A Letter to My Younger Self - Reflecting on Jinger Vuolo's "Becoming Free Indeed"
The struggle for freedom from damaging ideas about God and authority doesn't end when you leave Gothardism and the IBLP. But it can start there.
Eighteen months ago, as I was packing to move out of my house in the wake of my divorce, I came across an old journal I’d kept over 25 years ago. It read like a time capsule—a letter to me from my younger self about my revitalized faith, my renewed love for the Bible, and my hopes for my future. My fifty-year-old eyes skimmed the entries written by my twenty-something year old hand and filled with tears. If the Rachael I am today could have befriended the Rachael I was then, maybe I could have helped her fill in the gaps of what she couldn’t yet see, or helped her find answers to the questions she wasn’t empowered to ask. Who knows how differently her life would have unfolded.
Reading (and re-reading) Becoming Free Indeed—Jinger Duggar Vuolo’s story of how she “disentangled” her faith from its roots in her upbringing in the teachings of Bill Gothard—gave me the exact same feeling, and produced the same kind of tears. Prior to reading it, my only exposure to the teachings of Bill Gothard had been in the form of mocking critiques by the pastors of the church I’d attended as a young Christian around the same age Jinger is now. But I knew a little more about the Duggars because I’d followed their story with a particular interest. And it wasn’t just because some families from my former church were their friends.
I grew up as the daughter of a Reformed Baptist preacher in Melbourne, Australia. Jinger Vuolo grew up in Arkansas as the daughter of a small businessman, local politician and eventual TV reality star. And yet the similarities in our two stories are too numerous, too full of the same types of struggles, to be mere coincidence.
Both of our childhoods were shaped by our upbringing in Christian hyper-fundamentalism.
Both of our fathers aspired to lives of service in Christian ministry. Both of them viewed popular media as an invaluable channel to spread the good news of the gospel, and the image of a happy family life as essential in validating that message. Both of them worked diligently to keep our family stories of sexual abuse, and its impact on us, hidden in the shadows, to protect their ministry reputations.
Both of us had genuine experiences of saving faith, which catalyzed a renewed compulsion to understand what the Bible said vs. what we’d been previously taught to believe. Both of us were determined to embrace that faith with all our might. Both of us fought protracted emotional health battles as all of our efforts produced guilt and fear, instead of joy.
Both of our journeys toward a freer, more life-giving faith were catalyzed in part by long-distance courtship, then marriages, to men in ministry, and by the things we read and talked about together.
And both of our journeys intersect with Grace Community Church, and the ministry of John MacArthur.
Book Summary
In Becoming Free Indeed, Jinger Vuolo writes about the hyper-fundamentalist beliefs that shaped her growing up years as one of the “19 Kids and Counting” members of the Duggar family, and about the reality TV show that documented their life. Those beliefs were based on the teaching of Bill Gothard, and his program known as the Institute in Basic Life Principles. Gothard taught that seven principles—design, authority, responsibility, suffering, ownership, freedom and success— held the keys to a successful life. The Bible was the means of unlocking them. Jinger writes with poignant clarity about her eagerness to follow these principles to the letter, as well as the deep anxiety and guilt she experienced in her struggles to succeed.
Ironically, it’s through the very application of the principles in the courtship process—an element of their life Jinger notes was one of the most talked about aspects of the TV show—that the stranglehold of these principles on her young life begins to loosen. Her older sister Jessa meets, is courted by, and eventually marries an aspiring pastor named Ben Seewald. Through that relationship, Jinger meets Ben’s friend Jeremy Vuolo, who is a pastor as well. Ben and Jeremy read and understand the Bible differently from what Jinger’s been taught. It’s through her conversations with Ben and Jessa, and her courtship with Jeremy, that Jinger begins to question the way Bill Gothard interprets and teaches the Bible.
By the end of the book, Jinger Duggar is Jinger Vuolo—a happily married wife and mother of two girls. Her husband Jeremy now serves as a pastor at Grace Community Church. Jinger has become an eager student of the Bible, in large part because of the different way she’s come to understand it. It’s no longer a burdensome book of rules for a successful life, but a book about God, His plan of salvation, and the freedom that’s found through faith in Jesus.
