by Vyckie Garrison

Mega-family parents, Jim Bob & Michelle Duggar of TLC’s “19 & Counting” fame announced on TODAY they are expecting baby #20 – due in April 2012.

Despite a difficult pregnancy and premature delivery of now-23-month-old, Josie, Michelle told TLC viewers she is willing to “lay down her life” for another baby.

“We do not take for granted the wonderful blessings of life that God has bestowed upon us!” writes Michelle on The Duggar Family website. “Many years ago, Jim Bob & I gave this area of our lives to God, allowing Him to grant life as He saw fit.”

The flip side of the Quiverfull ideal of “trusting the Lord with our family planning” which Jim Bob & Michelle embrace and promote through their TV Reality show, website, and numerous books, is that Michelle also accepts the possibility of her own or her baby’s deaths, should such tragedy occur, as God’s will.

In her book, The Way Home, Beyond Feminism and Back To Reality, Quiverfull proponent, Mary Pride explains that mothers who risk their lives for the sake of building the Kingdom of God are to be honored the same as missionaries:

“Routinely we send missionaries off to work in unsavory climates, knowing full well that they will probably come down with amoebic dysentery, be overheated (or frozen), receive inadequate medical care in second-rate hospitals, and on the average live ten years less than other people. But we don’t tell people not to be missionaries. Instead, we commend missionaries for their courage. 

“Missionaries go to foreign countries to beget new Christians; mothers get pregnant to be beget new Christians. Even if maternal missionary work has some hazards (and what missionary work doesn’t?), the noble way is to face them with courage. Likewise, we really ought to honor women with medical problems … diabetes, asthma, quadriplegia, arthritis, heart problems … who are willing to serve God with their bodies as mothers.  These are the unsung heroines of the modern church.  (p. 57 emphasis in original)”

To further understand Michelle’s willingness to risk her life, consider that Quiverfull leaders routinely downplay the health risks when questioned regarding the prudence of prolific motherhood.  Again, Mary Pride, citing page after page of examples of supposedly bogus health risks and throwing in as an added bonus, the “medical dangers of not having children,” encourages women to trust the Lord in the face of suffering:

“Devotees of evil will sacrifice all they have — money, health, reputation — to maintain their lifestyle.  If the actual threat of venereal disease or AIDS does not deter the wicked from their pursuits, why should the mostly phantom threat of “medical problems” deter us from ours?  God will stand by His daughters who are willing to serve Him.”

I explain this idealism which led me to repeatedly endure high-risk pregnancies and life-threatening deliveries in greater detail at No Longer Quivering: here and here.

Quiverfull moms are nothing if not consistent in their submission to the will of God – for better or worse.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

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Readers of this blog who read and critique my Duggar-family posts, will be especially interested in Frank’s role in birthing the Quiverfull movement. Way back in the Day, when he was still styled “Franky Schaeffer” (to distinguish him from from his same-named father), Frank was literary agent to a new Christian author named Mary Pride. With the Schaeffer name attached, Pride’s book was a shoe-in. Today we know her, and her (in)famous book, The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality as the Spiritual Mother of the Quiverfull Movement. Frank(y) then, was her midwife.

What makes Frank(y)’s role so intriguing, is the fact that his parents were very much pro-birth control. His mother, who in fact and fiction, loved nothing (except maybe the Lord) more than discussing sex, revealed to her very young son that not only was his father a “passionate” lover, but his needs were such that they had marital relations every day–even when Mom was “off the roof” and Biblically unclean due to menstruation. She also showed him her diaphram and explained its purpose fully to her surprised son.

Known as well for her talks on the importance of keeping a man’s needs fulfilled as she was for her Hidden Art of Homemaking
[life style and book of same name--which predate Martha Stewart and still have a cult-like following today], Edith famously said that even on the Mission Field a wife needs a see-thru black nightie to entertain her husband. After “The Way Home,” Edith questioned her son with “Where did you find this unfortunate woman?” Like much of Edith’s prose, rhetoric and general life questions, this is a question still relevant today.

Quiverfull also promotes stay-at-home-wives who “support” their husbands, by staying quiet, gazing adoringly, popping out child-after-child regardless of consequences to Mother’s health, regardless of the Father’s ability to provide a decent standard of living, regardless of whether the needs of all those children as individuals are being met. Yet, Edith was very much a career woman and very much a “stand UP to your man” type wife. A missionary serving alongside her husband, she was also his secretary, agent, fundraiser, financial adviser, PR person—oh yes, and housewife and mother. Edith became a success in her own right, publishing books, giving lectures, etc. She also generally traveled with her husband–due to his “needs”–leaving her children at home. Meanwhile, her youngest child, Franky/Frank pretty much was left to raise himself.

