Not long ago, a friend asked me how many siblings my husband, Jeremy, has. I said, “Two,” and, without thinking, added, “so he grew up in a small family.” My friend laughed and said, “Three kids isn’t what I’d call a small family.” Of course, she’s right. I’d guess the typical American family has about two kids, so three is above average. But when you grow up in a family with nineteen children, three can seem like an empty house.
That conversation was another reminder of how different my childhood was from the typical American. The size of my family was a big reason (no pun intended) that my life was unique. Hardly anyone can say they have eighteen siblings, all of whose names start with the letter J. Of the handful of families that large, I can think of only ours and one other—the Bates family—that had camera crews following them around, filming people who didn’t watch television.
Beyond the cameras and the size of my family, the way we dressed was different. How we talked to one another was unique, and not just because we had Arkansas accents. I hardly fought with my siblings, which is pretty wild considering the number of us, and we shared clothes, shoes, and curling irons. I also didn’t have a typical education. I was homeschooled and didn’t go to college.
As a teenager, I knew my life was different from most girls my age. I also knew that a lot of people had strong opinions about what my future should look like. But I didn’t think I needed the criticism or advice, no matter how well-intentioned. I knew exactly why God had put me on earth. The future was so clear, I could see it in my head and trace every major event in my life. I was going to marry in my early twenties (if not by the time I was eighteen or nineteen). I was sure I’d marry a godly, Christian man who worked hard, loved children, and made me laugh. I would quickly become a mother and have as many kids as possible. I’d stay home and take care of our growing family while my husband worked to keep us out of debt.
I was not only certain I’d be a mother but also confident about how I’d parent my kids. I’d teach them to respect my husband and me. They would rarely argue, and they wouldn’t rebel because I was going to teach them the same basic life principles that had guided me. I tended to judge parents if I saw their older children acting up. I’d think, If they only knew what I know about parenting, their kid wouldn’t behave that way.
I was convinced that after marrying at a young age, my husband and I would be madly in love for decades. Sure, we might have a disagreement or two, but in general, there’d be unity. He would lead, the children and I would gladly submit to him, and our family would enjoy peace, success, and health. Other families would look at us as a model of what God can do for a family if they obey His principles.
By the time I was having these teenage conceptions, my older brother was already a father. Many of my sisters gladly volunteered to watch our nieces and nephews. They also offered to babysit for family friends. I joined them from time to time, but I wasn’t passionate about kids. I wasn’t the girl who begged to hold other people’s babies. I admire those who strongly desire to have a lot of children. But these days I just can’t say I feel the same way. Of course, I adore my two precious daughters. Being their mom is one of the greatest joys of my life. I love my children with my whole heart and soul. But my current perspective on parenthood and what that looks like for me is very different from the perspective of the culture in which I was raised.
I grew up assuming that a woman starts having children as soon as she is married and continues until she physically can’t have any more. Even if she has severe health issues or feels overwhelmed by the number of children she already has, she cannot stop having children. This belief was largely due to Gothard’s teaching. His “Basic Care Booklet” says this about pregnancy and children:
What if another pregnancy will cause health problems? What should a woman do if her doctor tells her that another pregnancy will create serious or even life-threatening complications? What should a man do if he is warned, “If you get your wife pregnant, you will be responsible for her death!”?
In answering these questions, the following factors must be carefully evaluated:
1. God has ultimate control.
If God wants to give a child to a couple, He is also able to give the level of health in the mother and the child that will bring the greatest glory to Him. . . .
2. No Decision Should Be Based on Fear
God has not given us a spirit of fear. Therefore, fear is from Satan and not from God.1
Gothard also said Christian families should ignore potentially life-saving medical advice because “all births require sacrifice on the part of the parents” and “many predictions do not come true.”2 He taught that God’s will was for a woman to have children no matter what, even if her life was in danger.
In Genesis 1, God told Adam and Eve to “be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it” (v. 28).
