Here’s one of the many quirky facts about being a Duggar: my husband, Jeremy, and I didn’t watch our first movie together until we were husband and wife. On our honeymoon in 2016, we watched The Truman Show. I had never seen it before. (That’s something I can say about a lot of movies!)
You probably already know that The Truman Show is about the ultimate fishbowl. The main character, Truman Burbank, is the star of a reality TV show, but he doesn’t know it. Every moment of his life is captured for television. He lives inside a dome in Burbank, California, but he thinks he lives in a place called Seahaven Island. Many people from the outside world have opinions and expectations about who Truman should be and how he should live. Truman marries a woman the producers pick for him—not the woman he loves. The producers also pick his job and decide where he will live and who his best friend will be. When Truman begins to question his reality and tries to get out of Seahaven, his escape is blocked at every turn.
After we finished the movie, I turned to Jeremy and said, “That movie is my life.” Well, except for the spouse-picking part.
I’ve been on television since I was ten years old. In 2004, Discovery Health Channel aired a documentary about my family called 14 Children and Pregnant Again, which was followed by three more documentaries. Eventually, we started filming a reality show for TLC called 17 Kids and Counting, which was changed to 18 Kids and Counting and then 19 Kids and Counting as our family grew. Five of my siblings took their first breaths on television. That makes them, like Truman Burbank, reality TV stars at birth. The show aired on TLC for seven years, and then from 2015 through September 2020, TLC aired a spin-off show about my siblings and me called Counting On.
Life on TV has its perks as well as its challenges. For me, one of those challenges has been dealing with other people’s expectations. When strangers expect me to make certain decisions—even rooting for me to make them as if I’m a character on a sitcom—they seem to forget that I’m a real person with my own feelings and emotions. Add my family’s values to the equation and you get even more criticism, opinions, and debates about how I should live. Every decision is put under a microscope, dissected, and either criticized or praised.
Another challenge has been dealing with the lack of privacy. Whether I’m being recognized in public or chased by photographers, I’m still learning to navigate a life lived publicly.
It hasn’t always been easy knowing that millions of strangers have strong opinions about what I should or shouldn’t do, say, or be. I am a people pleaser. I don’t like conflict. And I don’t want to be the center of attention. But that last part comes with being on television—as I quickly learned after my family’s show started and a few of my on-air, offhand comments started a movement.
In 2005, a website called Television Without Pity started an online forum about my family. It wasn’t especially flattering. (I know; it’s hard to believe an online discussion could be critical!) After 14 Children and Pregnant Again aired, reviews of the documentary poured in. At first, people were just talking about the show—what they liked and didn’t like. Then they started talking about my family. Pretty soon, people who had seen the documentary, and perhaps a few who hadn’t, were discussing conservative Christianity, homeschooling, courtship, and other topics that were part of my family’s fabric. I guess these conversations were a bit afield from the purpose of the Television Without Pity thread, so the forum migrated to a new discussion board that the moderators decided—for reasons I still find amusing—to call Free Jinger. Why in the world did they name it after me? Well, I have a theory.
During several episodes of 19 Kids and Counting, our family traveled to cities like New York, Chicago, and London. We even went to Disneyland in Southern California. I especially enjoyed those trips because I’ve always loved big cities. I’ll never forget my first visit to Times Square. I loved all the people out and about. The hustle and bustle. It was energizing. Exhilarating. It made me feel small and important at the same time.
My sister Jessa and I liked to pretend we were big-city locals. We would pack for our siblings before trips to New York for filming with Good Morning America or the TODAY show. We’d try to select the most stylish outfits from the family closet. One time we even met former president Bill Clinton on the TODAY set. The producers thought it was neat that he, like us, was from Arkansas. They piled our whole family on this couch and asked the president to take a picture. As Bill Clinton walked toward all of us, he tripped on a cord and accidentally grabbed one of my sisters by the hair to stop his fall. We had a good laugh about it. To me, this perfectly encapsulated the magic of New York. Big cities always held the possibility of a surprise introduction or unexpected encounter.
On one of the talk shows, I mentioned my love for cities, and from what I can tell, that is why I became the namesake of the new Duggar family forum. Critics of the show—and of my family’s lifestyle—interpreted my love for cities as a rejection of rural, small-town life. They assumed that if I wanted to live in a big city, that also meant I wanted to break away from the values of my childhood, since most cities are overwhelmingly secular.
Deeply religious and conservative people often talk about the temptations and dangers of big cities. Those who embrace city life typically aim to reinvent themselves or find themselves. Apparently, the moderators of this forum thought I was after the same thing. They thought I had an independent, freedom-loving streak. Their website says they chose the name because they saw in me a spark and spunk.1 (Also, I think they thought my name was funny. So there’s that.)
