A Response to Shiny Happy People, The Duggars, and Alex Harris

TruthScript Tuesday and the Featured Articles

Welcome once again to TruthScript Tuesday. I'm your host, John Harris. We have a lot of articles as always on the TruthScript website. In fact, that's not the article. That's Russell Moore's face. Hold on.

Let me see if I can get the article up. There we go. We have right now featured on the website a article about a poem actually about the Father's Day that actually David, who is our guest today, I'll introduce in a moment, wrote.

And then the top performing article is Shiny Happy People. It's a review of this documentary that was produced and I think is out. Well, I think, I don't know if, is the whole thing out right now? I think it is.

Yeah. Yeah. It's four episodes.

They're talking about doing a second season, but it's right now there's, it's sort of a, I mean, it's not a whole show, but it's, it's like four 45 minute episodes. So yeah, there's,.

There's an article right now, Shiny Happy People and Not So Thinly Veiled Attack on Conservative Christians about the Duggar family. And then another Father's Day article on the website, The Courage of My Father Remembered.

So we have two tributes to fathers. Russell Fuller wrote an article that was featured early last week, the 10 theological resources that I find helpful and one more. And you can go to the TruthScript .com website to find out what theological resources Dr. Russell Fuller, who is an accomplished Hebrew scholar, uses when he studies scripture.

And then there's a few other articles, Heroes or Heals by Pastor Troy Skinner, an encouraging article about some of the people in the Bible who had failures and yet God used them. And then Mark Coppinger on manliness.

Mark Coppinger was a professor at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary for years, and he wrote this right ahead of the SBC convention. And it's actually pretty brilliant. He says some things I hadn't really thought of for example, he talks about how Rick Warren doesn't have a problem violating Lady Wisdom and Lady Scripture.

And I just thought that's true. They're personified as women in scripture. And Rick Warren says he's so pro-women, but he has no problem violating Lady Wisdom and Lady Scripture to forward his agenda.

So anyway, there's a lot of good stuff on the TruthScript website. And the top performing article, of course, is this Shiny Happy People article and a review. And so David Harris is the one who wrote it, my brother.

And so he's going to talk to us a little bit about it. Did you watch all four episodes of that show? I watched all four episodes.

I watched three in one night. I stayed up till like two in the morning. And then I watched the next one like the next morning. So I watched it all very quickly. I watched it in sequence.

Okay. So you wrote this article. You're also the president of TruthScript. And so you're busy. I know we were talking before I started recording, getting the donations up and running. Hopefully by the time this drops, we'll have that up and running and you can go to the link in the info section.

And it is a 501c3. And we would appreciate whatever you can give to help sustain something like this. This is basically our answer to the Gospel Coalition. It's a very similar type of format. As we'll talk about today, very important topics that concern Christians that are very relevant.

And you're not going to find this information in other places. You might find really good exegetical information. You might find good theological resources. You might even find good discernment type ministry stuff, but short, digestible, hard hitting, and very accessible articles on very relevant topics that Christians are asking questions about now.

There's not a whole lot of websites like that. The left is good at that. We aren't as much. And so I think we can be though, and that's what TruthScript is about. So anyway, David, tell us a little bit about the documentary and let me know when you want me to play the clip.

Because I have it cued. Sure. So this is a very, very popular documentary right now. I didn't check the stats of how many people have watched it, but it's a lot. And they're the sort of like exvangelical, they often just refer to themselves as survivors, but the exvangelical community, if that's a thing, is really, really kind of gushing over it because it's an expose.

It's an expose of the Duggars, sort of. It's one of the things that I put, I write in the beginning of the article is it's not like the series doesn't seem to quite know what it is, whether it's an expose on the Duggars, an expose on the guy, Bill Gothard, who they were involved with.

It seems I had never heard of Bill Gothard before seeing this series, but I didn't watch the Duggars, but I've also heard from a lot of people who are really into the Duggars. I have friends who were very, very much into the Duggars and they had no idea who Bill Gothard was, which kind of undermines the whole point of the series because the docu-series basically is postulating that the Duggars were in TLC.

