The mission of Issues in Perspective is to provide thoughtful, historical and biblically-centered perspectives on current ethical and cultural issues.

I grew up in the late 1950s and was in high school in the early 1960s.  I was immersed in the culture of Protestant fundamentalism.  My parents loved the Lord but were also immersed in that culture.  In my family, Christianity was defined by a series of rigid rules.  Behavior, dress and entertainment were all regulated by our church.  I heard little about an intimate, personal walk with Jesus Christ.  Instead, our youth group leader directed us to destroy any rock and roll records, burn all playing cards in the house and never go to a Hollywood movie, to a dance or to plays in a theater.  We were taught not to even hold hands with members of the opposite sex.  As I progressed in high school I became more and more uncomfortable with my parent’s faith.  In college, I rebelled against it, rejecting their faith and their church.

I made quite a mess of my life in the years that followed and in 1972-73 came to faith in Jesus Christ.   Thankfully, over the next two years, my pastor mentored me.  He modeled a vibrant faith that emphasized God’s grace, not rules and control.  He helped me to understand that the struggle with sin was part of the process of sanctification.  Slowly I began to see and experience God’s grace, His mercy and His love.

In the mid-1970s my wife and I attended Bill Gothard’s Institute in Basic Youth Conflicts, one of the variety of ministries developed under The Institute for Basic Life Principles (IBLP), founded by Gothard in 1961. [In the decades that followed, he built the non-denominational Christian ministry, which eventually included multiple campuses, workshops, a homeschool program, and countless seminars.]  We received a thick, red book in which we were encouraged to take copious notes.  The Seven Basic Life Principles characterized the essence of the seminar and gave structure to the book we received.  [Those seven principles are:  design, authority, responsibility, suffering, ownership, freedom and success.]

The weekend seminar was almost overwhelming for two fairly young Christians.  We learned of the umbrella of authority that Gothard argued was central to living as a Christian.  That umbrella was established by God and affected the Christian’s relationships with parents, government and the church.  The husband has authority over his wife and his children.  He is to exercise that authority in every facet of life.  It was very hard for us to avoid using the term “control.”  It also led us to see this authority as comprehensive and all-encompassing.  We left the weekend challenged by a new perspective on what it meant to be a Christian.  But, for me, it also brought back memories of my teenage years.  I was very uncomfortable with what we had learned and quite honestly a bit confused.  During the weeks that followed, we basically chose to ignore much of what we learned that weekend.  In hindsight, I am thankful for that.

I have reached the conclusion that Gothard’s entire ministry lacks a healthy emphasis on God’s grace.  This was confirmed when I recently watched the Amazon Prime documentary series called “Shiny Happy People.” It’s centered on the Duggar family and the teachings of Bill Gothard. The Duggars were the focus of a popular 2008 reality television show called “19 Kids and Counting” and its 2015 spinoff, “Counting On.”  As I watched the documentary, my heart grieved deeply as I watched a family consumed by a legalistic, control-oriented brand of Christianity.  I kept asking, where is God’s grace in all this?  The Duggars became the face of Gothard’s movement for a time, but underneath that façade were deep psychological dysfunction, hypocrisy and pain.  Many lives have been shattered as a result.

In 1993, evangelical columnist David French experienced an exposure to Gothard that was similar to mine.  Here are a few of his comments:

