The DL Team reviews the Amazon docu-series "Shiny Happy People," discusses the Duggars, and talks about the positives and negatives of conservative Christianity.
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The DL Team reviews the Amazon docu-series "Shiny Happy People," discusses the Duggars, and talks about the positives and negatives of conservative Christianity.
Website: www.dangerousfaith.net
YouTube: Dangerous Faith
Rumble: Dangerous Faith
Instagram: nwdangerousfaith
Twitter: @FaithDangerous
Facebook: @NWDangerousFaith
Shining happy people Documentary on Amazon about the Duggar family and the organization IBLP. This is the Dangerous Faith podcast. We're going to be talking about it With me I have Zeke, chloe, mackenzie, isaac and Blake. We will just cover different aspects of it. It was four episodes. Again, it's on Amazon. You can check it out if you have Amazon Prime. There might be other versions as well. So broadly you?
Speaker 2:Oh, zeke, quick question Is Amazon Prime the mark of the beast? Yes, okay, making sure. So if you, subscribe to it.
Speaker 1:You are evil. Now that we have biblically supported that claim, we're going to move on to talk about the documentary itself. Any broad thoughts and feelings about what was portrayed, Chloe?
Speaker 3:Broadly. I thought it was very good and informative. I learned a lot through it about their family and the IBLP cult that they were associated with, but in my opinion I thought that the last episode was very unnecessary.
Speaker 1:Last episode was unnecessary. What do you mean by that?
Speaker 3:They really didn't even talk about the Duggars in the last episode. It almost seemed like they were attacking Christians. For some of the views that we believe, the Duggars are a very extreme legalistic belief system, but for Christians not all of us, we don't believe that, all of that. But they seem to portray that we were all like that and that legalistic and strict.
Speaker 1:That's true. That's true. Sometimes with documentaries like this and there have been a couple, I think, on Hillsong as well they'll start with something good, but then they'll use the documentary for cultural commentary and they'll start to go after or attack traditional Christian beliefs. So they'll start in the area of, hey, this is abuse, this is bad. But then they'll kind of wrap in their own thoughts on the faith as well. So I think I agree with you there, chloe, anyone else thoughts as a whole.
Speaker 2:I think that was kind of like an underlying thing. I mean, especially on the fourth episode, which I did not watch, but I even noticed that in the first three episodes it was kind of like an underlying thing of Christianity bad. And here's a prime example of why that is and clues. That's like an extreme sect that we I don't think any of us agree with everything they say. There's plenty of things I know for a fact we don't. But they treat that as if it's normal Christianity and therefore that's why it's bad to be a Christian. It just kind of shows where the mindset of the people making it is coming from.
Speaker 4:And they portray it as like if you have a big family or if you want to homeschool your kids and you're in part of this sect.
Speaker 1:So let's dive into that. Big families, homeschooling. We have several homeschoolers here. I was homeschooled. We have Zeke and Isaac as well, and so let's talk about how they portrayed homeschooling In your experience. What was that like for you? Are you dugger? Was it like the duggers, or was it something completely different?
Speaker 2:I would say that there's some similarities, but I think that there's a reason for that. I think it comes from the heart of the parents, because not that I have kids, but I'm just looking to the future of what the world around us is just getting crazier and crazier and I can understand where a parent would come from to say you know what? I don't want to send my kid out into that right away at such a young age. So I think that always, like with all homeschoolers I think that's part of the heart of it is just not wanting to have to send your kid into a crazy world before they've had time to grow up and also want to protect them as long as you can. The part, the problem that happens whenever you try to take control over every little aspect of their life, kind of like what happened with them, and to the point to where they don't have any say or control over their own actions.
Speaker 4:Yeah, and not that I agree with all the values that they have. But that's kind of one of the things with homeschooling is, like you want to give your kids the values that you have, like how you believe things are in the world and stuff like that and how the world works and all that. So I don't think homeschooling is a bad thing, but I don't totally agree with everything that they believe either.
Speaker 2:But to our experience, like it was, it was nothing like that and this is, like I think, the sum of the what's the word? Assumptions. I can't think of the other word but stereotypes that you get from homeschoolers is like, oh well, you know, you're just you and your family at home all day and you don't really get out. But for us we had a organization. It was like a homeschool organization where other homeschoolers would kind of meet up and hang out. You have like social interactions.
Speaker 2:There's probably like 30 plus kids that we've met with every week to do that and we go and field trips, I feel like Probably every other week or once, at least once a month to different places where we like and wasn't just like vacations, like Ruby Falls, places when we could go learn different things that we are learning in class civil war Places a lot of different stuff like that.