It's sort of like, not backhandedly, it's kind of attacking TLC too, that TLC used the Duggars as a vehicle to promote Bill Gothard. And when I just, just thinking about myself, we started to watch this thing because a bunch of friends were interested.

I had family that were interested in it and I immediately was kind of like, that's Alex Harris. And I'll go into that connection in a second, but it undermines the overall point of the film that, I was homeschooled K through 12.

I grew up in a conservative, I guess what you could call fundamentalist. I mean, the church that we went to was part of a explicitly fundamentalist church association. Like I, we check pretty much, I check all those boxes and I never heard of this guy ever.

And I wasn't, I wasn't familiar with the curriculum that his, his ministry produced, that apparently all these homeschooled, that was super influential. It was all over the country. Never heard of it.

Didn't, don't really know anybody who had heard of it. So it appears that this thing's a lot more niche than they're, they're kind of making it out. But the thing that, the thing that really got me to sit down and watch the entire thing was, it's, it says in the description on Amazon that, where is it?

I can't find the exact quote, but basically that this, the Duggars and Gothard and this whole homeschooling cult, I guess, are a threat to democracy and their, their, their goal is world domination. So there's a very, they never say Christian nationalism in the, in the show, but the connection is impossible not to make.

It's very obvious that there's like a, look, the Christians, you know, the conservative homeschooler Christians, they're, they're trying to take over the world. And so you'll see these, like, there's no explicit connections to Donald Trump.

And yet there's these passing clips of Donald Trump. Oh, actually that's not true. There was, there's one connection. It's like, this person worked on the, you know, Trump's campaign or something. So it's, it, it ties in homeschooling.

It's a cult. There's all this abuse, the Duggars, pop culture, the Duggars are popular all over the country, all over the world. TLC, you know, bankrolled them and made them famous. And the goal basically is world domination by, by conservative Christians.

Towards the end of the series, the Handmaid's Tale is brought up and, you know, there's these ex-evangelicals because it's interspersed with these, these clips of ex-evangelicals talking about their abusive situations, which a lot of them, you know, were in genuinely.

And it sounds like Bill Gothard was a pretty abusive guy, but, or still is, he's still alive. But there's, you know, there's this talk about like this one, this one girl is talking about how, when I, you know, when I finally read the Handmaid's Tale, I realized that was my life, which is a little rich because the Handmaid's Tale is all about, the Handmaid's Tale is basically the left's version of 1984.

But in the Handmaid's Tale, all women are forced to reproduce. They're basically forcibly reproduced. They're like baby factories and they're forcibly raped and all this stuff. And like, there's so many, there's so much stuff tied in together, but the overall narrative is really, really clear.

It's, it's a hit piece on conservative Christianity. And there's all sorts of evidence I can go into that, but I guess that's the overall, that was, that was why I sat down. That's why I.

Wrote this review. I should say, cause I know I'm going to get questions about it. Alex Harris is not related to us, maybe distantly, but not directly. So I get that all the time with Josh Harris. People used to think you must be related.

I'm not, but so this is broader than just the Duggars. And I had never even heard of Bill Godford either. Bill Godford. I can't even say his name. Bill Gothard. Thank you. Yeah. I never even heard of him until I think it was Rachel Denhollander started saying that he's connected with John MacArthur.

And I'm like, who's connected with him? Who is this guy? And so I guess he was very influential with, with a small group of people with, with a, I guess, influential group because the Duggars were part of his group.

But, but yeah, I mean, obviously he doesn't reflect all of conservative Christianity or homeschooling or the right wing or any of that. And, and if he is a bad guy, which it sounds like, I guess he was, then even that, I wonder whether or not, to what extent that actually reflects on his people, how many of them were duped, how many of them rejected him when they found out he was abusive?

I mean, I don't know answers to these questions, but it seems to me that TLC or not TLC, but.