Gothard used this verse and others similar to teach that Christian families not only should have as many children as possible but also were sinning against God if they didn’t. This is what Jim Sammons, a teacher with IBLP, said during a lecture about finances:
You know, I used to wonder, God, why don’t you stop abortion in our country? [My wife] and I have been actively involved in the right to life movement, and I sit as an advisor on a board of a pregnancy crisis center, and I work with legislators trying to get them to change the law and it just doesn’t seem to be working. I used to wonder, God, why aren’t you doing it? Proverbs 21:1 says, “The heart of the king is in the hand of the Lord” [v. 1 DRA]—you can turn it whatever way you want! Cause the king, the judges, the congressmen, to change. And then it was like God said, “That law, Jim, reflects your view and the view of Christians, of my people.” And I personally don’t believe God will ever let that law change until God’s people change their view on children.3
I interpreted this to mean that if a husband and wife used any kind of birth control for family planning, they were as good as aborting their children. Sammons went on to suggest that such couples were guilty not only of abortion but also of rejecting Jesus. He said:
There was one verse that was interesting—it was Matthew 18:5, and Jesus says, “And whoso shall receive one such little child in My name, receiveth Me” [KJ21]. And I decided to look up the word receive in Thayer’s Greek-English Lexicon of the New Testament, and I was amazed when I saw there it means to receive into one’s family in order to bring up and to educate. And Jesus said, if you receive that child, it’s like receiving me. I realized that it was like by rejecting children, we had rejected our Lord.4
Even though Jesus was not talking about families giving birth to children in the passage from Matthew 18, Sammons used it to tell thousands of wives and mothers to have as many children as possible. To refuse would be to reject Jesus Himself. You can imagine the guilt this placed on many women—including me.
This teaching was a misrepresentation of what the Bible says. Are children a gift from God? Absolutely—an incredible one! I cannot imagine my life without Felicity and Evangeline, and I thank God for them. Is it a blessing to have children? Without a doubt. Did God command humankind to have children? Yes—it’s a basic requirement for civilizations to grow and flourish. But the Bible never tells women how many they should have. Pastor John Piper has something helpful to say about this. He wrote,
We love those big families, and anybody that wants to can have a big family in this church. It is a good thing, if you bring those kids up to be radical soldiers for Jesus.5
But his teaching doesn’t stop there. According to Desiring God, a ministry Piper founded:
Just because something is a gift from the Lord does not mean that it is wrong to be a steward of when or whether you will come into possession of it. It is wrong to reason that since A is good and a gift from the Lord, then we must pursue as much of A as possible. God has made this a world in which tradeoffs have to be made and we cannot do everything to the fullest extent. . . .
Although it is true that “blessed is the man whose quiver is full of [children]” (Psalm 127:5 NASB), we need to realize that God has not given everyone the same size quiver. And so birth control is a gift from God that may be used for the wise regulation of the size of one’s family, as well as a means of seeking to have children at the time which seems to be wisest.6
I didn’t understand this as a teenager. Based on Gothard’s teaching, and the teachings of men like Jim Sammons at IBLP, I assumed that wives should have as many children as physically possible. And that intimidated me. Yet I never thought my feelings could affect the course of my life. So whether I was anxious about it or not, having lots of children was in my future. My purpose was essentially wrapped up in being a wife and mother. Those two roles were the primary reasons God had put me on earth. I didn’t question that. Also, I wanted to please God, so if a big family was a primary way to honor Him, then I was willing to get over my fear and have as many children as I could.
Of course, God does call many women to be wives and mothers. Titus 2:4–5 says young women should “love their husbands and children, to be self-controlled, pure, working at home, kind, and submissive to their own husbands.” That is a lot of work, but it’s an impactful, God-honoring, and fulfilling life. That said, womanhood is not confined to being only a mother. Women, like men, are made in God’s image, which means they are made to know and glorify Him. A Christian woman’s identity is found in Jesus, not in her roles, which will change throughout her life.
When a woman becomes a Christian, she is God’s workmanship. The good works that God prepares won’t be the same for everyone. While a woman can walk in good works as a wife and mom, she can also do that through a vocation, service to the church, and by loving others well. I hope that’s something all women know, especially those who are not married or who struggle with infertility.
Women who never marry or have children can absolutely glorify God. I didn’t realize that when I was younger. I’ve had to disentangle the truth of my identity in Christ from a narrow view of my identity as primarily a wife and mother.
