Duggar cult founder plans Kansas ‘retreat’ to set up arranged marriages for teen girls

[LeftyMom]

25. Ugh, Vyvkie and RawStory? No wonder this story is clickbaity crap.

First of all, Vaughn Ohlman is not the Duggars' cult leader. Their cult leader is Bill Gothard. Whatever their flaws are, none of their kids were married underage.

Second let's talk about the context here, because it's important: this particular slice of fundamentalism has been talking for years about what they term "the marriage crisis." Basically the issue is that they deliberately raised their daughters in particular to aspire to be mothers of large families, and they're reaching adulthood and not finding suitable partners, often until well into their thirties. Which is a problem if you want a big family, because the math just doesn't work at that point. Different people in their communities identify different contributing factors, and a lot of them are focusing on mentoring young men. Personally I suspect that their emphasis on debt-free living is a big part of the problem: if you need to buy a house to get married and you can't take out a loan, you're unlikely to be marrying young because you need to make some serious money even to buy a little fixer in most places.

Third Ohlman's argument is that young men are ready to be husbands before they're ready to be the independent leaders of their own family unit, and that if they need to live with family for a while on their own or something that's not a dealbreaker. If you look at his website he's talking about people in their late teens and twenties. He's explicitly not talking about people younger than the end of puberty. What he's rejecting is "leave and cleave" theology where marriage means a couple is entirely and irreperably independent of their families: since this theology places abused women in danger and traps them in bad situations (ie Anna Duggar) this might not be the worst thing. He also suggests that ruling out young people because their family's ideology is very slightly different is stupid. In a subculture where it's not uncommon for dads to make young men write many theological position papers as part of the courtship process that's also not objectionable advice.

Fourth and most importantly every fundamentalist activity is explicitly a place for matchmaking. That's why they have eleventy billion conferences and parachurch ministries, and why they're forever sending their teenagers and young adults off to assist other ministries, why they all emphasize hospitality and visiting likeminded families, and why highly experienced families with older children still attend several homeschooling conferences a year, even though they could recite the speakers' advice from memory.

Fifth and most importantly Vyckie Garrison is a crank and writing articles about fundamentalism for liberals is her latest grift. Take her articles with a box of salt, okay?