A Walker County native was recently featured in the Prime Video limited docuseries “Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets,” sharing his story of growing up under the teachings of the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP) and its leader Bill Gothard.
Chad Harris, who now lives in Gardendale, spent much of his formative years as a homeschooled student living on Bryan Road in east Walker County. Harris said his family got into the IBLP movement through his mother’s OB-GYN.
“My folks were approaching their 40s and they were talking about family planning, how they didn’t really want any kids moving forward,” he said told The Community Journal in a phone interview. “The doctor said they should turn that over to God, and he gave them a book called ‘A Full Quiver,’ which was one of the cornerstone books for the Quiver Full Movement. Both his family and my family went to the Bill Gothard seminar at the same time, and they all went into the IBLP cult together.”
Harris’ father was pastor of New Testament Baptist Church on the Hull Road in Sumiton. Harris is the fourth of six children in his family. He said he was the first to be fully homeschooled. Gothard’s homeschool curriculum, Advanced Training Institute (ATI), ended up being the curriculum his parents used for his education.
“My folks pulled my older brother, who was 10 years older than me, out of a Christian school in Jasper, and they were going to homeschool us at the same time,” he said. “They settled on the ATI curriculum, because it was promised that would work for myself and my older brother. It really wasn’t geared to younger children at all. As I said in the documentary, it was just a bunch of made up ramblings from Bill Godard and his friends. It really didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me.”
Harris said there was a lot of fear around his homeschooling. He said the teaching was full of fear, but his family was also fearful of outsiders.
“My folks were constantly afraid that the government was going to bother to come out to the backside of Bryan Road and take me away because I was a truant,” he said.
Harris said he was “coached” what to say if anyone asked why he was not at school.
“I was taught to fear any kind of interference by anybody from the outside,” he said. “So we were pretty isolated back there, and I really didn’t have any friends other than who all we knew at the church.”
While his brother went further into the IBLP movement, Harris said that was not the road he took.
“My parents were called to be missionaries in Belgium when I was 12, so it was too far for me to go to go to the training centers like he did,” Harris said. “They did keep me in the ATI curriculum.”
When it was time for college, Harris said there were not many options. He said the ATI curriculum would train people to work for the IBPL.
“I myself didn’t take that route, and the colleges that my parents approved of were not accredited at all, and, more or less, just extensions of fundamentalism,” he said. “I wasn’t very happy to get into that, but I was still very much sold on the idea of the church itself.”
Harris decided to work for a church in Mississippi. The church’s membership were mostly older people, but its pastor was young, trying to get younger people to come and grow the church, he said.
“I absolutely thought he was the best thing since sliced bread. He seemed to have a vision. He seemed to have a real drive,” Harris said. “And come to find out, after less than a year of me working for him, his wife left and laid a charge of emotional abuse against him. It was in the paper and everything. And through some strange turn of events, about a month later, she came back as if nothing had happened. He claimed that he was fine and wanted to pastor again.
“I knew something bad strange was going on,” Harris added. “Through a very complicated, long series of events, he was allowed to pastor there again with the church voting him back in by just one vote difference.”
After that experience, Harris said he knew what had happened was wrong, but his father and others close to him told him not to talk about it because it could “hurt the ministry.”
“I thought that was a little odd, because, you know if nothing else, the independent, fundamentalist Baptist church loves to yell about sin from the pulpit and who was committing them. But when it comes to in-house, suddenly you have to be quiet,” he said.
It was at that point when Harris started looking into other preachers that his father had followed in the past. He found several who had horrible allegations against them, everything from sexual abuse of their own family members to transporting a minor across state lines for sex.
“I started seeing all this pattern emerge, And I said, ‘wait a minute, something is definitely wrong,’” Harris said. “My dad continued to say they just don’t talk about things like that. And I said, ‘well, who does? Because I’m seeing people getting hurt. My friends are getting hurt. This is more than just a few isolated incidents.’”
About that time is when sexual harassment allegations came against Gothard.
“And that was my when my entire world fell out from under me,” Harris said. “I was already starting to question the IBPL church but then I started to question everything I was raised with too.”
Harris said he told his father in a loud argument, “I didn’t sign up to hurt people.”
“I left fundamentalism and everything behind,” he said. “One thing that I did admire about my dad was early in his ministry whenever he saw something that he thought was wrong and thought was hurting people, he would speak out against it. That change as he got older.”
Harris’ relationship with his entire family deteriorated over time, to the point they all agreed to not have contact with each other. He said the last time he had contact with the family was at his father’s funeral in 2020.
“My mom and siblings aren’t affiliated with the IBPL any more, but they still support its teaching,” he said. “I just couldn’t stand by and watch people continue to get hurt by this ideology without bringing some attention to it.”
Harris has been very outspoken about the IBLP since 2020 when he started sharing his experience via his TikTok account archradish, which has now grown to have more than 32,000 followers.
“I just started making little mini videos talking about IBLP and my experience in it and how it affected my life,” Harris said. “I started gaining a small following, and I started meeting other people who were also sharing their stories from the cult.”
Harris found out about the documentary through an IBLP survivor’s page on Facebook.
“There were some filmmakers looking to do interviews with people who had grown up in the IBLP, and I was already doing that on TikTok, so I decided to contact them,” he said. “They had clearly done some research. I was very impressed because most of the time when I tell my story, it sounds a little far out there, but they listened with empathy. At a few points, they came to tears and said they were sorry I went through that but thanked me for being willing to share.”
After hearing about the Duggar tie-in with the docuseries, Harris said he was a little concerned their family would be the focus, but he trusted the filmmakers to reveal the full story of survivors of the IBPL.
“I didn’t get to see an advanced screening,” he said. “I watched it just like everyone else when it was released on Prime. Once I watched it, I was so impressed. I watched with my friend Heather, who was also interviewed in it. I looked at her and said, ‘I think we just killed a cult.’”
The docuseries was No. 1 on Prime Video for two weeks. Harris said the popularity surprised him in a way, but he is happy so many people have been able to hear his story and the story of others who grew up in the IBPL.
“It’s always nerve-wracking when you share your story and you don’t know what people are going to do with it,” he said. “But I feel like we gave it in good hands, and they really treated it with respect. And hopefully now people understand the impact that this cult has had even in mainstream society. I keep hearing from people all the time who were raised with some of these things, or they went to some of these programs, like Bill (Gothard) got in their head in public schools or in city hall seminars and stuff.
“I’m pleased with people seeing just how widespread it was,” Harris added. “And I’m hoping that this turns into action to shut down the IBLP once and for all, and to rid their teachings out of everything. Any child that gets hurt by any of this stuff again, is one child too many. And I cannot be adamant enough about it.”
Harris said he would like the filmmakers to go even deeper into the stories told by him and others.
“I would love for Amazon to call for a second season. The footage is there. I know that,” he said.
