Just weeks ago, Jinger Duggar released her controversial memoir, Becoming Free Indeed.
Among fans, it stirred discourse because some feel that Jinger has only traded one cult for another.
But Jinger’s book and what she wrote about her toxic upbringing also struck a nerve with her family.
Apparently, Jim Bob and Michelle feel embarrassed — as they should — by what the book has to say. And they’re preventing Jinger’s own siblings from reading it. Some of them, anyway.
Though Jinger Duggar Vuolo is still very much a conservative evangelical Christian, many of her beliefs have evolved since her upbringing in a fundamentalist cult.
This goes well beyond Jinger’s rebellious outfits. Marrying Jeremy and moving to Los Angeles confirmed her parents’ worst fears: she exposed herself to new ideas and new people, and thus grew as a person.
That kind of open-mindedness and personal agency is anathema in their family, their church, and the IBLP cult.
In Becoming Free Indeed, Jinger works to detangle and separate her Christian faith and her conservative beliefs from her authoritarian upbringing.
She grew up in a toxic, abusive cult. And she grew up on reality television.
Even without the cult’s most notorious sexual predators — from her eldest brother to the cult’s founder — things were less than ideal. And Jinger is clearly still unpacking all of that in her own mind.
Jinger has stepped away from the pernicious teachings of the Institute in Basic Life Principles.
Disgraced sexual predator Bill Gothard conceived of these twisted, sexist restrictions on people’s everyday lives. And Jim Bob and Michelle forced their children to live in this restrictive environment.
Jinger has seen enough of the world to look back upon her own experiences and know that it was both “wrong” and hurtful.
Now, RadarOnline reports that Jinger’s parents feel “embarrassed” by the various revelations in Becoming Free Indeed.
Additionally, sources say that Jim Bob and Michelle are working to insulate their younger children from Jinger’s book and its contents.
After all, this is their policy for any material that challenges or merely differs from the odious teachings of the IBLP cult.
The cult teaches that women are very explicitly inferior to men, yet have almost supernatural powers to control them.
Women must submit to men without IBLP. As wives, there is no concept of “consent,” but merely of being available to the husband’s sexual desires at all times. Obviously, this is the groundwork for abuse.
Speaking of desire, women also take the blame for men’s thoughts, feelings, and actions within this horrific ideology. So women must dress modestly in order to avoid “defrauding” men. This is more or less rape apology 101.
It is no surprise to hear that Jim Bob and Michelle do not want their younger kids reading Jinger’s book, especially family. It’s the same reason that they don’t allow them to attend school or make normal friends.
They grow up with IBLP as the only world that they know. Everything else is foreign, intimidating, and somehow impure or unholy.
Jinger was able to learn better when she grew up. But not everyone will get a chance to move out of Arkansas. For the girls, it will depend upon the whims of their future “lord husbands.” And who approves of suitors for marriage? Jim Bob.
Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar “Embarrassed” by Revelations in Jinger’s … was originally published on The Hollywood Gossip.