My Mother's Mixer

Last year I wrote a piece called ‘My Grandma’s Hooker Shoes.’ This isn’t really a sequel, but it is not lost on me that inanimate objects have found center stage in my deep thoughts lately. 

My mother owns a mixer just like this one.  If you know someone who owns a Bosch mixer from this era, odds are you know someone who was influenced by Bill Gothard.  In the mid-80s, Bill Gothard started to develop his “Biblical” view of “daily bread.”  He published it in a 64 page "Wisdom Book" - one of many such books that formed the backbone of his ATI homeschool program. 

You can find that book in its entirety at the

link below.  If you ever wondered what made Gothard so distinct, this is classic Gothard - one Biblical phrase extrapolated and expounded until it filled a book that you could actually order your life around.  To his followers, this was exegesis.  This was THE way God meant the passage or verse or the 7 words to be interpreted.

https://archive.org/details/wisdom-booklet-34-p1679-1742/mode/2up

Fast forward from 1987 to the early ‘90s and you’ll find Bosch mixers flying off the shelves as Gothardites race to obey God’s directive for his children to consume what most would consider unholy quantities of homemade wheat bread. 

Staged photo of Jana Duggar making bread on her mother's Bosch mixer.

By this time, Gothard had expanded his original interpretation to include the consumption of 24 slices of bread a day for maximum health.  Gothard would have had you believe that this was the optimal fuel for your body by God’s design.  And a Bosch mixer could best rival the hands of a good woman when it came to the proper mixing and kneading of the dough.  In Gothard’s world, every detail mattered for those seeking God’s best.  The bread had to be whole wheat ideally made from fresh ground flour.  If you weren’t dedicated enough to grind your own flour and make bread by hand, buying flour from a mill was permissible as was mixing the dough on a Bosch mixer. 

So people with very little disposable income prioritized investing in an expensive mixer so they could enjoy the benefits of following God’s plan.  I doubt Gothard owed stock in Bosch, but he should have. I’m sure thousand of mixers were purchased if not tens of thousands. 

If you took the time to peruse the wisdom book, by now you are asking yourself how anyone could fall for that nonsense.  

It was a slow fade.  An incremental replacement of critical thought with full trust in the ideas of Bill Gothard until there was no more thinking, just doing what Gothard said.  It is the epitome of the frog in boiling water analogy except that frogs don’t actually allow themselves to be boiled to death unless you pith them first.  The experiment where we get the notion that frogs will allow themselves to be boiled if we slowly increase the temperature was performed on pithed frogs.  Their brains were intentionally scrambled.  A healthy frog will absolutely exit the warming water. 

And so it is with cults.  When we step back and take an objective look at much of what came out of IBLP, we can see it for what it is.  But when you are in it, your brain doesn’t work the way a healthy brain should.  I suppose this is why it is called brain washing. 

A few years after my mother got her Bosch, the light began to dawn that perhaps Gothard was wrong about eating all of that bread.  Thirty years later, she still uses her mixer for all the normal things one uses a mixer for. 

A few years after I got married, she bought me a KitchenAid mixer knowing it would be the only mixer I would ever need.  It was a sacrificial gift she could not afford, but I never stopped to think about why she gave me a KitchenAid when Bosch was so highly regarded in her circles.

A few months ago, I was visiting her when she mentioned in passing that she wished she had gotten a KitchenAid instead of a Bosch.  My heart broke.  It isn’t a big deal.  Her Bosch serves its purpose.  But that is the only serious mixer she will ever own, and it isn’t the one she would have chosen had it not been for the influence of a cult leader. 

I could go on and on about the lasting impacts of spiritual leaders who made the rounds speaking on God’s behalf, telling people they should do one thing or another.  Long after the wind of doctrine blows over and the trend subsides, there are still enclaves of people clinging to it as if it were truly God’s way. 

People of faith need to question everything, weigh it carefully, step back routinely, and never let trust for a respected leader replace critical thought.  Bill Gothard is a cautionary tale of someone who didn’t set out to be a cult leader, but society is not wrong when they regard him as one.