Nineteen-year-old me had all that confidence because I assumed life is like a recipe book: use the right ingredients in the right way, and the outcome is virtually guaranteed. Ever heard that famous saying from Forrest Gump (which I haven’t seen—no surprise): “My momma always said, ‘Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re gonna get’”?7 The idea is that life is unpredictable: you take it as it comes. If I’d watched that movie when I was a teenager, I would have thought that was a silly thing to believe. Life was the opposite of a box of chocolates. It was predictable, repeatable, with few surprises. All you needed were the right ingredients—the principles that were key to a successful Christian life. If I followed them, then God would bless me. If I didn’t, then God would not bless me. If another woman was struggling—if she didn’t get the husband she wanted or children that were a blessing or financial security—it was probably because she didn’t know these principles.
Those who watched me on television, particularly when I was a teenager, saw me living out these principles. No doubt they had some questions about the way I lived. Why did I dress that way? Why did I say that? Why did I go there or do that? Many of the answers can be traced to Gothard’s seven basic life principles.
Gothard described his first principle—the principle of design—this way: “God has a precise purpose for each person, object, and relationship that He creates. As we understand and live in harmony with His design, we will discover self-acceptance, identity, and fulfillment in life.”8 I understood this to mean that if I recognized God’s design and thanked Him for it, I would find satisfaction and fulfillment.
According to Gothard’s principle of authority, God assigns “various responsibilities to parents, church leaders, government officials, and other authorities.” What’s more, “as we learn to acknowledge and honor these authorities, we can see God work through them to provide direction and protection in our lives.”9 I believed that in doing so, I would experience inner peace.
Gothard described his third principle—responsibility—as “realizing that I am responsible to God for all my thoughts, words, actions, attitudes, and motives and that I must clear up every past offense against God and others.”10 According to Gothard, this is necessary to achieve a clear conscience.
The fourth principle—suffering—is closely related to the third principle of responsibility. For this one, Gothard said Christians should welcome “the chastening of the Lord and the sorrows and hurts of life as necessary for my maturity and future leadership.”11 Often, those “sorrows and hurts of life” are a result of conflict—people saying unkind and untrue things. In response to the suffering this conflict produces, Gothard said believers must forgive others. Based on his teaching, I thought that if I followed this principle, I would experience genuine joy.
The fifth basic life principle is ownership, which Gothard described as “knowing that everything I have or will have is entrusted to me by the Lord and is to be used in ways that will benefit the Lord and the lives of others.”12 So if I yielded my rights to God, then I’d enjoy true security.
For the sixth principle—freedom—Gothard had a clever description: “Enjoying the desire and the power to do what is right rather than claiming the privilege to do what I want.”13 By embracing this view of freedom, I expected to experience moral purity.
Here’s how Gothard defined the seventh and final principle: “The principle of success involves building God’s Word into every aspect of our being so we can receive His direction for every decision.”14 Gothard said that if I filled my mind with God’s Word, then God would direct my daily decisions. The result? A successful life. He elaborated on this in his seminar. At one point he said that if we follow these principles, we can be sure that we will always succeed.15 That’s what I believed for many, many years. I saw Gothard’s principles as the ticket to success. I figured if I followed them, God would make it clear to me what decisions I was supposed to make and not make. He would do that for the big decisions in life, like who I was supposed to marry, and the smallest of events, including questions like “What am I supposed to eat?”
Most have probably never heard those principles before, but for me, not a day went by when I didn’t apply them to my life in some way. Here are a couple of examples of what that looked like.
Courtship was probably the most famous application of these principles in my life. It was one of the most talked about aspects of the show. When I was younger, I didn’t understand why so many people thought it was fascinating, bizarre, or ridiculous. To me, courtship was a normal, healthy way to live out the principles of design and authority.
Courtship is the process through which a young man and woman go from being friends to spouses. Two people don’t enter a courtship unless they are considering marriage. Courtship doesn’t have to lead to the altar, but there’s an expectation that the courting couple is spending time together because they are serious about potentially marrying each other, even if they don’t know each other well when the relationship begins.
