Tag: Deconversion

A Reluctant Review of A Book – Becoming Free Indeed by Jinger Duggar

The book.

Okay, yes, I did read this glossy author-on-the-cover reality TV star’s co-written faith ‘memoir.’ Guilty as charged. As a general rule, I avoid any book with the author on the cover like a slug avoids the salt shaker. I know what I’m likely to find behind the cover: smarmy tone, bland prose, predictable writing – But! There were extenuating circumstances, your Honor. You see, my wife, whom I love, watched the Duggar show for a while (and possibly I sat beside her at various points while it was on – who can say?), and so she was interested in the book, and we were on a long road trip, and we had free access to it via Scribd, and it purported to be a kind of reverse-deconstruction of the author’s faith, a topic which has interested me for some time. So you see? Anyone would have read this book in such circumstances. Good, I’m glad we got that out of the way.

Frankly, I had quite low expectations, so I can say it was better than I expected. The story, in case you’re not up to speed, is that Jinger Duggar grew up in a uber-conservative subset of American evangelicalism that had many elements of your typical cult. Centered around the person and teaching of Bill Gothard, a one-time Wheaton grad and inner city youth minister, it focused heavily on external issues of morality such modest dress, courting instead of dating, having lots of children, shunning debt and mortgages, not drinking alcohol, not listening to secular music, etc. Her family had a long-running reality TV show because they had 19 kids and seemed like a strange artifact of American culture. The whole thing took a dark turn when the eldest Duggar son, Josh, was accused of molesting some sisters and eventually got caught with child pornography and was hauled off to jail where he remains. Gothard was also accused by scores of the young attractive women he staffed his headquarters with of sexual misconduct of various kinds.

Gothard’s ministry was called the Institute for Biblical Life Principles (IBLP) and the whole thing sounds to me like a giant collection of red flags literally on fire. But clearly quite a few thousand people were taken in hook, line, and sinker. As with other legalistic and unbiblical religious groups, you can’t help but have a lot of compassion for the people raised in it. And it’s not surprising that a huge chunk of them leave Christianity behind completely, imagining it to be equated with what they knew growing up.

This book does a decent job of drawing important distinctions between the legalism of IBLP (and ultra-conservative fundamentalism in general) and the gospel of Christ. The story, such as it is, is pretty interesting and is written in a simple, straightforward style. The narrative is interspersed with lengthy treatments of Gothard’s teaching and explanations of Jinger’s new understanding. There is a certain irony in the fact that Jinger recovers from the fundamentalism of IBLP by landing at Grace Church in California, a place which many within evangelicalism would equate with a kind of quasi-fundamentalism. I wouldn’t totally agree with that characterization but there’s no denying that Grace is very conservative.

One thing I found particularly interesting was the author’s description of how her view of God changed as she ‘disentangled’ the beliefs she absorbed from Gothard from the truth of Scripture. I recently re-read Sinclair Ferguson’s superb ‘The Whole Christ,’ wherein he shows how legalism and antinomianism share a common rotten root, one which reaches all the way back to the garden, and that this root is a suspicion that the heart of God the Father is not one of love, mercy, and grace. So this God must be appeased with performance and religious duties lest he be angry and withhold the good things we want.

At one point, Jinger quotes Gothard as telling a woman whose life was a sinful mess that she needed to clean up her life before Christ could come into it. As Ferguson shows, this is more or less the same instinct as some in the Church of Scotland had during the Marrow Controversy and the debates over whether the gospel should be freely offered to all or only towards the truly repentent.

It is nothing less than an anti-gospel, and it enslaves rather than frees. It sees the Father as one who holds back the benefits of redemption through his Son until the person has made themselves worthy to receive them. But as Ferguson points out, this results in a grave error, the separation of Christ from His benefits, and it breeds spiritual sickness rather than health.

Rather, the Father has sent the Son because he loves us, and all who turn to Christ in repentance and faith receive Him and all the manifold gifts of redemption. The believer is united to Christ by the Holy Spirit, and Jesus is the greatest gift – for in Him are all the benefits, and through Him we are reconciled to the Father, and it is His Spirit by which we are sealed and with which we are filled.

