Shiny Happy People, a new docuseries documenting the effects of the teachings of Bill Gothard on the Duggars, had the biggest debut of any documentary series ever produced by Amazon. In this episode of the Good Faith podcast, guest host Nancy French and “founding friend” David French discuss this popular series, the legacy of Bill Gothard, purity culture, and the true hope for those affected by this anti-Biblical ideology.

NANCY FRENCH: Many of you may not know that David was engaged to another woman before we met. He almost got married to a different person. He wrote about this in the New York Times in an article called, “Shiny Happy People: Fundamentalism and the Toxic Quest for Certainty.” And I love the first line: “In the summer of 1993, I almost joined a cult. For love.” David, I’ll let you take it from here. Why did you almost join a cult?

DAVID FRENCH: Well, to be clear, you did not break up the engagement! It was over before you and I started dating.

NANCY FRENCH: Yeah but if I was there, I would’ve broken that up – seen what I was missing and edged on in.

[laughs]

DAVID FRENCH: Yeah, so I was dating and got engaged to somebody I met in college. I went to college Lipscomb University, a Christian college in Nashville, a much more conservative place then than it is now. And I knew they were involved in this thing called IBLP, and that they’d gone to something called ATI. IBLP stands for Institute in Basic Life Principles. ATI stood for the Advanced Training Institute. They weren’t homeschooled, but they had become very curious about homeschooling, and had been to these conferences. 

So my fiance said, “You need to go. We can’t get married unless you go.” Her father said it too, “You can’t get married unless you go to this IBLP seminar.” So I went. It was about a full week in Louisville. I was living outside of Lexington, Kentucky at the time, and it was the summer break, and so I drove to Louisville every day for a week to a big, big, big, big megachurch in Louisville. It was a packed house of families and young couples and we sat under Bill Gothard’s teaching for a week. And wow. It was something else. 

You know, I go into it engaged to somebody, and I’m kind of told I have to do this for the engagement to work, so I’m coming in primed to accept it. I’m thinking, “We’re going to be building a family together. She really values this teaching. I want to know about it.” So I come in with my mind open, and wow. I think the best way to describe it would be a combination of legalism on steroids with a version of the prosperity gospel. 

The legalism on steroids came from the rules upon rules designed to make sure you had a godly family. Just to give you an example, there were rules about music, that if you’re listening to music, there had to be the following hierarchy: That melody had to be primary, harmony had to be secondary, and rhythm had to be tertiary. Rock music, because it put rhythm forward first, was inherently sexualized, and therefore there was no such thing as good rock music. Not even Christian rock music was good music. So the music there was very hymn-heavy, sung by big choirs. 

Then you had other rules. You had rules around dressing. Girls in particular had to pay extremely close attention to the way that they dressed, not just to be modest – modesty was presumed – but a very particular kind of modest, one that couldn’t even hint at any sexuality at all. The hints at sexuality were called “eye traps.” Any slit on a skirt was an “eye trap,” or anything, even if you were wearing clothing that covered you up to your neck, designed in such a way that implied the existence of breasts, for example, was an eye trap. And there was a huge emphasis on the role of the girl in male purity. Because men were deemed to be inherently visual creatures, modesty and chastity were absolutely indispensable, with an emphasis that really applied to women much more than men.

And here’s the prosperity gospel element of it: You also had this sense that, if you followed these rules, not only would your family be harmonious and peaceful and your children follow the Lord, but that you would be successful and prosperous. If you followed the hierarchy of authority  – with Jesus providing an umbrella of protection over the family, the husband providing an umbrella of protection over the wife, the wife managing the household –  then the wife would be more beautiful. Obedience was actually a key to physical beauty. Term was countenance. Your countenance would be radiant if you did this. 

It was very appealing to people because it purported to provide certainty. If you are in this deeply confusing, highly sexualized world that is hostile to Christian values and you don’t know how to raise your children in such a world, you don’t know how to have a godly marriage in such a world, this was the formula. If you did it, all would be well with you. That’s why you call it a prosperity gospel. It was not a “name it, claim it” kind of community, looking for miraculous signs and wonders, but there was absolutely this sense that, if you were in these umbrellas of protection, prosperity, beauty, obedience, all of these things awaited. And if you were outside of them, then you were vulnerable to Satan, death, disease, destruction, shame. So it was very authoritarian, but because of what it promised to families, was at least initially very appealing to an awful lot of people.

NANCY FRENCH: How did you respond? You were all in. You proposed. You were going to get married. Everything was going to be happily ever after. Tell us more about how that actually manifested in your relationship. 

DAVID FRENCH: Yeah, so there was a rule within Gothardism that’s actually going to sound quite familiar to people who were in Evangelicalism in the 90s and familiar with purity culture and with the Josh Harris book from many, many years ago, I Kissed Dating Goodbye. In Gothard world, you didn’t really date, you courted, and so I would describe our relationship as more of a courtship in Gothard lingo than a dating relationship in the classic way that you think of outside of that world. So it was very heavily parentally influenced. 

For example, if you had two Gothard families, it could be a lot like arranged marriage. It would sometimes come really, really close to arranged marriage because it was all a very father-directed enterprise. So we had a hybrid relationship, quasi-courting, quasi-dating. And I was initially fine with all of that, but then when I saw the teachings up close and in-depth, I just wasn’t. I couldn’t get on board with it. 

