The Duggar Dead Stare, Cult Glaze and the Christian Countenance

Those eyes are a tell for high control and trauma

The author of Uncultured recently released a reel on the cult glaze. The thousand-yard stare. It also goes by the Mormon stare. Dead-eyes. Daniella Mestyanek Young is a survivor of the Children of God cult. Today she’s a cult scholar and group behavior researcher, my fellow memoirist and friend. We frequently find overlap in our experiences, although as an evangelical fundie, I would’ve sworn I had nothing in common with the Children of God sex cult.

In Bill Gothard’s Institute of Basic Life Principles (the IBLP) and related Christian fundamentalism, we had another name for the glaze, stare, and dead look: we called it our godly countenance. Viewers of the Duggar shows picked up on it too—in my comment section, they often ask about the “Duggar dead stare.” Outsiders find it weird. Insiders work towards it as a goal.

Your countenance is the expressionless serenity of your face. It betrays no emotion, no passion, no opinion. The best countenance is one where you’ve learned to smile with your mouth but your eyes are blank. We knew we had it right when other Christians commented we had Jesus shining through our eyes. Daniella’s experience is the same. Children of God youth would be complimented for the, “The light of the Lord shining through your eyes.”

High-control religion loves a shined-up appearance. Never more so than on the faces of their women and children. As Jill Duggar Dillard showed so well in her book, Counting the Cost, image consciousness is constant.

Daniella points out it’s from the constant thought-stopping to stay within the bounds of control—because once you start thinking critically about what you’re living through, you snap out of the spell and it shows in your eyes.

I agree. There’s a seven-year gap between when I started having doubts about fundamentalism and when I physically escaped. My questions showed on my face even when I didn’t blurt them aloud. I got in a lot of trouble for that—those were the same years we practiced Christian Domestic Discipline—and staying safe meant learning to hide my true feelings. So I learned to use dissociation and thought-stopping as a deliberate tool and survival technique.

There’s a scene in my upcoming memoir, A Well-Trained Wife, where I use one of our study books, The Excellent Wife by Martha Peace, to learn how to smile properly. Peace recommends that wives living in conflict learn to develop “a quiet spirit.” I needed to transform my anger into gentleness and relied on Psalm 42:11 for reinforcement: “Hope in God, for I shall yet praise him, the help of my countenance and my God.”

The Excellent Wife built off what I already knew from an old fundie classic and Mormon mainstay, Fascinating Womanhood. Like vocal control, a woman’s expression is essential. Helen B. Andelin called it “radiant happiness.”

“Radiant happiness is a voluntary quality and can be ‘put on’ like a smile. It is such things as cheerfulness, laughter, singing, joyfulness, smiles, bright eyes, pleasant outlooks, hope, optimism, the ability to radiate happiness to others, and a sense of humor.”

The chief goal of radiant happiness is to charm men. Fundamentalist women are taught they have a duty to please men and they achieve it by being sweet, smiling, serene servants with soft voices and compliant bodies. But if you’re angry because conflict and abuse are the state of your marriage, where can you turn?

In the 90s we turned to Christian womanhood books. Today’s wife might open Instagram or listen to a podcast. But the real goods are in books because they hint at the nitty-gritty pain Christian women never say out loud. Peace’s book includes charts on what to do if you want to take a gun and kill your husband, for instance. (She should realize vengeance belongs to the Lord and pray for his repentance, presumably with the soft and gentle submission laid out earlier in the book.)

Andelin offered instructions.

“After you’ve applied your makeup, stand before the mirror for a few seconds and practice radiance. Remember, your artful makeup will do little good if you wear a glum expression. If you leave the room with a happy face, your friends and family will be apt to reflect back the same expression, and your day will begin with good spirit and charm. The radiance, however, must be of the lips, the eyes, and of the whole countenance, and not just a stiff wooden-like smile.”

That’s where fundie women hit a snag. When they’re glum because they’re depressed, isolated, and lonely, or scared because there’s abuse and conflict, or so angry, as Peace suggests, they want to purchase a gun and kill him, how are they going to pull off a radiant countenance?”

The answer is the thousand-yard stare.

The thousand-yard stare is also known as shell shock. It’s the blank, unfocused stare of combat survivors who’ve detached from their emotions. It’s also used to describe dissociation—a detachment of emotion and disconnect from reality.

There are whole years of my life I could only get through by dissociating. The mind-fuck is that it was that smiling blank face that was most pleasing to the patriarchs. Dissociation and the thousand-yard stare kept me safe. I was most accepted when I was mentally absent, dead-eyed, and serene, cooperating with the order of our lives. I was considered godly. A good wife—maybe even an excellent one. A sweet Christian girl. A good example and a radiant, fascinating woman.

And I was proud of this achievement. When I sent out my holiday card in 2006, I was so encouraged with my “Vision Forum” family optics that I used this photo on my blog. What happened next is a turning point scene in the book that I won’t spoil here other than to say—my expression was alarming to anyone who truly knew me.

As a side note—I’ve already shared I experienced Jinger Duggar’s memoir very differently than Jill’s. The first tip-off I had, even before I read about her shift to Calvinism, was her smile on the cover. It’s a classic example of the serene calm high-control patriarchy likes to see in its women. I understood when commenters still want Jinger to “blink twice if you need help.”

All that emotional control is a means to an end.

A few years ago a disgusting holiday card image made the rounds online and spurred a trend in families of the same ilk Daniella and I are from, which now may also be referred to as followers of Dale Partridge and Donald Trump, trad wives, trad Catholics, FLDS Mormons, homesteaders, and far-right conservatives.

They thought this image was funny and made light of the joke that real peace on earth will only come when women are silent. But that’s why I do this work. It’s not a joke. Fundamentalist women are taught they have a duty to please men and they achieve it by being sweet, smiling, serene servants with soft voices and compliant bodies. Patriarchy doesn’t need duct tape to achieve it. The women and children are so traumatized by the lifestyle and indoctrination, they learn to silence themselves.