To segway from my previous post and pod cast, I want to focus on one aspect of American Christian mischief, one of a thousand cuts that has led to the irrevocable demise of American cultural Christianity. After that, I want to leave this topic of religion before someone accuses me of having an agenda. But I sincerely think that my MO isn’t just to throw stones—and I do live in a glass house—but because of all the people who have been hurt, at the worst, or confused, in the least.

The impetus for me posting again this morning was binge-watching for four hours the documentary series, Shinny Happy People. It is about the rise and fall of the Duggar family, you know, the adorable Christian couple with 19 children who had a series on TLC. This family was not the aberration within American evangelical Christianity, but the flagship of the movement. I could easily write a book on all the things that went wrong within their belief system, but I will focus on a couple of points.

This story brought about a lot of unpleasant memories for me, because I spent 18 years within that subculture. Profoundly familiar. I’ve shared many times that I made a deliberate decision in 1990 to abandon that culture for the sake of honesty. I was tired of pretending. Those who still support an allegiance to that system, suppose that I mean that I, alone, was the liar. No, that is not what I mean. The whole system was pretentious. If you watch the series, I think you will understand what I mean about the emotional and factual dishonesty that brand of religion (maybe all religions) breed. Those who are still deeply embedded within that culture will see this documentary as a “work of the devil.” All cults block criticism of their leaders and their groups with that kind of defensive language. Was the documentary 100% factual? I don’t know. But the familiarity of it convinces me that most of it was.

I want to focus on one aspect of the Duggar journey and that was their relationship with a Christian leader, Bill Gothard. I have picked this issue because in the 1970s and 1980s, in my group we were students of Bill Gothard. We considered him one of the godliest men in the world. We attended his huge seminars and used his materials. It is estimated that two million people went through his training during this time. You must watch the series or at least do your own research to understand this movement. Many will think that Gothard and his evangelical empire is insignificant to their personal lives, but maybe not. They have a plan, as I mentioned in my previous post, of taking over the American government and imposing sharia law … woops Freudian slip, I mean “Christian values” (as they determine) upon all Americans.

To sum up the facts of the documentary, one of the Duggar sons, Josh, confessed to sexually abusing at least two of his sisters and is now serving time in prison for owning and disturbing child pornography. Bill Gothard, who is now in his 80s, a self-proclaimed authority on marriage and raising children—who never married or had children by the way—and was a champion of sexual purity, was fired from the organization that he started, even removed from their campus by the police, because of dozens of claims against him of sexual misconduct by the women who served under him. Some of them were young girls. Now, the Gothard empire directors did hire an independent group to investigate the claims and arrived at the conclusion that while what he did was tasteless, it was not criminal. I imagine they mean, while he manipulated girls emotionally and touched them inappropriately, he never raped any that we know of.

So, I ask myself, as I always do, “What key element of the thinking of this group led to this tragedy?” I arrived at two (of possibly many) principles as the culprit. In philosophy we talk about “particulars” and “universals.” Particulars are those granular day to day things that are dependent on other things and universals are the big concepts that stand alone. One of these principles is in the category of the particular and the other, more of a universal notion.

Authority. If you were to define the teachings of Bill Gothard into one word, it would be “authority.” Simply, he promoted a system of a hierarchy of authority such as:

God

Spiritual Leader (pastor, or him)

Secular leader (work boss)

Husband

Wife

Children

Pet

If you keep under the authority of the one above you, obeying all of their wishes, then God will bless you and your life will be almost perfect. But if you disobey the figure above you, your life is shit. The exception is a secular boss who wants you to do something against “God’s will.” To instill this type of obedience, children were handled harshly, assuming the concept they were born into filthy sin, and you had to beat them into godliness and obedience. But also, within that system, as with many Islamic systems, men have complete authority over women. Total obedience to their husbands as if to God himself.

Isn’t it suspicious that men always create systems where they are superior? Where “their women” must obey them and they have more value in society than the women? They claim that is what the Bible is telling them and that they are simply and humbly following what the Bible (or Koran) is telling them. I disagree. I believe it is a profound self-interest guided endeavor. The Bible is a complex collection of writing, a mine of words, and from it, if you want, you can dig out supporting words of the most heinous egocentric ideas. In other words, it is not the Bible telling a group that the men must devalue and subjugate women, but it is their own primordial impulses that makes them read the Bible that way.

But once the woman, and the child, is devalued within that system, it allows for the abuse to occur. Josh Duggar felt comfortable sexually abusing his sisters (and other unrelated girls) because he was of a different, higher class than them. He was a man (actually a boy), above them in this chain of authority. Bill Gothard, I believe, held the same arrogant perspective. Women, girls, were objects to him. That’s where this notion always leads. This attitude towards women is one of the negative things a Christian culture has brought us and for which we can rejoice with it is shed along with other parts of that culture.

Sanctification. Now to the universal, which I think is the fundamental flaw of these systems. “Sanctification” has many religious connotations, but I must define it here as the way evangelicals use it. Evangelicals believe that, as aforementioned, we are all born as dirty rotten sinners (thus why the child needs the rod). Then, there is a continuum of “sanctification” or process that leads upward to a state of near perfection or “godliness.”

I think this notion is totally false. That we mere mortals are all cut from the same cloth. Someone famous said, “The only difference between the cruelest criminal and the greatest saint, is opportunity.” I will not go quite that far, but to suggest that this long continuum of goodness is rather short. That is why our heroes disappoint us so much.

My break with evangelicalism came when I got to serve under the person the organization promoted as the godliest man within their system. Once I knew him on a personal level, I saw his profound character flaws and cruelty. But it wasn’t just him. I began to look at my own life and, while I wore the mask of godliness, I knew that my own flaws ran deep.

When you are in a system of thought that believes you can ascend a continuum to a “righteous” place, above the others, but that is not true at all, then there is only one choice, to put on that “Shinny Happy” exterior and pretend your way to popularity within that group. This is why it is so shocking when our heroes fail. But the distance between their sainthood and ultimate depravity was always measured in inches, not miles. Pretending only gives the illusion of moral distance. Therefore, if we stay humble and avoid hero worship, we might make it out of life without too many scars. But I do encourage you to watch the series.

Mike