This process means parents decide if their daughters can get to know a particular man. And the parents also have final say over whether or not the daughter and suitor can get married. It’s a little different for sons. It seems like they have more freedom than the girls. Most of the time within this culture, a young man can pursue a girl and decide if he wants to marry her. The parents have input, but they aren’t as involved throughout the process. For my sisters and me, this process didn’t mean we had no say in who we were going to marry. Rather, it meant that young men who were interested in a relationship with me had to first get my parents’ approval. Jeremy and I weren’t set up by my mom and dad. We decided for ourselves that we wanted to be in a relationship and consider marriage. But it took more than five months for our relationship to begin because we didn’t initially have my parents’ approval. They wanted to get to know Jeremy. His background and theology were different from ours, and that gave my parents pause. When they did approve and we began courting, we followed specific guidelines. We didn’t go on one-on-one dates. Our time together took place at one of our families’ homes, or we had a sibling tag along with us if we went shopping, to a restaurant, or went for a walk. We also didn’t hold hands until we were engaged or kiss until marriage. My parents encouraged us to follow these guidelines.
I was committed to those courtship principles. I never thought about going out on a date with a guy by myself or spending time with a guy before he’d gained my parents’ approval. I was determined to reserve all of myself for my future husband. If I gave any affection to a guy who didn’t become my husband, I thought I’d be giving pieces of my heart to him, which would make it harder for me to give all of myself to my husband when the time came.
I wrote about this a lot in my journal. Here’s an example from July 22, 2015:
We went to the courtship class at church. I was so greatly convicted by the message talking about the dating spirit. I am so guilty in this area. This morning I was thinking about all of the wrongs it seems like I’ve been getting myself wrapped up in. Saddened and so sick of this state. Asking God for answers.
I saw attraction as being a distraction. I was so afraid of having a “dating spirit” that there were times when I wouldn’t even talk to a young man I might’ve been attracted to. Here’s another of my journal entries in which I conflated having thoughts about a guy with being attacked by Satan:
The past few days I have had a flood of thoughts about a young man. I was wisely encouraged to have a prayer target so when the temptation comes to dwell on such thoughts, I’m going to stop and pray for my sister. It’s really cool. What Satan meant for evil, God used for good.
That’s how I viewed any thoughts of attraction: as being evil and from Satan. I needed to fight against them, resist them with prayer. Today, I recognize that there were real problems with how I thought about relationships between guys and girls.
I was so afraid of defrauding guys or giving away my heart that I thought it was safer to avoid them altogether. I now see how harmful that view was. In relationships, there’s no substitute for spending time—lots of time—with your boyfriend or girlfriend. Getting to know them in their context of life and family, spending hours talking, going on dates, and experiencing all sorts of life situations together is so valuable. Courtship can become so highly controlled by parents, regulated, and overseen that it doesn’t allow for this level of openness and vulnerability.
There was a practical problem with courting, and my fear of having a dating spirit, when it came to my relationship with Jeremy. My determination to guard my heart made it difficult for Jeremy to figure out whether I liked him. He would ask Jessa what I was saying about him or if I had any interest. He, of course, assumed that I’d shared these things with my sisters. But I hadn’t. I hadn’t told Jessa or any of my other siblings how I felt about Jeremy. I wasn’t comfortable revealing my feelings because I was trying to guard my heart.
When Jeremy and I did begin our relationship, we felt a lot of pressure. We didn’t know each other well, yet from the moment we started talking on the phone, there was an expectation of marriage. That can be emotionally challenging. I know it was for me. When my dad gave Jeremy and me permission to court, I wasn’t yet convinced I wanted to marry him. I loved being around him, I respected him, but I didn’t know him well enough to say whether or not I wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. After all, we hadn’t had a lot of in-depth conversations. Our courtship sometimes made it tough to have those necessary conversations in an informal setting. When we were with each other in person, we had a chaperone, which a lot of times was one of my younger siblings. We obviously didn’t want to have those important discussions that every couple needs to have if a brother or sister was in earshot. Instead of enjoying our time together, we skipped the “friendship” stage and went straight to the “are we going to marry” stage. Looking back, I see how important that friendship stage is because friendship is such an important part of marriage. Despite those challenges, Jeremy and I were still able to grow together and figure out that we did want to marry. Marrying him was one of the best decisions I ever made.
Watch any episode of 19 Kids and Counting or Counting On and you’ll probably notice that I only wore skirts. Every skirt had to reach at least below the knee. I also wore blouses and shirts that covered the shoulders. That dress code was a big part of my life because Gothard said modesty was a serious responsibility for every Christian.
The Bible does say modesty is important. First Timothy 2:9 says women are to “adorn themselves in respectable apparel, with modesty and self-control, not with braided hair and gold or pearls or costly attire.” But it doesn’t say how long skirts should be or mandate shirtsleeves.