Who made this, who accompanied me? TLC. But one thing to note just on TLC. So my wife and I were talking about this yesterday, TLC to, to, to kind of, to attack TLC as the, you know, that they're, they're purposefully, or at least, you know, they're just either really stupid or they're maniacal.

They're, they're trying to make Bill Gothard, trying to make Bill Gothard's ideas famous through the Duggars. Think about the other shows that are on TLC, My 600 Pound Life, Hoarders. So it's all freak shows and the Duggars are in that lineup.

So you literally would watch the Duggars before My 600 Pound Life and after Hoarders. And like, the Duggars to Hollywood were, I think, a freak show. The fact that they had a great relationship with the people who filmed the show, you know, because these people were living, basically, the cameramen and the people who were producing it, they're living in Fayetteville, Arkansas for a few years, filming all this, I think is just a testimony to the Duggars as a family.

I'm not, I'm not defending the Duggars necessarily. Like I don't, I don't have a dog in that fight. I don't really care that much. But they're, you know, there's Hollywood producers around them for several years and they have a good relationship.

TLC, the people who are watching the Duggars, I think it's very similar to the Duck Dynasty phenomenon. The Duck Dynasty is supposed to be these Christian freaks. They're supposed to be these, look at these crazy guys.

They all got these big beards. It's a funny show. It's, but then like Christians took them and said like, yeah, that's us. You know, we're proud of this. And so they blow up and become really big. And now where do you, where do you, where can you hear Duck Dynasty guys on the blaze?

You know,.

That's where they are now. So it is kind of weird. Yeah. Comedy show ends up becoming a serious political commentary. Not that Phil Robertson shouldn't have that, but it's just what, yeah, what the world or what TLC thinks is crazy and is going to be, it will shock you and you'll watch it because it is so abnormal.

It ends up like Christians are like, Hey, we're on TV.

And then at some point, at some point people do actually look at that. You know, I have a lot of, I had a lot of friends in college who looked at the Duggars with longing. They thought like, man, that, that would be so great.

I wish I lived in a big family because, you know, for whatever the Duggars faults. And obviously there's a fair amount of, you know, there are problems in that, that family as there are in all families.

There's no perfect family. Every, I mean, the Harris family, not, I mean our family, but like Alex and Brett and Josh, man, they got, they got some, some pretty serious issues too, that I guess we can address in a second.

But people looked at the Duggars and thought that's man, they have community. They, they love each other. Everybody supports one another. You know, and now we know that, you know, some of that there were, there probably was some dishonesty, but a lot of it wasn't, a lot of that was most of that probably was very legitimate.

Like the family still, even the ones who have gone off, like only one kid talks in the show. The whole show is based around the one kid who would talk, Jill Duggard, Jill and Derek. I forget their, I think it's Dillard.

They were the only ones that would talk. They're the ones who have kind of gone the most. I think they've kind of drifted the most left. They're a little, I think a little woker in some ways, but other ones like Ginger Duggar, she is, she's married to a guy who I think is a master's grad and they would not cooperate with the show.

They didn't go on it. There's no clips of them. But they have been talking about some of the negative aspects of Bill Gothard while maintaining complete respect for their parents, complete respect for the family, respect for most of the values they were raised with.

So it's just, it's, it's kind of ironic that they're put on as a freak show. It doesn't really work because a lot of people look at it and they, they're like, man, I want that. That looks great. And so then they need, they have to take them out.

But you saw the same thing with Duck Dynasty, because they did that to Phil Robertson. I think it was GQ interviewed him and, you know, he said something about, he said something about gay men and that was kind of the end of the Duck Dynasty empire, at least on, on A &E.

So yeah, it doesn't really work.

Segregation or something first. And then yeah, and then the thing that got the most headlines was this, what he said about homosexual marriage or something. But yeah, these, these left-leaning outlets in Hollywood want to, they look at these families and think, how can we make money off of this?

