Another Duggar son has been charged with sexually abusing a child.
This time it’s Joseph Duggar, the seventh born and third son.
(I wrote this piece before news broke that his wife Kendra has also been charged with 4 counts of false imprisonment, among other things. I’m not surprised, and I do hope their children are in safe hands.)
My social media feeds are replete with posts about how fundamentalism, and especially the Bill Gothard type that the Duggars were raised with, are so focused on misogyny with a fixation on sexual purity that it’s almost like a petri dish for raising abusers.
And I have a few things swirling in my head I wanted to get written down.
I’d like to focus on WHY exactly authoritarianism and fundamentalism lead to pedophilia. And we’re going to be connecting a bunch of different dots, so grab a cup of tea (or coffee) and pull up a comfy chair and let’s get started.
Just a note everyone! This article appeared on my Substack last Friday–you can subscribe to me on Substack here!
I usually repost my Substack articles here, because I like to keep them on my blog which I totally own for posterity, etc.
This week, though, I’m super glad I have something I already wrote to post, because I’m rather busy with my new grandbaby who arrived last week! I’m at my younger daughter Katie’s house all week on toddler duty as she gets settled in with the new little one.
We’re all delighted, if a little bit tired! So if I’m a bit quiet on my social media this week, that’s why!
What is authoritarianism?
Let’s first take a huge step back and look at the larger systems. Last August Rebecca and I recorded a really important podcast on authoritarianism and what it has to do with evangelicalism. Authoritarianism and evangelicalism aren’t just a Venn diagram; they’re pretty much a circle. Most evangelicals score high on fundamentalism scales; and the fundamentalism scale fits perfectly on the right wing authoritarian scale.
So evangelicals tend to be authoritarians.
Interestingly, other Christian groups actually score quite low on authoritarianism scales, and evangelicals in other countries score lower than evangelicals in the United States. So authoritarianism is a hallmark of American evangelicalism, not of Christianity as a whole.
And what’s an authoritarian? It’s a person who is eager to submit to authority; who believes in hierarchy; who sees the world in terms of us vs. them. They’re the people who are likely to go along with a Hitler or an authoritarian leader. And that’s why academia studies them; if we can understand what makes people authoritarian, then we can potentially avoid another Hitler situation.
Authoritarians tend to see the world in terms of a zero sum game; somebody has to be a winner, and somebody has to be a loser. We can’t all be winners.
So authoritarians are drawn to religious and political systems that make sure that THEY are the ones who win, and that figure out which group should lose.
Remember that, because it’s going to become important later.
Now let’s turn to parenting philosophies.
Parenting can be based on either connection or control.
When parenting instead is based on connection, parents attune to their children’s needs and emotions. The child feels safe and so they are able to explore their emotions and desires. Instead of suppressing their feelings and needs, their parents teach them how to regulate.
Their orientation to the outside world is one of curiosity and openness.
When parenting is based on control, parents are not focused on attuning to what their children need or want, or who their children are meant to be. Instead, parenting based on control is focused on making sure children’s outward behaviour makes life as easy as possible for the parent, while painting the parent in the best possible light.
The aim is for compliant children who do not bother the parent, act up in public, or make demands of the parent. The aim is a child who is very easy to raise because they wouldn’t think of doing anything wrong.
And how do you do that? You focus on obedience through punishment. Children are punished if they do something a parent doesn’t like or inconveniences the parent. Children learn that their needs won’t go met, and so eventually they stop trying to get needs met. They don’t expect anything at all. They lose track of their actual feelings and needs, and suppress them.
Their orientation to the world is one of suspicion and fear.
Controlling parenting is based in hierarchy
Parents have authority over children who must obey and do what they say, so there is a hierarchy from the beginning.
And the only people who get their needs and wants met are those at the top of the hierarchy. Everyone else’s needs are suppressed. Thus, one’s ability to get one’s emotional needs met is based on one’s position in the hierarchy.
It is vitally important for people in these systems, then, to find a way to have hierarchy over others. And who can you have hierarchy over? Those smaller and less powerful than you.
Small children are at the bottom of the hierarchy. Women are at the bottom of the hierarchy. Racial minorities are at the bottom of the hierarchy.
Women often gain some semblance of control by being very controlling of children, or by adopting a teaching/mentoring role for other women and young girls, where they teach them to obey men. By carrying water for the patriarchal controlling system, they can gain some semblance of recognition and admiration, and by becoming very judgmental of other women, they can gain some feelings of self-worth.
