THE WASHINGTON POST: The new Duggar doc is the cold, hard ‘reality TV’ we needed all along

By Monica Hesse

June 2, 2023 5:00am ET

For seven years, plus specials, plus spinoffs, America had the dubious pleasure of following the daily lives of the Duggar family, a supersize gaggle of well-scrubbed Arkansans who procreated with such zeal that the name of the show kept changing: “17 Kids and Counting” became “19 Kids and Counting” by the time of its cancellation, at which point matriarch Michelle’s astounding uterus finally retired.

The Duggars needed a bazillion pancakes to get through breakfast. The Duggars drove a literal bus. A whole episode could be made of Duggar laundry day, and of the cheerful way the older daughters mini-mama’d the household chores. The family was a little weird. They eschewed all birth control and prohibited kissing or hugging before marriage. But TLC mostly played it as gentle-weird, maybe even aspirational-weird, up until 2015, when the show was yanked from the air following allegations that oldest-child Josh had as a teenager molested five girls including, as his parents later affirmed, four of his sisters.

That’s the backstory you need to know as you watch “Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets,” an exposé by Amazon’s Prime Video about the Duggars and the deeply conservative religious organization, the Institute in Basic Life Principles, that molded and shaped every aspect of the family’s life. (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post.)

Lists are already appearing online of the documentary’s most shocking takeaways: The Duggar children were never paid for their participation in the series; dad Jim Bob guarded the purse strings even while at least one of the older kids was forced to go on food stamps, daughter Jill Duggar tells the camera. She also says that she was made to sign contracts without knowing what they were, and to reluctantly film her labor and delivery because viewership spiked during wedding or baby episodes.

After watching all four parts of the series, here’s a tiny little nugget I can’t stop thinking about: In the culture of IBLP — a uniquely American spin on Christianity where the logo is a bald eagle landing on a Bible — boys in families are discouraged from changing their baby sisters’ diapers.

The thinking, as explained by the former IBLP adherent who mentions the rule, was that exposure to female genitalia, even those belonging to an infant, would be too much temptation for a pubescent male.

Hoo boy.

It’s hard to imagine what kind of sad brain would even come up with such logic — or maybe it isn’t, because the documentary also notes that more than 30 women accused former IBLP head honcho Bill Gothard of harassment before he was ousted from his post.

It’s not hard to imagine the damage that such a teaching would inflict on the parishioners who internalized it — the parishioners who were taught that girls and women are temptresses, that boys and men are deviant at heart, and that the way to handle discussions about sex and bodies is to never, ever have them.

Perhaps you remember the Megyn Kelly interview that Jim Bob and Michelle sat through in an apparent effort to save their reputation after allegations of Josh’s sexual abuse came to light. A saucer-eyed Michelle told Kelly that the family had enacted “safeguards” to make sure nothing like that ever happened again.

“Little ones don’t sit on big boys’ laps, unless it’s your daddy,” she explained. None of the children were allowed to play hide-and-seek, nor were a brother-sister pair ever allowed to be in a room alone without a third to chaperone. The family’s insistence on “side hugs” — clinical peripheral squeezes rather than anything requiring two arms — had been noted online but suddenly had context.

The Duggars appeared to sincerely believe that they could safeguard sin away from their household by wearing longer dresses, subscribing to rigid gender roles, praying harder. “Shiny Happy People” makes it clear that this wasn’t a desperate family’s magical thinking. This was IBLP doctrine. An organizational workbook for grade-schoolers contained an exercise in which students were instructed to circle the dangerous, “immodest” attire — an exposed knee or shoulder — worn by several women pictured.

In 2015, Jim Bob and Michelle explained that they had sent Josh to a church-run program to rehabilitate him. “We had taken care of all that years ago,” is what they told Kelly. It never seemed to occur to them that IBLP might be spectacularly ill-equipped to treat a troubled boy like Josh. In the documentary, multiple women recount that IBLP teachings had made them more susceptible to abuse: as girls, they were taught that it was their job always to obey men, and they were denied the sex education necessary to communicate, or even fully grasp, when bad things happened to them.

In 2021, Josh, now a 30-something man, was sentenced to more than 12 years in a child pornography case, and is in prison.

To be very clear, I’m not saying that the IBLP caused Josh Duggar’s behavior. Hundreds of children were raised in the faith and grew up to be decent, well-adjusted adults.

What I’m saying, more than anything else, is that “Shiny Happy People,” rather than “19 and Counting,” is the reality show that should have been made all along.

We didn’t need episodes about the gallons of peanut butter consumed by the Duggar household, and we didn’t need to marvel at the way the Duggar children all seemed to do their chores, practice their instruments, and go on chaste, chaperoned dates with romantic prospects of their parents’ choosing — smiling all the while, and without complaint. How did the Duggars do it?!

They did it — at least, as the former IBLP adherents describe the situation — because they were in a “cult.” They did it because their rigid faith preached frequent corporal punishment, subjugation of women, and a profound fear and distrust of the outside world. They did it because the self-discipline and obedience depicted on camera might have been a church virtue, but those virtues came at a huge cost, and viewers never saw that cost weighed when the camera was rolling.

That’s what we needed to see. The cost. The complexity. We needed to know that the Duggars’ preoccupations with purity and modesty weren’t part of a kitschy family creed but were instead do-this-or-go-to-hell requirements of their faith. We needed to know that the same religious doctrine that caused this family to thrive had broken other families.

And, by the way, had it caused the Duggars to thrive? Or had it simply taught them that showing distress, or even asking questions, would be seen as a personal failure or sign of moral decay?

I don’t know whether the show I’m describing would have lasted for seven years. But as far as reality television goes, it would have been a lot more real.