Beyond the principle of responsibility, Gothard tied his specific dress code to the principles of authority, design, and freedom. Modesty was an application of authority because I was submitting to what I thought God said about modesty. Dressing modestly was also part of the freedom Gothard defined as “not the right to do what I want, but the power to do what I ought.”16 I had no problem wearing what I thought I ought to. In fact, I wanted to dress conservatively and for everyone around me to do the same. I remember being so disappointed when a friend of mine started wearing pants. I thought that she had stepped away from the truth she knew she should be following. I was heartbroken and prayed for her. I was concerned about where her life was headed.
But most of all, based on Gothard’s teaching, I saw it as my responsibility to protect others’ moral purity by dressing modestly. If someone struggled with impure thoughts because of something I wore, then I bore some responsibility for that person’s sin. I needed to make sure no one stumbled because of my outfit choices. That’s why I cared so much about the length of my skirts, even down to the inches.
Now that I have walked away from the Gothard teachings, I find this idea deeply problematic. Though the Bible warns against causing others to sin (Luke 17:1–2), it doesn’t say that if someone has impure thoughts about me, I am at fault. That logic shifts blame away from the individual committing the sin. In extreme circumstances, it can put blame on the victims of assault instead of the abusers. This is exactly what Gothard taught. In a document called “Counseling Sexual Abuse” that was given to attendees at IBLP’s Advanced Training Institute, he said God allows victims to be abused because of:
Those are two of the more famous examples of how I lived out these principles. However, I’ve since realized the need to disentangle the truth from the errors in the way Gothard taught me to apply them.
God made me a specific way. Psalm 139:13–14 says:
For you formed my inward parts;
you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.
Wonderful are your works;
my soul knows it very well.
God designed everything about me: from my height and eye color to my personality and talents. That’s true, and it’s beautiful.
God not only made me on purpose but also has a purpose for how I live. All of us owe our existence to God, and He designed us to obey and honor Him. Dozens of verses talk about God’s purpose for all people, but the simplest might be 1 Corinthians 10:31, which says, “Whether you eat or drink, or whatever you do, do all to the glory of God.”
Gothard had a lot of ideas about design that I no longer believe. For example, he said that one of the best ways to find out God’s design, and why He allows defects in our lives, is to look at the sins of our forefathers. Gothard said,
Teenagers are asking a very profound question. They’re saying, “If God is really a God of love, could not He have made children so that the sins of the parents would not in any way affect the children?” God could’ve made us that way, but He didn’t. So it is that the sins of the parents are passed on to the children.18
According to Gothard, if someone’s grandfather was an alcoholic, it would take “five generations of no liquor at all just to remove the proneness to alcoholism that’s passed on to the children.”19 That same principle applied to any sin: anger, laziness, lying, or lust. If my great-grandfather struggled with anger, Gothard said it would be passed on to me. To break this family curse, to reverse the way my family was designed, I had to set up special disciplines and limits. I needed to create barriers to committing those sins or being exposed to them in any way.
Let me explain what this would look like in my life. For a while, I tried to avoid places that even sold alcohol, including restaurants, grocery stores, and convenience stores. I thought this was the best way to avoid the abuse of alcohol, something I was sure would be inevitable if I let myself be exposed to it at all. The same principle—avoiding any association with a potential sin—dominated my life. So much of what I didn’t wear, listen to, or eat was not just because I was trying to avoid disobeying God. It was because I was trying to stay away from any possible associating with disobedience. In recent years, I’ve learned that I am not always more prone to a particular sin because a previous generation struggled with it. I’ve also learned there’s a difference between disobeying God and interacting with someone or something that would not be godly behavior. The two are not the same.
What I’ve disentangled in recent years isn’t so much Gothard’s view of courtship and parents’ authority before marriage; there’s more than one way to find a spouse. It’s what Gothard said about parents’ authority after marriage that’s problematic.
He taught that when a couple gets married, there is a new structure of protection and authority, and the husband is the head of the house. But he also said the young couple is “under counsel of father and father-in-law, mother and mother-in-law.”20 In volume 1 of his Men’s Manual, he said, “A grandfather’s responsibility for his sons and daughters does not end when they finish their education or when they are married. His responsibility continues for as long as he lives!”21 This idea is nowhere in God’s Word. Rather, God’s Word commands, “Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh” (Genesis 2:24). Gothard invented a system whereby grown children still have to listen to their parents and obey their counsel. He maintained the authority of the parents, even after the marriage vows.
