Shiny Happy People is only nominally about the Duggars and their weird, distinctly American celebrity. "We wanted to use the Duggars as a societal touchpoint and not focus solely on them, because they were the gateway in terms of knowing who they were for the average American to bring us into something that's unknown," said the series co-director Julia Willoughby Nason (LulaRich, Fyre Fraud). Though the Institute in Basic Life Principles may be unknown to many, it's not irrelevant. The extreme teachings of Bill Gothard dovetailed with the Christian homeschooling movement in the US, and the politically active religious right in the US. "I think more and more [fundamentalist Christianity] is becoming more mainstream, especially since Trump got elected – there's this huge underbelly and infrastructure in American culture of authoritarianism," said Nason.
"The Duggar family is not a bizarre fascination. It is a horrifying glimpse of a story that was told over and over and over again in so many different families," says Josh Pease, a pastor and journalist, in the series. As the series argues in later episodes, that story of harmonious obedience flowed through the Duggars, to IBLP, through other fundamentalist ministries and into mainstream American institutions via the "Joshua Generation", a decades-long project to place fundamentalist, evangelical Christians in positions of power, up to and including the US Senate and supreme court…https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2023/jun/01/shiny-happy-people-duggar-family-amazon
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