Hot or Not: Shiny Happy People
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I would like to make it clear that I am a “What Not to Wear” TLC person, not a “19 Kids and Counting” TLC person.
Stacey and Clinton were my nightly companions as a preteen and teenager during their replays at 2 AM. My chronic insomnia was soothed by their gentle makeovers for busy moms. This viewing habit is also the reason I dressed like a middle-aged woman from the time I was around 11 years old until I graduated from college.
So, when “Shiny Happy People” came out on Amazon Prime, my interest at first was minimal. The Duggars were mainly background noise to me when they were on the air. But I was a part of the Southern Baptist evangelical church until I was around twenty years old, and the fringes of our congregations were devoted to the lives of the 25 Duggars.
My fellow congregants’ attraction to the show was a reflection of the deep pull of fundamentalism on Southern Baptists then and now. The Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) is one of the most conservative mainstream sects of Christianity. Having been a member of that sect, I can vouch for how the preaching of certain churches can pull certain families in the SBC away from the mainstream and toward more fundamentalist ideas. Addressing that fundamentalism in this docuseries, alongside a clear-eyed interrogation into the Duggar family, is what makes “Shiny Happy People” successful.
Jim Bob’s Empire
From those on the outside looking in, the sprawling Duggar institution can seem like a quirky oddity revolving around some outdated white people. Upon interrogation, that quirkiness melts away into darker truths about why the Duggars made the choices they made, the role of women in their family, and the secrets hidden not just inside of their own walls but within the church that benefitted so greatly from their fame.
The Institute of Basic Life Principles (IBLP) lies at the heart of the docuseries, and also at the heart of the ultra-conservative homeschooling movement today. The ILBP’s mainstreaming by the Duggars and its seeming connections to Christianity give what is essentially a sexist, retrograde view of the world in which children are objects owned by their parents, a veneer of religious respectability.
This congregation is what launched the Duggars into their lifestyle of bearing children upon the earth at any costs without any boundaries. Spreading this mission to inhabit the earth with children raised in upright, Godly homes was always the Trojan horse of the TLC show.
At the head of the Duggar family stands Jim Bob Duggar, a man with a salt-of-the-earth name who raked in millions on the unpaid labor of his family. As an Arkansas state representative, Jim Bob experienced a taste of the limelight that led him to a calling to lead by example through an increasingly public platform centering around his fundamentalist family.
In addition to raising Jim Bob from the obscurity of the Arkansas State HOP, the show also raised the profile of Jim Bob within the ILBP, a place where the family’s ultraconservative bonifieds helped to legitimize the teaching of Bill Gothard. In looking into the origins of the Duggars, Gothard and his church become the subject of “Shiny Happy People” in what I think is the most successful turn of the show.
The trainwreck of the Duggars has been a pop sensation for almost twenty years at this point, and diving into the ILBP is what helps the viewer unravel the beginnings of the inevitable. Former members of the ILBP—homeschoolers, sexual assault survivors, and fellow parents—make up a good majority of the documentary’s airing time. These interviews reveal the disciplinary tactics and belief systems that lay underneath the docility of the Duggar children, the patriarchal and sexually abusive roots of the ILBP, and the far-reaching impacts the show had on Christian homeschoolers.
There’s Still Plenty of Gawk-Worthy Content Here
Some of the more bizarre scenes in the docuseries come from these insights. We watch young girls in modest dresses run up to tables with the Duggar teens to pronounce their commitment to “purity” (abstinence) until marriage, approaching fourteen- and fifteen-year-old kids with braces and middle parts as the celebrities they were in fundamentalist households at the time. Watching young Duggar women discussing their commitment to “purity” as a gift to their father makes these scenes all the more skin-crawly.
Another jarring scene goes deeper into the disciplinary tactics mentioned by Michelle Duggar in her book. A former ILBP follower Lara Smith says, “When I was watching the Duggars, the attitudes of the children are what I noticed right off the bat. My heart broke for them, because they were so calm, and they were so peaceful and well-behaved, and I knew what it took to get there.”
Smith is talking about the corporal punishment detailed by both Jill, one of the Duggars’ adult children, and their cousin Amy King. According to the women, it was common in the Duggar household for the children to be beaten with a rod to “correct their behavior.” Another chilling passage details Michelle’s own recommendation of “blanket training” wherein six month old babies are taught “obedience” by being hit every time they for an object just out of reach of the blanket they’ve been laid on.
Just because of the pure size of the Duggar family, imagining the prevalence of this kind of emotional and physical abuse in their home is staggering. But the documentary uses the other former ILBP followers to make it clear that this behavior was not just a Duggar household tradition. Gothard, the conference leader and homeschool advocate, is shown vehemently supporting the use of beatings to shape a child’s behavior well after society had moved on from this kind of discipline as a norm.
Why This Series Works
The salacious details about the Duggars themselves are interspersed into “Shiny Happy People,” but they lose their tabloid edge in the wider context of Christian fundamentalism’s growth in the early 2000s. The spectacle is deeply transparent especially when the directors dwell on how much money TLC made through their complicity as a vehicle for the ILBP ideology’s spread.
“19 Kids and Counting” grew in concert with the political connections of Jim Bob Duggar and later Joshua Duggar (before his fall from grace). A viewer can easily see how an assumingly innocent show about a giant, weird family was always more than it appeared to be on the surface. “Shiny Happy People” is at its best when it is asking bigger questions about what the Duggars taught America about church and state, religious liberty in the US, and the tolerance of misogyny and religious extremism from Christian fundamentalists today.
My final rating for this show is 4/5 green chiles. I wanted more academic interrogation of Christian fundamentalism (there are spotlights from sociologists and historians in certain episodes that really strengthen the conversation). I also think that there could have been a deeper dive into the political ramifications of the movement.
However, if you were skipping this one because you are not a “TLC kind of person,” I actually think this series is made for you. The bad vibes that kept most of us away from the show are actually at the center of “Shiny Happy People”. With this limited docuseries, you’ll get a first person look behind a lesser known fundamentalist cult, and also be granted the gift of some jaw-dropping revelations and gossip along the way.