Aside from family read-alouds and the education that the work of L’Abri itself provided, the famous homeschooling, that her daughter Susan Schaeffer Macaualy, would raise to the level of a near-idolic adoration in her classic book, For the Children’s Sake: Foundations of Education for Home and School, was almost non-existent in Edith’s role as Franky’s educator. So neglected was his formal education, that he was finally sent to boarding school in England to catch up. His informal education, though, could have sent him straight to Harvard if the College Board had an admission test that covered Calvinist doctrine, Biblical sex and other essential “life skills.”

Also interesting is that many Christian homeschooling parents, if they even expose their children to the fine arts, are known to cover the genitals on Michelangelo’s “David” in photographs with black Sharpie-marker or post-it notes considering them “defrauding” to their children (I can sympathize with the endless jokes young boys can make about David’s “stuff” though…). Fran and Edith Schaeffer believed in ART and beauty as part of God’s creation. Frank grew up with Fran blasting music of the world’s great operas to drown out his family, L’Abri students and his unsaved Mother all struggling to muddle thru the day in the Chateau in Switzerland

Still another way that Edith Schaeffer is totally at odds with the Quiverfull wives of today is fashion. Far from hiding herself in the ubiquitous “frumpers”*** of today, Edith kept herself in shape, wore the “right” amount of makeup and dressed in ways that showed off her neat figure. She would never have drawn attention to herself in a way that would make her look ridiculous–such as appearing on the beach in a Duggar-style wholesome swimsuit or riding a float in a parade nursing a baby in a huge pink cape! Instead, she choose a modest bathing suit (and other clothing) in tune with the day’s style.

Nor would she draw unwelcome attention to her children by saddling them with a name like “Levicticus” or “Justice Truth” or other politically-charged “wear-the-parents-politics-for-life” name. But unlike many Quiverfull families today, instead of trying to isolate herself from the world, she fearlessly and unashamedly lived the Great Commission. She had the courage to share he faith whenever possible. [Please, can anyone EVER forget the "Gospel Walnut"???] She could pray extemporaneously in any situation, in a volume guaranteed to be heard by the UN-churched anywhere. Now, how many Quiverfull wives today would dare pray when their husband is at the head of the table [well, without being TOLD to by her husband!]? How many would allow STRANGERS, (“WORLDLY” ones at that!) whose beliefs were not in any way close to the “party line,” to live in their home and possibly “corrupt” their children??

For all that many critics accuse Frank of belittling his parents in his books, I think the fact that Edith READ all of his books speaks volumes. She is not offended, or if she is, it has not been offended in such a degree or way as to ask him not to publish his work. Also telling is the very love that shines thru from Frank to his mother in all of his writings. He may not agree with everything, but he does certainly “honor” his mother in his own way. Probably with hindsight, like most parents, Edith can see how outrageous some of life was in those hectic L’Abri days.

Hopefully, hindsight will help some of the extremely-isolating Quiverfull and Christian Patriarchy parents of today to see that moderation is a good thing. I am only sad that Edith, approaching 100, cannot write her own book–a follow up to her The Tapestry: The Life and Times of Francis and Edith Schaeffer
that would set the Quiverfull movement on its ear in her gracious, very positive way!

***[Note: "Frumper" is a made-up name for the long, shapeless jumpers so beloved of extreme-Quiverfull moms.]

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum! Comments are also open below.

This book review originally appeared on Hopewell’s blog: Hopewell Takes On Life!

More from Hopewell:

A FULL QUIVER OF INFORMATION [my information only site]
Personal Blog

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by Africaturtle

Dear Debi,

It’s been a few years now since I read your book Created to be His Help Meet for the first time.

I am married to a Mr. Command Man, as per your book’s description. My mom gave me your book for Christmas the first year I was married (six years ago now). She told me it was the best book she had read on the subject, and after reading it I was convinced it was too. (I had already read many other Christian books and periodicals on godly womanhood, including those of Mary Pride, Nancy Campbell, and a few from Vision Forum.) As a new wife and soon-to-be mother (I was pregnant within the first month after our wedding) I soaked up all of your stories and advice, expecting wholeheartedly to put these lessons into action and experience the heavenly marriage I was destined for!

