I just finished reading/listening to Becoming Free Indeed by Jinger Duggar Vuolo. It's a short book, only 5 hours and 49 minutes in the audio version. I read 50-60% of it in around three hours on a Wednesday night, and then finished the rest of it on Audible while driving around for work on Thursday and Friday.
I wish it were longer, because I really like where she was going. Mrs. Vuolo is the sixth daughter of Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, who was raised in Bill Gothard's ATI homeschooling program and was on several reality TV shows about her family from the time she was ten years old until 2021. She is married to Jeremy Vuolo, a former professional soccer player who now is a college pastor for John MacArthur's church near Los Angeles.
The book talks about her theological development, both thanking her parents for her upbringing and critiquing Gothard's teachings for their self-imposed rules and weird biblical interpretations, which led to an overactive and anxious conscience. Now with two little girls of her own, she talks about her hopes and dreams for raising them out of the limelight and in a loving and non-legalistic environment.
I connected very well with the book -- even though I thought the hype around her family was silly, she comes across as a real person trying to overcome her anxieties and be realer than she was before under Gothard's system. I've struggled with the same things.
Another strength of her book was how she gives actual quotes transcribed from Gothard's seminar videos to strengthen her critique, citing the specific video and timestamp. This is the first time I've seen someone do this, and it is quite effective. She says that when she and her now-husband were courting long-distance, they watched Gothard's Advanced Seminar and Basic Seminar and Jim Sammons's Financial Freedom Seminar, and would often pause the video and discuss the content -- often Jeremy would point out errors, and she started to learn a more reasonable way of interpreting the Bible.
The audio is read by the author, and I think she has a very pleasing voice -- I'm fascinated by the younger generation's use of vocal fry at moments of vulnerability, slang phrases like "came in clutch". Because her 29-year-old voice still sounds so youthful, and because her parents are still famous, I wonder if maybe she doesn't get respected as an adult in some circles, despite being a pastor's wife, a mother of two, and a thrice-published author.
A lot of taboids and news agencies have written about the book and tried to drum up controversy about who among her relatives support her and who doesn't. I wish she had a little more privacy for those types of things.
It might look like she's pounding a dead horse, since Gothard is now 88 and has been deposed from his organization since 2014. However, there are still some families who still attend IBLP conferences, and still others who remember Gothard's teachings with some measure of nostalgia and fondness, who could benefit from hearing how the teachings affected her, especially with the direct evidence she gives by quoting the videos themselves.
I should show my own bias here in that I was in the same ATI program during my high school years, and attended Journey to the Heart, which she also mentions. One of my sisters also met either her or some of her sisters at another Journey to the Heart or other IBLP event. So maybe the story is especially interesting to me in that I have lived a similar story. I appreciate how she talks about her theological development as a "detangling" of faith from fear and biblical teaching from man-made rules, rather than simply deconstructing belief into something nihilistic or self-centered. I'm glad she's found a solid place to stand on now, and I agree with her denunciations of some of Gothard's teachings.
I do worry that the memoir may come off a bit premature, as it swings a big about-face from the 2014 pro-Gothard memoir Growing Up Duggar that she wrote with her sisters. And she may yet change her mind on other things. But as a time capsule of her fresh experiences over the past ten years, it's good to have the record as long as we see it as simply that and not necessarily the final statement of her life.
