Today, Explained - The Joshua Generation

Episode Date: July 14, 2023

A group of evangelical Christians raised their children to become influential in the White House, on Capitol Hill, and in the Supreme Court. Now, as adults, the "Joshua generation" are reckoning with their upbringing. This episode was produced by Victoria Chamberlin with help from Siona Peterous, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The documentary Shiny Happy People, Duggar Family Secrets, was Amazon's biggest documentary debut ever. It's about the evangelical Christian family who were stars of TLC's 19 Kids and Counting. Some things about the Duggars were already well known. They were part of a movement where having and then homeschooling many, many children was encouraged. Creating an army for God, it was sometimes called. Less well known was that the Duggars considered themselves and their kids part of something called the Joshua Generation. It sounds almost conspiratorial, but these kids were raised to

become influential in places where influence mattered. The goal was Christian homeschool graduates who would be U.S. senators, who would be U.S. presidents, and most importantly, who would be U.S. senators, who would be U.S. presidents, and most importantly, who would be U.S. Supreme Court justices. Coming up on Today Explained, what is the Joshua Generation and why are some evangelicals turning their backs on it? This NFL season, get in on all the hard-hitting action with FanDuel, North America's number one sportsbook. You can bet on anything from money lines to spreads and player props, or combine your bets in a same-game parlay for a shot at an even bigger payout.

Plus, with super-simple live betting, lightning-fast bet settlement, and instant withdrawals, FanDuel makes betting on the NFL easier than ever before. So make the most of this football season and download FanDuel today. 19-plus and physically located in Ontario. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600 or visit connectsontario.ca. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Kristen Kobes-Dumé is a historian and author of the book Jesus and John Wayne. She was featured in Shiny Happy People explaining things about the evangelical movement. And so I called her to explain to us what the Joshua generation is.

It was a term coined by Michael Ferris, who may not be familiar to people outside of evangelical spaces, but within conservative evangelicalism, he's an extremely important figure. A lawyer who founded the Homeschool Legal Defense Association, has been instrumental in advancing a conservative legal agenda and in training up a younger generation of culture warriors, and that's the Joshua generation. It is supposed to be a generation now who would be trained and equipped to take back the country for God. To understand the agenda of the Joshua generation, you have to go back a little further to the 1960s and 1970s. We're asking you, our friend watching through television,

to join us as these are joining us here in the Big Tenth Cathedral. We want your compassion. And this is really the rise of the Christian right that we're talking about, but a particular strand of it, a theological foundation that revolves around the ideas of an obscure person by the name of R.J. Rush Dooney. Now this tells us something about man and about education, that only Christian education can succeed. He essentially said that the society needed to be reconstructed.

And so his philosophy is called Christian Reconstructionism. It needed to be reconstructed according to God's Old Testament law. I think people sense that things are falling apart, that a worldwide breakdown is underway of our culture. The state is a bankrupt institution. As a result, they're going to have to find it religiously or go into a dark age. Authority and hierarchy was critical. Rushduni's own ideas were also white supremacists. God is going to give the country to somebody else.

If the white Christian population has no regard for the blessings they received. But essentially, it was an agenda to bring all of American society, American law, American culture in line with his interpretation of the Old Testament. I wonder in this whether we are talking about evangelical Christians or a certain type of evangelical Christian. Yeah, certainly not all evangelical Christians would be followers of Rush Dooney. He was fringe. His ideas were powerful in a small group of conservative Presbyterian denominations. It's influential in particular spaces, but especially in the homeschool movement. Because core to Rushduni's philosophy was that God has ordained authorities in life, and it is wrong, it is evil to usurp the proper authorities.

So that's the authority of the father and the husband inside of a family. It's the authority of parents over children. It's the authority of family over against government. But then the ultimate goal was for the good Christians who are properly trained to observe these proper hierarchies to ultimately then go out and influence the rest of culture, to reconstruct America, to make it into a Christian nation once again. Tonight, 19 Kids and Counting star Jim Bob Duggar announcing today that he is running for a seat in the Arkansas Senate. Now, this is not the mainstream movement of evangelicalism, but historically you can see how his ideas influenced figures who were mainstream.