May I also note that I had been very careful in choosing a godly, Christian man. Someone who welcomed the idea of children as a “blessing”, that served God wholeheartedly (we were involved in campus ministry together) and who respected my ideas and encouraged me to be a “keeper at home”, as described in Titus 2. I was sure we were destined for something great and unique as a family, and that our lives would be a testimony of faith and God’s greatness in a place that was in dire need of the light of the Gospel (we were living in Europe, not the US).

I quite naturally shared this vision with my husband and shared with him the insights I was reading and discovering through your book. I even wondered if we could get this book translated so I could share its message more easily with those around me, as the church people I knew seemed to be the first to “need” its message. I felt sorry for all the men who had grumpy, pestering wives who never appreciated them. Wives who had obviously bought into the lies of feminism and insisted on pursuing ambitions of their own through career and temporal pursuits.

I am writing to you now because I have had some problems in experiencing the “fruit” promised in your teachings. For an entire year I really tried to apply joyful, unconditional submission. I spent a second year wondering “what am I doing wrong?” and so prayed a lot and read and re-read many parts of your book. By year three I was starting to wear down in my resolve, starting to question the workings of my relationship and by year four I began to turn to other sources for insight. I am now at the beginning of year six and after coming to a point of near break-down (as in “I’m going to go crazy, literally, if something doesn’t change”) I can tell you that there are some problems with some of the assumptions in your book.

I think that given you have a “mature” husband that treats you “well”, you might have a hard time understanding where I am coming from. I too, could never have imagined what this would be like without having lived it myself. I grew up in a stable home with loving parents, who, while maybe didn’t have as “heavenly” of a marriage as you claim to have, did treat each other with love and respect.

My husband does not (love/respect me). Of course he loves me. He wouldn’t have married me otherwise. But let me talk, for a minute, about a subject that you cover at length in your book: anger. You describe two types of anger. Typical “male” anger, where it is predictable and can be avoided if you (as the wife) learn his “triggers” and avoid setting him off. The second kind is “seething anger”. This is the kind of anger that makes him bitter and suspicious of others, and is often fueled by negative comments the wife makes about others.

Let me describe a third type of anger for you, that your book left out: Abusive anger.

This kind of anger has no “reason” other than maintaining an illusion of control. This kind of anger erupts for any and every reason at any time of day or night. This kind of anger is most often hidden from anyone else but the one who is closest and dearest to the abuser. This kind of anger is like a dark cloud that blows in unannounced and does not leave until it has rained down all of its evil torment and has nothing left to “dump” on you. This kind of anger is maddening, because no matter how hard you try you can NEVER find the “trigger” and avoid it. It always “hits” you when you least expect it. Just when you start to trust again, just when you’ve dried your tears, just when you’ve gained enough strength to raise your head up out of your hole and look around “BOOM” it strikes again. This kind of anger cannot be reasoned with. There is no answer that is ever “good enough”. You are required to answer questions to which there is no “right answer” and then commanded to shut up because your answers are making the questioner mad. In this reality EVERYTHING is your fault. In fact you only possess faults. You have never done anything good or useful really. Of course that is, until the cloud lifts. Until the anger has run its course. Then you are FREE! 

Free to smile. Free to laugh. Free to forgive. Free to carry-on as if nothing ever happened. In fact you MUST smile. You MUST forgive. You MUST carry-on. Because you don’t have a choice. If you don’t he “might” just get mad at you again. Mad that you cry too much, mad that you didn’t forgive quickly enough. Mad that you don’t trust him the way you ought to. Now according to your book I’m not sure that really crosses any “bright red line” (as your husband describes it, in discussing spheres of authority).

But I can assure you it crosses many lines. It DESTROYS your soul. It destroys your confidence. It steals your peace of mind. It physically drains your energy and makes you sick. (I have a cold nearly every-other month despite eating healthy organic food.) It takes away any hope of a happy home, the one place on earth that is to be your HAVEN!! It destroys your children as well. They develop nervous habits, nightmares, and anger issues themselves (and mine are still all under the age of 5!) Now granted, he has never actually “hit” me…so I guess I can’t really “prove” he has done anything “too” bad. At least not bad enough to call the police. I mean I definitely didn’t want to involve anyone else in our problems because your book made me keenly aware of how fragile men’s egos truly are, and how important it is to ONLY speak good of them to others. So actually your book has encouraged me to become a pretty good liar. Yes everyone always asks “How are you? How are things going?” and of course I can’t say “terrible” because that would require an explanation, which would reveal “bad things about my husband”, a man everyone thinks so highly of. And so I am stuck. Stuck in silence, in heartache, with unanswered prayers.

