The "Culture Wars" Kids Are All Grown Up

And not so Shiny or Happy

For a week in 6th grade, my mom pulled me out of my Christian school early each day, and drove us to a giant lecture hall in downtown Kansas City.

There, Bill Gothard's organization, the Institute of Basic Life Principles (IBLP) filled the seats with Christian families seeking spiritual guidance. These families resembled a smaller version of the Duggars from the reality show 19 Kids and Counting - all of which is the subject of the new Amazon Prime docuseries, Shiny, Happy People.

As the series explains in devastating detail, many of the children of that generation - kids like me who grew up at a time when the religious right was reaching its apex - are now adults. And many are not feeling especially shiny or happy as they reflect on it.

Bill Gothard - and a host of other fundamentalist and evangelical leaders who organized a generation of conservative Christians around an ideological project that was at once spiritual and political - offered a heavily prescribed vision for what Christian families could be. That vision was carried out meticulously by earnest young parents raising a generation of children who’ve begun to come of age in the 21st century.

And many of those grown-up children now have stories to tell, and traumas to unpack.

In my memory of Gothard’s seminars, we sat silently, diligently taking notes in our red workbooks while Gothard's video lectures played on the big screen. My family attended for at least a couple of consecutive years - far less than many of the families who became deeply entrenched in IBLP - but the message began to permeate our church and our family.

IBLP’s teachings took our already-conservative ideals to another level. At one point, Gothard (or his video-based avatar) instructed young, unmarried members of the audience to close our eyes, raise our hands, and pledge to only "court" people approved by our fathers. I raised my hand, thinking it was the righteous thing to do, but something about it felt... off.

Gothard was one of the leading proponents of courtship, which went beyond abstinence-until-marriage and promoted a more intense, parent-directed form of purity culture. This meant not simply dating and marrying a Christian, but restricting a relationship to platonic friendship until the point where a couple made an intentional decision to "court" and pursue marriage – with the guidance and blessing of the girl’s father. There was no casual dating, no flirting, no physical contact prior to marriage, or even prior to deciding to pursue marriage, in what was usually a brief courtship followed by a short engagement. According to Gothard, this approach would prevent "defrauding" a person of the opposite sex by creating unfulfilled sexual desires and expectations.

These ideas would eventually infuse mainstream evangelicalism through books like I Kissed Dating Goodbye, published in 1997 by a young evangelical named Joshua Harris (decades later, Harris would apologize for harm caused by the book and ask his publisher to stop publishing it – but not before a generation of young evangelicals made major life decisions guided in part by its message).

While my siblings and I already attended a Christian school, many of the families in attendance had taken things further. Some mothers were homeschooling families of five, six, seven, or even 10 or more children. Soon, courtship and homeschooling became the latest trends in my church. Although I managed to persuade my parents not to homeschool me (my Christian school was already quite conservative, and I liked interacting with people outside our family on a daily basis), courtship ideology shaped the way I would approach dating and marriage as I grew older.

For the past couple of weeks, my social media feeds have been filled with commentary on Shiny, Happy People, and I'm seeing reactions from three main groups:

1. People who are just learning about all of this and are like, "Wait, WTF???"

2. People who grew up deeply entrenched in the Christian homeschool movement and under the influence of Bill Gothard, who are now saying, "Yeah, finally, someone's explaining to the world what we lived through."

3. People who, like me, grew up on the edges of Gothard's movement but were still significantly shaped by its influences.

It's challenging to convey the extent of Gothard's influence, and the collective trauma that many who grew up in that world are beginning to publicly grapple with today.

Gothard’s vision was heavy on hierarchy and authoritarianism, and offered a deeply formulaic promise to Christian parents: here is “God’s plan” (as explained by Gothard) for an orderly, thriving family with children who’ll stay on the straight and narrow.

This is a page from a 1979 copy of IBLP’s “Research in Principles of Life.” I bought it as research for my book, “The Exvangelicals,” and I once had a more recent copy of my own.

This system - based on teachings that many who lived through it say systematically discouraged victims from speaking up - allowed a climate of fear and abuse to fester, leaving lifelong scars on many of the people raised in it.

But Gothard was just one part of a much larger evangelical-fundamentalist ecosystem that overlapped and cross-pollinated.

As my friend (and media critic) Alissa Wilkinson explained in this excellent piece for Vox, Gothard’s influence also was felt by many others raised on the margins of IBLP. Evangelicalism and fundamentalism are enormous (and overlapping) movements with a host of smaller and intersecting sub-sects and factions, and the lines are always a bit blurry. With his lectures that traveled around the country via video, and printed publications that circulated among many conservative Christian families, Gothard’s ideas exerted enormous influence in congregations around the country – and with leaders of the Christian right, including former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee.

This is why it’s entirely possible for someone like Gothard to be seen as a bit extreme by many mainstream evangelicals, while simultaneously shaping the thinking and culture of that mainstream.

Alissa’s whole piece is worth a read, but here’s the part that I think is so essential, in which she explores why it’s so hard for people enmeshed in these ideological ecosystems to leave them.

"The further your cult removes you from contact with the real world, the more implausible it seems that there even is life beyond its walls. Several subjects in Shiny, Happy People, including Jill Duggar Dillard, speak about the bewildering nature of living on the “outside,” feeling as though you’ve suddenly moved to a different universe where they speak another language, with totally different body language and customs and costumes. Furthermore, the rules of the culture are so deeply ingrained in your psyche that to leave seems impossible.”

As those who’ve grown up enmeshed in these systems emerge into the adult world and build their own lives, many are dealing layers of trauma and the aftermath of major life decisions that were made based on a deep trust in the teachings of people like Bill Gothard, Joshua Harris, and other leading evangelical figures including James Dobson.

And now, a growing number are speaking out about their experiences, largely aided by social media. For my forthcoming book, The Exvangelicals, I’ve spent more than a year interviewing scores of people raised in the evangelical world about how they’re reflecting on its impact on them, and I’m observing what feels like an acceleration of these discussions catalyzed by the release of Shiny, Happy People.

Dobson’s teachings, by the way, loomed much larger than Gothard in my own childhood - and I’m seeing a lot of chatter about his ideas, too, in my social media feeds in recent days. As Rachel Chamberlain tweeted, “I was also raised under Dobson influence. I cannot stress enough that he wrote a parenting book that uses examples of how he beat his dog as a blueprint for getting children to behave. Yes, this stuff exists and is still widely read and circulated.”

I reached out both to Dobson and the organization he founded, Focus on the Family, while writing my book. Both declined requests to respond to detailed questions about the trauma many adults who grew up under their influence now describe to me.

A nerdy post-script for those who’ve watched Shiny, Happy People:

Oh and fun fact if you watched the series, I go WAY back with Joshua Pease, the journalist and pastor interviewed throughout about his research on Gothard and IBLP. Josh and I attended the same tiny, fundamentalist/evangelical (again, where’s the line?) Christian school in Kansas City.

Behold, our 9th grade yearbook photo in all of its glory/horror (sorry, Josh).

It’s a very small world.

One more quick note: this newsletter is free, and I’d be grateful if you’d consider pre-ordering The Exvangelicals. Thank you!