I guess it just seemed pharisaical. I’d grown up in the Church of Christ, so I had not been exposed to many other denominations or other streams of Christian tradition because the Church of Christ was pretty insular and believed all other streams of Christian tradition were heretical. So I wasn’t familiar with the prosperity gospel, so I couldn’t have a name for this thing that I was seeing, but I knew what it was. I knew that scripture did not teach a formulaic lifestyle, that if you do this then all of these things will happen to you. Now, there are blessings and curses that you see in the Old Testament, but the New Testament is quite clear that, when you are Christian, you take up your cross. You’re not taking up your cross when you teach, “If you signal your willingness to take up your cross, here comes health and wealth and beauty.” No, no, that’s not it at all. 

So I would put it this way, Nancy: When I knew I was not going to be a part of IBLP, the Titanic hit the iceberg.

I use that advisedly, because the Titanic sank slowly. But that ship was going down. After that, we sank slowly, but the ship was definitely going down, and it was apparent to me relatively soon that it couldn’t be saved. So we ended our relationship. 

So the docuseries had all this personal resonance for me, but it resonated with you, Nancy, even without any experience with IBLP.  So could you walk through that a bit?

NANCY FRENCH: I feel like, for the past few years as I’ve been investigating sexual abuse in the context of church communities like Kanakuk Kamps, I’ve encountered so many people who are awakening in the post “Me Too” era. It’s actually very beautiful. After talking to so many hundreds of people, I have seen victims become awakened to this reality that they were not responsible for their abuse, and maybe for the first time reengaging with their faith. A lot of people have left the faith, understandably, after being victimized in this context. I’m seeing people awaken to this reality and retell the stories of their lives.

In these abusive religious settings you can get stuck in a false narrative and it’s very hard to overcome it. It’s hard to perceive yourself as someone God loves, someone who is good. A lot of times in church there’s so much focus on the depravity of man. It’s not helpful, especially for victims of sexual abuse, because that’s what we’ve been told our entire lives. But I’ve seen a lot of people change the stories, tell themselves the more accurate narrative, and start the healing process. 

There are probably a lot of listeners who’ve been through similar situations, coming to terms with what they were taught as a kid, some of the teachings that were directly against the gospel. So that’s one good thing that comes from the Shiny Happy People documentary. What else? What else is good about this, David?

DAVID FRENCH: I think anything is good that clears away the cobweb of lies that get in the way of the actual gospel. You know, I have seen that, for people who’ve grown up in hyper-legalistic environments, whether they’re Gothard or not Gothard, encountering the actual gospel means encountering good news. It’s really good news in contrast to what you experience in the IBLP environment or other fundamentalist environments. So one of the positives of this sort of “deconstructing” movement is that a lot of people are untangling themselves from the falsehoods. But that’s only half the journey, right? It’s untangling yourself from the falsehoods and then embracing truth. 

And what is the truth? The truth is  good news about who Jesus is. The truth is good news about grace. The truth is good news about redemption. The truth is good news about the fruit of the spirit. So, as painful as it is to have your eyes opened to falsehoods, especially falsehoods that caused real harm, it’s often a necessary first precondition to understanding the good news. We had a pastor, Nancy, who used to say, “You can’t understand how good the good news is until you understand how bad the bad news is.”

NANCY FRENCH: Right, I feel like I have a PhD in the bad news. But listeners may not know that, when I was struggling, had rejected Christianity, wore black fingernail polish, smoked clove cigarettes, and sat on the edge of my Christian campus sort of being a malcontent, that’s when I met you.

David is the one who told me about the gospel for the first time. We were sitting in my apartment in Green Hills in Nashville and you told me about the gospel. We talked about CS Lewis, and right there in Green Hills in my apartment, I encountered God in a way that I’d never encountered in my life. What I was rejecting was a lot of this false gospel. Behavioral modification is probably the best way to put it. And I remember you presented the gospel in a way that was so beautiful and so alluring. I’d never encountered anything like it. I loved the way that you said Jesus. I had gotten so sick of religious people. I’d gotten so sick of Christians. Anytime they would talk to me about faith, I recoiled. I had this hard carapace about me spiritually, and then I met you and you told me about the gospel and I believed. And that was, what, 27 years ago? It’s been a crazy ride. In a lot of ways, that was the beginning of it.

I wanted to end with Philippians 4. A lot of times people critical of conversations like this quote Philippians 4, which is, “Finally, brothers, whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable, if anything is excellent or praiseworthy, think about such things.”

This has become sort of a clobber verse for people like me, who are uncovering the dark underbelly of some Christian practices, used to tell us we need to focus more on positivity. But I wanted to read the verse because I think it’s actually very beautiful. 

In that list, the first adjective is true. So whatever is true, think about these things. And I think if you ever have a conflict between something that is true and something that is not praiseworthy, or something that is true and something that is not excellent, the priority should be focusing on the truth. Jesus is the Truth with a capital T, and he’s not afraid of all of the complexities that we bring to him. 

So for everybody who’s been enmeshed in these Christian worlds or churches or communities that force inappropriate, unbiblical teachings on them, this is a cultural moment when we can stop, pause, reflect on what we’ve been taught, and reject the stuff that does not correlate with biblical teaching. And there’s joy there. 

There’s truth, there’s joy, there’s possibility for healing, and it’s very beautiful. I’m thankful for the Shiny Happy People documentary for uncovering this, for lifting up the rock, and for the whistleblowers who were willing to tell the truth. I appreciate their courage. I hope everyone who saw that documentary and reflects on how it’s affected their own lives can come away, not embittered, but invigorated that the truth of the gospel is so much more powerful than the false teaching.