"Shiny Happy People" and My Experience with the IBLP
Not many people are indifferent to the Duggars. Since Josh Duggar’s troubles with the law began the family’s carefully cultivated public image has taken major hits, and naturally inquiring minds want to know the real story. While Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets promises to reveal all, myopic political talking points and outright falsehoods cast big shadows.
Since the family is pretty infamous, I won’t go into too much detail about them. Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar have nineteen children and are heavily involved in the Institute of Basic Life Principles, or IBLP. Formerly known as Basic Youth Conflicts, IBLP not only gave life advice supposedly drawn from Scripture, but advice about everything else. Seminars teaching Bill Gothard’s ideas were held around the United States and later the world, and if anyone wanted to go deeper there was the Advanced Training Institute, or ATI.
Full disclosure: I went to an IBLP seminar with my parents when I was in high school. Among its teachings was the idea that submitting to authority kept Satan from gaining a foothold. While I could see the value in some of it, I also saw women in dresses with giant collars and curly hair that seemed straight out of the eighties being held up as paragons of virtue because of the way they looked and acted.
Image was very important in the IBLP. Watching TV or movies were suspect activities. Any phrasing that was even remotely colloquial was put in quotations in IBLP writings so as not to appear worldly. Listening to rock music was of the devil even if it was Christian rock, because drumbeats and syncopation were subliminal devices intended to inspire salacious desires. Only hymns and classical music were pure and worthy of a Christian’s attention.
That last item used to make me mad because anyone who has ever studied classical music knows it is not all that pure—classical composers were once looked at in the same way as today’s rock stars. Not only that, but the first known instances of the evil syncopation Gothard attributed to rock music happened in fourteenth-century Europe as a response to the Black Plague. Oops.
Fortunately, my parents chose not to keep on with IBLP because while we respect God’s authority and authority in general, our family has always been keenly aware that humans make mistakes and therefore submitting oneself to human authority without question is problematic. I was always taught that if an authority figure wanted me to do something I knew was wrong or I was uncomfortable with, I had the right to say no and remove myself from the situation.
Given that background, I viewed Shiny Happy People with a somewhat jaundiced, albeit curious eye. While I don’t doubt that a lot of the accusations of abuse made by those interviewed are true, the overall product is very one-sided. No attempts seem to have been made to include the IBLP in the conversation, and I’m not saying that to excuse anything that’s happened, but good journalism requires both sides be presented as much as possible.
As a matter of fact, the IBLP has issued a statement about the documentary, although they don’t mention it or the Duggars specifically. I sort of believe what it says but not quite. While IBLP seems to have cleaned up its act since Bill Gothard’s 2014 exit, at least on the surface, the online version of the Basic Principles seminar still features Gothard.
Where the series really shines is when the Duggars and those who know them are allowed to tell their stories, but those moments are much fewer than they should be and are framed in such a way as to support the filmmakers’ agenda.
Shiny Happy People runs down a checklist of woke talking points and anti-Christian bigotry that goes far beyond the IBLP. We hear ominous music played under most interviews and see de rigueur mentions of abortion and The Handmaid’s Tale, as well as the implication that anyone who doesn’t agree with the filmmakers’ politics is a heartless, stupid hick. The series condescendingly postures that homeschooling is a sinister practice that robs kids of a good education and homeschooled Christian kids shouldn’t learn political science because they might want to run for office.
I’m guessing the filmmakers are completely fine with the fact that civics aren’t taught adequately in public schools nowadays either, if at all, because someone might get the crazy idea that politicians lie and even representative governments only pay voters lip service if not held accountable. They might even learn what the Constitution says and why America has the kind of government it has. Gasp. Someone grab the smelling salts.
Other claims are laughable. One of the interviewees, Brooke Arnold, falsely states that Wheaton College is the “Harvard of fundies.” While Gothard is a graduate of Wheaton, its affiliation is Evangelical, not fundamentalist. Jim and Elisabeth Elliot, Wes Craven, Billy and Ruth Graham, John Piper and Todd and Lisa Beamer are among those who have graduated from Wheaton and none of them were fundies.
The series also falsely claims missionary Baptists are extremely strict; for instance, they’re not allowed to dance. I don’t know why the series mentions missionary Baptists in the first place, seeing as they don’t single out any other denominations, but it probably stood out to me anyway because my dad was raised missionary Baptist. He was not only allowed to go to dances but he’s been a big Elvis fan since the mid-fifties and freely listened to rock music of all kinds as a teenager.
In fact, when my parents started dating, my mom, who was raised Church of Christ, immediately noticed that the missionary Baptists had more carte blanche in how they worshiped and taught the Bible.
Accusations of racism are a thing in Shiny Happy People because no slam of Christians is complete without them even if the accusations are absurd and untrue. New Republic writer Josh Pease states in one episode that white Christians protested desegregation of schools when in actuality there were Christians or at least people who claimed to be Christians on both sides of the issue. I suspect Pease would bristle if reminded that the Republican party was born out of the abolition movement and the KKK was founded by Democrats. The mainstream media has done their darndest to deny this, but primary sources show that the KKK has been proudly and overtly Democrat from the beginning.
In what is perhaps the surest evidence of the filmmakers’ anti-Christian sentiment and tenuous commitment to reality, Shiny Happy People doesn’t include a single word about the current spiritual lives of any of its participants, not even the Duggars and their friends and relatives. We’re supposed to believe the IBLP is evil, Christianity is also evil, everyone’s been hurt, and leave it at that. Wham, bam, thank you ma’am.
It’s pretty safe to say that opinions of Shiny Happy People will vary according to each viewer’s level of confirmation bias. As far as journalism and ethics are concerned, though, it needs more Duggars and less politics.
Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets is currently streaming on Amazon Prime. Rated 16+.
My grade: D+
Principal Cast: Derrick Dillard, Jill Duggar Dillard, Amy King, Dillon King, Brooke Arnold, Kristin Kobes du Mez, Deanna Duggar, Jim Bob Duggar, Michelle Duggar, Bobye Holt, Jim Holt, Danielle Lindemann, Josh Pease, Jen Sutphin, Kathleen Shugrue, Alex Harris, Lindsey J. WIlliams.
Directed by Olivia Crist and Julia Willoughby Nason.