Remember: in controlling parenting, people are often unable to even name or understand their own emotions. The only way to feel safe in this system is to feel as if you have power over others. You’re so out of touch with your emotions that you channel your needs for connection into a need for control.
This controlling orientation to the world affects our sexuality.
Sexuality is at heart a drive for connection. When we are raised with connection as our parenting style, then the way we feel safe is to express our emotions and be heard. People raised in connection feel safe through intimate relationships.
Thus, intimacy drives libido, as it should. When we feel known, when we’re able to be vulnerable with someone that we also share attraction for, then we want to express that sexually.
But if our feelings of safety are not based on connection but instead based on control, our sexuality will be severely distorted. Then our sexuality becomes a vehicle to express what we need to feel safe—in this case our sexuality becomes a way to express our control.
Combine this with purity culture (which we wrote about extensively in our book She Deserves Better), and you have a surefire recipe for how to raise a pedophile.
Doug Wilson, Secretary of Defence’s Pete Hegseth’s pastor, who is a slavery apologist and a misogynist, admits this drive to control is intrinsic to his own sexuality. He says in his book Fidelity:
His arousal pathway is entirely built on control, not connection. He admits that feeling connected with his wife and caring about her in bed would be a turn off. Eroticism is based on power over someone you can control and dominate.
Do you see how this fits in with pedophilia?
Misogyny and authoritarianism go hand in hand
You can’t have misogyny without authoritarianism, because misogyny is based on the idea that one group is more important than the other. It’s based on hierarchy.
This is one reason why focusing only on misogyny and purity culture when it comes to the Duggars can miss the mark. It is not only misogyny that is the problem. It is the whole system that is based on control. It is patriarchal authoritarianism.
Even if you aimed to eliminate misogyny, if you are still in an authoritarian system, you won’t be able to get rid of it. Authoritarianism requires in groups and out groups. To free ourselves of misogyny, we have to free ourselves of hierarchical forms of Christianity which by their very necessity become exploitative and abusive.
Let’s put this all together:
When people are raised on control not connection, they find their safety in being able to control others, rather than in true connection.
Thus, life by necessity must be about winners and losers. And thus it must have groups that are lower on the hierarchy than others—especially women and children.
When your safety is based on control over others, this will affect your arousal pathways, and thus we shouldn’t be surprised when people raised under control become pedophiles.
Tragically, American evangelicalism is largely based on control.
Christianity as a whole is not, and even evangelicalism as a whole is not, but the American expression of it is. And that’s one of the reasons why we see so many sexual abuse scandals in the American evangelical church.
You simply cannot have an institutional system that is based on control over others not have sexual abuse scandals. An authoritarian, hierarchical system requires both winners and losers, people at the top and people at the bottom. It conditions people to only feel safe if they are in control over others, and thus a hierarchical system warps people’s sexuality so that abuse becomes inevitable. Sexuality has been about power not connection.
We should not be surprised that two Duggar men are apparently pedophiles
What should surprise us would be if there are not more. When we see a church caught up in an authoritarian, evangelical view of Christianity, and we haven’t seen abuse scandals, our approach should be—where are the scandals that are being covered up? Because we know they have to be there.
Authoritarianism breeds abuse.
I’m so heartbroken for the Duggar girls and for the victims of Josh and Joseph, and there are likely many more that we do not know about. I hope the victims are able to escape an authoritarian strain of Christianity in order to find real healing.
And I’m so angry at the Duggar parents who covered up their son Josh’s abuse, and who knows what else. I’m angry that they raised their kids in such an unhealthy way. And I’m even angrier that the evangelical church bought it at the time hook, line, and sinker.
What do you think? Why are these cases coming to light? What do you think is the commonality? Let’s talk in the comments!
I actually found you from the online fundie snark communities since a lot of them like you for your Christian marriage book commentaries. Though nowadays I wonder if those communities devoted to hate watching these people are doing more harm than good. I felt a lot better mentally when I left them behind and I think by giving these people attention you are just giving them what they want. Even if it is negative attention because it fuels their desire to be martyrs. It is probably better if these people are left alone at this point and let the authorities deal with them because I have a feeling this isn’t the last time something like this will be revealed.
I think these cases are coming to light because the victims/survivors are sick and tired of hiding and feeling like victims and they don’t want this to be happening to the next generations.
Enough is enough.
