Duggars, 19 Kids and Counting
collectivism, children, and the Duggar predators
To understand how a boy raised in this world becomes a man who molests children, you have to understand what the theology does to the moral imagination.
In a normally functioning moral development, a person learns to navigate a spectrum. A glance is different from a stare. A stare is different from a fantasy. A fantasy is different from a conversation. A conversation is different from a touch. The gradations matter — not because every step on that spectrum is equally acceptable, but because the spaces between them are where conscience gets built.
You learn where lines are because you can see the distance between them.
You learn to stop because stopping somewhere short of the worst thing is meaningfully different from not stopping at all.
The theology of IBLP and its fellow travelers obliterates that spectrum entirely.
In this world, a glance at an immodestly dressed woman is already a sin of significant spiritual weight. The boys were not taught that looking was a minor thing to be managed with ordinary self-discipline. They were taught that looking was a catastrophic failure — a door opened to Satan, a grievous wound to their purity, a thing requiring immediate intervention by their sisters and eventual confession to spiritual authority.
The distance between a glance and an assault, morally and psychologically, was reduced to almost nothing. You are already a sinner the moment your eyes move wrong. The category of fallen, impure, in need of redemption kicks in at the lowest possible threshold.
Once you are in that category, the incremental cost of each subsequent step collapses. You have already failed. The framework that might have allowed you to think I have done something wrong but I can stop here was never built, because it requires gradations the theology refused to supply.
There is no inhabitable middle ground.
There is only pure and fallen. And once you are fallen, you are fallen.
Now consider what happens when a boy raised this way hits puberty and finds that the desire he has been taught is catastrophically sinful is also, as it turns out, completely unignorable.
He cannot date. He cannot have normal adolescent romantic experiences that would teach him, through ordinary fumbling trial and error, how desire and ethics coexist. He has no legitimate language for what he is feeling. He has no graduated framework for navigating it.
What he has is a vast, undifferentiated category of sin — and he is already in it.
Here is where I want to say something that is going to be uncomfortable, and I want to be precise, because precision matters here.
I think there is a reason that the Duggar brothers’ offenses involve children rather than adult women. I do not think it is incidental..."
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