It’s hard to overstate the distance between this rich and glorious gospel and the paltry saltine cracker ‘gospel’ of IBLP and Bill Gothard. This book made me thankful for the wonderful teaching I found and received early in my Christian life which helped me grasp not only the pulsing heart of the gospel but the grand sweep of Scripture’s united narrative, the history of redemption.

I have to say there’s a certain amount of righteous anger I feel towards the people who run these legalistic religious systems based on the Bible. I was stunned to hear that Jinger, despite having grown up in a supposedly very ‘Christian’ environment for her entire life, had never heard decent expository preaching (only proof-texting), nor an explanation of how the two Testaments fit together, nor how Christ fulfilled the law, nor had she ever heard a real God-centered emphasis on His glory and character, nor been given any sense of the historical placement of her community’s tiny slice of Christian belief within the grand scope of Christendom, nor had Romans 14 or the concept of liberty over disputable matters or the Christian conscience ever been explained to her, nor had she been shown how all of Scripture is ONE story which all culminates in Jesus. What!? Was it really all about how long skirts should be and avoiding rock music? These poor people.

I’m glad Jinger managed to disentangle that mess and find that Christ is far better. Given the size of the audience for their now-ended TV show and the toxic level of interest many Americans have towards the lives of celebrities, I’m sure it will be read by many. I think it could be helpful for some, especially those who grew up in IBLP or similar legalistic groups. If some are thereby guided towards a living faith in the real Christ through a richer understanding of the gospel, then all I have to say is: Thanks be to God.

Reflections on William Lobdell’s ‘Losing My Religion’

Introduction

This interesting and well-written book gives believers and unbelievers alike an opportunity to reflect. It chronicles the spiritual journey of William Lobdell. He went from unbeliever, to evangelical, to Catholic, then worked as a religion reporter for a major US newspaper covering the Catholic Sex Abuse Scandal among other things, and subsequently lost his belief in God. As a Christian of the reformed and evangelical stripe, I found Lobdell’s journey fascinating, sad, and instructive. Let me take each of those in turn.

LosingReligion

Fascinating

Lobdell is an experienced writer and that comes through on every page. As one who has struggled through many a book full of good ideas and poor writing, this was a nice surprise.

I did not expect Lobdell’s move from the shallow evangelicalism of his conversion and early Christian experience to the Catholic Church, but it does make sense in hindsight. Nothing seems to drive Protestants to Rome like the rootlessness of contemporary evangelicalism, which so often puts emotion and experience in the driver’s seat, despite the fact that emotion is a terrible driver and experience an even worse navigator. With them in control, there’s no telling where you might end up: Rome or somewhere worse. I will return to the roles of emotion and experience in the last section.

The quality of Lobdell’s storytelling comes through in the middle section of the book when he really starts to dig into the underbelly of the corruption of institutional religion. This made for riveting and stomach-turning reading. The two main targets of his investigative reporting are the Catholic Church and the Prosperity Gospel industrial complex. Now while I have a measure of appreciation for the Catholic Church, despite fundamental and important differences, I have no appreciation at all for the prosperity gospel and its preachers, those misery-sowing peddlers of a false and damning gospel. Ahem. Where was I? Oh right.

Sad

This brings us to the book’s sadness. Lobdell has his heart and soul crushed by the steady willful evil of a cold church bureaucracy and the unfathomable suffering of many innocent, vulnerable people. I felt the anger welling up as I read the stories of these atrocities; I can’t imagine what it would have been like to sit with these victims and hear their stories. I don’t know how anyone can handle that emotionally. So I have a lot of compassion for how hard this would have been.

What is also sad is how theologically unprepared he was to grapple with these realities. It seems, from a distance, that the kind of Christianity Lobdell was discipled into was very acclimated to the comfortable affluent Southern California world in which he moved. This may the norm, but it does leave one totally unprepared to relate to the majority of Christians in the world today, not to mention the majority of Christians throughout the ages, who have and who are suffering in all kinds of ways. Oh, and the Bible, which in many ways is a pretty brutal book.

