Let's take it from the top

(this is a response I gave someone who asked what connection I have to the Shiny Happy People documentary, if any)

Yeah, totally okay to ask (thank you for asking!). My answer is a little bit complicated, but it’s the truth I have to offer lol.

1. That’s wild! I am absolutely going to go watch that documentary on YouTube, thank you for telling me about it!
2. My family wasn’t IBLP, but by the time I was growing up (baby of the family by 10-16 years), our parents were Devout Roman Catholics who had been convinced that even Catholic parochial schools and Catholic high schools and most Catholic colleges were actually not safe and were brainwashing kids too–less so than public schools but still insidious and Bad. Literally my mom would threaten and pretend to pick up the phone to Call Sister [REDACTED] and have her enroll me in Parish School as punishment if I wasn’t cooperating with homeschooling enough. Obviously this had been taught to me as a Dangerous Place To Go, so that made me shape up quick every time.
3. As far as I’ve been able to retrospectively put together, my family was pulled into a bubble of Especially Special Devout Holy Practicing Roman Catholicism that was a combination of tradCath influences (plus voting based on the USCCB and pro-life group publications each year), Evangelical influences especially from Focus on the Family/Dr. Dobson (and WORLD magazine, and the HSLDA), and IBLP influences through the Catholic and Christian homeschool circles I was funneled through.
4. My family got stricter as I got older, and as I was in middle and high school my sister and her group of Catholic homeschool families went further into conspiracy theory and tradCath territory than my Mom and Dad have, and I was getting influenced from her (her family and me and my mom and dad had a large chunk of time per week together and she also has been a partial mother figure as I’ve grown up).
5. My family was also involved with Opus Dei, and I was way more involved than my Mom’s ever been because the women’s center for our area had a LOT of teen girl programming–Evenings of Recollection, Weekend Virtue Retreats, service projects, etc. etc., and I got a lot of influence from that too.
6. We had a lot of the child-rearing practices that are mild-to-moderate among the fundie/evangelical homeschooler crowds, if that gives some insight.
7. I, as an older child and teen in the Strict Homeschool Groups (not the fun homeschool groups)–and via my sister and the media I was allowed to consume–got HEAPING doses of purity culture indoctrination AND the push towards martyrdom and persecution complexes AND christian nationalism AND female submission AND science denialism AND–
8. For many years in a row, my Mom specifically trained me in Apologetics and Church doctrine and theology, trying to patch up any possible hole that led to my oldest brother leave the Church, and on top of this got me books about like “resisting the indoctrination every college will try to give you” etc. etc. I also got trained as a younger child to resist indoctrination and to give specific rote answers from the HSLDA guidance whenever questioned about homeschooling.
9. Most of the families I was allowed to socialize with were living under various flavors of the same homeschooling/modesty/fear-indoctrination/super-devout kind of worldview that IBLP spread and a LOT were fans of the Duggars (I know I definitely watched sometimes while at my grandparents’ house). There’s also an IBLP-adjacent book that I call the Fucking Purple Book that uses “Marian virtue” and stuff as a way to plug IBLP-style modesty and submission practices. This book ran rampant among moms in my high school homeschool co-op circles.
10. tl;dr – I was raised as an IBLP-adjacent homeschool kid and definitely interacted with families that were following IBLP’s practices over the years