And through the Joshua generation, have really gone kind of mainstream into Republican politics, training up young people to work in government, to campaign, to elect officials who will further this agenda. So, Rushduni provides the foundation, but then another man takes his ideas and brings them further into the mainstream, to families like the Duggars. He founded a group called the Institute for Basic Life Principles. Tell me about Bill Gothard. Bill Gothard founded this organization in the 1960s in order to help Christian parents raise their kids. 1960s, this is when the counterculture, civil rights movement, feminist movement, all of these rights movements were disrupting the status quo.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed. And this nation, for all its hopes and all its votes, will not be fully free until all its citizens are free. Now, thanks to the spirit of equality in the air, and to the work of many of my more foresighted sisters, I no longer accept society's judgment that my group is second class. A lot of parents were asking, how do we raise our kids? And Christian parents were especially concerned. And he stepped in and he offered answers. The answers that he offered were structured around a very conservative, even reactionary interpretation of the Bible. It involved teaching patriarchal authority.

As long as we're under these umbrellas of protection, Satan cannot get through with destructive temptations. A male leadership teaching girls to be modest. Their role was as homemakers, as wives, as mothers who would lead up the next generation of young Christians. We want to pass on to young ladies what it means to be lovely and feminine. And he really emphasized teachings like sexual purity. He called eye traps anything that a woman would wear that might draw a man's attention or fill him with lust. And so much responsibility was placed on obedience. The first time I say it, you obey it. And they can quote that with mommy and we practice.

Yes, ma'am, I will obey you. Obedience to your God-ordained authorities. Instant obedience., cheerful obedience. And he taught parents to train up their children to give that instant obedience. So corporal punishment was essential to his recommendations for child rearing. If he screams too hard when the first five gets hysterical, wait. You know, a little psychological terror is sometimes more effective than the pain. Even little babies needed to be disciplined harshly. The real benefit of that is that

when a child sees this neutral object coming out of the drawer or whatever, it becomes like a policeman. In order to guarantee that children would be obedient and submissive to their parents, their God-ordained authorities, so that through all of life they would continue to act in that submission to their proper authorities. How many people were involved in this? How big did it get?

So the numbers are hard to track, and they are coming from Gothard himself. You're talking about probably a couple of million people who have had fairly direct exposure to Gothard's teachings through communities. But indirectly, you're talking probably tens of millions who have been shaped in some way by Gothard's teachings. And often, they aren't even aware that that's where these ideas are coming from. How did he actually become involved in homeschooling? For Gothard, homeschooling was absolutely critical because public schools interfered with parental authority. You don't

want government schools, as people often called them in these spaces, instructing your children. And so, Gothard not only encouraged homeschooling in his seminars, he also developed a homeschool curriculum called the Advanced Training Institute, or ATI. And so, parents could use his materials, his curriculum, to train their children. The purpose of the Advanced Training Institute is to train up young men and women to become leaders of the next century. And I think today we have so much of a negative peer pressure coming in from the outside world that young people need a role model, someone to look up to. What was the intended outcome for kids who went through Christian homeschooling? What they wanted for their kids depended in some cases on if it was a son or a daughter.

Many within this movement didn't want their daughters to go on to college. And so there's a kind of offshoot here, the stay-at-home daughter movement, which suggests that, you know, once you finish your schooling, then you stay at home under the authority of your father until, through courtship, you are then handed off to a husband. And so that's part of this movement. Not all members of even the conservative wing of the homeschool movement went along with that. Many did send their girls to college, but usually to Christian colleges,

as kind of the next step for these homeschool kids to further equip them to fulfill their God-ordained roles. They knew that their numbers were small, very small, but they focused on placing their graduates in positions of great influence. And this is where the broader network comes in. Many Republican candidates and Republican members of Congress would draw interns from Patrick Henry College. Patrick Henry College seeks to produce new leaders who, like the founding fathers, are trained in the traditions of freedom, equipped with the skills of leadership,

and instilled with the character of Christ in his word. Their students would work on political campaigns for Republicans across the country. So their goal was power and strategic positions of power throughout the government. Do we know any of the people who graduated from Patrick Henry College? Is there like a Supreme Court justice or anything that we should know about? Not yet in terms of Supreme Court. But probably the most famous member of Gen J is Madison Cawthorn. And so I'm telling you, all of you moms here, the people who I said were the most vicious in our movement,