Speaker 4:So you're telling me you didn't take your mom to prom.
Speaker 2:I Cannot confirm or done. Well to be fair, well, you didn't go to homeschool during high school. I went back in ninth grade and I was in, went back in seventh, yeah.
Speaker 4:So we got the best of both worlds and I still think homeschooling phenomenal.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I enjoyed homeschool for those years, but I'm glad I went back to high school for the teenage years.
Speaker 5:I don't regret it and with the Duggars too. They, their curriculum was from the IBLP Belief system. Like what's his name? I'm sorry, I just bill bill gothard created the curriculum and it was based on his principles and Rules and crazy, crazy stuff, and he wasn't married or had children or anything like that. Yeah and not. I mean, not all homeschool curriculum is like that, you know.
Speaker 2:Yeah, something that I noticed with that about how the organization was based off his beliefs and One of the things that they pointed out was like, yeah, they were, one of their goals was to create a community of children for the next generation to uphold their values and stuff. I'm like and they were kind of saying that like it was a bad thing and a sense I kind of get where they're coming from, because if the values are bad, then yeah, it's not a good thing, but every parent won't say that happened. They want their children to have similar values to them that they think is right and good and true. The only difference is are they actually right, good and true? So that's where, like, they pretend, like having children grow up to believe your own values. That's just something wrong that they don't do, when obviously they do the same thing with their own.
Speaker 1:I think they. What they did was they took something that every belief system tries to do, but because of the way they portrayed homeschoolers and Christians, and particularly very conservative Christians, they had this evil bent to it where they talked about the Joshua generation Raising up Christians to infiltrate every level of society. Well, as someone who's generally conservative myself a conservative Christian the answer is yes, we do want Christians at every level of society. But if you ask anyone that's a part of a major belief system, let's say you're a Muslim or atheist, agnostic, oftentimes. That's just normal. You want people who think like you and have your values to be at the different levels of society. It's, that's normal. It's not this nefarious evil plot that they made it out to be. It's pretty normal actually, but anyway. So that's something they did and I wish they would have been a little even-handed To show, quote-unquote, normal homeschoolers and homeschoolers tend to do very well in college. They do very well in the standardized test scores that SATs and the ACT's. I'm more from up north, so SAT is what comes to mind for me, but I know from the sound of it y'all take ACT's more down here. But anyways, I wish there would have been a bit more even-handed portrayal of homeschoolers.
Speaker 1:But going back to One of their main contensions when they made the documentary and obviously all abuse is evil and so we denounce it, we reject it. Abuse of power as sexual abuse, all that why do you think that in those circles they gave a bunch of examples, but in those types of circles, super fundamentalist, super conservative, why do you think there's a lot of abuse there? Any, any ideas, any thoughts there? Or do you think that maybe they overplayed it and there's just abuse everywhere? What are our thoughts there?
Speaker 5:I think there is abuse everywhere you go. That are our hearts, as as humans are Wicked and deceitful, and anywhere you go, any religion, there's gonna be Abuse and everything. But I think what they do or what Bill got there did was Build like a system to where you don't really have anybody to go to. Like, let's say, one of the daughters was being abused, she goes to her mom and her mom's like okay, well, you know, we're not gonna talk about it, we're just gonna thank you for telling me that. You know we're done with that. You know, push it away, push it down, and so there's, there's not a really like safe place for them to go, and even if there were, it just is that cycle of, well, let's just focus on something else and not, you know, just Acknowledge it or fix it. Because it was created by a man who was very perverted and had all those women and stuff around them. The system that he built was obviously Could make it easy for women and young girls to be taken advantage of.
Speaker 1:Yes, and that's you have to be careful. One of the things I often talk about is in society you have to have checks and balances when you answer to one person, and one person alone. Unless that person's Jesus, who's perfect, that's any sort of human I guess this gets into the fact that we're Protestants here as well. If that person's human, there's going to be abuse. And so, mackenzie, I'm glad you brought up the fact that you always need checks and balances, people you can go to for safety, because if everything bottle next to one person and that one person's not great, you're kind of stuck.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So this kind of brings up a good point, for even it's easy for us to look at them and say, okay, well, I didn't believe what they believed anyway, so I can write them off. As you know, the abuse doesn't really bother me on a more personal level, but we have even as well I can speak for me and they at least people that we've put trust in, apologists or speakers that we really enjoyed have made really bad decisions and really messed up in the past, and I think this is a good reminder that if something like that happens let's say there's a figure, a religious figure in your life that does something bad and they do something wrong and your whole belief system comes crumbling down I think that might be an indication that your belief system wasn't based on the right person, because we have the entire scripture that tells us time and time again that there's only one man who did it perfectly, and all the examples that he chose to use in the Bible through Abraham, isaac, jacob, etc. They all messed up, david especially. They all made plenty of mistakes, so we didn't have to have someone new to mess up to show us that humans aren't perfect.