I don’t really hold you responsible as we are all responsible for what we do with the information we are given (and plus your book only re-iterated what the Bible says, so my problem is probably more directly with the Bible) I wish you could see the dilemma your teachings create for women in my situation (and there are many, as I have come to learn!) You see the more I shared with my husband on your teachings of a wife’s duty and the workings of a Christian family, the more my husband came to expect all of that from me. The more he rubbed it in my face when I fell short of his expectations (which are “perfection”, by the way) and the more he felt “entitled” to be waited on hand and foot. It didn’t matter that I had just given birth and that he had 2 wks vacation from work…since the house was my “domain” he was not touching it! He would gripe and complain about what I was not doing and then go play basketball with friends or read a book and then chew me out for being “lazy” and yell at me at night for “keeping him up” while I was up trying to nurse the baby. You see with men like this there is no “winning”. When you “submit” to a man like this you only “feed” the monster inside. It is like giving-in to a 2-year-old who is throwing a temper tantrum. He uses anger to intimidate everyone into doing things in a way that “suits” him (and sometimes even HE doesn’t know what that means!) and the more you cooperate the more he uses it. You have understood this principle quite well in your child-rearing books so I’m kind of wondering why you don’t see that it works the same way with adults too.

Now there is also the part of your book where you cover sex. For this part, my husband has not been abusive, as in forceful. And for the fact that I prefer not to talk about my sex life with strangers I will be as vague as possible. But I would just like to say that you should not assume that EVERY man functions like your man. It seems he has a HUGE appetite for sex and likes you to dress up for him, etc. Good for you! But this is not true for everyone and if you send all girls into marriage assuming the ONLY thing their husband cares about is “getting some” you might be setting them up for disappointment. If the only motivation a wife has in “putting out” is to keep her husband from straying?? Well, I don’t think that guarantees anything, and I think it is a pretty lousy assessment of what men, (honorable, thinking men) are capable of. I think actually, in many ways your book degrades men. You seem to think that stroking their ego and giving good sex is all that’s required for a happy man. I don’t think all men are this shallow. And if a woman “saves” her marriage in this way, I don’t see how she ever can truly respect the man she is married to. I think you even use the word “manipulate” once in describing the wife’s way of handling a situation. Manipulation doesn’t seem very Christian to me, come to think of it.

I know you are very busy so I do not want you to “lose” too much time on this letter, I know it is getting long. But I want you to be aware that your teachings can indeed create some dangerous situations for those of us out there that are gullible enough to try applying them to our own situations.

What has helped me the most is reading through some good (non-Christian) books on verbal abuse. One my husband is currently working through (yes, because he does recognize the destructiveness of his behavior, though he hasn’t been able to break his own destructive cycle) is “Why Does He Do That? Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men” by Lundy Bancroft. Telling him that he doesn’t actually have the right to control me and that he needs to view me as an “equal” is one of the most-needed sermons he could have heard. (Unfortunately the church doesn’t really agree with that message, nor does your book.) But for the first time (in six years) I have the spark of hope that our marriage could indeed be something worth “saving”. Had I continued down the path your book laid out for me, I would most certainly be emotionally dead, slaving away from morning till night for an ever-increasingly ungrateful, dissatisfied husband.

As I write this letter I have still not found “peace” in my marriage but I am convinced that if it is possible it is far away from the path I once was following.

Thank you for taking the time to read this. I hope it will help someone, and that maybe you and your husband will choose to take a much more official and militant stance against (all forms of) abuse, especially in “Christian” homes. Your book pretty much puts the happiness of the whole marriage on the shoulders of the woman, and this I do not think is a healthy burden (happily married or not) for any woman to bear.

Sincerely,

J.

Note from NLQ: The Lundy Bancroft book referenced in this article is a fantastic resource for women in abusive relationships seeking to understand their partner’s behavior however NLQ does not recommend it as a resource for the men in such relationships.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.

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Warning: This story series contains descriptions of physical abuse.

by CherylAnnHannah

My journey into and out of the Quiver Full movement is so intertwined with the abuse that my children and I experienced in my marriage that it is hard for me to tell the tale of being QF without mentioning the abuse as well.

I had grown up in a Christian home, but at the age of 18 fell in love with the man who would become my husband. As is typical of a lot of teens allowed to spend too much time alone, we had sex and I ended up pregnant before my graduation from high school. My boyfriend completely freaked out and insisted on an abortion. I couldn’t go to my parents because my mother had told me when I was 16 that if I ever ended up pregnant, I knew where the door was. When I found myself pregnant, and with no job, no support from my boyfriend, and afraid to face my parents, I chose to abort my first child at 12 weeks gestation in July of 1979.

