(LifeSiteNews) — On this week’s solo episode of The Van Maren Show, Jonathon discusses a documentary series on Amazon Prime called Shiny Happy People. The documentary is about a reality television-starring Baptist family connected to an organization whose founder was allegedly involved in sexual abuse. One of the family members is also currently in prison for sexual abuse.
Discussing the series, Jonathon opines that while the leftist media will attempt to use such scandals to discredit Christianity and portray Christians as evil, Christians bring such attention to themselves whenever they fail to live up to what they believe.
“I think it’s important to recognize that Christian malpractice, the way we deal with our own scandals, the way we deal with things inside our institutions, these things will be exposed in the coming years by the secular mainstream media,” Jonathon says. “And so I think it’s really important for us to look at documentaries like Shiny Happy People and recognize that although the intent of the documentary may be nefarious, that does not necessarily mean that everything cited in the documentary is nefarious.”
The documentary itself deals primarily with the Duggars, an Independent Baptist family whose patriarch, Jim Bob Duggar, allows his family to appear on a reality television show called 19 Kids and Counting, despite knowledge that his eldest son Josh sexually abused several of his sisters. The documentary also discusses the Institute of Basic Life Principles (IBLP), a non-denominational Christian organization that runs seminars dealing with every aspect of Christian living supported by the Duggars. It was at one point run by Bill Gothard, who was himself involved with sexual scandal.
“So the primary story of Shiny Happy People is an exposé that essentially Jim Bob was courting,” Jonathon declares. “We all knew something like this was going to come at some point at the end of the day … when he decided to put [his family] on TV and make them essentially celebrities.”
“So the key takeaway from Shiny Happy People is that scandals and a lack of accountability within Christian institutions, movements or churches will be exposed sooner or later,” Jonathon contends.
“Many Christians are willing to accept persecution for their deeply held beliefs. To be … pilloried for genuine scandals and moral failures is much more difficult. The media and entertainment world are increasingly hostile to Christianity and thus deeply motivated to uncover Christian scandals and malpractice. And I think that we should expect to see many of these stories in the years to come.”
Jonathon further discusses the Christian response to such scandals, noting that “films of this genre are often difficult for those with a culture war mindset to process.”
“These stories are a potent mixture of legitimate criticism and then an unsubtle demonization of Christianity, and that can provoke our primary instinct to dismiss criticism out of hand, or worse, play down the abuse described, especially if the abuses being described are accurate,” he continues.
“We should recognize that this is a trap and not fall into it, because if they can produce a documentary where they highlight some real abuses and then use them to condemn Christianity altogether, and our … culture war mindset is to play down the abuses, to pretend it wasn’t that big of a deal, to insist it didn’t really happen, or to simply attack without admitting that things that were done were wrong and un-Christian [in] our own terms, and are actually wrong by our own standards, then we’ve really fallen into a trap, because when we defend the indefensible, we end up becoming who they say we are.”
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