Speaker 2:Even take Abraham, for example, whenever they went to a new place. He told someone that his wife was his sister because he didn't want to get beat up or killed, so he almost sold his wife away. Then you have Jacob, who betrayed his own brother, etc. Etc. So these things shouldn't be things that hurt our faith. It should just be like something like yep, this happens, we're human and you know what, I'm not going to follow that person anymore. And ultimately it comes back to Jesus. Yeah, I agree.
Speaker 4:Another thing I saw that maybe they kind of portrayed more as like evil than I think they should have was like the kind of Because they kept bringing it up that they were like there's this umbrella thing where like, oh, this person is the authority of all of us, which, for a lot of Christians out there, we're complementarianism or compliment. How do you say it? How do you say it? Nate, complimentarians, complimentarians, nate's not, and I know.
Speaker 4:And so we believe that God has set like a role of authority where, like the man's over his household and all that stuff, and that's not bad in the way that God set it up. But they portrayed as this thing where it's like, I guess, because it's like society nowadays everyone's equal, everybody's on the same plane, they set it up to where like, oh, this is horrible, this is why there's so much abuse, when I don't really believe that was the main root cause, like maybe the guys took it too far and they pushed too much power because they weren't really doing it for the right reasons, but I don't think that's what was the main. The structure of like having authorities and stuff is not why there was abuse.
Speaker 2:I think what's at the heart of everything we've been saying is essentially this is that for anything like this that happens, you have to look at the intention behind it, in the sense of what does the thing itself actually teach and represent? And were they following that what they spoke? So, for example, with Christians, people who want to say, oh, christianity is wrong because this person did this or there's this abuse or etc. Etc. But is that what Christianity actually teaches? Because if we actually read what Jesus said, he said love your neighbor as yourself. Treat others as better than you treat yourself. If you go to Philippians, it talks about treating others as more important than yourself.
Speaker 2:So if you go to those things like was Christianity actually teach? Then you can see that this is a perversion of Christianity. So for the documentary to say, oh, look at this example of bad Christians, therefore Christianity bad. It would be like me saying, oh well, I had a bad interaction with someone who's an atheist, therefore all atheists are bad. But that doesn't make sense. That just means that those are bad atheists. Now we get down to the belief system of okay, what does atheism actually teach? That's where you can start making critiques of oh no, this is a bad belief system and it leads to bad people hypothetically I think that's a good point have to balance a whole bunch of things.
Speaker 1:So in the documentary they go over the Duggar family and then the broader belief system a Bill Gotherd and the IBLP institutes of basic life principles I think is what it was, and you present it and you see the abuses and obviously, as Christians so we don't like it, we denounce it, we're against it. But then at the same time, when you're portraying a group, you want to be even-handed and it's such a tricky middle ground to walk. But I don't think all conservative Christian families are like that. I don't think all Christians behave in that way. And but at the same time I think Isaac, you brought this out where what about gender roles? Some people would say, oh, that leads to abuse Automatically. If men are leaders and women are followers, abuse is right there. Other people would say, no, that's not inherently abusive. So that comes down to your worldview. One thing that they talked about was large families and in your experience let's talk about that a little bit Families with how would we define a large family to you? What do you think?
Speaker 5:Well, I think this is an area where I kind of agree with the Duggers. Actually a good bet. Now, not entirely, but as a society today, a lot of times, you know, with the invention of contraceptions, birth control, abortion, all these, all these things that we've created women think that they should be in control of how many children they have, when they have them, you know at what age, all this kind of stuff. But I do believe that God calls us to trust him with our womb and if he decides to bless us with 10 children, maybe that's what we, what we should have. I think children they made this very clear Children are blessings from the Lord. I 100% agree with that and that, as parents, it's our job to raise them up in the ways of the Lord and send them out. But I don't think, you know, if you don't have 20 kids, you're not saved, or anything like that. But I do think, like they said, children are gifts from God and you know why not be blessed with many?