if you were raising a young man, please raise them to be a monster. So he would be an example. He did not graduate from Patrick Henry College. He didn't make it all the way through, but he is in some ways a kind of poster boy, or at least used to be, for the potential for these graduates. So ultimately, would we say that the plan, the plan for the Joshua generation, succeeded or failed or partially succeeded? How would you characterize what has happened? I would say they're not done yet. They're not done. This is not a democratic movement, but it is a movement that is very strategic and intent upon using our

democratic mechanisms to place themselves in positions of power so that they can take hold of this country, reshape its laws, and bring it into accord with their vision. Coming up, I took a drive out to Virginia to meet two former members of the Joshua Generation. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift, you can personalize it, you can

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It's Blaine. I'm Christina Beal, and I am a stay-at-home mom. I'm Aaron Beal, and I'm a software engineer. Very cool. All right, so guys, in the first half of our show, we heard about this term that I will admit was unfamiliar to me until a couple of weeks ago, something called the Joshua Generation. Can you tell me, what does that term mean to you? Growing up, there was sort of a constellation of beliefs that probably could fall under the category of Joshua Generation. I don't know that I was ever told, like, you are the Joshua Generation, but the ideas around it about us kind of being separate from the world,

pulled out into homeschool, and raised up to be, in very militaristic language, kind of kids that were going to grow up and we were going to literally storm the political and cultural scene and be part of the movement to turn the nation back to our parents' view of, you know, a good godly nation. In my family, in the environment in which we were raised, women had the role of having a lot of babies to sort of outpopulate any other religious groups, as silly as that sounds. That was the stated goal. Scorn birth control and have as many babies as you possibly can in order to raise up a just like flood of Christians. That was the role I was taught, that you were to be a mom and have a lot

of babies. And another big thing was you were supposed to help your husband. There was language such as the husband sits in the gates with the elders of the land, but the woman is supposed to be content to stay at home. She's not supposed to have those kinds of aspirations. Were you both homeschooled? Yes. I definitely had the sense being homeschooled that the rest of the world just wouldn't understand the world that we had and that that was sort of an indictment of the rest of the world and we had the truth and someday maybe the rest of the world, and we had the truth. And someday, maybe the rest of the world would be able to understand. But until then, you know, whatever we're doing inside is

sort of by definition, best. What were you learning in first grade, second grade, seventh grade, eighth grade at home, that maybe you wouldn't have been learning if you had gone to public school? Well, Christianity was certainly infused in all of the topics. I did have, I think I had an adequate baseline academic education. I had typical subjects, but they were very much colored with what I would now understand as kind of Christian nationalist bias and slant. I don't ever remember learning about how, for example, the civil rights movement really came to fruition. I certainly remember being told on numerous occasions that racism was kind of a thing in the past and we've dealt with it, which I now understand is not at all the case. Basically,

they'd start with the Bible and then try to connect it to various school topics. And it would be some things that are almost hard to put into words because they're so strange, like a diagram helping you identify the eye traps of female dress, which is just basically teaching me slut-shaming, as I understand it. There were no boundary between religious indoctrination and education. The two were kind of just always the same thing. I was absolutely led to believe that evolution is really just a big conspiracy, that there's no evidence for it, that all the scientists out there are basically just wanting to disprove God and please themselves and come up with excuses to not believe in God, that that's really what the foundation of evolution was about. I really believed that because that's all I knew. It really took adulthood in reading books that weren't trying to disprove God. They were simply explaining science and explaining the data and explaining the history behind how we got to our understanding that made me realize that that rhetoric was basically a lie.

And I had no outside voice as a homeschooled child to even begin to know that that could be wrong. I think for both of us, our families sort of doubled down in these movements as we were teenagers and as we were becoming young adults with our own fledgling interests and ideas. And that's the opposite. It's more of an air we breathed than like, I learned this specific lesson on this specific day, but of you've got to submit to authority. You're not an adult until you are, I mean, Aaron heard this, you're not an adult until you're walking down the aisle to get married. Somehow you magically become an adult at that point in time. They call it the transfer of authority. Yeah. So, there was not this gradual blossoming into adulthood, blossoming into your own person.

