Sorry, world, but now Bill Gothard is everyone’s problem. More accurately, his cult—and I do mean to say cult here—is now the topic of Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets, and the dangerous teachings of the IBLP (Institute in Basic Life Principles) are making national headlines in the wake of the high-profile documentary. While the Duggar name is surely the draw of Shiny Happy People, the Amazon Prime documentary series largely focuses on the IBLP itself, speaking with survivors to discuss the high control practices of the group.
If any of this sounds vaguely familiar, you might have read my blog post about Fundie Fridays last year and checked out Jen’s channel for yourself. Jen appears in Shiny Happy People, doing what she does best and providing context for the environment that led to the Duggars’ fame, but there are many other special guests included in the doc. While survivors of the IBLP’s teachings show that the Duggars’ experiences don’t exist in isolation, Jill Dillard and her husband Derrick give insight into broken family relationships and their divergence from the IBLP community.
Needless to say, I ate up all four episodes of the docuseries in two sittings.
© Courtesy of Prime Video
The most interesting aspect of Shiny Happy People was how little it actually focused on the Duggars. Instead of revealing long-hidden dark secrets of the family, the show uses them as an example of a larger problem with the IBLP movement, namely its tendency to cover up child sexual abuse at the hands of its leaders and its hierarchical system of authority that makes women more like property than autonomous beings. By showcasing the IBLP’s teachings alongside specific moments in Duggar history, the documentary presents a compelling case—but what is it? If we’re not spilling about the Duggar family “secrets,” then what are we doing here?
The IBLP uses an idea called the Umbrella of Protection to condition children—and especially girls—into being highly controlled and malleable. The Umbrella (which, by the way, doesn’t at ALL resemble how umbrellas actually work) supposes that every person in the family has a certain amount of authority over others. For example, wives have authority over children, and are meant to manage the home and other domestic matters. Husbands have more authority—power over wives and children—but have more responsibility as well, as they have to provide for the family financially. And protect them, whatever that means. Christ has authority over all of them, but, of course, He’s not doing specific duties or holding up some end of a family agreement. The Umbrella of Authority highlights an important problem for the children of IBLP—they have no autonomy, not even over themselves or their own bodies. Women don’t have much authority, either, and are locked out of making big family decisions or working.
Okay, so kids don’t have a lot of power. That’s not so unusual, right? Even though children often don’t have power over their family units (and really, shouldn’t—they’re learning!), IBLP takes things a step further by using intentionally damaging disciplinary action to literally break their spirits. Michael and Debi Pearl’s teachings—namely To Train Up a Child—have been used by many parents in IBLP, and the couple has talked in an official capacity on behalf of the convention. Families (like the Duggars) use the Pearls’ teachings to help teach their children obedience, but it’s not the typical kind of good-kid behavior one might expect. Instead, it’s things like blanket training, which involves parents intentionally luring their child off of a designated area and beating them when they inevitably move. Eventually, they stop leaving the area, or the blanket, too scared to move. Allegedly, this will help them be more obedient in the future, but it sort of ends up meaning that they’ll just blindly do whatever their parents say.
If the top umbrella is protecting everyone, why is there still water dripping off the others?
Shiny Happy People describes the IBLP movement in detail in part to explain why the Duggar girls were willing to cover up their older brother Josh’s sexual abuse. In an interview for the documentary, Jill explains that she regretted the now-infamous interview she did with Megyn Kelly, where she said she didn’t remember the abuse she suffered. At the time, it was what her parents wanted her to say.
Of course, the documentary goes into other, more well-known aspects of the Duggar family, things that the Fundie Snark community has been aware of for years—like how Jim Bob manipulated his older daughters into appearing on the show without pay. While these individual incidents are horrific, the scarier part of the show is how the IBLP in general promotes a systematic chain of abuse—led by the very people that claim to want to save children or protect them from the world.
Bill Gothard, who was accused of some CSA crimes of his own, is not a good man, and Shiny Happy People is only bringing his name to a group of people who might not otherwise know about him. After being disgraced from the IBLP movement and essentially kicked out of the club he created, Gothard didn’t experience any sort of other punishment for his behavior. No jail, no fines, no penance at all. Because above all else—as evidenced in Josh Duggar’s case—members of this movement protect their own, no matter what they’ve done.
I ate this show up, as I do tons of Fundie Snark material, but Shiny Happy People does more than rehash old controversies about the Duggars. It makes Bill Gothard the world’s problem, and hopefully inspires viewers to reject the IBLP’s teachings completely.