Speaker 3:I agree with you in the sense of like God is in control of your womb. But I think where we would maybe disagree is that I think that you could be on if you, if there's someone that's on every single type of birth control because they want to choose when they have kids, god can still make a way. Like God is God, he's in control of anything. So even if someone's on birth control and God wants them to have kids, they can still get pregnant, you know. But yes, children are a blessing and a gift from the Lord. But I don't know that that means we have to have 20 plus kids like they are 19 kids.
Speaker 5:I think a lot of women think they'll automatically have 20 children. But you know, for one woman it may be 20 children, like Michelle, or it just may be two, like that's. That may be all you get, I think. A lot of the times we think like, oh, if I go off birth control I'm going to get pregnant right after I have another baby and stuff. A lot of people don't.
Speaker 4:A lot of people can't even get pregnant with one baby you know, some people get one, and then they keep trying and trying and they don't even get that second one I think sometimes we overly assume that we can have 20 children.
Speaker 5:You know, yeah, sometimes we can, working have one.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, and I think too, god sometimes calls us to other things, like you know. Like, obviously, like I want to be a mother one day, but I also am trying to get established professionally first, with my being in PT school, and so it's not really possible for me to be in PT school and have kids at the same time. I would not get through the program, and that's just a fact. But if God really wanted me to get pregnant right now, then I would take that with open hands and just say okay, god, that is your will for me, I'm going to have this child and it's going to be a blessing.
Speaker 1:Yeah yeah, a lot of different thoughts there on families, size of families. I think that, anyways, we could. That's a whole debate we could get into. I'm not wanting to do that, but it's something that the documentary highlighted so I thought we should go over it Overall with the documentary. The tone that the guests who were invited all mention that oftentimes invite guests to give cultural commentary, and I just noticed that the guests were of a certain kind of mindset. Typically you could tell they were against these things and I don't know if they invited anyone on. I'm trying to think through who really defended a conservative Christian lifestyle, big family, lots of kids. Did they invite any guests?
Speaker 3:I'm trying to remember the ginger talking because she, I'm pretty sure, is a Christian now.
Speaker 1:Yes. So I'm thinking yes, they had some people from the family extra yeah, I mean outside of the family, the guest to kind of get perspective on the situation. I just noticed they didn't definitely tended to lean a certain way with their biases. So I thought maybe you could have a couple different people as well to give the other side On some of these issues, like, for example, they had a youtuber who hosted Fundy Fridays where she went over just some of the things that went on in fundamentalist churches and that's fine and fundamentalist beliefs, and I have no problem with that.
Speaker 1:It's a free country, say what you will. But what about maybe healthy examples of families, fathers and mothers where there hasn't been abuse and they had a large family? It would have been nice to see some of that too. But anyways, like I said, it's tough to walk a middle ground between biases and advancing agenda but also accurate reporting, making a good documentary. So I'm not gonna act like. It's an easy job to do, it's easy to critique, but it's harder to create something that's very even handed Zkev any thoughts.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we have. We're gonna mention some of the things that came up.
Speaker 3:That was a little shocking yeah, so I wrote down three of probably the most shocking things that I heard in the documentary. The first one is that they don't allow any hand holding until you're engaged and no kissing until you're married. I don't know, that's just a little strange premier like contact address yeah.
Speaker 5:I actually remember an episode like this is one of the episodes I remember watching, but it was Jill and her husband and they were taking their engagement photos and the photographer was like okay, hold hands. And they're like no, we can never. And you know, it was like this big thing and they always had to be accompanied by chaperone and all this stuff.
Speaker 1:And well, it's because of the potential for sexual sin. And so here's the tough thing with if you are thinking like that. It can be tough in a marriage when, for the first time, as a man and a woman, you're by yourself.
Speaker 1:You don't know how the other person is. You haven't lived any sort of life with them. You don't see them making life decisions by themselves. So it's very I understand it. I don't agree with it. I understand it. But also, people who live like that are in for a rude awakening when they're by themselves.
Speaker 2:I think you can even have some less extreme cases that I think we've kind of shifted away from, sometimes for good, sometimes for worse, in the sense of now we've gotten to the point where I think there's a healthy balance, where you don't treat sex as if this is awful, evil thing when properly done so, like you have maybe a generation ago, where they would look sex is bad. You don't ever have it. And then, soon as you're married, like oh, it's good, you're good now. And then it's like why can't we just teach that is a good thing when properly used?