How can we, and they're not in it to promote their theology or their way of living. They're in it to poke fun at it, to, if anything, it's to discourage people, probably from that. And maybe it backfires on them at times, but I don't think that TLC wants people to be hoarders or to live a 600 pound life.

You know, they're not like after that, they probably want to show this as an example of, Hey, things can get crazy if you eat too much or you hoard too much. So I think there's a few angles to look at here.

One is how, and maybe we'll pick this up with the Harris's, the other Harris's, how there is this trend of people who grew up in these, they call them conservative. I wish there was another word for it.

Cause I don't know that it's actually conservative. These hyper ideological, legalistic, legalistic, ideological families that just, they almost make the family into some kind of an abstract thing where you're supposed to, your loyalty, your allegiance, your whole worth is wrapped up just about in this family unit.

And it's supposed to fulfill all your needs somehow. And obviously no family unit can, cause God didn't design it that way. It fulfills a lot of needs, but not all of them. And so anyway, people who grow up in that and end up rejecting it, and I have a lot of personal stories I can tell about this.

They go hard woke. They're the worst, as far as like the most extreme form of social justice warrior, usually. Cause they reject all of it and they'll throw out the baby with the bath water. And I wonder whether or not some of the Harris boys are in transition.

Obviously Josh Harris went like all the way and just threw it all out. But he's got his younger siblings who I guess were featured in this. It seems to me that they're going that direction. And some of the Duggar kids, a few of them, not all of them, but are going that direction.

And it's like, that's the sad thing to me. When you reject this, you reject so much more than just this ideology and Gothard's teaching, which wasn't good, but you reject all of Christianity or you reject all of literal biblical interpretation or male leadership or all these things that are important.

And so let's play the clip here. Maybe this will be a good segue into that. This is on Russell Moore's, I guess, podcast. Christianity Today. It's the.

Podcast he has on, I guess it's the Christianity Today podcast. And this is with Alex Harris,.

Who many of you know, Josh Harris wrote, I Kissed Dating Goodbye. Alex Harris as coauthor of Do Hard Things. And they're big in that conservative Christian homeschool world, or at least they were. And so now he's, this is years after that success.

I would say 15, 20 years. I don't know. After their success, Alex Harris is on the Russell Moore podcast.

That's a good question that many people ask me. Why, having seen all of this stuff, both just sort of the gut intuitions that said, something's wrong here. And then having seen what we saw in the series, which is chilling, why are you still a Christian?

The grace of God. I am so grateful for my parents, who I differ and disagree with on some things. And yet, I can say they taught me the gospel. And they taught me to love God's Word. They taught me that the church always needs reforming.

They set me up to think and read and reflect on what was going on around me. And as I've grown, I mean, God has just been kind to place me in positions where some of my presuppositions were challenged, to put me in some churches, maybe a little bit more removed from some of the cultural background that I grew up in, with pastors who just faithfully preached the Word and helped me see Jesus more clearly.

Jesus is not just a card-carrying member of the political party. And over time, I think I was able to disentangle the beauty of the gospel and the beauty of Christ from some of the distortions that had previously been just kind of enmeshed in my understanding of what it meant to follow Christ.

Alright, so that's interesting. He sounds like he's a lot more careful than his brother, Josh, as far as trying to disentangle and find what are the things that were wrong with my upbringing. Let's excise those things.

But of course, it sounds like he's excising the politics and he's excising the social, at least some of the social stuff. So I don't know, you know more about him.

Than me. Why did you want to play that clip? A couple of different reasons. When I started watching the series, I didn't realize that Alex had done an interview for the show. And so it kind of popped up and surprised me.

And the reason why it surprised me is Alex and Brett Harris, for me, were in terms of like the young restless reform movement that a lot of us millennials were in, you know, 10, 15 years ago. Alex and Brett Harris were the most influential guys to me because they wrote a book called Do Hard Things.