Given the interest and airtime dedicated to the courtship aspect of Jinger’s upbringing in “19 Kids and Counting”, it’s notable that Jinger doesn’t examine that aspect of her life too closely, even in light of the burgeoning cultural commentary about purity culture. “There’s more than one way to find a spouse”, she writes on page 49. And then she moves on—dedicating the entire next chapter to a different principle and its hold on her, and what leads to its disentanglement.
The principle of authority.
Authority Umbrellas (Come in More Than One Shape and Size)
In the chapter 4, “Life Under the Umbrella,” Jinger describes the Gothardite framing of authority, as illustrated by the now infamous metaphor of an umbrella.
“According to this concept, God gives every person authority figures who must always be obeyed. Just as an umbrella protects against rain, these authorities protect a person from spiritual harm, including suffering, pain, and temptations from Satan. But, also like an umbrella, the protection is limited. During a downpour, one wrong step (or strong gust of wind) could leave an individual soaked. Likewise, according to Gothard’s teaching, one act of disobedience, even an unintended act of rebellion against authority, could result in God’s punishment. Gothard taught that by rebelling we were subjecting ourselves to the realm and power of Satan.” (page 61)
While Gothard teaches that God is the ultimate authority for life,
“...to live under the umbrella and enjoy a flourishing life, you had to obey, respect, and honor the four human institutions to which God had delegated His authority: parents, government, church leaders, and employers. Gothard said Christians who disobeyed even one of these authorities would no longer be under the umbrella of protection and would instead find themselves under the domain of Satanic attack.” (page 61)
The Gothardite umbrella of authority is as thin as it is broad, alternately producing self-righteousness in Jinger’s heart when she discerns other young people rebelling, and fear at the thought of what could happen to her if she did.
Jinger concludes chapter 4 by writing:
“I don’t know what would have happened to me if I stayed under the umbrella of authority and closely followed the rest of Gothard’s principles throughout my life. I know it would have been exhausting to try to please God by obeying man-made rules. Perhaps at some point the effort would have been too much. …Thankfully, when I was twenty-one years old, my life, and my view of Gothard’s teachings, started to change.” (page 69)
In the chapters that follow, it clear that it’s the process of meeting and marrying Jeremy Vuolo, the pastor who becomes her husband, and the process of settling into ministry life at Grace Community church, that catalyzes that change
Like Jinger Vuolo, I too spent more than a decade trying to disentangle a true understanding of Biblical authority from the false one. And like Jinger, my own process was catalyzed by long distance courtship conversations with an aspiring ministry leader about those wrong ideas.
But the ideas about authority from which I needed disentangling came from John MacArthur.
With the MacArthur authority umbrella model, the purpose of authority is essentially the same as in Gothardism: the safety and provision for the people underneath it. But its origin differs, in that it is derived from what he believes the Bible says about the very nature of God in his trinitarian Self. In the MacArthurite model, God the Father and God the Son are in an eternal relationship of authority and submission. Human beings, as created in God’s image, reflect these elements of God’s nature through their gender. Authority (and its synonymous twin, leadership) is an ontological characteristic of what it means to be a man; submission functions in the same way for women.1
Given its basis in trinitarian theology, this is an umbrella seemingly made of much sturdier stuff.
As with Gothard’s model, the MacArthurite model includes the concept of God-ordained institutional structures as the conduits for the exercise of authority. It eschews employers, but focuses squarely on government, home and church. Its distinguishing feature is the gendered construct by which each institution should operate—with men leading, and women submitting to that leadership as the means by which everyone benefits and thrives.
Even the institutions themselves function in a hierarchical way. If the Bible—God’s ultimate revelation of Himself—is the ultimate authority on how the world and its institutions should operate, it necessarily follows that the institution established to teach people the Bible, and the individuals called to do that teaching, should function as the ultimate authority over the others. Thus, the church is the authority over the government and the home, and the leaders of the church the authority over leaders, and laypeople, in every sphere of life. 2
All of this makes the MacArthurite umbrella of authority taller, more narrow, and far more impermeable. Women like me who spent their early adulthood under it are the ones who may most easily recognize the way it’s influenced Jinger Vuolo’s journey too. It hasn’t just informed her new way of thinking; it’s been the canopy under which the entire book has been constructed.