Speaker 2:I think we're starting to do a better job of that, because what you run into is like you're saying like their whole lives, kids are being told that this is bad, this bad, stay away, don't do it, don't do it. And then, soon as you get married, like I don't know, this is a bad thing, I feel wrong for doing this. I'm like you shouldn't have any. No, you shouldn't feel guilty about doing something that God created for Marriage. Like, so you have to ride that line between, yeah, this is something that's for marriage, but at the same time, like it's a good thing and that's a hard thing to balance.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and then the. The next thing that kind of just was really shocking was that I think it was Jill whenever she decided or whenever they started having kids, she didn't want any of that to be filmed, obviously because that's a very vulnerable moment, being at the hospital giving birth. But they ended up showing up anyways and she couldn't do anything about it at that point because she was like in labor. Well, they had unknowingly signed some kind of contract with the dad and None of the income from actually any of the episodes went to her. So she said the first, like seven years of her adult life she was not paid at all, even for the birth of her. Like that's the episode with that.
Speaker 1:Yeah, that was. That was terrible that they he, in an underhanded way, the father had them sign a contract which kind of made them unpaid workers, and so I don't know legally how that would hold up, but he definitely held it over their heads to make them be a part of the show.
Speaker 5:Yeah, and it's sad too. They talked about how the most profitable Episodes were the ones with the weddings and the given birth and all this stuff that was purely focused on the Children being exploited.
Speaker 3:Yeah, crazy. And then, lastly, I just wanted to bring up Whenever they would have like the IBLP gatherings and they would have certain groupings with like leaders. Well, there was a couple, or there was. One of them I specifically Remember was this girl who came in with these shoes, who had it, they were like a heel of like maybe a fourth of an inch. She showed it like with her fingers and they made her go into this Prayer room, which is an empty hotel room with no furniture, and you would literally stay in there for days sometimes, just like until they believe that you're truly repentant. And then another girl, this one, this one is crazy.
Speaker 1:Another, let's pause one moment. What Chloe's talking about is the IBLP. That organization, led by Bill Gotherd, had a bunch of spin-off buildings, camps, groups that People would send their, their teens to, their kids and their teens to for training, for learning and for educate all that stuff. And so some of the disciplinary measures that they would quote, unquote, you know, learn from, but not really it, just abuse Would be things like that being locked in a room, no furniture, where all you had was a Bible until you were seen as what. What did you?
Speaker 3:use.
Speaker 1:Repentant enough to be let out. But anyway, so that's IBLP the organization.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and then just just to add on to that, there was another girl who talked about how she Like started her period or something when she was at a gathering, and then she, so she went to the store to get like some tampons and they caught her with the tampons. They locked her in the prayer room because they said those were sticks of the devil and that you lose your virginity.
Speaker 1:Oh wow, yes. The finest the finest in, I guess, christian thought. I'm just kidding, it's not but, but what happens is. The tough thing is Chloe's outlining these things is, if you are not a Christian, let's say you're not, you're not. Well, you don't know what goes on in Christian circles and this is the only exposure that you have to Christianity in the church.
Speaker 1:You're probably like man. These people are nutcases and I really I don't know if I blame you. If this is your only exposure to the church, Well then you're gonna believe certain things that aren't true of all of us, but but yeah majority of us, or majority of us? Yeah, anyways, chloe, anything else from your notes?
Speaker 1:Yeah it's just again abuse, and it starts when there are there's no Accountability, when things are secretive and hidden and private, and really, as churches, there should be very, unless it's to protect a victim or protect someone. There's really no need to have a whole bunch of secret relationships and things done in private. Most of it Should be out in the open when it comes to how churches go about things, and a lot of our teachings or most of our teachings, if not all of them should be from the Bible itself, and hey, anyone can read that. But anyways, any any more thoughts on the documentary Shiny happy people? I'd be interested. It's on Amazon, amazon Prime or, who knows, maybe some other places. If you've watched the Documentary, I'd love to know your thoughts. You can leave a comment Facebook, instagram, twitter. Let us know what, what you think, and we'll respond. If you have anything else you'd like for us to watch and see and Review, let us know that as well. So what else should we review? Any thoughts? Movies, tv shows, what's that?
Speaker 1:Zeke wants to talk about gypsy rose anything else I Know Hillsong has had at least one documentary on Just some of the scandals there but anyways, that'd be good.
Speaker 2:That'd be a good one. I've watched that one already, so that'd be a good one, or Spencer when you need him.
Speaker 1:Spencer.
Speaker 3:Rest in peace.
Speaker 1:He's not dead but he's not with us. All right, friends, signing off. I hope you all have a wonderful day and we will come out with more episodes as weeks go by. You.