And when I was 17, I read it, and I kind of read it at the perfect time to get really, really impacted by it. And it guided my life for, I'd say, at least five years. And it's, I mean, it's a good book.

I would still recommend it for teens to read. And like the premise of the book is basically, if you're a young person, then you should take, you know, the verse that says, don't let anybody despise you for your youth.

I think it's in First Timothy, but basically to be an example instead. And their whole thing was rebel against low expectations. So just because you're young, don't use that as an excuse to just kind of mess around and waste those years.

Use, I think the way they put it was, use your young adult years as the launchpad for life. And they had a ton of like really specific examples, and they really impact a lot of people, including me. I mean, I ended up living in Southern Africa and doing like work with a mission for a while.

And there's just all sorts of things I did because I got a lot of gas in my tank from that book. So when I saw Alex on that show, I was like, dude, what happened? Like, I remember, you know, whatever it was, 10, 12, 13 years ago, being totally animated by you.

You know, we were going to go, we were going to take Jesus to the whole world. And now you're on a podcast with Russell Moore, like what happened? So that's kind of the context. And that's why I wrote the article to begin with, because I was just really kind of surprised that Alex had taken part in that.

But just a note, I guess on the Harris family. So the Harris family, Greg Harris, who's the sort of the patriarch of that family. He was very, him, he was sort of the, Doug Wilson was influential at that time in terms of home homeschooling.

Doug Wilson kind of went the classical Christian route. He became an advocate for classical learning. Greg Harris was the homeschooling guru. So he would do conferences all over the country. And, you know, his sons all kind of rose to, or most of them, the three, the twins, which is our Alex and Brett, and obviously Joshua Harris, rose to prominence very, very quickly.

And Joshua kind of deconstructed over a period of about five years. And now he's, you know, he's completely secular. He's, there's no evidence that he really has any Christian beliefs other than, you know, the ones, the ones that keep the infrastructure of where he lives going.

But Alex and Brett, Alex and Brett seem to, Brett we haven't heard from in a long time. All of these guys have had, the whole family has had a lot of trials come on them. So my heart goes out to the family in a little bit, because it's been one thing after another.

Their mother died very suddenly about a decade ago, a little over a decade ago. And there seems to have been a fair amount of fracturing from that point. To Alex's credit, so I'll give him credit and then I'm going to, okay, and then critique.

To his credit, he still maintains a respect for his parents, a respect for obviously Christianity. He still considers himself a Christian. So good. All right. That's, that's great. But think about the implications of the question, right?

He's going on, he's talking to Russell Moore. And just think about that question. Why are you still a Christian? Why would you still be a Christian? Christians do horrible things. Why are you still a Christian?

And that question, to me, really underscores why we're doing TruthScript. Because that is, unfortunately, that's the assumption now from the Christianity Today and the Gospel Coalition. Alex expressed all this stuff in an article for the Gospel Coalition about two weeks ago.

So, you know, thank God he's still under the umbrella of Christendom. But that's, that's really, that's where these organizations are at. Why, why would we, we have, we need to reconcile, we need to figure out why we're still Christians.

Because Christians do such terrible things. The framing of that question is insane. You know, because we, we could, we could, we could take a documentary. I'm a public school teacher. That's what I've done for the last 10 years.

I've never seen a, I've never seen a documentary on the abuse that goes in, on in public schools. And yet you could make one probably about any district in the, in the entire country. And you could probably find stuff that's just as bad.

And most districts would be a lot worse than whatever they found with Gothard and the Duggars. But you're not going to see that documentary, right? So we're not asking, how can you, how do you still send your kids to public school?

No, we're asking, why are we still Christians? Christians do terrible things. So all of the assumptions that these guys have taken on, Russell Moore, and unfortunately, Alex did as well. There's, there's secular, it's secular framing.

They're, they're approaching.

This question from a secular vantage point. Yeah. It, and there may be in the background running a utopian vision for what it means to be a Christian or Christian family, Christian homeschooler. And I met, I've certainly met people like this who think that that's the key that unlocks every door.