The commonality is that authoritarianism and patriarchy spaces infantilize women causing them to sound like little girls. In one of the YouTube videos I saw of the Duggar parents being interviewed about the abuse allegations of their oldest son when he was a teenager, Mrs. Duggar, in her little girl voice (which I’m not sure if it’s how she really sounds or she has made herself sound like that) said that they have made it a rule in their household that girls do not sit on the laps of men or boys. So, in these circles it is taught that teenage boys cannot babysit little girls therefore little girls are being sexualized at a young age. Yet, teenage girls can babysit both boys and girls. I see this in churches. They don’t let teenage boys or grown men help out in the nursery or children’s church but they can help out with the youth. I asked that once in a mixed group Bible study and no one could give me an answer.
I think that is why I’ve always struggled to just be friends with the opposite sex my entire life because the church has sexualized everything and even trained boys to become pedophiles. Why are there so many men wanting to date women half their age? Even in the secular world.
“The commonality is that authoritarianism and patriarchy spaces infantilize women causing them to sound like little girls.”
When I first heard Michelle Duggar’s voice, my first reaction was “Josh isn’t the only Pedo in the family!” SHE SOUNDED LIKE SHIRLEY TEMPLE IN A 1930s MOVIE! I kept expecting her to any second break into “On the Good Ship Lollypop” or “Animal Crackers in My Soup”!
What type of man would want a wife/bang doll who acts and sounds like that EXCEPT a Pedo?
It’s called the “Fundy Baby Voice” and is apparently a Mark of her Salvation or something. Especially when the Fundy Baby Voice includes “breathy”, like a bad impression of Marilyn Monroe. To me “breathy voice” means sexual. So the ideal Fundy Baby Voice is supposed to sound like a hot-to-trot four-year-old child nymphomaniac. Riiight. Again, who would think that Sex-Ay EXCEPT a Pedo?
(SIT DOWN, HUMBERT! NABOKOV WROTE YOU AS AN *UNRELIABLE* NARRATOR! COMPLETELY SUBMERGED IN YOUR DELUSION!)
P.S. 40 years ago, I had a girlfriend who DID have a “soft, sweet voice”. But hers was an ADULT voice, not a Fundy Baby Voice.
The author discusses how, in training women to present as “sweet,” compliant, and needing “leadership,” fundamentalist cultures train men to prefer those qualities. In other words, when girls/women are trained to be childish (“fundie baby voice” and everything that goes with that) boys/men learn to be attracted to people who don’t act like adults, with predictable but horrible consequences.
It seems to me that all of these elements, and more, are present. Mistrust of outside authorities (or psychological help!) A belief that the group/family’s appearance of perfect harmony and goodness is their “witness.” Widespread lack of real maturity even amongst supposed leaders, making confronting real problems productively near impossible. It goes on and on.
Oops, somehow I cut off the link to the article I was talking about:
https://kaeleytrillerharms.substack.com/p/men-are-attracted-to-weakness-a-theology?utm_source=%2Finbox%2Fhistory&utm_medium=reader2&utm_campaign=posts-open-in-app&triedRedirect=true
Here in Scotland last year I was pursued somewhat by a Reformed Calvinist Complementarian pastor-to-be in a church organised on para-military lines.
I ran away away from in 2024 because his lovebombing was off the scale and I’m aromantic so it felt like being beamed on by ten Saharan suns.
I most struck by his demeanor of looking at me which was anything but ‘pure’.
I looked up Andrew J Baumans ‘Pornographic Style Of Relating’ and everything about this young man made sense.
(Perhaps he embraced ‘Depravity’.)
It’s interesting that he was keen on me at all because I’m the furthest that one can get to ‘baby sounding’ or ‘little girl’ like.
He had an aversion to the young women in his orbit.
I suppose there are outliers in all spheres of life….
Out here in the States, the More-Calvinist-than-Calvin types seem to be competing in a one-upmanship game of “More Utterly Depraved than Thou”. Like it was Proof of My Predestined Election or something.
Your framing of that Doug Wilson quote is SPOT ON. He is claiming to simply be describing what sex *is*, claiming that *by definition* it has to be one partner dominating the other and can’t be about mutual pleasure, but in reality he’s telling us about himself. *He* is not able to imagine any way that sex can be about mutual pleasure. Sounds like a *him* problem!
The actual quote is “The Man Penetrates, Colonizes, Conquers, Plants. The Woman Lies Back and Accepts.”
(Which is why to me he will always be “PCCP Wilson”.)
Real “Slave Girls of Gor” vibe there.
Or Rapist mentality — same thing.
I remember John Norman, the author of Gor saying in a non Gor book he wrote that humanity could have gotten to the moon sooner if it weren’t for feminism even though there were plenty of female employees at NASA that were invaluable to making the moon landing happen in the first place…
He got cancelled in the 80s by feminists before being cancelled by the woke mob was “cool” which is definitely an achievement!
