Why Are So Many Duggars PDFiles?

Why authoritarian fundamentalism goes hand in hand with sexual abuse

Another Duggar son has been charged with sexually abusing a child.

This time it’s Joseph Duggar, the seventh born and third son.

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.

I’m a little late to the party to comment because for the last 48 hours I’ve been on toddler duty, since my youngest just delivered her baby. So posts are likely to be light over the next week!

But I did 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.

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:

In other words, however we try, the sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage. This means that we have sought to suppress the concepts of authority and submission as they relate to the marriage bed……True authority and true submission are therefore an erotic necessity.

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 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.

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 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 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.

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You may also enjoy:

• Our book She Deserves Better, based on a study of 7000 women and how purity culture affected them

• Does Christian fundamentalism infantilize women? Let’s look at Michelle Duggar’s strange signature

• My take on Josh Duggar’s verdict (Amnon and Tamar replayed)

• Our podcast on authoritarianism (It’s a must listen!)

• Our book on how to reframe sex after being raised in this kind of an environment—The Great Sex Rescue

• Our interview with Marissa and Burt and Kelsey McGinnis about controlling parenting