So much more apologising: The Botkins and who should be taking responsibility for the harm of the stay-at-home-daughter movement
Bronwyn Rideout - 9th November 2026
Credit to the YouTuber Jen and her channel Fundy Fridays for putting out a video on this development; I still recommend watching Jen’s earlier videos on The Botkin Family and the now-defunct Vision Forum that the Botkins were associated with:
I devoted two parts (Part 1 and Part 2) to this family in my Fundamentalist Exchange series, which tracked the successes of two New Zealand evangelists (Nancy Campbell and Ray Comfort) who found fame in the US, and two Americans who had more than a passing interest in New Zealand (Botkin, who sits more in the grey area between fundamentalism and evangelicalism, and Bill Gothard). Before coming to New Zealand, Botkin ran a television production company and was a part of Jim McCotter’s Great Commission Ministries. After a couple of reccy trips in 1997, Geoff brought his wife and children (then between the ages of 4 and 18) over to NZ in 1999. He lacked confidence in the US’s ability to deal with the Y2K problem. New Zealand, on the other hand, was a great place to raise children, and less likely to be impacted by Y2K:
In November 1997 there was “a point of no return” for United States’ companies, he says. If a company hadn’t got to a certain critical point in its efforts to fix any Y2K bug problems by then, it wouldn’t get it done. “It was roughly around that time that I began to see what contingency plans were being made around the country, and that was very little.”
While living the Antipodean life, Botkin and his eldest son worked with various Christian businesses, including HuHu Studios, Lifeway College, and the Family Television Network.
Then Jim McCotter moved to Christchurch in 2000 and, in 2001, purchased Canterbury Television, while also launching a newspaper and a magazine, before leaving New Zealand and never returning (as far as anyone can tell). Botkin was made the CEO of this media conglomerate, but had resigned from the role by 2002. It is unclear how long the family remained in New Zealand, but some of their business interests retained New Zealand addresses through to between 2004 and 2007. Botkin appeared on a 2007 podcast with Kevin Swanson where he speculated on the leadership skills his eldest so, Isaac, would need to be Prime Minister of New Zealand at age 56/57 - I don’t know if the Botkins ever got their citizenship, but the likelihood of this happening is not a total impossibility: Isaac is in his 40s, and has recently taken over his younger brother’s holster manufacturing company, characteristics which would make him a viable party leader for some sectors of the population. By 2008, their website was directing donations to an address in San Antonio, Texas.
Botkin’s two daughters, Anna Sofia and Elizabeth, published their book, So Much More, in 2005, and the early editions included the flap below. The flap implies that the family still lived in New Zealand at the time of the book’s release.
In So Much More, the sisters encourage women to return to the traditional roles of motherhood, to become stay-at-home daughters, and to remain under the authority of their fathers until such time as they are handed over to a husband. Readers were counselled to avoid university, and to limit employment to businesses owned by their father or a brother. Mission trips were also out of the question, not because of the ethical issues that surround them, but due to their being no female missionaries in the bible. It’s biblical patriarchy, albeit at its most extreme. The Botkin sisters didn’t invent it, but they were living under it (in New Zealand, no less) as 17 and 19-year-olds when their book was released. All while being followed by the story of how their father had a 200-year dynastic plan for how many children they would have. Botkin even prayed over Anna Sofia as a baby and blessed her ovaries.
I cannot attest to the true popularity and reach of So Much More; I was in University when the book was released, and didn’t have anyone in my social circle anymore who was a young Christian, or had their pulse on that culture. Even as an atheist in high school in the post-Columbine era, I was aware of books like “I Kissed Dating Goodbye” and “She Said Yes: The Unlikely Martyrdom of Cassie Bernall”.
Still, the Botkin Sisters became doyennes, ingénues, and the subjects of fascination all at once, and still are two decades later. They were poised and well-spoken, but their hair and clothing styles were criticised as being too modern and even too sexy for their message of female submission. There was no small amount of schadenfreude (and pity) directed towards both them and their father for each year that passed with no courtship for the sisters, while their older and younger brothers got married. In 2017, they posted a blog that tip-toed into suggesting another way to a fulfilling life for the Christian single woman, which was taken by some critics as a sign that the two were giving up on marriage. Whether this was the preference of the sisters was a matter of speculation that may never get a full explanation.
The past decade and a bit have been pretty rocky ones for Botkin family as a whole. First, their support and promoter, Vision Forum, collapsed in 2013 following a scandal involving its leader Doug Phillips and an accusation of sexual harassment of the family nanny.
Two of the sons appear to have broken ranks, and may either be estranged or incredibly distant from their parents and some/all of their siblings. After five years of relative silence (with the exception of a 2019 letter sent to the website Under Much Grace), a YouTube video was posted in 2023 where the sisters shared how their opinions of biblical womanhood have evolved beyond just being a wife, mother, and daughter, and demonstrate how the bible provided far more opportunities for women than they originally perceived, building on what they first explored in that 2017 blog post:
In this video, they admit that their vision of parental authority was from the perspective of a 15 and 17-year-old, which was how old they were when they started writing So Much More. At this time, both sisters had paying jobs inside and outside the family home; whether that was something that occurred as a consequence of the spiritual reckoning they were undertaking, or was a wholly practical economic decision, is unknown. There was no public pushback from Geoff at the time. Anna Sofia even shared during that talk that Geoff’s preference was for his children to take the tools he gave them and go figure things out for themselves, rather than consult him for every decision. To anyone who was keeping tabs on the Botkins over the years, the video was surprising for the sisters’ candor in admitting how their stances had changed so dramatically. However, the 2023 video clearly went under the radar, as many were taken aback by what would happen on September 29th, 2026.
This September, the sisters posted a thorough apology and critique of So Much More, along with two videos (14 minutes and the other 2 hours long) for those who do not want to read. It is pretty much their 2023 talk on steroids, and an utter skewering of what I think might have been one of the family’s best money makers until their younger brother started T-Rex Arms. To their credit, they front load the apology before they unpack how they believe they mishandled scripture (the bold font matches what they emphasised:
If you’re concerned that we now think following culture instead of Scripture would have been better all along or that we’re going to handwave away any of God’s actual biblical requirements for women, please keep reading to see why many of So Much More’s positions on women’s roles went against the Bible’s teaching on women, and to see if you find our Scriptural study and conclusions now as compelling as you found the ones we made as exegetically-untrained teenagers.
If you believe God genuinely used So Much More for good in your life, we are not here to dismiss your experience, or His ability to use even very flawed means!
But if you were one of the many who were hurt by So Much More — if it shaped decisions you now regret about education, work, relationships, ministry, where you lived, how you spent your twenties or thirties — we are deeply sorry.
If it contributed to spiritual harm, abuse you couldn’t escape, or influenced those in authority over you to take away opportunities you can never recover, we grieve with you.
If it bound your conscience to do things God doesn’t require, or feel guilt over things God would have allowed (or called) you to do, we’re sorry for binding these false burdens, and the false guilt this brought into your life.
We’re sorry for how we harshly, gracelessly, and pridefully caricatured and straw-manned those who made different life choices or came to different positions, making our view the only possible “right” view.
We’re sorry for how we misrepresented God’s word and (most likely) His will for your life. We confidently insisted that God required of you things He hadn’t, and forbade things He hadn’t. This was a sin against both God and you.
And we’re sorry for how we misrepresented God’s character and His heart toward you. By depicting God as only giving His daughters a few options – as opposed to the abundance that He demonstrated from the very first in the garden, urging Adam and Eve to eat freely of every tree but one – we depicted Him as stingy and controlling, rather than as a generous, abundant God Who treats us like sons and daughters instead of slaves. And by dishing out one-size-fits-all prescriptions or solutions for hard situations, we presented God as narrow-minded, simple, and ignorant of the kind of complex or awful situations that many of His daughters were actually in, instead of a God Whose word always provided the vulnerable with a way out of bad situations.
We ask your forgiveness for all this and any other harm the book caused you.
The response to this apology has been incredibly interesting and, in my opinion, largely positive. The two women are respected for what the apology conveys, and how they take responsibility for the choices they made, while the burden of the blame is instead put on their parents, religious leaders, and the various organisations who platformed the sisters when they were so young. Of course, there are more cynical takes on the apology. Some feel that had they married in their 20s, then the apology wouldn’t have happened (Elizabeth is now married with children, and Anna Sofia is engaged to a pastor), others are suspicious that this is just a stab at self-promotion, while others still are reserving their judgement until the Botkins do something to prove themselves going forward.
Survivors are also split in their responses. On a recent episode of their podcast, Lourdes Torres and author Cait West are sympathetic and open to the apology. Both women are contemporaries of the Botkins, with Lourdes being in the inner circle of Vision Forum, and appearing in the documentary Return of the Daughters, of which So Much More served as the theological foundation. Torres was also the aforementioned Nanny who took Doug Phillips to court for sexual battery, assault, fraud, and emotional distress; this case was ultimately dismissed by the plaintiff. Both Torres and West feel that the sisters were exploited, and were taking the responsibility for something that existed in the Christian community prior to So Much More. There is a lot of empathy towards the pressure the women must have faced at such a young age to be standard bearers for a movement, with the acknowledgement that the Botkins are likely still processing their upbringing, given that they both have only recently left their father’s umbrella of authority. It was interesting to hear Lourdes point out that the main thing missing for her is a statement of who was making money off of the Botkins; I would hazard a guess that a lot of money went to their publisher, Vision Forum.
On the more skeptical side are Jennie Gage, who is ex-Mormon, and Tia Levings, who was part of multiple fundamentalist groups including Bill Gothard’s IBLP. Both are approximately 52 years old, and married at the ages of 18 and 19 respectively; they likely married between 1992 and 1994, about a decade before So Much More was published. They posted a YouTube video where Levings states that the Botkins were responsible for helping girls gaslight themselves into staying in the Stay-at-Home daughters movement, and advised survivors that they were under no obligation to accept the apology. They, like others, remain wary that there is a book, a PR pivot, or some sort of project that may be in the wings. Levings goes further in her criticisms of the Botkins in her TikTok, where she talks about how apologies that come from previous abusers and those complicit with systemic abuse, while a good start, should be taken with a grain of salt.
There is also the uneasy, but still sympathetic, midground. TikTokkers like 90shomesechool and startoverstrategy both acknowledge the apology, while saying that it is not enough, and does not return the time lost. While there was harm caused by So Much More, many agree that the sisters were victims with little control, like many other women in such movements, and that the responsibility or fault is actually on the parents and other adults who used them. One of the most thorough midground critiques comes from Hannah Callahan on her substack, Paradise Loosed. Callahan was 11 when she received a copy of So Much More in 2005, but notes that the Botkins were not the first, nor the most influential, voices on stay-at-home daughterhood in her life - what it did do was normalise and solidify the lifestyle. Like commentators, Callahan agrees that all aspects of the book’s creation, publication, and distribution were the responsibility of adults - Geoff assigned the book, it was marketed by Vision Forum, and it was parents who purchased and gave the book to their own children.
While Callahan doesn’t view the Botkins as people who harmed her like Leving does, her critique focuses on how the apology is still steeped in the same fundamentalist Christian beliefs, albeit more moderate. As they were in 2005, and in the 2023 video, the 2026 apology sees the Botkins assuring their audience that they aren’t feminists, and that there are still aspects of biblical patriarchy to hold on to. As Leving commented, the apology is written in Christianese. Callahan further questions whether the sisters have just switched out their father for another spiritual leader, Dr Phil Kayser. She describes Kayser as an obscure figure, but still rooted in Christian reconstructionism and biblical patriarchy, as Geoff Botkin is. Kayser’s influence is not presumptive - both Elizabeth and her husband work for Kayser, through his Biblical Blueprints website. Elizabeth is also listed as the primary author of the apology.
The sisters included in their addendum to the apology that they might perform a similar psychic autopsy on Return of the Daughters. I am genuinely interested in seeing their audit of that documentary, while also prepared to see how Levings and Callahan’s concerns play out.
As in 2023, neither Geoff Botkin nor any of the Botkin brothers have made any comments about this apology. Granted, the brothers are in a maelstrom of their own, but Geoff’s silence is more curious. Maybe, as implied by Anna Soifia’s anecdote in 2023, Geoff’s views have also evolved as his role changed, from needing to protect his minor daughters to having adults at home in need of an occupation. On the other hand, being a stay-at-home daughter in one’s mid-to-late 30s in a culture that promoted marriage and childrearing as the entirety of a woman’s purpose likely undermined what So Much More promised young women. I’m curious as to whether they either retained any rights to So Much More after Vision Forum disintegrated or utilised self-publishing, because otherwise this is something of a dead piece of intellectual property.
Of the other adults that promoted So Much More, there have been two acknowledgements. The organisation Church and Family Life, led by Steve Walker and Scott Brown, who was second-in-command at Vision Forum, wrote that they agreed with much of what was in the apology, but took exception with other arguments. Emily Velez took Brown and Walker to task for stating that the Botkins’ young age meant that they were in a “…straight forward season of submission to their parents”.
Kevin Swanson, a pastor and broadcaster who produces the Generations podcast, has also spoken about the apology. Both Geoff and his daughters were guests on the podcast in the 2000s. Swanson tries to make swift intellectual work of the apology, while initially claiming that he never read the book (See at 04:49). An open letter to Swanson was quickly published online, which called Swanson out for extolling the virtues of So Much More:
It is one of the very best books I have ever read…Let me encourage you to get this book. This book will change the way that you live. It will change the way we do economics. I believe books like this will have significant economic consequences, social consequences. These are the sorts of books it will take to rebuild the way that we think and the way that we establish our cultures and our societies. And, ladies and gentlemen, it couldn’t come at a better time. The Western world is breaking down. This is a powerful book. It is an intelligent book, written with balance, with honor and respect. This book will save a lot of pain for a lot of women. I think it’s going to be a defining book for the next generation. If you have a daughter, you must get this book.
Swanson is also taken to task for promoting the book, and his own teachings on the topic, amongst other things. Swanson soon after released an apology of his own, where he admitted that he recently found an annotated copy of the book. He claimed that he recognised years ago that the biblical exegesis was weak, which led to him eventually pulling the book from his online store. This lack of awareness is astounding, because it makes him more culpable rather than less. Additionally, one former employee who helped produce the open letter alleged that Swanson sold copies of So Much More at least through to 2013, and at the very least the book remained available until Vision Forum shuttered:
After the hiss and roar of the first week after the apology was released, things have quieted down on this front. I do hope that the sisters return with their retrospective on Return of the Daughters. I would love to hear from some of the former subjects of the documentary, like Lourdes or Jasmine Baucham, about how their lives turned out 20 years on.