At times, this has played itself out in my marriage in tricky ways, especially in the early years after Jeremy and I became husband and wife. I had always felt like Jeremy and I had to check with my parents, see what they thought about the decisions we were making. I felt this way when we were buying our first house in Texas and when we decided to move to California. I had to remind myself that at the end of the day, we could get advice, but Jeremy and I would make the final decision. We were our own family and we had to make decisions that would honor God and be best for us and our children. Figuring out how to navigate those dynamics was something I had to do as I disentangled what Gothard taught about parental authority from what I believed the Bible truly said.
Gothard taught me that it was my responsibility to clear up all offenses, to make sure I asked God and others to forgive me for every action.
God loves forgiveness. John MacArthur often says, “Never are we more like the God we proclaim than when we forgive.”22 I have seen again and again that we are blessed to be forgiven by God and others. I’ve also experienced the peace that comes with forgiving those who’ve offended me. But I’ve had to disentangle the truth about forgiveness—and my responsibility in that process—from the unhealthy version of it I learned from Gothard.
As a teenager, I used to be terrified that I had some unconfessed sin. I thought that if I hadn’t cleared up “every past offense against God and others,” as Gothard taught,23 then God would punish me. Before bed, I’d scan my memory from the day’s events and make sure I hadn’t offended a sibling, said something disrespectful to my parents, or had a negative thought about a friend or family member. If I thought of some wrong I’d committed, I’d quickly ask God to forgive me and take the first opportunity to ask the person I’d offended to forgive me, too, even if they didn’t know I’d offended them.
This uncertainty could be overwhelming on Sunday mornings when our church took Communion. This part of Christian worship is an opportunity to remember what the Lord did for sinners on the cross. It’s meant to bring joy to every believer. When Christians drink the cup and eat the bread, the Bible says they “proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Corinthians 11:26). Taking Communion is serious, but it’s also a celebration. Yet most Sunday mornings, I didn’t see it that way. I thought of it more as a game of Russian roulette. I was convinced that if I took Communion with some unconfessed sin I didn’t know about, then God would punish me, possibly with death.
Before taking Communion, I’d rack my brain, trying to think of anything I could have said or done that might require an apology or confession. Even if I couldn’t think of anything, I still wouldn’t take Communion if I thought there might be the smallest possibility I was forgetting a sin.
This is an unhealthy view because it assumes that God wants to punish me—and that it’s my responsibility to avoid that punishment. But for the person whose faith is in Jesus, the Bible says the opposite is true. Psalm 103:12 promises, “As far as the east is from the west, so far does [God] remove our transgressions from us.”
Gothard taught me that if I was suffering, there was a good chance it was because of some hidden or secret sin in my life. I was disobeying God in some way, and that was why I was experiencing pain and hardship. He even said that “most illnesses today are the result of bitterness, or guilt, or just lack of love.”24 I quickly became terrified that if I didn’t do everything I could to be agreeable, I’d face the consequences in the form of suffering.
Of course, sin and disobedience can certainly produce a lot of pain. For instance, if someone is angry and they punch a wall and break their hand, their sin has caused them pain. But sometimes suffering happens for reasons unknown to the believer. The Bible says that sometimes the reason for our suffering is to help us grow closer to God. Sometimes it’s simply a result of living in a broken world. And yes, sometimes it’s because of sin. But, contrary to what Gothard taught, there’s not always a way to know why suffering happens.
I firmly disagree with what Gothard said about Job—an Old Testament man who lost his wealth, friends, health, and children. After Job lost everything he loved, three friends visited him. They figured that he must be suffering because he did something wrong. They didn’t know what he did wrong, but they assumed that someone suffering as much as Job must have made a mistake. Gothard not only agrees with Job’s friends, he at one point said he knows something they don’t—why Job was suffering: he was afraid. According to Gothard, Job apparently had three fears: He feared his children would rebel. He feared he would lose his health. He feared that he would lose his possessions. The reason we know that is because in the third chapter, Job gave us something of a confession. He said, “The thing that I greatly feared has come upon me, and the thing that I was greatly afraid of has now happened to me!” (v. 25, paraphrase). No wonder God tells us over and over in Scripture, “Don’t fear! Fear not.”25
If you assume that the story of Job is a warning against fear, you are going to be more afraid. At least that’s what happened to me when I was younger! I was afraid that if I felt fear, God would punish me for that.