These men probably wish they could be isekai’d to Gor even though most of them probably don’t know how to actually fight at all as much as they clam it is their job to protect their women.
Bit of oral Lore regarding Gor fandom:
There’s this story going around that John Norman was guesting at a con (probably DragonCon in Atlanta) and naturally all the Gorians flocked to the con to see his face and hear his voice. Finding out their beloved Author of Gor was this mousy wet noodle of a man constantly submitting to a wife twice his size and weight — “Yes, Dear… Yes, Dear… Whatever YOU Say, Dear…”
Obviously Gor was his wish-fulfillment fantasy, as he dared not raise hand against She Who Must Be Obeyed.
The reason I think this happened at a DragonCon is because that con has a lot of stories along those lines. Like the bootleg BDSM suspension rig in one of the hotel rooms attached to the room fire sprinkler; put enough weight on it and it pulls the sprinkler out of the ceiling and floods out two or three floors of the con hotel. Room occupants set a world record packing up and checking out of dodge before the hotel could notice.
Unfortunately, they used their real names and credit cards for the room so they weren’t hard for hotel management to track down and exact a terrible revenge..
“Women often gain some semblance of control by being very controlling of children, or by adopting a teaching/mentoring role for other women and young girls, where they teach them to obey men.”
AKA “Serena Joy Syndrome”.
(as in “Serena Joy just can’t stop lecturing the Handmaids, can she?”)
That might have happened to Kendra with her and Joes kids. Since CPS looked into her and found her using seclusion inappropriately among other things with the kids.
On Shiela’s YouTube video about this post, one of the comments said that when Golden Boy Josh was raping his sisters, the family solution was to lock the daughters into one big bedroom for their protection and that Kendra might have been doing the same. After all, that IS a Duggar Family Solution.
The explanation here of sex being either about connection or about control is a light bulb moment for me. It definitely makes sense.
Another piece of the Duggar/fundamentalist pedophilia culture that helped me was this piece on Substack: https://hollymathnerd.substack.com/p/ten-loads-of-laundry
the Bare Marriage team has talked a lot about the difference between noticing vs lusting. This piece just gave me another light-bulb moment for it: “In a normally functioning moral development, a person learns to navigate a spectrum. A glance is different from a stare. A stare is different from a fantasy. A fantasy is different from a conversation. A conversation is different from a touch. The gradations matter — not because every step on that spectrum is equally acceptable, but because the spaces between them are where conscience gets built. . .In this world, a glance at an immodestly dressed woman is already a sin of significant spiritual weight. The boys were not taught that looking was a minor thing to be managed with ordinary self-discipline. They were taught that looking was a catastrophic failure — a door opened to Satan, a grievous wound to their purity, a thing requiring immediate intervention by their sisters and eventual confession to spiritual authority.
The distance between a glance and an assault, morally and psychologically, was reduced to almost nothing. You are already a sinner the moment your eyes move wrong. The category of fallen, impure, in need of redemption kicks in at the lowest possible threshold.”
I remember feeling exactly the same way as a teenage girl–that even having a crush on a boy, much less any hormonal urges I experienced, were signs of my utter depravity and that I was disappointing God. My sister slept with the first guy she kissed because she felt like she’d already gone too far and was damaged beyond repair. I’m sure we’re not alone in those experiences but we definitely felt like it at the time.
“The gradations matter — not because every step on that spectrum is equally acceptable, but because the spaces between them are where conscience gets built. . .”
But when Everything is Sin-Levelled UP, there is only “THOU SHALT NOT” with God’s Hell-gun pressed to the back of your head, one up the spout and the safety off. Any moral development frozen at the toddler level: Avoid Punishment At All Costs.
“FOR GOD HATES SIN WITH SUCH A PERFECT HATRED…” — probably Roy Sessions’ “The Calvary Road”
“My sister slept with the first guy she kissed because she felt like she’d already gone too far and was damaged beyond repair.”
This is called “Extreme Virgin/Whore Dichotomy”. I am personally familiar with it from the inside, and it messes up your head BAD.
(I was NOT raised in or around Christianese Purity Culture — far from it — but ended up internalizing many of its tropes.)
Yes, exactly. When you set the expectation that they won’t even see or look, then the all-encompassing shame comes early, and you’re already a helpless sinner. That’s a great way of explaining it!
