Becoming Free Indeed book review

 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.

The self beneath the rawness

I remember a church-kitchen conversation with Jim Schmitt around 2006, in which he told me he hoped that there was something deeper and wholly good in him, that is, in his new nature, beneath the sinfulness that kept coming up. I thought again about that comment when I listened to the audiobook for Platonic by Marisa Franco this month. 

Franco says the following about authenticity (pp.168-169):

...I used to think authenticity was about rawness, boldly sharing whatever is on your mind. But now I see that it's about listening, listening to yourself, not being afraid to experience what's going on inside you, to acknowledge what you truly think and feel and fear and love, without covering it up with defenses. It's not just about having the bravery to admit your opinions to others, but in having the bravery to admit them within. It's only in this listening that we can sense which friends feel most safe for our authenticity and share our truest internal world. Because when we do this internal work, we don't ask others to do it for us. We don't dominate, control, bash, deflect, ignore, ghost, discriminate, or otherwise mistreat because we need them to relieve us from whatever discomfort is warbling inside. And with what's left, we can love others more deeply, cherish them in their truest form, and find friendship.

She gives the following among her takeaways (p.169):

• Authenticity is a state of presence we access when we aren't hijacked by threat. It's who we are underneath our defense mechanisms.
• Authenticity nurtures friendship because humans are social beings, which means when we're authentic, we unleash our nature of empathy and compassion.
• To be more authentic in threatening situations, restrain from indulging in what comes reflexively, because it is likely a defense mechanism. Be mindful and aware of the triggers that propel you to self-protect without indulging them. Pause and breathe. Shift your attention from defensiveness to openness. Access your higher self.
• To stave off social anxiety that impedes authenticity, focus on the person in front of you instead of yourself.

So the first response is not always the most authentic one, and the raw self is not always the true self. This is going to take some work!

This idea of the self beneath the rawness reminds me in turn of Elijah's experience in the cave (1 Kings 19:11-12). The Lord told Elijah he was going to pass by the mountain, but the Lord was not in the wind, the earthquake, or the fire that came first, one after the other, but only in the gentle whisper that came at the end. Were those other things meant to test Elijah and see if he would jump? Or to prepare him to be in awe when the real thing came, which was different from all that came before?

Now the human "true self" and the divine presence are not the same. But each one takes time and preparation to see.

Jim Schmitt passed on from this life on May 24, 2017. Now he knows both his true self and the divine presence, and, unlike Marisa Franco and I, he no longer has to speculate.