Former U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn is making headlines this week for a connection to the Duggar family, stars of the TLC reality show “19 Kids and Counting.”
Cawthorn, 27, who served one term in Congress representing North Carolina, was given screen time in the new docuseries “Shiny Happy People: Duggar Family Secrets.”
Cawthorn’s seven minutes of fame in the series come during the fourth episode. It describes his connection to Generation Joshua, a division of the Home School Legal Defense Association that intends to bring up conservative Christian home-schoolers to become part of the government, according to Alex Harris, a former leader of the group who now opposes it in the documentary.
“The Joshua Generation is one of the most ambitious plots of modern evangelical history, and almost no one has ever heard of it,” Harris, an attorney, said. “It’s a decadeslong, multigenerational plan to raise an elite strike force of Christian home-school graduates to infiltrate the highest levels of government.”
And so far, Cawthorn was their largest success, Harris said.
Harris also tweeted in 2021 that Cawthorn had campaigned with Generation Joshua while in high school.
Cawthorn spent two years in Congress using the House floor as a pulpit. His speeches included ideological beliefs matching those of Generation Joshua as listed on the organization’s website, including opposition to “nontraditional families” and abortion.
Generation Joshua, founded at Patrick Henry College, is named after the biblical Joshua who succeeded Moses as leader of the Israelites. The organization says more than 25,000 students have passed through their program and worked on 155 political campaigns.
“The whole purpose was really to position kind of the best and brightest of the Christian home-school movement to assume positions of power and influence in government and in the law,” Harris said in the series. “The goal was Christian home-school graduates who would be U.S. senators, who would be U.S. presidents, and most importantly, who would be U.S. Supreme Court justices, in order to bring America back to its rightful position as a truly Christian nation.”
Cawthorn, a former home-school student, attended Patrick Henry College for a semester. Buzzfeed News uncovered allegations of misogyny and sexual predatory behavior by Cawthorn against women at the college. He told the now-defunct news outlet that he had never done anything sexually inappropriate in his life.
Cawthorn lost his reelection after numerous scandals surfaced ahead of his primary.
The docuseries’ four episodes highlight the sexual abuse allegations against both Josh Duggar, the family’s eldest son, and Bill Gothard, the founder of the Institute in Basic Life Principles, a controversial nondenominational Christian organization, who helped shape Generation Joshua.
The series interviews several women who accused Gothard of grooming them as young girls before preying on them at his headquarters and the organization’s camp. He has not been charged, but resigned as the head of IBLP because of the allegations.
The series also looks at how Gothard’s alleged action mirrors that of others who have gone through the program including Cawthorn, who has never been charged with sexual wrongdoing, and Josh Duggar, who admittedly abused his sisters and is now serving prison time for child pornography.
The Duggars closely followed Gothard and the principles of IBLP as they raised their 19 children. The documentary describes how father Jim Bob Duggar hoped to use their television show as a means outside politics, which he also tried his hands at, to advance the message of IBLP.
The docuseries, which includes interviews with one of the Duggar children, published Friday and can be watched on Amazon Prime.
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