• “The beating heart of Gothardism was a combination of authority and superstition. One of Gothard’s keys to Christian life was something called the ‘umbrella of protection.’ So long as the wife placed herself under the husband’s authority and the husband placed himself under Christ’s authority, then the family would flourish. Defying Gothard’s teachings, by contrast, placed you outside of this zone of God’s protection and rendered you (and your family) vulnerable to disaster, destruction and even death.”
• “When I went to the Gothard seminar, I didn’t see strange people. I saw people seeking community and certainty in the most important relationships of their lives . . . They loved God, and they wanted to learn how to serve him better. They loved their spouses and children and wanted to make sure that their marriages were healthy and their children thrived. Many of them came to the seminar facing serious challenges. Their marriages were in trouble, or there was conflict with their kids.  They found community in the people who flocked to the churches like the one I visited in Louisville. Certainty, however, was elusive. The formulas they received from Gothard seemed to work for some, didn’t work for others, and deeply damaged many, many people—especially women and children. The Duggars are a prime example. As the Amazon series recounts, even as the Duggar parents, Jim Bob and Michelle, were enormous celebrities in Gothard-world, extolling the virtues of his vision, they were concealing terrible secrets about their family.  Their oldest son, Josh, had molested four of his sisters. Later, he admitted to cheating on his wife. And now he’s in prison for possessing child pornography. The Duggars weren’t the model family they were presented as. They were in crisis.”
• “With authority so central to Gothardism (and so many other fundamentalist movements), the quest for certainty turned into a quest for control. The explicitly patriarchal structure fed the will to power in troubled men. Failures in the family would lead to tighter controls, more rules, and an enormous amount of guilt and shame. After all, the principles Gothard taught were supposed to work. At the seminar I attended Gothard even taught that following his principles would make a young woman more beautiful. Obedience would improve her ‘countenance.’ If a family struggled, the principles weren’t wrong—they were.  A healthy church can provide community. But it must also teach its members that . . . humility is essential to the Christian faith and the will to power is antithetical to the example of Jesus. Otherwise, America’s conservative Christian communities will continue to face different versions of the same rigid fundamentalism. They’ll be tempted to follow more gurus like Bill Gothard . . . The quest for certainty and control can tempt people of every faith and no faith. We crave control, even when attempts to establish control sow destruction in our loved ones’ lives.”

Arguably, our God is a God of order and structure.  You see it in the world He created and in the institutions he formed, namely the family, the state and the church.  But our God is also a God of grace.  Chuck Swindoll has written masterfully on the centrality of God’s grace in our lives.  He defines grace as “God’s favor shown to those of us who don’t deserve it, cannot earn it, and will never be able to repay it.”  He also argues that “Jesus never intended the Christian life to become drudgery, predictable, or laden with a litany of rules. That was the religion of the Pharisees, who, with their nitpicking ways, managed to squash all the joy out of life. They shackled people with detailed regulations to govern every conceivable situation and forced people to live on a religious treadmill doing works and following rituals that were never enough to please God. The Pharisees viewed God as petty and demanding. Their worldview was restrictive and narrow; their expectations, extreme; their mind-set, negative. Any behavior not up to their standard was met with a grimace and a scowl. Their faces shouted No! even before the word formed on their lips. The welcoming face of Jesus, however, always beamed Yes! With delight, He invited people into the kingdom of God—the kind of life God intended for us under His rule. Life in God’s kingdom is worshipful, creative, spontaneous, loving, and full of the joy that filled Jesus Himself (John 17:13). Today’s ‘Pharisees,’ or legalists, still enslave people. But Jesus sets us free to live in a loving relationship with God and others. The way of the modern-day Pharisee is condemnation—conform to the standard or be shunned. But the way of Christ is transformation—change on the inside and become like the Master. Legalists may force external compliance to a standard, but only Jesus has the power through the Holy Spirit to make us new and draw us to His way of living. How does God raise us to new life in Christ? How does He rouse love in cold hearts? He transforms us with His grace. He gives us a grace awakening!”

“To show grace is to extend favor or kindness to one who doesn’t deserve it and can never earn it. Receiving God’s acceptance by grace always stands in sharp contrast to earning it on the basis of works. Every time the thought of grace appears, there is the idea of its being undeserved. In no way is the recipient getting what he or she deserves. Favor is being extended simply out of the goodness of the heart of the giver.”  This is what the Gothard movement and, tragically, the Duggars are neglecting.  The consequences of that neglect are heartbreaking.

See David French, “’Shiny Happy People,’ Fundamentalism and Seeking Certainty” in the New York Times (16 June 2023); and Chuck Swindoll, “THE GRACE AWAKENING Study One– Grace: It’s Really Amazing.”