I felt somewhat numbed by the whole experience. My boyfriend showed a complete disregard towards any angst I might have felt as a result of the abortion and instead he chose to assert his authority over me and humiliated me sexually after the abortion in ways I don’t like to contemplate to this day. In fact, I felt so debauched by the whole experience that I thought no decent man would want to have anything to do with me after that. Accordingly, I went ahead and married him, against my parents’ counsel and wishes.

Three weeks into the marriage, my new husband and I got into a disagreement and he ended the argument by choking me. We had left our hometown the day after we married on a round-the-world tour by bicycle and we were in the New England states at the time. I was shocked because I had never experienced such actions in my home. The same thing happened a month and a half later when we got into another argument. I was a fast learner and I realized that if I didn’t argue with my husband, I wouldn’t get choked.

We got as far as Mexico and then came north up the west coast of the US til we were back in Canada. We stopped in Vancouver and decided to work and save money for a year or so in order to continue our bike trip in Australia. However, I got pregnant with my “atonement” baby in November of 1981 and our eldest child, a girl, was born. Thirteen months later another baby girl followed. At the time we were living on the west coast of Canada, far from my parents, family, and friends, and living in motel suites as my husband’s job had us travelling all over the place. When our eldest daughter turned 18 months old, my husband was settled in the Lower Mainland of BC and we bought a repossessed condo that was in need of a lot of clean up and repair.

It was during this time I hit rock bottom as far as my ability to cope with life. In order to go through with the abortion, I had to turn my back on my upbringing in a vain attempt to avoid the guilt it brought. But like a beach ball I was trying to hold under water, it kept popping up out of the water at unexpected times. I remember going to a local Christian bookstore and the owner saw my bedraggled and hopeless despair and invited me to a woman’s Bible study at a local Baptist church. I began to attend there and began to find some community and some solace.

My husband, despite a profession of faith in Christ, never really showed any fruit of salvation. My attempts to go out in the evening for my Bible study were impeded by him. He refused to do anything with our children that would put him out in any way so I would have to have the children fed, bathed and in bed in order to be allowed to go anywhere. Additionally, he got involved with Herbert W. Armstrong’s World Wide Church of God and became a real legalist with regard to Christmas, Easter, observing OT holy days and not eating unclean meats. I remember at one point he was following me around the house with a book quoting stuff to me out of it til I finally couldn’t take it any more and I grabbed the book and pitched it out of the nearest window. His involvement with the WWCG meant that I was attending a “synagogue of Satan” and so he had his excuse ready made as to why he could never attend church with me.

Soon after I had begun my attendance at the Baptist church, I got involved in a class on the Doctrines of Grace and was introduced to Calvinism. I had been raised in the Plymouth Brethren Assemblies and Calvinism completely turned the way I read the Bible on its head. Quite a few things that hadn’t made sense began to make a great deal of sense. I also got involved in something called Christian Reconstruction and I became a regular reader of a magazine called, “The Chalcedon Report”.

I’ve been a bookaholic since I can remember. I had been married six years, was 25 years old, and already I was on my sixth pregnancy, but third child when Mary Pride’s book, The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality, fell into my hands. With my newfound Calvinism, much of what she said about the sovereignty of God in governing our families and the womb made sense. For reasons I will never understand, my husband decided no birth control was okay and he also decided that homeschooling was the way to go with our children. In retrospect, the only time I really slowed down in terms of my activities outside of the home was when I was pregnant or nursing a baby. Homeschooling also kept me home and occupied for most of the day, so I guess it was part of the strategy to isolate and otherwise tie up a woman that abusive men use.

We were living a fairly comfortable life and I was beginning to develop something of a network through my local church when my husband decided it was time to move our family. I was five months pregnant with our fourth child at the time he announced this, and forgetting past lessons, I took exception to having to move away from all my friends and having to start all over in building a support network. He punched me out in front of my daughters who were three and four at the time. He threw me on the bed and sat on my pregnant belly and gave it to me. I had a severely split and swollen lip, a black eye, and bruises on my arms from that encounter. The next day a floral arrangement arrived on our doorstep as his way of saying sorry. My first desire was to pitch it as far and as hard as I could. But I didn’t, fearing that my lack of forgiveness would only bring more wrath and recriminations down on my head.

