Not a Book: Shiny Happy People

My interest in the weirder side of American religion and cults is well known on this blog – see my posts on things like Educated, Unfinished: Short Creek, LulaRich and so much more – so the fact that I’m writing about the new Amazon Prime documentary about the Duggar family and the IBLP should probably come as no surprise to you.

In case you haven’t come across the Duggar family (lucky you?), parents Michelle and Jim Bob believe in having as many children as you can and featured in a string of documentaries and later a TLC docu-series starting with 14 kids and counting, where the number in the title increased as more kids were born and eventually also started to feature the eldest kids marriages. This initial series was cancelled after allegations emerged that their eldest son Josh (all the kids have J names) had molested girls (including some of his sisters) when he was a teenager. But TLC then commissioned Counting On – focusing on the elder daughters as they married and had kids. This ran for a number of seasons until Joshua was arrested and charged with possession of child sexual abuse images. He has now been convicted and is serving a jail lengthy jail sentence. Across four episodes, Shiny Happy People examines all of this and puts it into context of the “church” that they belong to – Bill Goatherd’s Institute of Basic Life Principles – and where it all sits in the right wing American Christian fundamentalist ecosystem.

I was not a viewer of the …And Counting series, but was aware of the series because of the press coverage of it and watched the first episode Counting On to see how on earth they were going to deal with the elephant in the room (spoiler: they did not deal with it) and continued watching in horrified fascination at a world where people got engaged after a handful of dates, were saving their first kiss for the altar and not allowed to be alone with their future spouse until they were married. And that’s before you get into the fact that the Duggar daughters – in their late teens when they married – had spent their childhoods bringing up their younger siblings, and were giving birth on sofas at home with no professional medical help. Horrifying. But no matter how bad you think that sounds, it’s all a lot worse when you’ve watched the documentary and have the rest of the context. It’s bad.

The documentary came out on Friday last week, and I had watched all four episodes before formula one qualifying started on Saturday afternoon. To be honest I could have finished it on Friday night, but it was nearly midnight by the time we finished part three and I was worried I’d have nightmares if we carried on. I was expecting it to take me longer to watch, because traditionally Him Indoors isn’t interested in this sort of documentary – but he came in as I was watching part one and got caught up in the horror of watch he was seeing and wanted to keep watching. He wasn’t fully aware of everything that had gone on and what the family actually believed and so his face as it all unrolled was an absolute picture. There was also quite a lot of ranting.

I’m not going to say this is a fun watch. It’s not. It has child abuse, child sex abuse and possibly the most horrifying public spanking demonstration you will ever see. I definitely came away feeling icky with myself for ever having watched the TV show – even though I was watching because I thought their lives were insane and ridiculous. But the documentary is incredibly interesting and illustrative of a lot of things that you might have seem bubbling along in American culture and wondered what was going on. I recommend it – but pay attention to the warnings at the start of each episode and expect to be horrified by what you see.