If you're a homeschooler, if you go to a good, sometimes it's like, you've got to be reformed church, right? It's, there's a, you know, Cal, some people think Calvinism is the key that unlocks all the doors.

They would never say that, but there's whatever theology it is. There's some theology, there's some way of living. Hey, if you have patriarchy, patriarchy, and, and I think, I don't know, it just seems like it's, it's too much of a strain for those theologies to bear, to put, to, I guess, maybe I'll rephrase it this way.

It's, given that that man has fallen and we have sinful tendencies, and even as believers, we still struggle with sin. We are going to, no matter what structure that we try to live in or theology we want to believe, we're still going to have problems.

And if you have to start out with the expectation that, oh, now I've gained this theology or gained this family structure, I won't have problems anymore, or it's going to be so good. It's going to look like that.

I think as the show says in the title, shiny, happy people, and then you're let down when it doesn't go that direction. And, and with the public schools, I don't think there is as much of an expectation there.

I mean, you could go back to a century ago and you could look at maybe the, really the founders of our modern public school system, and they would have said that this is going to be this great progressive thing.

But I mean, today we're, we're far removed from that. And people don't expect a lot of public schools. They expect there to be fights. They expect there to be drugs and, and all that stuff. So there isn't this like let down that, oh, there was, we have a fight and drugs and the police showed up and it's like, yeah, well, it's a public school.

And just as a, I didn't go into this in the article really in any great depth, but one of the things that one of the sort of features of this documentary was people who were in, I'll just call it a cult.

I mean, it seems like it was a cult. So people who are in the Gothard cult, I guess, that they missed out on an education, right? That was one of the things that was, you know, that was a form of abuse.

That was one of the abuses that they experienced was they were basically, they were never educated. They were illiterate when they came out of school, which literacy is the ability to read and write. It's not necessarily the ability to reason, you know, complex arguments or to be able to articulate why it's okay to mutilate kids.

That's not the definition of illiteracy, but that's one of the forms of abuses that they talk about. And, you know, documentary filmmaking is powerful. We know this, we've worked on a few documentaries.

What you cut in during the interviews, that's the weight of the documentary. You're actually getting more from that than the people talking, because that's the whole point of a documentary. It's meant to be a visual sort of, you're trying to market ideas or push a narrative or tell a story, and you're using that visual component.

That's why people don't like talking heads. They prefer documentaries that are interspersed with, you know, pictures and video and stuff. So the pictures, the videos for these ex-evangelicals talking about the abuse they experienced from not getting educated are the Duggars at the Creation Museum.

You know, that's, so it's very clear what the narrative is. The narrative is they didn't learn, you know, they didn't learn truth. They didn't learn science. They learned this pseudo, you know, Christian extreme science.

Creation Museum is a massively popular place. I was there two weeks ago. People come from everywhere to go to the Creation Museum, partially just to see the Ark. But, you know, even around here, like I live in Tennessee, even around here, people who I'm like, that's, you're not a Christian.

They go to the Creation Museum, like they go to it because it's because of the quality of how good it is. And, you know, that's sort of the poster child for not being educated is that we believe in creation.

We don't believe in evolution. So there's a lot of those, I guess you'd call that a straw man. There's a lot of those straw men throughout the series. And really what it winds up being is creationism.

They call it patriarchy, but it's just male headship. That's all it is. It's the theology of male headship. Creationism, male headship, homeschooling, and political involvement with Republicans. That comes up over and over again.

There's all these connections to the Huckabees. They're connected to the Huckabees. Mike Huckabee and Sarah Huckabee Sanders. So even though it's about the Duggars and Bill Gothard, it's very clear what the target is.

It's you. It is you if you are a red state, a red voting conservative evangelical or just conservative Christian. You're the target of this. You are the one who is a threat to democracy, which is another narrative that comes up.

Over and over again. Yeah. Wow. Well, thanks for watching it. So I don't have to. And hopefully the viewers don't feel like they need to watch it. I mean, you didn't have to pay for it, did you?