We finally ended up moving 500 miles north to the central interior of British Columbia a month after our fifth child was born. To my joy, my husband decided to attend church with us. I thought that this, perhaps, would be the beginnings of something good and that the promise of I Peter 3:1-3 was finally coming true. Instead it was a prelude to moving the entire family out of church altogether and into a home church with us as the only family attending it.

My husband had, in this time, gotten involved with a movement called Christian Identity. It was something of a match with the World Wide Church of God which taught a form of British Israelism. However, Christian Identity took it a step further and said that the white, Anglo-Saxon, Scandinavian, Germanic peoples were actually the 10 “lost” tribes of Israel. This meant that Jews were really not the people of God but rather imposters who were behind every evil conspiracy against the true people of God and who were the off-scourings of the earth.

I, on the other hand, had become drawn more and more into Christian Reconstruction, and from there into the Reformed Faith. I made contact with some local believers who were on the same journey but who were in different churches. Eventually, through the instrumentality of Still Waters Revival Books out of Edmonton we formed a local body who wanted to be part of a reformed covenanted church.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum!

View All Posts by CherylAnnHannah

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In late 2009, I learned that a journalist had written a book about the Quiverfull movement.[1]  I ordered the book and also discovered an online forum for survivors and refugees who’d fled from it (No Longer Quivering).  As far back as 1989, I’d known several families who fit the description but could never really understand their rationale.  I hoped the NLQ forum and the book might shed some light on their beliefs. I was not disappointed.

In mid-February 2010, a thread title on the forum caught my eye: How did you get yourself into this mess?  The author, a female refugee from the movement, was wondering how she and so many others could have fallen for it in the first place.  After reading it, I again realized how closely the QF/P movement intersects with mainstream evangelicalism and fundamentalism; and how easily I too could have been recruited, given the wrong circumstances.

How, one may ask, do people get into such a seemingly bizarre religious movement?  And how had I (in the past) been in danger of being sucked in myself?

The answer boils down to one simple word: “gradually.”

The substance of my gradual experience, which I’ll summarize here, is the shared story of countless rank & file believers who come under the broad labels “Pentecostal,” “charismatic,” “evangelical,” and “fundamentalist.”

In the beginning, as a teen in the mid 1970s, my cousin, followed by my mother, became born-again Christians.  It was really positive in those days: God loves you and has a wonderful plan, and so forth. It was all about having a new life, full of purpose and meaning. A life in which the very Creator of the Universe actually cared about little people like us!

In her adolescent southern California manner, my fourteen-year-old cousin would say, “I used to get high on weed, but now I get high on Jesus!” She gave me a copy of The Way, a hippie-friendly version of The Living Bible, which I actually enjoyed. (At age 15, while terrified and deranged from a drug-trip gone bad, I picked it up and read about 20 pages, after which I felt calm enough to endure the next few hours.)

And the early Jesus-music to which they exposed me (Chuck Girard and others), though not nearly on par with The Grateful Dead or Emerson, Lake & Palmer, still spoke to me in a profound manner.

By the time I finally became a Christian at 17, this was my milieu. Sure, I was exposed to some disturbing signs of things to come at my Christian high school, but neither I nor my new friends shared the views of the newly-founded Moral Majority, which we thought to be vestiges of an old religiosity on the verge of extinction.

It was all really positive in those early, idealistic years. Loving Jesus, hoping to save the world, helping homeless people, having an abundance of real friends who stood with me through thick and thin: it was all good; really good.  The song that often brought tears to my eyes in the early days was written by Keith Green immediately upon his conversion (before he’d entered into his extremist phase):

Like waking up from the longest dream

How real it seemed

Until your love broke through

But gradually…

A radio program called Focus on the Family that I used to hear doling out advice to crisis-wracked families, was becoming politicized.  Through the show, and then through the warnings of Tim LaHaye and others, I began learning of sinister threats being hatched against us by people called “Secular Humanists.”  LaHaye, in a breathless, frenzied spiel, warned of the threat as follows.  Humanists, he said:

have been “planted” in strategic places in the United Nations, they teach children in public schools “to read the words scientific humanism as soon as they’re old enough to read,” and 275,000 humanists control the American government, education, and media.[2]

As conspiracy-paranoia mounted, politics in church began to subvert the innocent, Jesus-loving expressions of faith I’d known in the beginning. Our churches started distributing candidates’ score cards in the foyers, telling us to vote accordingly.

