The Duggars & The God of Our Understanding

Moving from a God-Above-Us toward a God-With-Us

The morning after I watched the first episode of ‘Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets,” I sat on my back deck and wept. Under a cloudless, blue sky and with the gentle melody of chirping birds as my soundtrack, hot tears streaked my face as my mind traveled back in time over the story of my own religious life. Though I never watched the Duggar show in its heyday, and I never agreed with their principles regarding children and birth control, there is much in their religious beliefs with which I once fully identified. The parallels between the cult of which they were a part, Institute of Basic Life Principles or IBLP, and America’s brand of evangelicalism are striking. Both systems use fear and shame as tools to control, both accept arrogance and self-righteousness as proper responses to ‘the world,’ and both turn a blind eye to reality while fostering and promoting myths of grandeur and moral perfection.

I should know. I was part of the evangelical world for decades and I fit the description above quite nicely. In other words, I have receipts for my time in that world, and they will haunt me until my dying day.

I’ve seen plenty of articles and social media posts condemning the Duggars, and I understand that impulse. When we hear stories of the vulnerable being hurt, and when we feel we’ve been duped by people who showed us a mask instead of the real thing, our instinct is to condemn. Yet I can’t judge Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar because I have a plank in my own eye which requires a healthy proportion of my attention.

Like the Duggars, I used shame and fear to control myself and my children for many years. And I didn’t do this because I was evil or nefarious, but because the God of my understanding was One who not only used shame and fear as relational tactics, but prescribed their all-purpose use in daily human life. My religious conditioning convinced me that I was born dead in my sins, an object of God’s wrath, acceptable to God only because a battered and crucified Jesus stood between me and this Supreme Being who would just as soon annihilate me as look at me.

Yes, I could go to heaven if I believed and confessed the right things and tried my best to live a morally pure life (as defined for me by evangelical biblical interpreters). But, the truth of the matter, my religious conditioning told me, is that God only loved me or accepted me because of Jesus’s sacrifice on my behalf. And I had better walk the line if I wanted to keep it that way. Predictably, I passed this message on to my children, though my intuition barked at me throughout the years, sounding a small alarm which I mostly ignored.

Something isn’t coherent here. Why does the God of your understanding look nothing like the Jesus you read about in the gospels? How can you tell your children God has loved them since before they were formed in the womb, but also that they were born in sin, objects of God’s wrath? Where does the Imago Dei fit in? What about God’s passionate love for the world in the oft-quoted John 3:16?

Thoughts like these gnawed at me when I allowed them room, when I took a breather from my Private Perfection Project. It wasn’t until that project began to fail spectacularly that I began to allow these questions to penetrate my heart.

I was homeschooling my kids and providing them with religious education daily. I was praying with them and for them. I was over-protective and a strict disciplinarian, like James Dobson had convinced me I must be if I wanted what was best for them; but I still felt empty in my motherhood. I loved my children more than my own life, but so much between us felt performative and anxious.  I was faithful to my church and to my husband. I cleaned and cooked and did Bible studies. I filled my life with religious work and reading and thought. Yet, when I prayed, I felt nothing – no Presence on the other side of the conversation. When I read the Bible, I felt incredible guilt as I was not able to – and knew instinctively that I never would be able to – live up to all the prescriptions in those pages. I was striving so damn hard. But I still contended with pride, envy, greed, malice and so much more.  There was no life, no abundance, no connection with the Real.

And it’s no wonder, I whispered to myself the morning after I watched the Duggar family’s pain unfold on camera.

No wonder so many of us are wounded and limping, unable to gain traction in our spiritual journeys. With an over-valuing of speculative theology that ascribes God characteristics which keep God distant – immutability, omniscience, omnipotence, impassibility, and the like, it’s no wonder we are running ourselves ragged with our performative religion to please this God-Above-Us. When we perform our religion, it allows us to stay in control. We speak of grace out of one side of our mouth, and sneakily work to earn God’s approval out of the other.  

But when we discover what incarnation means – the vulnerability of exposure, the intimacy, the depth of Divine understanding that comes from God-With-Us – we realize how sad, unnecessary, and paltry are our performances. When the curtain is pulled back and we stare into reality – which is that God defines reality and God’s-Being-As-Love is that definition – it all comes to a screeching halt.

And that’s what happened to me over a decade ago. It all came to a halt, and I began submitting myself to God’s reality of love. It has been a slow, painful process to take a long, loving look at the real in me and in my life. And the Duggar documentary brought it all back up to the surface.

The hot tears streaking my face were ones of regret and deep sadness, especially as I recalled the harsh, false messages I submitted myself to and then turned around and taught to my children. I regret the fear, shame, and control; the wasted time; the empty years when abundant and overflowing love could have been our home.

But the tears were also ones of joy and deep gratitude, especially as I recalled the way God lovingly invited me out into the open. I’m grateful for the healing and hope; the time I’ve been given to repair; the newness of life and theological perspective that’s changing me; the experience of finding ‘joy unspeakable and full of glory,’ not because I curated the perfect life but because I simply exist in God’s love.

Unlike the fearful woman I once was, I don’t feel condemned as I sit with my regrets. I have experienced — not just heard about, but experienced — the deep love of God. Because of that, I can sit with my sins & my regrets and still feel loved and in communion with God. This is the joyous freedom that now animates my life.

And so I whisper a prayer for the Duggar family, who were only trying to please the God of their understanding, the God-Above-Us who demands moral perfection. I pray for healing and an awakening to the Real, the God-With-Us and the God-For-Us whose work is whole and beautiful and who is always looking down the road for us to return home, forgiveness of ‘seventy times seven’ eternally secured.

Invitation to Formation: Perhaps you’ve seen this documentary too, or this post stirred something up in you. If you’re feeling curious or sad or hopeful or anything in between, I invite you to take a few deep breaths and then pray to the God of your understanding:

Lord of light and love, please open my eyes to reality. Help me to see you in truth and to see myself and others through your eyes. Amen.