What Gothard said is simply not true. The Bible tells us why these events happened to Job, and it’s not because Job feared those things. It’s because God said Job was righteous, and Satan wanted to destroy his faith. But Gothard’s teaching paralyzed me with fear. I thought that anything I feared would come to be. I felt like my destiny was fully dependent on me and my mind, as if I were controlling my circumstances by what I thought.
I’ll never forget listening to Austin Duncan, the college pastor at my church, teach through the book of Job a few years ago. That series changed how I think about suffering and my own fear. Austin said this:
I think this is helpful for us because it teaches us that we can’t dodge suffering, that you can’t manage your life, you can’t control your circumstances, you can’t exercise enough or plan enough or save enough money or work your way into a place of security . . . to avoid suffering. 26
This lesson from the book of Job taught me that my suffering is not necessarily a result of my disobedience or some hidden fears in my subconscious. It helped me live out my faith with confidence.
Through Gothard’s teachings I became convinced that if I obeyed these principles, if I applied them every day and to every part of my life just as he told me to, I would enjoy extraordinary success. My marriage would be strong, and so would my bank account. Then God would use me to be a blessing to others. Non-Christians, and perhaps some Christians who were struggling with their health, relationships, or finances, would see my success and want the same blessings. That, Gothard said, was the ultimate goal: to be a light to the nations, a witness to the blessings God pours out on those who obey Him. I think that was my family’s driving motivation for being on television; we were convinced that if viewers saw the joy and harmony these principles produced in our lives, then they would want to be Christians and live like we did. Our goal was to show the world a positive, compelling view of Christianity.
Just as problematic as Gothard’s opinions, however, was his guarantee of success for everyone who follows his rules. Gothard taught that the future I wanted—husband, kids, financial freedom, and health—would be mine if I followed everything he was teaching. He claimed his seminars were the key to success, and I was sure to get all those blessings if I obeyed. In other words, I was being taught a version of the health and wealth gospel.
The health and wealth gospel is simply this: God wants to give His children money and physical health, but they must have faith that He will bless them. The size of someone’s financial success is proportional to the amount of that person’s faith and obedience. Here’s what Gothard said about money: “God uses riches to bless those who obey his commandments, and he removes money from those who violate his commandments.”27 If I saw a family who was following Gothard’s principles and they owned their house outright—had no debt on it—or they could afford to give generously, I assumed God was blessing them because they were so committed to the principles.
Millions of Americans believe the health and wealth gospel. There is no shortage of preachers and televangelists who have gained millions of followers by teaching this version of Christianity. When teachers promise healing for those who have enough faith, tens of thousands show up at their crusades, hoping they have enough faith to leave with a restored body.
When I was a teenager, I would have said that I rejected the health and wealth gospel. Gothard himself would have criticized what prosperity preachers were teaching. But I did believe that obedience was the key to success in life. I was convinced that if I obeyed, God would reward me with the blessings. In other words, I believed the health and wealth gospel. It looked a little different from the popular version that shows up on television and in some of America’s biggest churches, but it was essentially the same message. In recent years, I’ve started to understand that what I thought was the key to success was actually a recipe for spiritual failure.
Ultimately, Gothard’s seven principles produced exhaustion and fear in my life. I was consumed with being introspective, overcome by paranoia. I obsessively dissected my life—my thoughts, words, and actions—because I was terrified that a sin might sneak in and cause me to lose God’s blessings. If I forgot to ask forgiveness for a single sin, I felt condemned. I believed that I needed to know everything Gothard taught and that I needed to obey every one of his principles and their associated rules, no matter how obscure. Otherwise, my life would be a failure.
If that was true of all seven principles, it was especially the case for the principle of authority. It seemed like Gothard thought that was the most important one. He seemed to connect the rest of the principles back to authority, as if it was the foundation for everything he taught. Disobey that and I would remove myself from what Gothard called “the umbrella of authority” or “umbrella of protection,”28 thereby opening myself up to attacks from Satan.