And then there was a radio preacher, William Steuart McBirnie, whose Voice of Americanism program daily rehashed senator McCarthy’s and Carl McIntire’s Red Scare fundamentalism, updating it for the mid-1980s.  We had much to fear and many to loathe.

Music-wise, instead of hearing to how great it was to know Jesus, I discovered Steve Taylor, who was parroting the Christian Right in his angry, caustic songs.  Listening to and agreeing with Taylor could make my blood boil, and I heard him frequently; so much so that sixteen years later I can quote lines verbatim from memory—like this one from the 1984 song “Meat the Press”:

When the godless chair the judgment seat

We can thank the godless media elite

They can silence those who fall from their grace

With a note that says, “We haven’t the space.”

After the release of Taylor’s first album in 1983, Francis Schaeffer lavished gushing praise upon him.[3] (Francis, especially through his books How Should We Then Live?, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? and A Christian Manifesto, was the Godfather of the New Christian Right.)  On the jacket of a later album, Steve Taylor credited Schaeffer’s firebrand son Franky as his inspiration.

I met Francis Schaeffer and his son Franky in the spring of 1984, when they spoke at my college (Francis sat in a chair for the few minutes he spoke, being in the final stages of cancer. Two weeks later he died). It was the angry, energetic Franky who took center stage, bashing the “secular media establishment,” the vast Secular Humanist conspiracy, and even the bastion of evangelicalism, Wheaton College, which, he claimed, was compromising in some manner. “If I ever disappear,” he roared in a histrionic fit, “you can find my body buried in the swamps behind Wheaton!”  Franky’s rage was contagious, further fueling my anger.

Most cults have a well-planned program for the indoctrination of new recruits, in which they deceitfully hide their more bizarre teachings from seekers (an exoteric/esoteric truth divide). The new convert is only taught the vision piecemeal; gradually gaining deeper (and weirder) knowledge over a period of months or years.

But with us, although it may have appeared that way, it wasn’t exactly so. I later realized I was living in the midst of a drastic change in popular American Christianity.  The movement still really was (for the most part) benign when I joined. The resentful loathing was added gradually, not as a planned indoctrination program, but because the church genuinely was in the midst of radical transition during 1980s and ‘90s.

And thus by 1985, my original faith, though still there, was mixed with anger, resentment and fear—a sense of being under siege.

After another few years, the Rev. Don Wildmon, who Max Blumenthal would later describe as “churlish,”[4] started telling us to boycott Mennon Speed Stick deodorant because it was advertised on a TV show which he, and therefore God, didn’t approve of.

Then, in 1990, James Dobson openly began using the language of civil war: “Nothing short of a great Civil War of Values rages today throughout North America. Two sides with vastly differing and incompatible world views are locked in a bitter conflict that permeates every level of society.”[5]  Whether the timing of Dobson’s drum beating was cunning or just plain lucky, I don’t know. But it certainly was fortuitous. In September of that same year, PBS aired its nine-episode Civil War series, the most popular program in the network’s history. As Entertainment Weekly’s Albert Kim recalls, “The Civil War mesmerized 38.9 million viewers, upsetting the networks’ fall premieres.”[6]  Or as Dave McCoy, in the official Amazon.com review puts it:

While [Ken] Burns is a historian, a researcher, and a documentarian, he’s above all a gifted storyteller, and it’s his narrative powers that give this chronicle its beauty, overwhelming emotion, and devastating horror…Burns allows us not only to relearn and finally understand our history, but also to feel and experience it.[7]

Due to the gripping popularity of the series, it mattered not whether one was an avid history buff or history-illiterate.  Freshly burned in the psyches of those who read and heard Dobson’s 1990 Civil War cry were graphic images of America when it was in the throes of its most self-destructive conflict.

Civil War. What a great idea! Brother against brother. A woman against her coworker. Neighbor against neighbor. Divide and conquer. A nation’s unity destroyed. And when all was said and done, Dobson emerged from the fray as the new Republican Kingmaker.

In such a milieu, those negative traits of resentment and fear had become almost central, my original faith being sickly, barely alive and far beneath the surface.  We were now in the midst of full-blown culture-war.  And all that the churches and Christian mailing list materials were trumpeting was also confirmed by an outside source: The Rush Limbaugh show.

By 1992 I’d made the full transition from a spirituality of awe, joy and wonder to one of hatred, fear and all-around loathing.  We Christians were under siege.  “They” were taking away our freedoms. “They” had planted Secular Humanist agents in every ‘government school,’ brainwashing the next generation. Not only that, The New Age Movement (painted as a well-organized conspiracy rather than the loosely knit spiritual fad that it was) was out to forge a One World Government and wipe the final vestiges of Christianity from the face of the earth.

