Few revelations about the Duggar family could still shock the world, but that hasn't stopped defenders of the infamous brood from pretending that the new Amazon Prime docuseries, Shiny Happy People, is significantly tainting whatever is left of the Duggar name. Here's an illustrative example of this already-hackneyed trope.

For those who may have mercifully forgotten, the Duggar family, which includes 19 children born to Independent Fundamentalist Baptist parents in Arkansas, was once the marquee attraction of peak reality trash TV on The Learning Channel. The show 19 Kids and Counting ran for nearly a decade, illustrating the Duggar children's sheltered upbringings, their effectively arranged marriages (chaperoned courtships in which the couple could not so much as kiss until the wedding), and live streams of the women giving birth. (The family's religious rejection of modern marriage meant that women were expected to give birth at home, on camera, without so much as laughing gas, let alone an epidural.)

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The show was infamously canceled upon the discovery that Josh, the eldest boy of the band and burgeoning social conservative activist, had molested five children, four of whom were his pre-pubescent sisters, when he was 14 to 15 years old. The Duggar patriarch technically reported Josh to law enforcement, but it was a state trooper who was a personal friend of the family and would later be sentenced to a half-century in prison for child pornography charges. Josh ultimately faced zero legal consequences for these crimes, nor was he referred to professional medical care.

As the Amazon documentary details, two of the elder girls, then married mothers, were cajoled by their father, who controlled the finances for the entire family, into starring in a reality TV spinoff. "Jill and Jessa: Counting On," which ran for another five years until 2020, when Josh was arrested for receiving and possessing child pornography.

Shiny Happy People occasionally undermines the impact of its own thesis by straying away from the story of the Duggars themselves with asides about Generation Joshua and the wider Roe v. Wade abortion debate. By blurring the lines between what it calls fundamentalist (Wheaton College, which teaches evolutionary biology, hardly fits the bill) and the actual fundamentalist ideology of the Duggars, the series actually understates the horrors of the family.

It is actually the actions of the Duggar men and matriarch, not the documentary, that are responsible for making Christians look bad.

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Recall that Jesus tells us that “it would be better” to be “drowned in the depth of the sea” than to hurt a child. The Duggars, who claim to take God's word at face value, decided to protect their serial predator son when he molested five victims. Within a decade, Josh graduated to serial adultery against his wife. Within years after that, Josh was committing federal offenses by watching infants being raped. One of the ICE agents investigating Josh's case said the examples of child pornography in question were "in the top five of the worst of the worst that I've ever had to examine." Peter Scully, the convicted pedophile who made the most infamous video in Josh's possession, charged five figures for vermin to watch an 18-month-old being hung upside down from a chain and raped. Scully also reportedly made older victims dig their own graves before being raped on camera and murdered.

That behavior is the opposite of Christ-like. Even enabling that behavior is Satanic. We should always differentiate between Christ, the only sinless man in history, and the fallibility of Christians. But if the public thinks less of the latter after watching Shiny Happy People, don't blame the documentary. Blame the Duggars.