Are the Duggar Memoirs a Ploy?

Becoming Free Indeed and Counting the Cost

My breath caught when I was asked if the Duggar girls’ memoirs—Jinger’s Becoming Free Indeed and Jill’s Counting the Cost—are a ploy. The two books are not the same. The authors are, however, Jim Bob’s daughters. It’s a fair question.

A ploy is a cunning plan or action designed to turn a situation to one's own advantage. If there was any doubt left that the Duggar show franchise was a ploy after Shiny Happy People, the documentary exposing Bill Gothard’s Institute of Basic Life Principles (IBLP), Jill’s book certainly seals the deal. Jim Bob repeatedly and cunningly exploited his children to turn the show’s profits to his own advantage. I think that man must live every single day as a ploy.

Reading how he maneuvered and manipulated was raw and nauseating. Jill’s narrative, supported by ghost writer Craig Borlase, reads like the suffocatingly hot back seat of an old Cadillac on a curvy mountain road with the windows up. I wanted to puke.

And that atmosphere persists through the pages. Her childlike voice is evident in the earliest chapters. When the abuse she experienced occurs, her memory is obscured and the details are unwritten. Readers experience what it means to repress memories along with her.

So, later in the book, Jill suffers extreme trauma responses from unarticulated causes. Readers are left to struggle with the same disconnect Jill and to some extent, Derrick, felt as her reactions build with intensity. She struggles to assert her fledgling will against Jim Bob and his bloodthirst for fame. It doesn’t matter that the Duggar women carried the show with their literal labor pains. It’s called “Pop’s show” because it belonged to him, and he alone absorbed the profit, redistributing figures and charging his children the cost of their upbringing to evade taxation. All the while, Jill is panicking, having nightmares, and crying.

Counting the Cost is not a ploy. But I believe it was prematurely written. Jill’s nervous system is clearly still activated. Her story isn’t “cooked” the way a memoir needs to be to extrapolate the meaning and story running through the situation. She’s barely begun to uncover the depths of high control and trauma she experienced, and she’s retraumatizing herself when she shares vulnerably in such a raw condition. On her own admission, she’s fiercely private and distrusting, and there are times the narrative feels like more violation of a process that deserves protection.

Even with Borlase polishing the narrative, Jill’s voice slips back into caring for her parents’ reputation, even at great cost to herself. There’s a lot of “always” and “never” in the beginning and Michelle is presented as a saint. That pressure to keep up appearances, especially towards parents, is an IBLP hallmark. There’s never a mention of Michelle’s glaring complicity.

The toll is especially evident in Jill’s maternal health. I held my breath a number of times as I realized her body was keeping the score of violation and exploitation. Her body shielded and protected her from having her childbirth filmed by pretty much refusing to allow her to deliver. She suffers a uterine rupture and nearly dies—which happens to fundamentalist women in the IBLP cult. They die young. They die preventable deaths. Jill could’ve easily been another fundamentalist casualty.

Ready or not, I know the heat was on to get the book out. Shiny Happy People was released in June 2023. The Duggar brand still sells. And when you read Counting the Cost, you begin to understand why the business case to rush this exposé made sense.

I couldn’t help feeling though that even this, was told at Jill’s expense.

Jinger’s tale is not so cut and dry. Becoming Free Indeed reads as though told behind a screen.

One difference is that Jinger and Jill are married to very different men. When it was released in January 2023, my heart sank with dread for Jinger. I instantly recognized the hallmarks of Calvinism, reformed theology, and John MacArthur’s church, Grace Community, where Jeremy Vuolo often teaches. She’s gone from the fire into the frying pan, so to speak. Not off the stove.

But she’s still too relieved to be out to see it. Even as Jinger reveals she suffered from an eating disorder, severe social anxiety, and pressure to perform in her relationships, the depths of the root cause are glossed over.

What readers (and the author herself) may not realize is there’s a pipeline from the IBLP to reformed doctrine. There’s nothing free about it. I know this firsthand because I lived it too.

While the IBLP hyper-focused on external legalism— strict gender roles, women in modest dresses and long hair, extreme discipline—the reformers drove the legalism inward.

