Jon, Kate, and the Breakdown of the Evangelical Family

My young daughter is a dedicated fan of the TLC program Jon and Kate Plus Eight, a reality show of a wholesome family with a set of twins and a set of sextuplets.  Over the weekend, TLC ran a marathon of four seasons of the show leading up to the beginning of its fifth season on Monday night.  I confess--I spent a good number of hours watching the reruns with her. 

Rather unbelievably, the fourth season ended with parents Jon and Kate Gosselin renewing their wedding vows and--within just a few weeks--a tabloid explosion of scandalous rumors of the couple's marriage failing apart amid allegations of affairs.  In the world of reality TV, news doesn't get much bigger than this.  For months, fans, bloggers, and the tabloid press have been speculating:  How would season five open?  Would Jon and Kate stay together?  Would they get divorced? 

The scandal is exacerbated by the fact that Jon and Kate are evangelical Christians.  The Gosselins are folk heroes in the evangelical community--their sextuplets were the result of infertility treatments during which they refused selective abortion and carried all six babies to term.  TLC downplays the religious aspects of the show, but legions of conservative church-going fans delighted in Kate's stern discipline, cheered Jon wearing T-shirts emblazoned with Bible verses, and devoured the couple's Christian parenting books.  The show is something strangely compelling--the cute little kids and the endlessly cranky parents trying hard to make a good Christian family. 

The new season's opening episode recorded a familial train wreck.  Indeed, Jon barely participated in his sextuplet's fifth birthday while an emotionally drained Kate struggled alone to pull of the party.   In individual interviews, the couple talked about how hard their relationship is--how they've become "different" people--and how divorce was a distinct possibility.

As I watched, I recalled another show--An American Family--the original family reality show that PBS aired in 1973.  Conceived as a video diary of a liberal middle-class American family, the Louds of Santa Barbara, the program quickly devolved into the chronicle of crisis--complete with boundary-pushing teens and the wife confronting her philandering husband and demanding a divorce.  The Louds made big news--including the cover of Newsweek on the breakdown of the American family.

Which, of course, brings us back to Jon and Kate.  If the Loud saga depicted the crisis of the liberal 1970s family, what does Jon and Kate's tale reveal about the state of the evangelical family?  Is this where their politics of "family values" have taken conservative evangelicals?  Are the Gosselins the Louds of the Christian right?  

In Jon and Kate's case, evangelical gender expectations seem to be the root of their troubles: they reversed the parental roles.  After a couple of seasons, Jon decided to stay at home and Kate went on the road to promote the show and their books.  The choice made Jon increasingly sullen and Kate happier and began to wear at their relationship.   For evangelicals, this is an unusual arrangement that leaves the husband open to charges of "feminization" and the wife of being difficult.  The Gosselin's tensions demonstrate how unsuccessfully conservative religious groups have been dealing with gender--and how when a woman like Kate Gosselin breaks with tradition in order to pursue what she loves--even when her business is family and motherhood--she gets both blamed and punished for problems in her relationships. 

Kate kept saying, "it is so complex; it is so difficult," unable to stop her tears.  In a way, she embodies many evangelical women who struggle between the role of homemaker that their churches assign them and of finding interesting and creative work in the world.   Kate, despite all her pretentions to tradition, is actually a very contemporary woman with feminist inclinations--one who is figuring out that her theology is at odds with the way life works out.  She often violates the mores of a nice evangelical mom (which I think is part of the appeal; she is, in many ways, an evangelical fantasy mother).  She clearly likes travel, Oprah interviews, and book signings.  Staying at home with eight kids can be a drag, so she left her husband with them only to find out that there may have been a girlfriend, too.  Success, good children, happy marriage--are they all possible within her theological framework?  "I have a lot of anger," she said on Monday's program.  I bet. 

How dreary it is to watch a relationship implode on national television.  In some measure, the failure is theirs.  But the conservative evangelical community shares some of that failure, too.  The religious world to which Jon and Kate belong never successfully navigated the gender changes of the last three decades, insisting that happiness can still be found in hierarchical roles of male superiority and female submission.  Having rejected feminist theology, evangelicals can't really navigate contemporary marriage issues like those facing Jon and Kate.  They made celebrities of the Gosselins for being traditionalists, yet that success eroded the very basis of the traditionalism on which their family was based.  Now, the woman is criticized for that same success by an increasingly cruel media and tabloid press.   I just wonder if all those church people will turn on you next.   

You are right, Kate.  It is complex and difficult.  It makes me angry for you.