Anna Duggar is the Leah of our time. To quote the poetic Rich Mullins for those unfamiliar with the story:
Jacob, he loved Rachel and Rachel, she loved him
And Leah was just there for dramatic effect
Well it’s right there in the Bible, so it must not be a sin
But it sure does seem like an awful dirty trick
And her sky is just a petal pressed in a book of a memory
Of the time he thought he loved her and they kissed
And her friends say, “Ah, he’s a devil”
But she says, “No, he is a dream”
This is the world as best as I can remember it
“The Way to see by Faith is to shut the Eye of Reason.” — Benjamin Franklin
Anna is the mother of four children ages five and younger. Her youngest child is barely a month old. That bears repeating:
her youngest child is barely a month old.
She is in a marriage more-or-less arranged by her father and Jim Bob Duggar to a man she knows to be something of a con-artist (much like Jacob), and even worse, a sexual deviant and predator of girls. If actions are any indicator, Josh doesn’t care about Anna’s needs; he may never have. He possibly entered into the whole charade as a means to some other end. (In Jacob’s case, the deception was so he could win Rachel; in Josh’s it may have been to further a political career.)
Anna, however, entered into her marriage out of a very serious and sacred sense of trust in God and of the men in authority over her based on her understanding of God. She was taught her role from a child, and had very few other influences. She did not attend college. In Anna’s world, her father and her husband and her pastor represent God-on-the-Earth to her, and she is to obey them as such as an act of trust and faith in God.
This trust would be blessed by God, according to what her faith teaches, and God woud use her example of submissive faithfulness to bring others to Christ, bless her life with children, and bring her love, joy, fulfillment, honor among her peers and her family, and a peace that passes understanding. Anna Duggar had been chosen. She has been blessed with the opportunity to be Used by God.
But, reality hasn’t wrought the promised results of obedience she was given, in fact, quite the opposite has occured. She’s the butt of the joke. She is now one of (in my opinion) the worst things a woman can become: an object of pity, like the biblical Leah. There is no greater heartache than to offer your life, your heart, and your eternity to God, only to have Him allow you, either passively or by His direct involvement (who knows for sure?), to be subjected to humiliation like Anna Duggar is going through. Awful questions may plague her mind: is this God’s perfect will for my life? And if it is, how sick is that? (Oddly enough, some people don’t think hell exists. Anna’s in a black hell; make no mistake about that.)
Now Jacob got two women and a whole house full of kids
And he schemed his way back to the promised land
And he finds it’s one thing to win ‘em
And it’s another to keep ‘em content
When he knows that he is only just one man
And his sky’s an empty bottle and when he’s drunk the ocean dry
Well he sails off three sheets to some reckless wind
And his friends say, “Ain’t it awful”
And he says, “No, I think it’s fine”
And this is the world as best as I can remember it
Top all of that spiritual turmoil with the economic and practical struggles Anna now faces: Josh had to quit his job. He’s virtually unemployable, and now it appears he’s been shipped off to Jesus Jail for “treatment”, even though the whole Christian-work-camp option was obviously ineffective when his parents tried it before.
Anna has no college education, no work experience, and four children under the age of five. Where the hell is the money for diapers going to come from? Her one option for income is to betray her faith and her moral code and write a tell-all book. What sort of option is that for a woman whose self-worth is based on absolute loyalty to her husband and obeying God as she understands Him? Anna Duggar can not win.
Now Rachel’s weeping for the children
That she thought she could not bear
And she bears a sorrow that she cannot hide
And she wishes she was with them
But she just looks and they’re not there
Seems that love comes for just a moment
And then it passes on by
Anna did everything a Good Christian Girl should. And now, her marriage has been revealed to be far less than what she was promised and conditioned to expect. Her husband made an absolute mockery of the vows he took before a huge crowd of witnesses, and used not only her, but an untold number of other women. A typical instinct for women in her shoes is to blame oneself: maybe she wasn’t doing enough to satisfy or submit to her husband. Maybe she wasn’t this, that, or the other thing. This reaction is baffling to people who can’t rationalize the connection between a husband and God that women in Bill Gothard-esque religious environs are made to believe. You see, if Anna wasn’t good enough for her husband, then she’s not good enough for God either. So, she’ll double down and try all the harder to save her life as she knows it.
It’s a sick, sick way to live.
And her sky is just a bandit
Swinging at the end of a hangman’s noose
‘Cause he stole the moon and must be made to pay for it
And her friends say, “My, that’s tragic”
She says, “Especially for the moon”
And this is the world as best as I can remember it
And this is the world as best as I can remember it.
Anna has two options: either she is to blame, or everything she has been taught, and everything she believes to be true about God and eternity is complete b.s. The former is likely easier to choke down, and she will try to keep it down as long as possible. The latter is like learning the law of gravity is a total sham, and that is terrifying in ways the secular world simply cannot fathom.
When the World-at-Large gets a glimpse at the World-that’s-Small–the isolated world of women in extreme fundamental environs–it sort of freaks out and forgets that real human beings are trying to live their lives and meet the needs of their kids in that strange place. I don’t know if Anna has internet access, but I hope she sees some of the kindness and truly empathetic responses to her situation. In the midst of the thoughtless memes there are decent people; I hope they continue to speak up if for no other reason than to drown out the cruel ones.
I like to think that Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent gets the end of Leah’s story correct, and that she took back control of her life. The Leah in that re-telling of the tale had a righteous anger. She was fierce and determined, a powerful matriarch, a woman who taught her children strength and dignity, and a force to be reckoned with. The thing I hope Anna can discover is this: she is the Leah of our time. She can, and should, control her own destiny.