![]() Cheeky interest in the family’s courtship rituals – entirely chaperoned dates, no kissing until marriage, presentation of a “wedding night” instructional CD the day before the ceremony – put a playful spin on the subjugation of women. “Wisdom booklets” from Gothard’s homeschooling program, which instructed children on sinful temptation – the series quotes one which asks children to identify the “eye traps” in different female outfits – are passed off as equivalent education. The immense amount of labor required to keep the household running, all assumed by the girls in the family, was treated as a curious oddity. The parentification of children – pre-teen and teenage siblings taking full-time care of a baby – was whitewashed as “the buddy system”. The series features interviews with several ex-IBLP members who contextualize, often in painful, haunting detail, the teachings polished up by the Duggars’ reality TV series. “I think more and more is becoming more mainstream, especially since Trump got elected – there’s this huge underbelly and infrastructure in American culture of authoritarianism,” said Nason. The extreme teachings of Bill Gothard dovetailed with the Christian homeschooling movement in the US, and the politically active religious right in the US. Though the Institute in Basic Life Principles may be unknown to many, it’s not irrelevant. “We wanted to use the Duggars as a societal touchpoint and not focus solely on them, because they were the gateway in terms of knowing who they were for the average American to bring us into something that’s unknown,” said the series co-director Julia Willoughby Nason ( LulaRich, Fyre Fraud). Shiny Happy People is only nominally about the Duggars and their weird, distinctly American celebrity. (The series arrives a month before the first anniversary of the reversal of Roe v Wade, long the goal for the religious right.) Over four episodes, Shiny Happy People mimics a rabbit hole of research – a show that is initially about an odd corner of American celebrity morphs into a recounting of abuse within the family, to abuse propagated and protected by IBLP, and to the inroads fundamentalist, authoritarian-leaning Christianity has made in US schools, government and civic life. The Duggars, who regularly touted Gothard’s seminars, were merely “the front-facing image of this insidious organization”, said the series co-director Olivia Crist. Founded in 1961, Gothard’s ministry preached to millions a strict hierarchy of male authority leading to him, then God, and an abdication of “temptation” – music, television, dating, alcohol, public schools. Gothard and IBLP were the shadowy scaffolding on which the Duggars’ celebrity was built, and whose strict teachings (and coffers) were burnished by the spotlight. (Gothard, 88, has denied all allegations.) Earlier this year, Jinger Duggar Vuolo published a memoir criticizing the strict control and fear-based teachings of her upbringing under the influence of a group called the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP) and its now disgraced leader, Bill Gothard, who has been accused by dozens of women of sexual harassment and assault. Several of the daughters, two of whom were trotted on to Megyn Kelly’s Fox News show to publicly forgive their brother for touching them and who starred in a successful spinoff series, have distanced themselves from their family’s teachings (and, to the interest of celebrity gossip sites, begun wearing pants). ![]() Last year, he was sentenced to 12 years in prison for downloading images and video of child sex abuse. Indeed, Shiny Happy People covers the family’s many scandals and splinters, which have unfurled publicly since the original show was cancelled in 2015, after it was revealed that the eldest son, Josh Duggar, had molested five young women, including several of his sisters, in 20. Perhaps unsurprisingly, a show about a family of 21 living in perfect harmony while disavowing the secular world and teaching women polite subservience was not quite as easy as it seemed, nor the harmless curiosity that viewers seemed to think it was. This is the jumping off point for Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets, a new Amazon Prime series about the family and the larger fundamentalist group their show represented and sanitized.
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