Inside The Duggars' Deep Ties With A Once-Powerful, Now-Scorned Ministry

Although the Duggar Debacle is now "old" news, there is still much to be gleaned from the fall-out surrounding it. This is a good article that lays out all the issues with the Duggars' main influence, Bill Gothard and his ATI.

But a mystery remained at the heart of the tabloid drama. The Duggars’ explanations for how they handled their son’s confessions elided some crucial details, and Josh Duggar’s did as well. In a statement issued to People magazine just hours after the In Touch report was published, he said, “We spoke with the authorities where I confessed my wrongdoing, and my parents arranged for me and those affected by my actions to receive counseling.”

What Josh Duggar didn’t say—and what his parents and two of his sisters didn’t say in interviews with Fox News’ Megyn Kelly a few weeks later—was what, precisely, that counseling entailed. Although none of the Duggars has ever publicly identified it as such, the facility where Josh was sent in Little Rock is owned and operated by the Institute in Basic Life Principles, an insular and authoritarian evangelical homeschooling ministry whose charismatic founder, former followers say, sexually harassed female employees, blamed rape victims for provoking their attackers, and subjected young disciples to grueling physical labor for little or no pay.
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By keeping Josh’s confession—and punishment—in a small, closed circle, the Duggars were acting in accordance with the teachings of IBLP’s founder, Bill Gothard, and the Advanced Training Institute, IBLP’s exclusive homeschooling program that provides curricula to parents, holds conferences, and offers missionary and work opportunities. The Duggars have belonged to ATI since 1992, when Josh was four, according to their own accounts on 19 Kids and Counting.

That hugely successful reality television series, which aired from 2008 until May 2015, depicts ATI conferences as wholesome family fun, with Jim Bob describing it as “an old style family camp” and “one of the best things we’ve done for our family.”

But that portrayal obscures a dark reality, about family sexual abuse and more, according to more than a dozen former ATI members who spoke to TPM and The Investigative Fund.
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Michelle Duggar has used the ATI curriculum—consisting of a series of “Wisdom Booklets”—to homeschool all of her children. Several members of the Duggar family, including Jim Bob and Michelle, Josh, and the four oldest sisters, Jana, Jill, Jessa, and Jinger, are frequent featured speakers at IBLP conferences. Most recently, Michelle, Jana, and Jinger spoke at an August 2015 conference called Commit, aimed at girls aged 12 to 17 and their mothers.

Gothard’s philosophy on sexual assault is detailed explicitly in his publications, including in the Wisdom Booklets. When a woman is attacked, one booklet reads, “She is to cry out for help. The victim who fails to do this is equally guilty with the attacker.” A document Gothard sent to ATI families, “Lessons from Moral Failures in a Family,” purports to be a teenage boy’s meditation on his sexual assault of his sisters, which he blames in part on his mother, for allowing his sisters to run naked after a bath and for asking him to change his sisters’ diapers, something that would not have occurred if the family “had only applied Levitical law.”

Inside The Duggars' Deep Ties With A Once-Powerful, Now-Scorned Ministry

Something that has been bugging me since the Duggar Debacle broke,

According to the 2006 Springdale, Arkansas police report, the Duggars had traveled to Chicago for an interview with The Oprah Winfrey Show in December 2006. Before the interview took place, the program had received an email from an unidentified person, accusing Josh of abusing his sisters and charging that “the parents have been hiding this secret for a long time.” The Oprah Winfrey Show interview was canceled—a major PR hit for TLC—and Harpo Studios, the show’s production company, faxed a copy of the email to Springdale human resources officials, prompting the police investigation. The Oprah Winfrey Network did not respond to interview requests or written questions. (In 2008, Discovery announced a joint venture with Oprah Winfrey to create the Oprah Winfrey Network, now part of the Discovery lineup of networks.)