They loved to emphasize their hearty zest for God. They could drink beer and wine and toast to the goodness of God! They read the Great Books and C.S Lewis and Tolkien. Men rolled up their sleeves and women could wear pants. After the oppressive desert of Gothard’s red textbooks, seminars, and ugly old Wisdom Booklets, the new reformers do feel like freedom. I’m sure that’s the spirit in which Jinger participated in her book.

But TULIP—Total Depravity, Unlimited Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, and the Preservation of the Saints—doesn’t feel free for long. You’re a nasty sinful worm too gross for the savior to save, and maybe you’re chosen or maybe you’re not, but you can’t say no anyway.

Becoming Free Indeed is not raw like Jill’s. The ghostwriter was Corey Williams; Jeremy is not on the cover; there’s an emphasis on her flowing pants. But more than that Jinger clarifies she’s gone through “disentanglement” rather than deconstruction—the sorting of fear out of faith. The message: Jinger’s free now because she questioned the high-control religious beliefs of her childhood, but decided ahead of time to keep Jesus.

Her book came at a time when churches were drenched in sweat over the deconstruction movement. Church leadership, seeing dramatically dwindling numbers, wants sojourners to “constructively deconstruct” if they deconstruct at all. That is, they decide ahead of time to question the harmful practices, behaviors, and cultural institutions but with a requirement to determine the outcome (Christianity) ahead of time.

But that’s kind of like if an archeologist decided to dig up a field—as long as they could be guaranteed an intact T-Rex lay buried at the bottom. Or a voyager crossed the ocean for the first time in humanity—but knew before they set sail they’d find a new land. True discovery includes curiosity, wonder, and risk. You might not end up where you predicted. Deconstruction is that way too.

What church proponents need is a fresh generation of faces willing to represent and inspire young believers. No one cares what Jim Bob thinks. Bill Gothard is elderly. Michael Pearl and Doug Wilson are geriatric, even if they are still just as vitriolic. Today’s big Christian brand is more the Kardashian Quiverfull than the Duggars. The patriarchs use women when it suits them—and deconstruction needed a pretty face.

And that makes Jinger an excellent counter-movement representative. A Duggar girl, detangling fear, but reminding the millions of viewers who were once the target of Jim Bob’s evangelism, not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.

The church she’s in is the same ideology in different clothes. The women might feel free but it’s in comparison. They’re still tools used at the men’s disposal. They still gotta play by the rules. In fact, instead of recoiling with nauseated empathy the way I did for Jill, I gagged over the language distinction I heard over and over again in Jinger’s press interviews: detangle, don’t deconstruct.

Language really matters. In Counting the Cost, Jim Bob calls Josh’s crimes his “issues.” In Becoming Free Indeed, Jinger calls Bill Gothard, “one of those dangerous teachers.” Underspeak is part of the lifestyle. While it took bravery for both girls to speak out against the “faith” of their opportunistic father, only Jill calls the IBLP a cult. Her willingness to call a thing by its proper name (Josh’s pedophilia) is one of the key distinguishing features of these two memoirs.

A ploy is a cunning plan or action designed to turn a situation to one's own advantage. By touting a theological line, instead of presenting an excavation of her high-control upbringing (and the reason why former cult kids, fans, and the #freejinger movement wanted her book) Jinger’s book did feel like a ploy to me. Not to Jinger’s advantage but to the men over her head.

MacArthur’s church still teaches complementarianism and strict gender roles. Followers riding the reformed pipeline, either to the Baptist side or the Presbyterian, still adhere to an ugly theology where God predestines people (even children) to heaven or hell. It’s still purity culture and courtship. Women may express opinions but it’s within the lines—women and children are to obey. They are still the strong arm of the conservative political machine.

Freedom doesn’t come from pants or as Jill found out, a nosering or date night cocktail. Freedom is telling the truth of your story without having to craft it around someone’s agenda. It’s setting sail to question the horizon, not knowing what you’re going to find when you get there.

Want more commentary on Counting the Cost? Listen to Episode 2 of The Wise Jezebels, out Tuesday, October 3.