UNITED STATES
Christian Today
Mark Woods CHRISTIAN TODAY CONTRIBUTING EDITOR 27 May 2015
he hit US reality TV series 19 Kids and Counting, now in its 10th season, is built around the Duggar family, whose parents Jim Bob and Michelle have brought their many children up according to a strictly conservative religious ethic.
They don’t allow their children to wear revealing clothing and practise ‘chaperoned courtship’ in which no physical contact is allowed. They are strict disciplinarians who have also become spokespeople for conservative causes such as the campaign against same-sex marriage, opposition to abortion and home-schooling children.
Now, however, one of the children – Josh Duggar, now married with three children – has been found to have molested five girls, reportedly some of his own sisters among them, when he was a teenager more than 10 years ago, in 2002-3. The case had expired under the statute of limitations by the time it was reported to the police in 2006 and the police report itself was ordered destroyed by a judge last week, though it has been widely leaked on the internet. …
So is there any way back for the Duggars? Perhaps: but this is what their defenders are getting wrong.
1. They’re minimising Josh Duggar’s offences. They seem to be saying that because he ‘repented’, everything’s OK. But you don’t avoid paying the price for wrongdoing just by saying the right things.
2. They aren’t talking about the victims. The focus is all on Josh and the Duggar family. Actually, five girls were involved too, and the impact on them is simply not known. They might have been deeply marked, or not at all, but it surely wasn’t the senior Duggars’ call to make.
3. They’re angry and defensive. The Duggar family has been inspirational for a lot of conservative evangelicals and the temptation is to defend them to the hilt. That makes them blind to the real issues. Yes, some of their critics might be godless liberals who just want to give them a good kicking, but that doesn’t mean they’re wrong to criticise.
4. They aren’t admitting that the senior Duggars got it wrong. They seem to have thought the problem wasn’t a problem because they’d ‘dealt with it’. But they sidestepped the law. If they’d done the right thing, they might not have had a TV show but they wouldn’t be facing this firestorm. …
And this is what the Duggars’ attackers are getting wrong.
1. Some of them are driven by an irrelevant agenda. The Duggars are poster-children for everything liberal America hates: they’re outspoken evangelical Christians and conservative right-wingers who don’t believe in sexual permissiveness and are against homosexuality, abortion and gun control and are in favour of the death penalty. A lot of the critics are only too glad to see them take a tumble.
2. Some of them are angry because they think they’ve been betrayed. A lot of people looked up to the Duggars in a way that probably wasn’t very healthy. This was an American family that really seemed to work and that had traditional values. Finding out that they weren’t perfect hurt people, and that fuels the bitterness. Some people need to step back and dial it down.
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