Instructive

From very early in his journey, Lobdell expressed doubts about the character of God as revealed in Scripture. However, he never seems to doubt the certitude of the moral assumptions that give rise to his doubts and questions. There is a lot of sentimentality there. The justice and judgment of God, which the author found so hard to accept, are the very things that would have anchored him in the face of such unimaginable evil as he encountered. Theologian Miroslav Volf, who hails from the Balkans and has seen more than his share of human evil, is right that without a God of judgment, the cycle of violence goes on and on, because only earthly justice is left. Likewise the sentimentalist is utterly unequipped to face the depth of evil humans are capable of. The imprecatory Psalms are an embarrassment to the sentimentalist, but they are a lifeline to the victim or troubled bystander of injustice and evil.

To return to my previous point, the assumption that emotion and experience are fundamental arbiters of truth is never questioned: ‘If I experience something, then my interpretation of that experience is true.’ Near the end of the book, he even says something about “his truth.” Oprah couldn’t have said it better – and it has all the objective solidity of an overcooked spaghetti noodle.

These are deeply modern (even post-modern) assumptions, shaped by the prevailing philosophy of our time and culture. Catholic philosopher Charles Taylor famously calls ours a Secular Age, in contrast to previous ages. Where once it was well-nigh impossible not to believe in God, given the available explanatory frameworks, now we are 200 years downstream from the enlightenment and it is, culturally speaking, pretty well impossible to believe in God. Unless one is able to zoom out a bit and see these things as the passing fancies that they are, it can be extremely disorienting and even destructive to one’s faith, as in Lobdell’s case.

In the last portion of the book, the author makes some attempts to voice his doubts and see if anyone can give him satisfactory answers. The questions and problems he raises however contain deeply embedded assumptions that again are never questioned. He decides to weigh the truthfulness of Christianity in part by measuring the moral quality of those who identify as Christians. In America. I almost laughed out loud.

This approach might work in Afghanistan or in China, where there are no massive cultural incentives to identify as Christian. But in America, even twenty years ago, Christianity was such a cultural expectation that these studies are basically useless. The shortcomings of these famous Barna studies were known even at the time, although perhaps not widely enough.

Consider what has happened since: the fastest growing religious identification is the “nones,” as in, religious affiliation: none. The ‘mushy middle’ of cultural Christianity, which was made up of mainline denominations and weak evangelicalism, basically hollow and doctrinally and morally indistinguishable from the surrounding culture, is quickly evaporating. What we are left with increasingly is a hard secularism on one side and a committed convictional Christianity on the other. It is even more like this in countries where secularism is more advanced, such as Canada where I live. Not too many people left here still claiming to be Christians if they aren’t personally committed to Christ. More recent and better-designed studies measuring the moral behaviour of believers has yielded different results, but I would still argue that this is a pretty terrible way to go about deciding if something is true.

Regarding the nature of prayer and of God’s providence, Lobdell again makes an assumption which renders the question essentially impossible. He assumes that the pattern of answered prayer and the observable fortunes and sufferings of people’s lives should immediately reveal to any observer the validity of God’s existence by vindicating his claim to love his people. In fact he seems to demand that this be the case. It’s difficult to know where to begin with an assumption like this, other than to say it is utterly foreign to the whole thrust of the New Testament, but utterly consistent with a very unreflective North American way of thinking.

His friend John, a Presbyterian pastor, hits the nail on the head with this comment on page 239:

“The fact is that [God] has not chosen to reveal everything to us. I can whine and complain that He hasn’t, demanding that God make it possible for me to understand everything. But when I do that, I’m getting pretty close to self-worship, lifting myself to the position of God, or perhaps even to a position superior to God, demanding that God function on my ground rules instead of me, humbly in worship, functioning on His.”

And that more or less describes what is going on in this book. In the end, Lobdell opts for a kind of unbelief that happily keeps all the moral and ethical capital of a Christian worldview while rejecting the Source of that morality and ethic. And since it can take a couple of generations for those fumes to dissipate, it’s quite possible he will live on borrowing happily and thinking all is well. His is a very Christian kind of atheism.

I am sure that many unbelievers and questioning believers will take encouragement from this book. It is a very human thing to find comfort in companionship. As a believer, I think it is a clarifying and revealing tale for anyone concerned with the state of Christian discipleship.