No.Nonsense.

Joshua Duggar- oldest son of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, star of 19 Kids and Counting, multiple accusations of molestation of young girls including two of his sisters, serving a 12 year and 7 month sentence in federal prison followed by 20 years of supervised probation for receipt and possession of child sexual materials.

Joseph Duggar- charged with lewd and lascivious conduct with a child under 12 in Florida and multiple counts of child endangerment and false imprisonment in Arkansas.

Post-script, Kendra Duggar, wife of Joshua- charged with multiple counts of child endangerment and false imprisonment.

The Duggar family was idolized for their large family with conservative Christian values. They allowed the world into their home and showed off their well-behaved children. They espoused family and structure and discipline.

And it was all a lie.

As the newest members of the family find themselves in legal jeopardy, I started rewatching the 2021 docuseries “Shiny, Happy People” on Prime. This series details the rise and fall of the Duggars, said fall resulting from the outing of multiple molestation charges against the oldest of the children, Joshua, in 2015. Two of his victims were his own sisters. The question at the time was why he was never charged with any crime and continued to live in the home with the girls, all while keeping this huge family secret hush-hush. In a media blitz in 2015 at the time of the revelations, the family and Discovery, the network that produced the show, justified their actions that they had dealt with it internally through counseling and sending Joshua away to a church camp for troubled teens.

Then in 2021, through a federal investigation, Joshua was arrested on child pornography charges.

Obviously, the counseling and church camp were ineffective.

Now, we have another Duggar male charged with molesting a 9 year old girl. The details of the child endangerment and false imprisonment charges against Joshua and his wife have not been made public, but clearly the trend of abuse continues.

So how did these two brothers go so off the rails to perversion and victimization?

Let’s go back to the family itself. While I believe parents can’t always be blamed for the choices their kids make, we do know that the decisions the parents make can influence who the children are as adults. If a parent is an alcoholic, the child has a greater chance of being an alcoholic. If a child is abused, they are more likely to become an abuser.

For Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, their lifestyle was rooted in their perceived Christian values. (I’ll get to why I use the word perceived shortly.) Jim Bob Duggar was raised in an independent missionary Baptist home. I, too, was raised in a similar home with multiple ministers and pastors in my family. Our families are strongly connected to the church. Our churches are very strict in their teachings. Our values are rooted in a lot of rules to show our commitment to our Christian principles. As with everything, there are gradations of the commitment and the list of rules we follow.

At some point around his teenage years, Jim Bob became involved with the Institute of Basic Life Principles which made the rules of the average independent Baptist look mild in comparison. The IBLP rules set forth “traditional” gender roles with the husband as supreme ruler over all, the wife as the cook, cleaner, and caregiver of the children, and the children as absolutely subservient with no question but to obey in all things.

They homeschooled with a curriculum that was more indoctrination than actual learning. They taught that females had to be modest so as not to tempt the males and if a male fell into sexual sin it was because the female enticed him to do so. Dates were chaperoned, no matter the age. Women were to remain under the rule of their fathers until married at which time their husbands took on that role. They were not allowed to deny their husbands anything, including their bodies. They were never to question their husbands and there was no divorce.

The leader of this organization (I refuse to call it a church) was Bill Gothard, a man who was never married nor had children, a man who was accused along with his own brother of sexual impropriety with young girls. He was ousted by the ministry but his teachings remain.

The issues begin with the upending of any rational doctrinal system.

When parents remove all decision-making from their children, they set them up for failure. It is a parent’s job to teach their children, guide them to the best path, and then let them walk forward while trusting that what they taught them will lead them to the best decisions. When children are isolated from the outside world and wholly insulted from those influences, they fail to learn the basic skills for successful living. We cannot shelter our children from the evils of the world. We must teach them to walk through those evils while choosing to stay on the right path. If we as parents fail to adequately prepare them for what is “out there” we cripple them as adults.

If we want to take this to a Biblical view, we’ve all heard the phrase, “spare the rod and spoil child”. This phrase never once appears in scripture. In Proverbs, Solomon references using a rod of discipline to lead in the right direction. If you think in terms of a shepherd, which the Bible regularly uses as a point of reference, the rod and staff were used not as punishment for the sheep but as direction. The staff pulled them back from danger, the rod directed them to the right road. The rod was never referring to corporal punishment.

Moving on to the women, conservative Christian circles like to reference Paul’s instructions in Ephesians for wives to submit to their husbands. Often, they stop there, failing to read further. If they did continue to read, they would see that he says the husband’s duty is to love his wife more than his own life, even to the point of willingly laying down his life for her. The husband is commanded to elevate his wife above himself, not place her in a subservient role. When women are diminished to the position of servant, they are removed from a place of value. When they are not valued, it becomes easier to victimize them.

Finally, when you remove punitive results for a crime in an effort to protect the reputation of the family, when you deal with wrongdoing “internally”, and when you fail to take accountability for your own actions, you allow the sin and corruption to fester- and you create more innocent victims in the process. Pedophilia is not a spiritual issue- it is a psychopathy that must be dealt with as such.

Yes, Joshua and Joseph are terrible men who have victimized countless children. They must pay for their crimes to the fullest extent of the law so that no other child becomes a victim. But understanding how these two predators were created is an important step in helping to ensure that it doesn’t happen again. Sadly, as long as there are false doctrines that distort the Bible, there will continue to be such predators. As parents, it is our responsibility to teach our children a better way of living. As Christians, it is our responsibility to call out these teachings that can be so destructive. As citizens, it is our responsibility to hold these men accountable.