I have a question. And I am asking this in an academic way. Is “purity” it’s own form of pornography? To be sure, purity exists on the opposite end of the warped sexuality continuum. But is that opposite extreme end just as harmful? Is exposing young boys to hardcore purity as dangerous as exposing them to hardcore pornography? Does it warp their view of human sexuality so much that it incites them to sexually abuse young girls? Looking at the Duggars and now Carvers it has me wondering.
” Is “purity” it’s own form of pornography?”
VERY GOOD QUESTION.
Opposite ends of the Spectrum are generally not good. Communism begets Objectivism, both total opposites on the surface, both identical beneath, both locked into a fight unto death, at each others’ throats for all eternity like those half-black and half-white aliens from that 1968 Star Trek episode.
“The devil sends sins in matched opposing pairs, so that in fleeing one we embrace the other.” — C.S.Lewis(?)
“If we must stand because Enemy Christians kneel, that is Protestantism taken to its most sterile extreme.” — Thomas Howard, “Evangelical is Not Enough”
And the fact that before the Dispensation of Hal Lindsay, there were TWO archetypes of Antichrist: The Fanatic Persecutor (“Anti” in the sense of “Against”) and The Slick Deceiver (“Anti” in the sense of “imitation of”). And it always struck me that these two work very well as a tag team: In Fleeing the Fanatic Persecutor Antichrist, you take refuge with (and take the Mark of) the Slick Deceiver Antichrist.
And my longstanding observation that Christians are just as screwed-up sexually as everybody else, just they show it in the opposite direction.
While exposing boys and men to hardcore pornography would be bad . Purity in wG its taught can cause serious problems too.
Having boys/and men have causal exposure to seeing the female body can help foster more self control. Because of Habituation.
Habituation is when a person is casually exposed to a stimulus the effect of the stimulus over time.
When boys and men are casually exposed to women’s bodies ,like seeing them at the mall, beach or around town can contribute to a form of sexual habituation.
Sexual habituation is when sexual arousal or excitement decreases after repeated exposure to the same partner, stimulus, or routine. It’s the same basic learning process
So if a man gets used to seeing women’s bodies it helps with habituation, he still will be attracted and get aroused but it won’t be as much of an effect.
But the modesty? Purity teachings short circuit and prevent habitation by hyping up, tabooing, hyper-vigilance and telling men to avoid seeing women’s bodies for fear of “lusting” the fear of seeing them amplifies the sexual tension,
Viewing porn can be the extreme opposite the hardcore purity” but ironically thier the two sides of the same coin oftentimes.
Look at men in strict Islamic cultures, where the glimpse of an eye or ankle beneath the burqa triggers uncontrollable “lusting”. (Saudi Arabia — where Purity is enforced by religious police with whips — also has THE highest per-capita level of porn consumption.)
I think in some ways it does. I wouldn’t say that it’s as bad as hardcore porn because hardcore porn is actual people being abused. But I do think that it sets people up to abuse in a similar way.
In addition to the pedo angle, I want to know when one of the Duggar sons comes out of the closet.
Just by raw probability numbers (and the fact that later in the birth order seems to up the odds), one of those Duggar sons should be Gay.
This is fascinating, i asked my mum if her and dad felt this need to make us obedient children when we were little and she admitted her and dad did do this.
Are there any books that specifically deal with how parenting styles focused on control obedience create a distorted type of sexuality in people?
I’m not sure offhand, but I did write an article about the sexual elements in spanking and the research around it!
The Duggars cult, Institute of Basic Life Principles basically views any men’s/boys kind of sexual attraction as lust(sin) .
Then they treat really horrible extreme predatory behavior and actions as normal sins that boys and men normally struggle with.
In there handbooks they heavily empathize that men and boys shouldn’t see certain parts of a woman’s body because they might lust but they go beyond that and emphasize that boys/men shouldn’t see real young girl children’s body’s because they may lust and that even female toddlers have to be fully covered to prevent this. This basically conditions boys growing to see them in a sexual way and The IBLP workbooks talk about sexual sin and sexual assault and even say if a molestation happens, they suggest it happened because the girl was not adequately clothed and tempted and caused the boy or man to do prevent it. This screws up boys causing to think that these predatory inclinations are just normal sins that men normally have. If it wasn’t why do they talk about like they do?
It’s a perverse way of downplaying extremely disturbing behavior and actions as normal man sins and the perpetrators need easy forgiveness from their wives and family.
Yes, exactly. It’s sin levelling really, when having a sexual feeling about an adult is seen as the same as abusing a toddler. Because it’s all “sexual sin.”