There was, at that time when our parents sensed that, there was more of a lockdown restriction, make them more who we want them to be. So on the day you guys walked down the aisle, it's a Christian wedding? Oh, yeah. Yeah. And the understanding for both of you at that point in that moment was, what year was this? 2012. 2012. A little over a decade ago, the understanding for you both as you walked down point in that moment was, what year was this? 2012. 2012. A little over a decade ago. The understanding for you both as you walked down the aisle that day was Christian household,

homeschooling for sure, as many kids as we possibly can, and you're fully bought in, and then we're sitting here today because at some point something changed. What happened? I would say having kids, because then you're looking at another human being and filtering your ideology through, here's a human being that I love and I have my own values and I have my own thoughts. And one of the very first things that I felt like ideologically I started to peel away was with discipline.

We had been taught not just that spanking is okay, but that it's an imperative, and it is godly, and it's good, and you love your child if you hit them. But the first time I had to supposedly, based on the training that I'd received, hit my child, something just didn't connect and I couldn't do it. I had spanked him a couple small times when they were very young, but it was this realization of like, wait a second, science matters, like established knowledge matters. And there's research here that shows that this can be harmful to children. And that's sort of when I was like, I mean, we rarely, rarely, rarely, I rarely spanked our children. And it was categorically different than what we were raised with. But again, it was this idea that you must do this.

And I realized, like, wait, I don't think I have to. And I think it was because of science. Basically, the moment that I realized so much of what I believed to be absolutely true was really just a presupposition. And that I had been taught that that's actually how you know truth is just by presupposing all these things we've given you, it fell apart. As soon as I could actually think critically and engage data outside my worldview and not just write it off as a conspiracy, there is actual science and data that supports views that contradict what I had been told.

We began going to a still rather conservative evangelical church, but that was a breath of fresh air for us. There were people there who weren't having as many children as they could. There were people there who sent their kids to public school. And it was a slow and gradual process of us. We would joke as a young married couple, we'd do something just the tiniest bit deviant from how we'd been raised, maybe wearing pants to church. And we'd be like, oh, we're quitting the vision. So, yeah. So, the vision all along has been you will work and provide, you will stay home and homeschool the kids.

Right. And you guys have to make a decision that you are not going to do that anymore. When did that happen? And what was the reasoning? For me, it was just, so I very much deconstructed. I'm not even religious at all at this point. I respect religious beliefs. But for me, I don't use that as the foundation for my life. So, I just lived for so long under the assumption that homeschooling is the way it has to be done. I started to look at other options. And it just turns out that we live right down the street from an excellent, excellent school. So, it just made me think, well, here's a

resource that we could use. And the more I learned about it and about the kids in our neighborhood that go there, the more it just seemed like a great option. Yeah. So, we ended up sending our daughter, Amy, to first grade, just Amy, while I kept Ezra, our oldest, home for third grade. And then Oliver was kind of doing some pre-K stuff. And I think it's important to remember at this point in time, my identity was a homeschool mom. I very much felt like, you know, how are we going to break the news to our families? Who am I if I have failed at homeschooling? Because this has been my whole life calling. So I sort of begged Darren, okay, I'll let Amy go as long as I can homeschool Ezra this year. Well, fast forward, it went phenomenally well for Amy. We fell in love with the community.

We began to see everything we had missed out on and just how much of a hub of the community the elementary school even was, you know, getting to know our neighbors in ways we never had before. And by the next summer, I was still like, okay, I'll homeschool Ezra because he was enjoying and thriving'll homeschool Ezra because he was enjoying and thriving in homeschool. But I just had this nagging sense of, I don't want him to miss this. This is so good and going so well, and I don't want him to miss it. And I mean, even as I say that, I want to be clear that I have nothing against homeschooling. I think homeschooling

can be done very well. I loved my time homeschooling. I think homeschooling can be done very well. I loved my time homeschooling my kids, and I even, there's a part of me that hopes I will again someday. But the reason this was a momentous decision was because it was a shift from homeschooling is the only way, this is your identity, this is what you must do, to, wow, we can embrace some other options, and they're not nearly as scary as we've been told they are. You're no longer an evangelical Christian. Correct. What about you, Christina?

I am. You are. I do still consider myself a Christian. Evangelical is up for debate. Yeah. edited by Amina El-Sadi and fact-checked by Laura Bullard. It was engineered by Patrick Boyd and Michael Raphael. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.