MAPACA

Mid-Atlantic Popular &
American Culture Association

Through a series of television specials and later a reality TV show, 19 Kids and Counting, the Duggars have risen to fame as a family that espouses conservative social values and follows a very conservative form of Christianity. As the Duggars’ television show became more successful, the family branched out into other media, including print books, audiobooks, and DVDs of their television series. Additionally, the Duggars have been interviewed on secular television shows, including Good Morning America and The Today Show, and for secular publications, including the often risqué Cosmopolitan.

The Duggar family presents a fascinating case study in evangelical Christian approaches to media. A common statement in the evangelical Christian community is that evangelical Christians are “in the world, but not of the world.” This statement reflects evangelical Christians’ assertion that they live adjacent to a secular culture in which they do not actively participate. However, I posit that evangelical Christians cannot escape secular culture, and the Duggars’ success in multiple media provides an example of this. For a family that claims to not consume secular media, their presence in and use of secular media to promote their products, in which they clearly and actively advocate the conservative values by which they live, seems confusing at best and hypocritical at worst.

The use of “secular” media to promote and spread religious messages is certainly not new. However, I argue that the Duggars’ success prompts us to further examine their impact on American culture, and to evaluate the ethics of disseminating an evangelical Christian message through secular media. This paper aims, in part, to address whether the Duggar family’s use of “secular” media is hypocritical, or merely an unavoidable aspect of evangelizing in the twenty-first century.