No, it was, I mean, I used, I think I used somebody else's prime account.

I don't know. Is that stealing? I don't know. Yeah. Prime is some of those services are weird where you can have like multiple people on the same account. But I won't let everyone know, I guess that we already did, that you have prime.

That's, you know, I told Danielle to get rid of the prime anyway. All right. So if you have prime, I guess you can, you want to do a review, I guess you could watch it. But I would just a quick note.

On that. So if you're a pastor, it's, it might not be the worst thing. I mean, you know, your pastor, you got tons of time to throw it around. If you're interested, if you know, you have people in your church that were influenced by the Duggars or, you know, I don't know, influenced by Gothard, which is probably very unlikely, but it's possible.

But if you have people who are really into the Duggars, enjoyed the Duggars, or maybe, maybe they have a chip on their shoulder because they were abused before, which happens. There's all sorts of abusive situations in churches too, all throughout this, this, you know, this land in the world.

It might be worth just seeing what they're seeing, because if you come, this thing is very clearly marketed towards millennial, zoomer, ex-evangelicals, people who are in the process of deconstructing with a chip on their shoulder, because those are the people for the most part that they have, that they interview.

One is like this blue haired YouTuber who that's her whole shtick. She just talks about, she has a YouTube channel and she, it's called Fundie Fridays. And I went on and I looked at some of her videos and she just basically just, she spins out some, you know, this is how bad the Christians are and fundamentalism and it's dangerous and oppressive.

And I was oppressed by it. And there's her only expertise is that she has a YouTube channel. So, but she fits this category, this ex-evangelical category. And at the end of the series, that's sort of the, that's the capstone of everything.

It's like, well, some people are at different, different steps in their deconstruction journey. So it's assumed that this is, this is your natural course. You grew up in this abusive homeschooling, which, you know, we have, we have, we know plenty of people who went through that.

They deconstructed and home conservative evangelical homeschoolers tend to deconstruct hard because when they reject, they're rejecting a lot. So they often completely.

Fly off the deep end. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The, the most intense social justice warriors are always the, the former Christians who are, have an ax to grind and reject it all. Which is, is kind of sad.

I think some people are surprised by that, but that's, that's just what I've seen. And I mean, I don't know, there's, there's different situations have different reasons, but it seems like primarily it comes down to some kind of a hypocrisy, some kind of a feeling like they let, they, they were stolen from, like there was some kind of experience that they were supposed to have that they were prevented from having because they were in this restrictive environment.

And then it's just lashing out and blaming their parents or their churches for all the problems that they've had. And it's not a mature way to look at anything. It's actually a fairly childish way to look at the world.

And I don't know, I could probably talk for a long time about it, but I have noticed a tendency. I'm not sure how, to what extent this plays in, but oftentimes in homeschool families you are encouraged at a very young age, they're very success driven, right?

So you're encouraged to go to college early to get high marks on your SAT. So there's this kind of this standard to upkeep this image of we are better. We are superior to the public schoolers. We're superior.

That, that, by the way, that's toxic and dangerous. And don't ever, if you're a homeschool family, do not ever please give them that impression that you're better because you're homeschooled. You could just say that this is the wise decision that mom and dad, because, you know, as Ephesians says that it is the parents who are children who are to obey their parents and it is for fathers to raise up their children.

So, you know, in the responsibility that mom and dad have here, we've decided this is the best course for you in the place that we live. But that doesn't mean you look down your nose at everyone else who did it different or think that you have this magic formula or something.

And I think the kids who grew up in that, um, and they think of themselves as, as there's an arrogance there of superiority or there's a pressure there. I need to perform. I need to do well. I need to get into college early.

I need to show that I'm worth it and that I'm, I'm successful and all that. Like that, that eventually that gets old. You eventually realize you can't actually meet all these standards. You don't maybe even want to meet all these standards and you're, you feel like a project instead of a kid.