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Gothard Cult Influence on Harmful Red State Laws and Children: The Religion Rejection [1]

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Date: 2023-06-06  

I have been chipping away at what I initially thought would be a tawdry tell-all on the downfall of the freakish Duggar family, as I used to watch the show in the same vein that one might read the World Weekly News for entertainment and fun. I was surprised to find that as I go through the episodes, that more was focused on how influential the cult of Bill Gothard and his organizations were on the evangelical and other branches of Christian churches, and how the uneasy/unethical relationship between The Discovery Channel and the Duggar patriarch exploited the children and especially the daughters of that family. I’m still watching the series and felt outraged and compelled to research more into how this particular cult-y movement influenced Republican politics and government — and — produced (and is still producing) a generation of homeschooled citizens who rejected their upbringing and the authoritarian abuse it waged against their childhoods. I am interested in this topic as my own family has experienced on my mother’s side similar trauma. As a Native American child, she spent most of her childhood in Christian orphanages, similar to the boarding school experiences suffered by thousands of Native American children, and endured lifelong traumatic effects from her upbringing.

In the episodes I’ve watched so far, notwithstanding the discussion on how the Duggar mother and father evidently didn’t watch the eldest son or the others enough while he victimized his sisters, former homeschoolers and relatives/acquaintances of the Duggars who were involved in the Gothard cult gave frank and brave testimony on their own experiences of dealing with physical and mental abuse, neglect (of their education and safety) and exploitation of their bodies for heavy labor and parentification (girls being forced to care for large numbers of siblings). The IBLP and its other organization, ATI (Advanced Training Institute) would take in children and teens from willing parents to train them up to work obediently in hard labor jobs, become brainwashed in the restrictive tenets of Gothard’s version of Christianity and accept abuse, a heaping of shame and fear, and punishment in various forms. Parents who were a part of this cult were also trained to organize their homes in a similar manner, creating little fiefdoms where a descending level of autocracy was established in a recommended format: God/Jesus, Dad, Mom, Children.

Religious extremist Republican politicians since the heyday of Gothard, who stepped down in 2016 due to allegations of sexual abuse (Christianity Today), have since carried the mantle of zealotry to re-engineer society in a similar fashion: outlawing abortion, banning books, demolishing public education, doing away with child labor laws, implementing restrictions on voting and living for women, gays, people of color and trans citizens. Most of all, the GOP wants to do away with democracy and put in place their own version of the umbrella of authority: at the top, an imaginary God who seems to love money and the wealthiest more than anybody and then government leaders who dole out restrictive laws on the rest of us unbelievers.

I’m not recommending that you watch the “Shiny Happy People” show to see for yourself how awful this system is. I would read how the survivors experienced it and what they did to raise themselves up from truly terrible childhoods. One such person is author is R. L. Stollar, who created Homeschoolers Anonymous, and who advocates on behalf of people and children who went through this trauma. Writers and educators like him are peeling back the myths created by The Discovery Channel’s farce on the Duggars that these childhoods were happy ones. With his permission, I am putting the link to a copy of a speech he made specifically at a conference on religious trauma in 2022, called “Traumatic Homeschooling: How Evangelicals Use Education to Totalize” (link). The lack of regulation is shocking and contributes to substantial unreported abuse, which, take it from me, lasts inter-generationally.

I’ll leave it with a couple of quotes: “Totalism is a concept first developed by psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton in his 1961 book Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism. Totalism is related to totalitarianism, and signifies a psychological form of totalitarianism — the totalitarian monitoring and control of another individual’s behaviors and thoughts. Lifton uses the term to describe the attributes of ideological movements and organizations that aim for total control over people’s behaviors and thoughts. While these movements and organizations may vary in design and goals, they follow common patterns and cause predicable types of psychological damage to those within them….Evangelical Christians are interested in creating a parallel society. They are interested in creating safe spaces, essentially, where their children will never encounter people or ideas that contradict their teachings until those children are properly equipped to defend those teachings and not stray from them despite any evidence that they are wrong. This is why evangelical Christians invest significantly in fields of study like apologetics and worldview studies. There are books and homeschool curricula and summer camps and college programs all dedicated to keeping children and young adults from straying from white evangelical Christian values—usually defined as white supremacy, Christian Nationalism, capitalism, and the supremacy of heterosexual marriage and sexuality….. By stripping children of their wills, by supplanting their children’s unique and diverse identities with the identity demanded by white evangelical leaders and other power holders, evangelicalism is teaching—and homeschooling is enabling and empowering it—that children have no rights to themselves. That they are not their own. That they owe their bodies, minds, and souls to those more powerful than them.”

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/6/6/2173711/-Gothard-Cult-Influence-on-Harmful-Red-State-Laws-and-Children-The-Religion-Rejection

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