I worked at an Arkansas Sam's Club. I ran into the female members of the Duggar family often. (Because grocery shopping is women's work, I guess? Also cause there's no shot they could afford not to shop in bulk?)

I have lived in AR my whole life, but I'm not a reality show fan so I had no idea what they looked like and had only vaguely heard of them at all.

The first time I saw the Duggar women, I saw one of the older girls outside the bathrooms and Michelle if I remember correctly (this would have been in 2012 or 2013).

I walked right up to the daughter and I said, "Excuse me miss, I have a rule that if you think something nice about someone you should tell them, so I just wanted to tell you that you have really beautiful hair." The daughter seemed surprised I'd even talked to her at all, and then seemed very flattered.

I am a cancer survivor, at the time my hair was still very short.

Someone in their group replied to me with something like "yours could be too if you grow it out." or "why don't you grow yours?" and I thought that was pretty rude, but I was at work in my work clothes so I said, "I'm working on growing it, unfortunately cancer and the treatment made me go bald."

It definitely got awkward from there.

I broke the silence with, "Thanks for talking with me, and I hope you have a great day."

They replied with something like "We will pray to God that your future is full of blessings"

I'd started to leave at that point. I turned back around to face the group (which I noticed had increased by several similarly dressed girls), and said, "I don't personally believe in God but I appreciate the sentiment." a genuine smile, and then I left. (This was only supposed to be a bathroom break for me after all, still on the clock and such.)

One of my team members looked at me quizzically when I returned to my place in the cafe area, and I said "That girl has really beautiful hair and I thought it would be nice to tell her I thought so." to which my coworker replied "Yeah, all the Duggars do."

I was like "What!?!"

This is the story of how a pixie haired, pants wearing, LGBTQIA+ card holding, liberal 18 year old girl accidently looked Michelle Duggar in the face, in front of SEVERAL daughters, in the middle of a Sam's Club straight up said "I don't believe in God..."

I have recently decided to get into the sims side of tumblr! I have loved the sims and have played since the original sims 1. This simblr is actually going to be a blog for my “fundie” sim family, The Flanagans! They will be having lots of children, wearing lots of skirts, and overall just blogging about the experience! My username is actually a play on the Anderson’s “All they all yours?”

This answer is going to be really vague, mostly because there is no such thing as a “fundamental” denomination in the Christian church (as of yet, but I think things are getting polarized in the Christian church, and soon there could be a division of this kind). Fundamentalists can be found in every denomination and every church, probably in the world, but certainly in America. Basically, Fundies believe that the Bible is God-inspired, literal, and infallible. So, if a footnote that a translator made suddenly becomes text in the Bible? Then God must have wanted that to happen. If a translator has an agenda and changes a woman’s name so that it looks like a man’s name so that it appears that a woman does not teach? Then that must have been the will of God as well. 

Just by contrast, when a new copy of The Torah is written, it is copied one character at a time in order to keep these “God-ordained” revisions from happening at all, meaning that the Christian Bible is about as historically accurate as the writings of Herotodus. It doesn’t mean that it’s all wrong, it just means that you can’t take it literally or at face value, but fundies DO.

Doesn’t everyone believe the same? 

No. No, they really don’t. Some Christians read original texts as well as histories, in order to understand the intent of what the author of the texts was truly attempting to say. Some sects dance around with serpents because of scriptures, some groups don’t use instruments during worship, some sects don’t worship at all, and so on. Then you have the “user-friendly” churches where they don’t even bother to force you to read or use the Bible in any way and have the necessary scriptures posted on a large screen behind the pastor, and all you have to do is sit there like a mindless drone and soak it all in. I hate those ones the most, because the pastor can post any scripture out of context, and force you to believe that it means something it might not mean. 

And that’s where the fundamental church comes in, because if the word of God is infallible, then you should just be able to take a scripture and believe it out of any sort of context, because the word of God doesn’t change, it’s always the same, so…why do you need context? If you ask for context in the fundamental church, you’re a heretic. That’s where you get the folks like the Duggars taking a throwaway line about how a person is happy if his quiver is full of “arrows” (children) without having any sort of context wherein King David could possibly be mourning how wicked his kids were and how one of his sons raped one of his daughters and how he basically failed as a father, so he made this psalm for himself trying to convince himself, like so many other religious folks through the centuries, that God has to be in control, right? And he knows what he’s doing, right?*

As for the snowman and reindeer thing, in the church I was raised in, anything that was a distraction from Jesus’s birth, so Santa Claus was outlawed completely, and reindeer were closely scrutinized to be sure that they weren’t one of HIS reindeer, and any decoration that wasn’t angels or a manger scene were heretic. We had folks argue about and finally involve the pastor in their argument, about whether or not Christmas trees were okay. After all, they were Pagan symbols, right? I was told by my mom that our decorating was not up for debate, and I shouldn’t talk about our tree or our stockings or anything. The stockings were apparently a no-no because Santa filled the stockings and we don’t believe in Santa, so we don’t talk about stockings. 

I found that Starbucks post really funny because if the church I was raised in was still around, I doubt anyone would have gone to Starbucks. They would have viewed it as a “Worldly” business, and depending on whether the pastor drank coffee or not, it could have been considered completely wicked. The whole point of fundamentalism is that you are setting yourself up to know more than everyone around you, so I would imagine the folks I used to know making sure that everyone knew they didn’t drink coffee like the unwashed heathens did. No, Brother, they awoke in the morning praising the Lord! He is all the coffee we need, am I right, Sister? The World can’t face the day because they don’t have the Hope of Christ within them, do they? No, sir. No coffee for us. If the pastor did drink coffee, though, then you’d have a bunch of folks who imported their whole beans from far away places, roasted and ground the beans themselves, and then prepared their coffee in the purest way possible. “I found this vintage 1950′s percolator! It’s designed for Simplicity! You really want to taste the bean, you know!” “Oh, a percolator? I only use a French Press. The secret is that you have to filter the water first. I got mine at a thrift store for only a dollar! Can you believe what the unbelievers throw away?” 

Please stop. You’re not helping. The Duggars are members of a fundamental Christian cult that has very little to do with the Bible or Jesus’ teachings. In the hierarchy of this cult, the Quiverful Movement, a woman’s word has absolutely no weight or consequence. Even if Michelle Duggar felt that something was wrong in the way she was raising her children, or in the way that Joshua Duggar behaved, the teaching that she has been indoctrinated into specifically states that she needs to shut her goddamned pie hole, and go along with what her husband says. In these cults, the word of a man is so absolute, I have seen five-year-old boys asked to bless food in a group of women because he needed to be deferred to, even in a group of people who were ten times his age. In these groups, a woman’s authority is thought so little of, I have seen men leave their nine and ten-year-old sons in charge of the family and house when he left because even though the mother was left in the house, her authority was nothing compared to hers. 

Addressing the Duggar women will produce nothing. They have no consideration in their households or their sect. You are spitting into the wind. You may as well be on my tumblr, posting to yourselves. You need to address Jim Bob. You need to address Josh. Hell, you can address Josiah, and it will get you more leverage. The Duggar women can literally do nothing until they leave their cult. 

What you can do for the Duggar women is show them a safe space that they can go to if they do decide to leave their cult. All they’re seeing from people like you right now is a space where they will be judged and misunderstood. 

  I’ve always hated the Duggar family or more specifically the parents and the disturbing way their family is run. Amidst the scandal it made me yet again think about the Duggar girls and how growing up in that family they have to care for the kids (I’m curious what Michelle even does) until they get married. They don’t have the option to go to college and get more of an education. They don’t…