So, You’ve Heard of the Duggars?: Bodily Autonomy, Religious Exemption, and the American South

Whether you’re a TV junkie or you just like to flip channels, you’ve likely seen or heard about the Duggars. Jim Bob, Michelle, and their 19 children have become a television phenomenon since their reality show 19 Kids and Counting made its debut on TLC in the fall of 2008. Following in the footsteps of other reality programs that showcased large, nonnormative families like Jon and Kate Plus 8 and Little People, Big World, 19 Kids and Counting follows the Duggars, a devout Independent Baptist family that is a prominent part of the Christian patriarchy movement.

Believing that patriarchy is best instilled into children through a homeschooling curriculum that emphasizes sex/gender roles that mandate submissiveness of girls and manliness in the boys, the Duggars promote Christian patriarchy, particularly in the South. Employing a pastiche of rhetorical strategies including biblical literalism, antifeminism, dogmatic paternalism, and purity culture, Independent Baptists and their close allies, members of the Quiverfull movement, are working to secure a “new” patriarchy that resists “modern notions of women’s autonomy, broad definitions of family and love and a high valuation of individual rights and fulfillment that, as they see it, can threaten the good of a community at large.”¹ It is in doing the work to undermine female empowerment and resist new definitions of the family that anti-woman and anti-GLBTQ politics find their footing, particularly in the South.

Central to the new Christian patriarchy movement is compulsory heterosexuality, which demands a submissive wife/mother and an all-powerful, patriarchal husband/father. In her groundbreaking work on the Christian patriarchy movement, Kathryn Joyce argues that within this paradigm, “women’s embrace of patriarchy is the preferable path to family security”; men, seen as weakened following the liberal successes of the feminist movement, are encouraged to form “a new patriarchy,” where they actively engage in the family as paternalistic fathers, omnipresent in the lives of the “traditional family.”² The Duggar family uses this paradigm of the Christian patriarchy to articulate new frames for body politics that demonize nonprocreative sex(uality).

Although you have no doubt encountered them from afar, the Duggars actually live just up the road from me in Tontitown, Arkansas, and they are omnipresent as the culture wars around GLBTQ equality and reproductive access emerged in Arkansas. I suggest that the body politics of the Duggar clan provide us with useful data to help make sense of the connections between the U.S. Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby decision and the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA). In both Hobby Lobby and ENDA, a primary question has been: can religious convictions exempt individuals (or corporations) from obligations that are required for everyone else?

The Duggars provide a way of reading the failure of ENDA and the majority opinion in the Hobby Lobby case together because the (ill)logic behind both decisions is rooted in the new Christian patriarchy movement. ENDA and Hobby Lobby are especially salient in the South because both demand autonomy for the white male while characterizing female and queer bodies as excessive and unruly, thereby justifying state regulation. In Arkansas, the Duggars (along with The Family Research Council) have been on the frontline of debates about GLBTQ anti-discrimination and contraception/abortion access. They provide a visible example of the Christian patriarchy movement and how it influences politics in the South. Because I do political consulting, gender equity advocacy, and reproductive justice work in Arkansas—including the groups challenging the Duggars and the Christian patriarchy—I have a close connection to both ENDA and Hobby Lobby.

Christian Patriarchy and Bodily Autonomy

For members of the Christian patriarchy movement, complete sovereignty of the white, cis-heterosexual male body and the preservation of its economic mobility is a primary goal of legislation designed to hamper the progress of feminists as well as new definitions of family. This goal links anti-reproductive rights discourse to anti-GLBTQ political sentiment. The relationship between ENDA and reproductive justice was openly acknowledged by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops...