1069
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- Oct 21, 2006
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Quiverfull: More Children for God's Army
Kathryn Joyce
"Between 1985 and 1990, three books were published by small, independent Christian presses that would have come to have a profound impact on Christian Right thinking on family planning, feminism and birth control. Charles Provan's The Bible and Birth Control, Mary Pride's The Way Home: Away from Feminism and Back to Reality, and Rick and Jan Hess's A Full Quiver: Family Planning and the Lordship of Christ. Together, these three books laid a comprehensive framework for the pro-natalist, anti-birth control movement today known as Quiverfull, wherein believers eschew all forms of birth control, natural and hormonal, and argue that Christian families should leave the number of children they have entirely in the hands of God.
>snip<
... I profiled a group of Quiverfull believers who had broods of 8, 11, 13 and 14 children, and who spoke of their decision to have such large families as a form of spiritual warfare. That much is reflected in their name, taken from Psalm 127: "Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies in the gate." Quiverfull mothers think of their children as no mere movement, but as an army they're building for God.
Quiverfull parents try to have upwards of six children. They homeschool their families, attend fundamentalist churches, and follow biblical guidelines of male headship - "father knows best" - and female submissiveness. They refuse any attempt to regulate pregnancy. Quiverfull probably began as a self-conscious movement with the publication of Rick and Jan Hess's 1989 book, A Full Quiver: Family Planning and the Lordship of Christ, in which they argue that God, as the "Great Physician" and sole "Birth Controller," is in charge of opening and closing the womb on a case-by-case basis. Women's attempts to control their own bodies - the Lord's temple - are a seizure of divine power.
Its word-of-mouth growth can be traced back to conservative Protestant critiques of contraception, and the growing belief among evangelicals that birth control pills are an "abortifacient" (that hormonal contraception such as the pill can cause the "chemical abortion" of accidentally fertilized eggs). This is one of the strongest ties between Quiverfull conviction and the larger Christian Right, connecting a radically-expanded "pro-life" agenda that has broadened its political interests from abortion, to birth control and sexual abstinence, to international pro-natalist and pro-population movements. (Such an expanded agenda was on full display this fall at the Contraception is Not the Answer conference in Illinois) >snip<
Pride's book - a grassroots hit among the homeschooling movement - denounced birth control as the hallmark of selfish feminists and paved the way for women's careers and abortion. "Family planning is the mother of abortion. A generation had to be indoctrinated in the ideal of planning children around personal convenience before abortion could be popular," Pride argued, calling for Christians to fight abortion by demonstrating that children were "unqualified blessings" by having as many as God gave them.
A number of families in the past twenty years have followed Pride's and the Hess's charge. Though there are no exact figures for the size of the movement, the number of families that identify as Quiverfull is likely in the low tens of thousands. In its most benign self-descriptions, Quiverfull is about faith, pure and simple: faith that God won't give a woman more children than she can handle, and faith that by opening themselves up receive multiple "blessings" - in the form of children - they will bring God's favor upon them in other areas of life as well. God "deals with the hearts" about birth control, and if they submit, they are cared for.
But a more disturbing rationale for Quiverfull can also be found in its founding texts. After arguing Scripture, the Hesses point to a number of more worldly effects that a Christian embrace of Quiverfull could bring. "When at the height of the Reagan Revolution," they write, "the conservative faction in Washington was enforced [sic] with squads of new conservative congressmen, legislators often found themselves handcuffed by lack of like-minded staff. There simply weren't enough conservatives trained to serve in Washington in the lower and middle capacities." But if just eight million American Christians began supplying more "arrows for the war" by having six children or more, they propose that the Christian Right ranks could rise to 550 million within a century.
The language of spiritual warfare, demographic victory in the culture war through population shifts drastic enough to influence the law, and the inversion of old patriarchal traditions to seem like rebellion against modern society, may seem dramatic, but these are key parts of the religious and pro-family agenda to fight birth control that has drawn the attention of policy makers on the right and in the middle, and deserves the attention of anyone concerned with reproductive freedom."
>snip<
link
For a fuller portrait of the movement and its members, read this article:
'Arrows for the War'.
I wasn't initially sure which board to post this on; it's political; it's partisan; it has to do with education, it has to do with contraception, it has to do with health.
Momentarily, I entertained the idea of posting it in the "conspiracy theories" section. But I couldn't figure out who was being paranoid: them, or me. :mrgreen:
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this movement.
First, I'd like to discuss whether or not it's even feasible to raise one's children to be "soldiers" for any particular cause or political movement, no matter how valid, or even to raise them to share one's political ideals, or even to be interested in politics and social issues at all.
I've never personally had much luck with it (although admittedly I've never taken it to this extreme; my attempts to persuade my kids to share my social ideals and political views and my way of thinking have never included isolating them from the rest of the world and from anyone else who could possibly influence them or introduce them to other viewpoints).
And if it is even remotely possible to indoctrinate children from birth into an extremist political view, in fact to breed them for the specific purpose of creating a radical new socio-political faction, an "army of God", is it ethical to do so?
Anyway, your thoughts on this would be most welcome.
Kathryn Joyce
"Between 1985 and 1990, three books were published by small, independent Christian presses that would have come to have a profound impact on Christian Right thinking on family planning, feminism and birth control. Charles Provan's The Bible and Birth Control, Mary Pride's The Way Home: Away from Feminism and Back to Reality, and Rick and Jan Hess's A Full Quiver: Family Planning and the Lordship of Christ. Together, these three books laid a comprehensive framework for the pro-natalist, anti-birth control movement today known as Quiverfull, wherein believers eschew all forms of birth control, natural and hormonal, and argue that Christian families should leave the number of children they have entirely in the hands of God.
>snip<
... I profiled a group of Quiverfull believers who had broods of 8, 11, 13 and 14 children, and who spoke of their decision to have such large families as a form of spiritual warfare. That much is reflected in their name, taken from Psalm 127: "Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies in the gate." Quiverfull mothers think of their children as no mere movement, but as an army they're building for God.
Quiverfull parents try to have upwards of six children. They homeschool their families, attend fundamentalist churches, and follow biblical guidelines of male headship - "father knows best" - and female submissiveness. They refuse any attempt to regulate pregnancy. Quiverfull probably began as a self-conscious movement with the publication of Rick and Jan Hess's 1989 book, A Full Quiver: Family Planning and the Lordship of Christ, in which they argue that God, as the "Great Physician" and sole "Birth Controller," is in charge of opening and closing the womb on a case-by-case basis. Women's attempts to control their own bodies - the Lord's temple - are a seizure of divine power.
Its word-of-mouth growth can be traced back to conservative Protestant critiques of contraception, and the growing belief among evangelicals that birth control pills are an "abortifacient" (that hormonal contraception such as the pill can cause the "chemical abortion" of accidentally fertilized eggs). This is one of the strongest ties between Quiverfull conviction and the larger Christian Right, connecting a radically-expanded "pro-life" agenda that has broadened its political interests from abortion, to birth control and sexual abstinence, to international pro-natalist and pro-population movements. (Such an expanded agenda was on full display this fall at the Contraception is Not the Answer conference in Illinois) >snip<
Pride's book - a grassroots hit among the homeschooling movement - denounced birth control as the hallmark of selfish feminists and paved the way for women's careers and abortion. "Family planning is the mother of abortion. A generation had to be indoctrinated in the ideal of planning children around personal convenience before abortion could be popular," Pride argued, calling for Christians to fight abortion by demonstrating that children were "unqualified blessings" by having as many as God gave them.
A number of families in the past twenty years have followed Pride's and the Hess's charge. Though there are no exact figures for the size of the movement, the number of families that identify as Quiverfull is likely in the low tens of thousands. In its most benign self-descriptions, Quiverfull is about faith, pure and simple: faith that God won't give a woman more children than she can handle, and faith that by opening themselves up receive multiple "blessings" - in the form of children - they will bring God's favor upon them in other areas of life as well. God "deals with the hearts" about birth control, and if they submit, they are cared for.
But a more disturbing rationale for Quiverfull can also be found in its founding texts. After arguing Scripture, the Hesses point to a number of more worldly effects that a Christian embrace of Quiverfull could bring. "When at the height of the Reagan Revolution," they write, "the conservative faction in Washington was enforced [sic] with squads of new conservative congressmen, legislators often found themselves handcuffed by lack of like-minded staff. There simply weren't enough conservatives trained to serve in Washington in the lower and middle capacities." But if just eight million American Christians began supplying more "arrows for the war" by having six children or more, they propose that the Christian Right ranks could rise to 550 million within a century.
The language of spiritual warfare, demographic victory in the culture war through population shifts drastic enough to influence the law, and the inversion of old patriarchal traditions to seem like rebellion against modern society, may seem dramatic, but these are key parts of the religious and pro-family agenda to fight birth control that has drawn the attention of policy makers on the right and in the middle, and deserves the attention of anyone concerned with reproductive freedom."
>snip<
link
For a fuller portrait of the movement and its members, read this article:
'Arrows for the War'.
I wasn't initially sure which board to post this on; it's political; it's partisan; it has to do with education, it has to do with contraception, it has to do with health.
Momentarily, I entertained the idea of posting it in the "conspiracy theories" section. But I couldn't figure out who was being paranoid: them, or me. :mrgreen:
I'd love to hear your thoughts on this movement.
First, I'd like to discuss whether or not it's even feasible to raise one's children to be "soldiers" for any particular cause or political movement, no matter how valid, or even to raise them to share one's political ideals, or even to be interested in politics and social issues at all.
I've never personally had much luck with it (although admittedly I've never taken it to this extreme; my attempts to persuade my kids to share my social ideals and political views and my way of thinking have never included isolating them from the rest of the world and from anyone else who could possibly influence them or introduce them to other viewpoints).
And if it is even remotely possible to indoctrinate children from birth into an extremist political view, in fact to breed them for the specific purpose of creating a radical new socio-political faction, an "army of God", is it ethical to do so?
Anyway, your thoughts on this would be most welcome.