own self-policing as a kind of legalism; “No matter how many restrictions I place on my behavior, my wardrobe, my time, or my appetites, I’ll never get away from my sinful self” (BFI). Her book describes her shift as one from trying to earn favor to learning to trust God’s goodness and grace.
Christianity distorted into a legalistic award system controlled by authoritarian leaders
Jill, too, underwent a transformation in the way she views God, coming to see God in a new way as a loving Father:
“…my thoughts turned to Derick. He wasn’t plagued by guilt or bound by fear. It reminded me of what Jesus said in the Bible about children not being afraid to ask their father for bread. I felt something change inside me” (CTC).
The quote above comes in the middle of a story about Jim Bob Duggar acting against Jill and her husband Derick in incredibly controlling, authoritarian, self-serving ways. I’ll name some of the most egregious of these, because Jim Bob’s actions here are important to understanding the kind of “authority” the Duggar children were taught to submit to.
Jill tells how Jim Bob tried to manipulate her and Derick into putting his show’s “ministry” above a ministry to which they’d made a commitment. Jim Bob maintained authority and control by forbidding any talk of family matters with others and even forbidding talk between the siblings, which he characterized as stirring up “contention among the brethren.”
Jim Bob tricked Jill into signing a multi-year contract for his reality shows and tried to get her to sign NDAs. The IRS contacted her about taxes on income which Jim Bob had reported as paid to her but which she had never received; when Jill asked her father for the money, he sent her an itemized bill for her life, down to per day costs for food.
When Josh’s abuse was made public, Jim Bob’s actions were not first to comfort his daughters or to get them help; instead he went into defensive mode to protect his television shows. In this moment of trauma, the family manipulated Jill into giving an interview to Fox news’s Megyn Kelly, in which Jill assured the public of Jim Bob’s view of the situation, minimizing the abuse and foregrounding “forgiveness.” (She was full on Kendall Roy-ed.)
“I had no boundaries,” writes Jill, “no sense of what I needed to do to protect myself. I was terrified and didn’t want to do the interview at all, but I felt like it was the only way to prove my love and commitment to my parents” (CTC). All of this control and abuse was underwritten by a view of patriarchal authority which allowed no questioning and which understood God as just such a controlling figure. Jill and Jinger aren’t explicit about the gendered aspects of the way they experienced abuse of authority, but that fact does come through in their stories. The whole system was lubricated with fear and threats that failure to submit would result in disaster.
While Jill is too circumspect to make this explicit, the contrast between the Jim Bob revealed in her book and God the Father could not be greater. She meets God as the loving Father revealed by Jesus the Son, who asks, “is there anyone among you who, if your child asked for bread, would give a stone? Or if the child asked for a fish, would give a snake? If you, then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Matthew 7:9-11). We don’t often name this, but the love of God the Father is known in contrast to the fact that there are human fathers who would give a snake, and Jill’s book has shown us one of them.
Both books recount moving from childhoods in which the women felt they must perform to adulthoods in which they discover the love and grace of God. So, says Jill, “I had grown up believing that if I just followed the rules, I would be okay. I guess that belief started to crumble when I learned that Pops had manipulated me into signing the contract. Maybe authority wasn’t always totally trustworthy” (CTC). From Jinger, a “leader without accountability is not a true leader” (BFI).
Jill describes her mom’s constant smile as such a performance: a “smile that’s pure innocence but protects like a shield” (CTC), and when television cameras arrived in the Duggar home, it was not the beginning of the children living under surveillance. The cameras certainly heightened that surveillance and brought, with them, other questions about deception, the commodification of children, privacy and consent, and sacrificing family for money and “ministry.” But the children grew up under policing eyes long before the cameras showed up, and they continue to endure that policing well into adulthood. Jill says, “I would hear anyone talk about how that first decision to bring the TV cameras into our home was a window of opportunity, all I would think about was secrets and lies” (CTC).
Jinger and Jill were taught to fear God as “all-powerful, in control of everything,” but they learn, in Jinger’s words, to know God as “kind, compassionate, and loving” (BFI).
All of our problems
In a post about the theological problems of the Duggars and IBLP, I referenced theologian Emily McGowin, who argues that:
“Rather than offer a radical, countercultural vision for the Christian family, the Quiverfull movement [a Duggar adjacent movement] presents a slightly modified version of something quite commonplace: a privatized, isolated nuclear family struggling (and often failing) to maintain their bonds to the broader community, the church, and other institutions.” — Emily McGowin, Quivering Families: The Quiverfull Movement and Evangelical Theology of the Family
That is, the problems in a world like that of the Duggars aren’t as comfortably other as many of us would like to believe. Those problems may be exaggerated, but they’re also all too common in North American Christianity more broadly.
I suspect that the gnosticism and legalism that Jill and Jinger are trying to leave behind infects many of our churches. If it didn’t, how could so many Christians have watched the Duggars and seen, in them, an example of Christian values?
And yet, the church can also be there as a witness to truth. It can come in from the outside of a separatist system like that of the Duggar household and bring good questions with it (Jim Bob knows this, of course, and so he chooses home church). Both Jinger and Jill were able to begin to ask questions because of relationships with faithful Christians who were outside the Duggar system. Both women have rejected legalism in favor of a gospel of grace. That’s the church being the church. That’s the church working.
While their husbands were vetted by Jim Bob, both men encouraged their wives to ask questions about Jim Bob’s authority, Gothard’s account of the faith, and the deeply ground in assumption that the way they had been raised was the right way. I don’t see any Duggar brothers going down this path. Could it be because, even if they were to marry outside of Gothard’s system, they’ve been trained to assume their own rightness as men? Could that make it all the harder to hear a challenging word from another? From an in-law? From a spouse?
What makes each of us immune to hearing from another? What makes us blind to the aberrations of our own little worlds?
In Flannery O’Connor’s story, “The Temple of the Holy Ghost,” a girl sneaks into a freak show, from which she’s been forbidden. As she stares at one of the humans on display, the “freak” says, “I’m going to show you this and if you laugh God may strike you the same way.” The girl comes to see the “freak” as, like all people, “a temple of the Holy Ghost.”
There’s no “them” over there, on TV or in a tent (whether circus or revival), from whom we are detached and separate. If we think we can look at “them” from the outside, we’re making the Duggars’s gnostic mistake, imagining our own purity, as though we could be separate from this sinful world. We all need the bigger church and the love of the world to open our eyes to ways we may be blinded by our upbringings and our wounds.
We need the church to do what Derick did for Jill in saying “‘But this isn’t normal” (CTC).
Grace & peace,
BFJ
This piece contains associate links. As always, I’m grateful if you choose to subscribe, forward, or share.
Register for Fall’s Theology & Fiction Book Club Gathering
Click here to get your ticket at Eventbrite. Get an early bird discount with promo code EARLYBIRD for any ticket purchased before the end of September.
Grab your copy of Purple Hibiscus now.
I have never been drawn to the Duggars in any fashion but your analysis reminds me many fold to "Keep alert."