I admit I’m a little bit touched that the curators of this website named it after me. Not because I appreciate the notoriety but because these people, in their own way, have expressed compassion for me. They think complete freedom is the ticket to happiness.
Yes, I have always wanted to live in a big city. I love living in Los Angeles today—but not for the reasons the Free Jinger founders assumed. I love the excitement. I love the variety of people and the seemingly endless number of places to go and things to do. I don’t see the city as a place to find myself or shake free from the world in which I grew up. It doesn’t offer me limitless freedom. Instead, living in the city is an opportunity for me to serve others and maximize the life God has given me.
No rules.
No limitations.
No authority beyond yourself.
The curators of the website saw in me a girl they assumed didn’t have the good life because she didn’t have unbridled freedom. They thought, If this girl could break free from her family’s ultraconservative rules—if she could wear what she wanted, date who she wanted, pursue the career she wanted, and eat and drink what she wanted—then she would be happy.
And they’re not alone. Most people think they have to be free from all restraints to be happy. Freedom is the water in which our culture swims, something as essential to most people as gravity. So I think it’s caring that others want this for me, even if I don’t embrace their version of the “good life.”
I am not in search of total freedom from rules and biblical morals, but that doesn’t mean I am the same Jinger I was when the website started. My faith has changed dramatically. I do not believe the same things I used to believe five or ten years ago about God, the Bible, and the Christian life. I’d like to talk about what has changed. But first, I need to make something clear: I am not deconstructing my faith. Deconstruction is a popular word in Christian circles today. It represents a movement of young people who grew up in Christian homes but in adulthood have decided that much, if not all, of what they were taught as children is not for them. They’ve abandoned their religious beliefs. They tore them down and never rebuilt any kind of faith. Perhaps the most famous example of this is Joshua Harris.
Growing up, I believed a lot of the same things Harris did. I never read I Kissed Dating Goodbye, but from what I knew of the book, I was sure its principles worked. It was easy to admire Harris.
Throughout the late ’90s and early 2000s, Joshua Harris was one of the country’s best-known evangelicals. I Kissed Dating Goodbye sold more than a million copies and shaped how an entire generation of Christians, including me, talked about dating, courtship, and relationships. Purity culture was a hot topic, mostly because of Harris. There weren’t any young evangelicals with a brighter future.
That’s why I was shocked when, in the fall of 2019, this influential author, conference speaker, and former pastor announced that he was no longer a Christian.2 This announcement came shortly after he and his wife separated (the woman he describes meeting and courting in Boy Meets Girl, his follow-up to I Kissed Dating Goodbye) and four years after Harris left Covenant Life Church in Gaithersburg, Maryland, where he’d served as a pastor for eleven years. Harris’s decisions to leave the ministry, end his marriage, and reject the faith discouraged many Christians. If someone with Harris’s pedigree of personal discipleship and ministry preparation could abandon Christianity, it seemed any believer could do the same.
Two years after Harris’s surprise announcement, I heard he was selling an online course called “Reframe Your Story,” which included a “Deconstruction Starter Pack.” It cost $275 (although it was free for anyone who claimed they were hurt by his previous ministry). He said the curriculum was created “for people who are unpacking and have questions and [are] changing their belief who feel really alone in doing that.” He also said he “wanted to create something to help people reframe their thinking and to be able to decide for themselves what things they want to hold onto and if they want, to let go of certain religious ideas.”3 Harris’s evolution was complete. He was no longer one of the country’s most popular Christians. He was now leading something entirely different: the deconstruction movement.
In some ways, I think Harris and I found ourselves in a similar place a few years ago. Like him, I grew up in a conservative Christian home. Like him, I was in the public eye from a young age. And like him, I came to a point in adulthood when I realized that my understanding of Christianity was insufficient. But today, there is a massive gulf between Harris and me. Instead of deconstruction, my faith journey is one of disentanglement.
I’ve come to understand that in the Christianity of my childhood, elements of the true gospel of Jesus Christ were tangled up with false teaching. I’ve spent eight years unthreading my faith: separating truth from error. Understanding my story of unthreading starts with the fishbowl I grew up in and the two very different expectations that were placed on me as a part of that world.
We’ve already discussed one of the expectations: that I would find “freedom” and the “good life” by rejecting all rules, commitments, family ties, and religious convictions, much like Joshua Harris and others in the deconstruction movement. But along my journey of disentanglement, I’ve come to see that unfettered freedom does not produce the good life. In the end, it often leads to more bondage. Why? Because it puts me in charge of my life, and I am not the best judge of what is best for me. If given limitless options and the responsibility of figuring out what is going to make me truly happy, I struggle to commit to anything. I have the same problem when I’m trying to pick a show on Netflix; I just keep scrolling, always wondering if there’s a better show out there. In the case of life’s big decisions, the question becomes: Is there a better job, home, or relationship? I’m left to constantly second-guess my choices.
