The Exclusion Zone: Part 1
Growing Up in Graham Country
CN: This essay contains a brief, general description of past personal child abuse.
On June 2, Amazon Prime released Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets. Instead of sanitizing the Duggars as a quirkily wholesome, J-themed antidote to the Kardashians, the documentary did not shy away from discussing the molestation, adultery, and family estrangement that led to the cancellation of their 19 Kids and Counting and Counting On reality TV series, and ultimately put eldest son Joshua in prison for possession of child sexual abuse materials. The main focus, though, was on the damage that Bill Gothard’s ultra-conservative Institute of Basic Life Principles (IBLP) Christian fundamentalist religious sect and Advanced Training Institute (ATI) homeschooling curriculum inflicted on the Duggars and other participating families. According to interviews with daughter Jill Duggar Dillard and others connected to the family, not only is IBLP still an active organization despite Gothard’s own history with inappropriate sexual behavior, Duggar parents Jim Bob and Michelle have replaced him as the group’s new de facto leaders.
The Shiny Happy People documentary (rightly) portrays IBLP as a repressive, coercive, aggressively patriarchal cult and the ATI homeschooling program as “educationally neglectful" propaganda designed to indoctrinate, rather than educate. Many viewers were horrified by the extent and severity of the abuse and manipulation described, and shocked at the lengths to which television networks and other media outlets had gone to normalize the Duggars’ beliefs and practices. Those who grew up in fundamentalist churches and homeschool programs, even ones not directly connected with IBLP or ATI, found the docuseries painfully relatable to their own experiences. Others were surprised to learn how many of Jim Bob Duggar’s high-level Republican political connections also had ties to the IBLP movement, particularly former Arkansas governor and two-time Presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, father of current Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
From there, it didn’t take long for viewer discussion to focus on the various ways that Evangelical Protestant church doctrines have come to resemble slightly watered-down versions of core IBLP tenets, and how many right-wing conservative politicians and judges have become ever more brazen in their efforts to force fundamentalist Christian Nationalist beliefs into secular laws and public policy. The point where those two observations overlapped is the exact place where some people’s compassion for survivors of religious-based trauma ran dry. Not only did they feel guilty and gullible for being charmed by a family that turned out to be so twisted, they were also being confronted with the idea that cults aren’t just small, isolated groups of weirdos with no power over mainstream society or politics. The possibility of skeletons in their own church closets and ballot boxes became too plausible to ignore, yet too uncomfortable to face. So, they chose projection over introspection, and began accusing the documentary’s creators of using the Duggars as an excuse to launch a broadside attack against conservative Christianity as a whole.
It's the kind of choice people often make about all kinds of difficult topics that hit too close to home. It’s a stubborn denial of an inconvenient reality in an attempt to avoid pain. I can’t condone it, but I do understand it.
Bill Gothard is neither the first nor the most famous Wheaton College graduate to reject congregational ministry, dedicate his life to marketing patriarchal evangelism to the masses, or to call that effort a “crusade.” He’s not the most politically well-connected, the most successful, or even the only one named William. While Gothard was first incorporating the “Campus Teams” youth ministry that would become IBLP, his fellow alumnus had already founded a multinational nonprofit organization, launched a radio show, a magazine, and a syndicated newspaper column, toured 13 countries in Africa and the Middle East, befriended Queen Elizabeth, and convinced President Eisenhower to establish a National Day of Prayer.
By the time the ATI homeschooling program launched in 1984, the other William had spoken at multiple college campuses in the United States and England, become spiritual advisor to every United States President since Truman, and preached to a global audience of millions. Instead of Gothard’s overt authoritarianism, this man built a six-decade career on a combination of rags-to-riches charisma and a reputation for near-universal mainline palatability. Upon his death in 2018 at the age of 99, he became the first religious leader to lie in honor in the United States Capitol rotunda and was eulogized as “America’s Pastor” and the “most important evangelist since the Apostle Paul.”
I’m speaking, of course, of the late Rev. William Franklin Graham, Jr. Most everybody called him Billy. Where I come from, we called him our neighbor. Rev. Graham was born and raised in my home state of North Carolina and lived most of his adult life in the tiny stone-gated enclave of Montreat. Since all roads leading to Montreat go through my own birthplace, Black Mountain, with the main one travelling right past my childhood home, we’ll start our journey in the same fashion.