From the Master’s Seminary executive who serves as her coauthor and the pastors she quotes, to the unidirectional conversations she describes with the man who becomes her husband, and the thought process she describes as she has them, every part of Jinger’s journey, and the way she writes about it, seems mediated by the authoritative voices of men.
Men predominately from one church, who are all under the authority of one man: John MacArthur.
John MacArthur: The Better Bill Gothard?
While a contemporary of Bill Gothard, John MacArthur’s various ministries and their reach have far exceeded him. Gothard’s exposure for inappropriate sexual behavior has sent him into the shadows. MacArthur’s own brushes with scandal due to accusations of nepotism and other kinds of institutional impropriety have been mostly downplayed. Meanwhile, his increased outspokenness about political issues in the wake of the COVID era have kept him and his ministries squarely in the public eye.
Given MacArthur’s prominence and obvious influence on Jinger Vuolo’s spiritual and circumstantial journey, the ways the book obscures it seem almost intentional.
At various times throughout the book, Jinger either quotes John’s sermons, or alludes to him as her pastor; it’s not until the acknowledgements that she finally names him directly.
But the most glaringly ironic example of this comes toward the end of the book, as Jinger writes about the reasons for Bill Gothard’s fall and IBLP’s declining influence. On page 177 she writes, “time and truth go hand in hand. Given enough time, someone’s true self is bound to come out.” Earlier this year, Christianity Today published a long and detailed expose of Grace Community Church leaders’ severe mishandling of reports of marital and child abuse made by some of the women in its membership. The leading figure in that article was Hohn Cho, the elder and attorney whose quest to uncover the truth and call his fellow elders to account for their leadership failures led to his departure, then erasure, from the church. In Cho’s reflection on the spiritual motivation for his decisions, he attributes those lines written by Jinger to none other than John MacArthur himself.
The Questions Jinger Doesn’t Ask, and The Answers She Doesn’t Yet Have
The most painful parts of Jinger Vuolo’s story, and mine—familial spiritual and sexual abuse and its intergenerational effects—are the parts with which she barely engages.
The years Jinger spent in what was essentially a protracted infomercial for Gothardism were bookended on either side by her eldest brother’s exposure for criminal sex offenses against children, including his own sisters. Those offenses eventually lead to his imprisonment.
As Jinger was writing her book, the media was full of reports of the roles her father and mother played in protecting Josh from the consequences of his crimes, to mitigate the impact on their media presence and minimize the time he spent in prison.
Jinger writes somewhat opaquely about this part of her story, focussing narrowly on her brother’s sin. She asks no questions about the impact of her parents’ actions to protect their son and their platform, even when the price of that protection was their own daughters’ wellbeing, and that of the children whose digital images were found in Josh Duggar’s possession. Questions like:
What happens when people who have been taught to view their relationships with God and others through the myopic lens of authority and submission, instead of the healing lens of love, are failed by authority figures?
What happens when a father chooses his ministry and mission over his children’s wellbeing? When a mother denies or hides a father’s abuse, instead of exposing it?
What happens when a parent treats a child, a husband treats a wife, a brother treats a sister, or a pastor treats a congregant, like an object of consumption, instead of an image bearer of God?
How long does it take for the damage spiral to stop?
What kind of work does it take to stop it?
Jinger Vuolo doesn’t wrestle with those questions, or their answers, and there are likely many reasons why. The season of young motherhood she’s in doesn’t offer much room for reflecting on them, and the church context she’s in now actively discourages it. I empathize with her greatly—those were my challenges too. The Rachael I was in my young adult years at Grace Community Church didn’t have the tools to ask those kinds of questions about her life then. And when she was shamed for the questions she did ask, she didn’t have the strength, or the courage, to keep asking them anyway.
She has those things now.
And with the release of a new documentary about the Duggars on Amazon Prime today, it looks like other members of Jinger’s family have them too.
So what I find myself wondering today is what questions Jinger Vuolo may be asking herself now, because of what her family is sharing. Will she be able to get the tools she needs to find the answers to those questions, and the courage to follow wherever they lead? I pray that she does.
Insofar as she’s able to, Jinger Vuolo will know that she is indeed free.