However, the opposite of total freedom—man-made rules—is also a false version of the good life. And others’ belief that I should obey these rules was the second expectation I had to wrestle with.
Not long after the Free Jinger website began, my family went to visit a prominent Christian leader. When asked about my family’s response to critics, I mentioned the Free Jinger website, explaining how many people online were saying that I would never be truly free unless I broke away from the strict conservative values I had been raised with. I later journaled about the Christian leader’s response, writing:
He mentioned that he had several people who had done the same to them. Then he slipped away and, little did I know, made a call to one of his staff members and told them to find the nicest shirt and have it printed with writing which says, “Jinger is Free Indeed.”
He sent me two of those shirts. One was red with neon-green letters. I still have it.
Why did that prominent Christian leader say I was already free when, at that time, nearly everything about my life was decided for me? I was fourteen years old and didn’t have the freedom to choose where I went, what I wore, what music I listened to, or who my friends were. Granted, most teenagers don’t have unlimited freedom, but many can agree I had less than most. Obviously, this leader’s understanding of freedom was very different from the people in the Free Jinger movement. He believed I was free because of the rules, and I understood this perspective.
To-do lists give life structure. They are like guardrails for the day. They identify exactly what needs to be done, and they make it easy to track your progress so you can be sure you are accomplishing your goals. There’s something freeing about to-do lists, especially that moment when you cross off a completed item. Man-made religious rules can give the same sense of satisfaction. They are intended to provide tangible proof that life is being lived the way God intended. And there is nothing more freeing than confidence that your decisions are right and you are making God happy.
That’s how I understood this leader’s definition of freedom. He seemed to be saying that I was already free because I was already following all the rules. There’s truth there. The question is, who was I obeying?
You won’t find man-made rules in the Bible. God’s Word calls for men and women to dress modestly, but it doesn’t specify which outfit to pick in the morning. It certainly doesn’t say that skirts are more appropriate than jeans! Scripture says our music should honor God, but it doesn’t say some genres are better than others. Christians should be sexually pure, but the Word of God doesn’t say anything about the specifics of dating. The word dating isn’t even in the Bible!
Often, these rules have good intentions. They are ways that many sincere Christians try to apply biblical principles. But there’s a problem with this vision of freedom: it’s based entirely on the individual—on my actions and attitudes. That kind of self-dependence may feel good for a while, but in the end, it’s going to crush the soul. I can’t obey enough man-made rules to be truly free from the weight of my imperfections. No matter how many restrictions I place on my behavior, my wardrobe, my time, or my appetites, I’ll never get away from my sinful self. The Bible says it is not what enters the mouth that defiles the man but what proceeds out of the mouth (Matthew 15:16–20). In other words, I am messed up because of sin, and no amount of good behavior is going to fix that. I need freedom from myself, not freedom from the world around me.
I’ve come to understand that the Free Jinger movement and the conception of freedom behind the “Jinger Is Free Indeed” T-shirt are both wrong. Freedom is not unlimited options. And it’s not obedience to man-made rules. So what is it? I’m excited to answer that question in the coming pages.
As I mentioned earlier, my story is one of disentanglement. Of course, this is a story that nearly every true believer could tell. Many of us have realized that our faith was insufficient, incomplete, or inaccurate. When these realizations come, some choose to deconstruct their faith while others refuse to acknowledge their quandary. Perhaps they don’t want to admit they might have been wrong, or maybe they are afraid of losing relationships. Neither of those paths was an option for me. I know that Jesus is real and true. This left me not with wanting to deconstruct my faith or ignore the problems but instead choosing to look deeper into the Word of God.
My path involved tracing the threads of true Christianity away from the false version taught by one man—the leader of a strict, conservative version of Christianity that greatly influenced my life. In recent years, I’ve come to see that the religious system this man built was not reflective of the gracious gospel of Jesus Christ. This man and his teaching produced a lot of legalism in my life.
Thankfully, this false teaching was not the end of my story. God’s grace is far more abundant than I realized. It redeemed me, and it can redeem all who have lived, as the apostle Paul said, “in the futility of their minds” (Ephesians 4:17). The grace of God is helping me understand that “if the Son sets you free, you will be free indeed” (John 8:36). In many ways, that verse describes my path from legalism to true freedom. And the beginning of that journey goes back to the fishbowl, to the year 2008, when I was fourteen years old and my private diary was listed on eBay for the absurd amount of $100,000.