Black Mountain the kind of place where 8,000 residents can choose between 20 different churches within a six-mile radius, yet all of them are Protestant. It’s more gentrified and touristy now than when I was little, but it’s still a 25-minute drive away from the nearest shopping mall or movie theater. As in so much of small-town America, Christianity is a cultural baseline that permeates and influences pretty much every aspect of everyday life.
I grew up within walk-by-yourself distance of my elementary and middle schools and right across the street from the Southern Baptist Church where Grandaddy was a deacon, usher, and Sunday school teacher for 64 years. My parents have lived in that house since I was four. Somewhere in the attic, amongst all the Barbie Magic Dream house paraphernalia, there’s probably still a trunk full of my old marching band trophies, theater scripts, choir sheet music, and National Honor Roll certificates stuffed in between my Vacation Bible School artwork, church summer camp postcards, and homemade prom dresses.
I learned how to ride a bicycle in our church’s parking lot and how to throw a Frisbee in the field behind the fellowship hall. I waited on the church’s front steps for the morning bus to my (allegedly) secular public high school, where I sang hymns and spirituals in chorus class every spring and practiced Christmas carols in symphonic band every fall. All our evening concerts were on Thursdays, because Mondays were for homework, Tuesdays for Scout meetings, and Wednesdays for youth groups and Bible study. Fridays, of course, were devoted to the supplementary worship of high school football, where local pastors took turns giving the invocation before every game. We didn’t have purity balls, but we did have legislatively-mandated sex education classes that declared “abstinence outside of mutually faithful monogamous heterosexual marriage” as the “expected standard” for all school-age children. Saturdays were for watching cartoons, mowing the lawn, and pretending not to recognize each other in the liquor store.
I don’t drink alcohol and I’ve never smoked a cigarette of any kind. Neither of those choices are for religious reasons. My father drank plenty enough for the both of us before he died, and the smell of my mother’s two-packs-a-day menthol cigarette habit will follow me to the grave. My stepfather used to hide his bong behind the canning jars in the pantry and we both pretended I didn’t know what it was. I wasn’t blanket trained, but I am quite familiar with what leather belts can do besides holding up a pair of pants, as well as being sent to cut my own switch. Want to see complementarianism in action? Look no further than Thanksgiving dinner, where my grandma and my aunts cooked, served, and cleaned up while the menfolk sat around watching football and not talking to each other. My hair used to be long enough to tuck into my own waistband and not because I particularly wanted it that way. These days I rock an undercut pixie and am thankful to finally be at a point in life where folks stop asking me whether my husband approves of it.
Anywho…
Growing up Graham-adjacent was a little bit like living next door to Bigfoot, except our elusive semi-mythical creature was a silver-haired theological celebrity who lived in a log home and appeared regularly on our television sets dressed in a three-piece suit. More people claimed to have met him than ever actually did, but absolutely everybody knew of him. As locals, our unofficial seasonal job was to direct over-zealous tourists toward the Chamber of Commerce and away from finding out exactly where the Grahams lived or trying to hike up to their private property.
Rev. Graham’s fame protected him in ways that barbed wire and chain link never could. If any of us home folks ever changed the channel away from one of his televised sermons or didn’t fully agree with everything he said or did, we kept that strictly to ourselves. Criticizing a man who prayed with Presidents and had shaken hands with the Pope was not only considered the height of holy hubris, it would have been the social equivalent of taking a dump on the dinner table. No one in our area was considered a more fitting icon of righteous living than a man who, by the time you were born, had already raised five children, and been faithfully married to his equally devout college sweetheart for 34 years.
So what if he called homosexuality “a sinister form of perversion” and his ministry still openly endorses pray the gay away-style conversion therapy? And yeah, maybe he was caught on tape saying that the “Jewish stranglehold has got to be broken or the country's going down the drain” after initially trying to deny it. At least he apologized for saying that AIDS was a judgement of God just as deaths in the United States from the disease were reaching their historical peak.
If I’d objected to any of those things as a teenager or tried pointing out the contradictions between Rev. Graham’s claims of being apolitical and his clear influence on national public policy and state law, I’d likely have been dismissed as not knowing what I was talking about. I’d also have faced some extremely pointed questions about why I cared so much about those specific topics. As an adult, I could very well have lost my job.
Montreat is an incorporated municipality with zero traditional commercial development. The town manages to pack a Presbyterian Church (USA) conference and retreat center, a private four-year Christian college originally founded by that same retreat center, and a local government body into 2.7 square miles of some of the most beautiful mountains in southern Appalachia. Montreat is also geopolitical ground zero for four generations of the Graham family dynasty, starting with Billy’s father-in-law, Dr. L. Nelson Bell, and proceeding down through his wife, his eldest son, and on to his eldest grandson. Although the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association maintained a local office until Billy’s death, the family’s closest and most influential ties are to Montreat College.
I served as Montreat’s Town Clerk for more than ten years. I accepted the job in the aftermath of a messy divorce and prolonged custody battle. Lawrence v. Texas had decriminalized same-sex relationships and Massachusetts had recently become the first state to recognize same-sex marriage, but North Carolina’s family courts still hadn’t stopped their habit of using the state’s now-defunct felony anti-sodomy law as an excuse to strip queer parents of their custodial and visitation rights. To this day, the state’s employment law still has no anti-discrimination protections on the bases of sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. I had an extremely forward-facing professional role, a shiny new heterosexual-looking marriage, a mortgage, and a stack of legal bills. Aside from my spouse, nobody in the entire state knew I was bisexual or had ever so much as glanced twice at a woman, and I was hellbent on making sure things stayed that way.
By law, local government employees are not allowed to engage in any kind of political activity during working hours. Billy Graham could get away with simply claiming to be non-partisan in his work life: I had to actually do it. A Clerk’s code of ethics also requires us to treat everyone we serve equally, regardless of anyone’s political or religious affiliation. I take both those things closely to heart. Nobody should ever have to sit through a sermon or a stump speech just to pay their water bill, and the Kim Davises of the world have no place in public service. The only challenging part was that my office visitors were not bound by that same rule.
One thing to know about living or working in a small town is that the airspeed velocity of gossip is boredom times self-righteousness squared. When the Montreat Presbyterian Church had a congregational split over the ordination of queer clergy and the performance or recognition of same-sex marriages, everybody and their dog wanted to talk about it for months. My stock response was that as a government official who also wasn’t a member of that church, I had no comment other than to hope the matter could be resolved as amicably and quickly as possible. That wasn’t quite good enough for one person who had also recently noticed my distinctly Not Scots-Irish surname and demanded to know if I was “at least Presbyterian.”
Which brings me to another thing to know about small town living: the assumption that everyone who is from a place, is also of that place in terms of having an identical set of beliefs (both sacred and secular) is also an expectation. Most people don’t voice it quite so aggressively, but it still comes out in the life experiences and perspectives they assume to be universal among people who look and talk like them.
To more than a few of the townsfolk who liked a good chat while waiting for their documents to print, my silence on church and political matters was seen as tacit agreement that simply couldn’t be expressed while on the clock. Of course the pregnant young woman with a ring on the correct finger supports our views on marriage and family! That faintly nauseated look on her face is just morning sickness, the poor thing. She still smiled, though, so it’s fine!
The last thing to know about small town living is that the people who gossip to you will just as readily gossip about you. The secrets you don’t allow yourself to think about are the ones you’re more likely to keep. Discretion sometimes feels less like valor and more like obligatory cowardice, but it can also be a form of protection when other people are depending on the results of your choices. Billy Graham’s rule for avoiding temptation and impropriety was to avoid traveling, meeting, or dining alone with a woman other than his wife. Mine was to chew multiple pieces of gum at a time during contentious public meetings, which gave me a physical outlet for stress or frustration without letting my words or facial expressions get me into trouble. My method might not have become a famous Christian manifesto, but it sure was a lot less sexist.
Over the next few years, the church’s doctrinal divide over same-sex marriage would evolve into a national flashpoint. North Carolina’s fashionably late entry into the culture war was a direct result of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association’s decision to weaponize Scripture and use Billy’s good name as a tool for their bully pulpit. Stick around for Part 2 to find out how that all came about, what came after, and what happens when not-so-good little girls finally get the freedom to be fed up.
Excellent read! Thank you Misty. Can't wait for next week.