Around that time, I heard a song by the excellent alternative Christian rock band, The Swirling Eddies. One of the lines said, “…and it scares me just how angry I have grown.” This was a bit unsettling, but I felt my anger was justified. After all, hadn’t Franky Schaeffer written a book called A Time for Anger?

As the content of our faith changed, so did our conceptualization of Jesus.  He was no longer a God of love, but a muscle-bound tyrant.  Speaking of the Christian Right in 2009, journalist Max Blumenthal’s following description also summarizes the view of Jesus that was gaining ascendancy among us in the 1990s:

The movement’s Jesus is the opposite of the prince of peace.  He is a stern, overtly masculine patriarch charging into the fray with his sword raised against secular foes; he is “the head of a dreadful company, mounted on a white horse, with a double-edged sword, his robe dipped in blood,” according to movement propagandist Steve Arterburn.  [Mega-church pastor] Mark Driscoll…stirs the souls of twenty-something evangelical men with visions of “Ultimate Fighting Jesus…”

A portrait of virility and violence, the movement’s omnipotent macho Jesus represents the mirror inversion of the weak men who necessitated his creation.  As [Erich] Fromm explained, “the lust for power is not rooted in strength, but in weakness [italics in original].  It is the expression of the individual self to stand alone and live.  It is the desperate attempt to gain secondary strength where genuine strength is lacking.” [8]

I knew three Quiverfull families back in those days, though I didn’t yet know the term.  Two of them had become discredited in my sight, one badly so. The other had moved far across the country to the Bible Belt, and thus their influence on me was minimal.

But: supposing a well-spoken, polished QF/P promoter, who in outward appearance had an exemplary life and family, had befriended me then. And supposing this theoretical person had possessed a charismatic personality. Had this happened, I very well could have bought into the QF/P vision.

The angry and ever-intensifying Christian Right machine had changed our churches into pre-stocked ponds in which QF/CP and other extremists fished.  I was one of those pre-stocked fish. I just happened (by no virtue of my own at the time) to always be on the other side of the pond when people like Nancy Campbell, R.C. Sproul Jr., Doug Phillips, et al., went fishing.

That’s why I find it no surprise that so many of the former QF/CP people (like Vyckie Garrison, for example) are so smart and articulate. People don’t join the movement because they’re idiots. On the contrary, they join because they’re thoughtful, intelligent human beings who really care about their country; who are concerned about the kind of world in which their children and grandchildren will live.  But these same good qualities became a curse when cunning fascist leaders subtly began to channel them for their ends.

And thus over the gradual course of time—sometimes even a decade—we (both “regular” believers and QF/P Christians) became foot soldiers in a zombie-army, doing the political bidding of our Christian Right masters.

My desertion from the zombie-army largely came about through some unexpected developments. In 2002, my family and I moved to Colorado Springs where I worked for an evangelical ministry until we left the area in late December, 2007.

As I headed toward Colorado in a U-Haul van, my knowledge of that city was minimal.  I knew it was America’s new evangelical Mecca, populated with scores of Christian organizations; and I loved the beautiful Front Range Mountains I’d seen on my visit a month before.  But my main source of information was a book I’d read seven years prior, Ted Haggard’s, Primary Purpose: Making It Hard for People to Go to Hell from Your City.[9]  In it, I’d read the amazing story of how Haggard and his initially small band of followers had transformed the supposedly pagan, anti-Christian city into God’s own country.  Through spiritual mapping (identifying the ruling demons in a given area) and systematic warfare-prayer walks through each neighborhood (in which those demons were expelled from the region, presumably to resettle in Washington state, California, New York and Massachusetts), Colorado Springs was now the godliest place in America: truly a city that was “hard to go to Hell from.”

Or so I thought…

Although the organization that employed me was benign and apolitical, through my involvement with it I was exposed to the other big ministries in the area.  Year after year I witnessed countless episodes of hypocrisy and self-congratulatory backslapping amongst Christian Right leaders.  I soon felt uneasy amongst people I’d once greatly admired.

The church we attended turned out to be a de facto outpost of the Republican Party, and according to the pastor’s bizarre interpretation of an Isaiah passage, God had foreordained Republican Jesus to defeat Babylonian Saddam Hussein. By 2005, the church was showing a smiling picture of Sam Brownback each Sunday on the large overhead screen. The pastor would then instruct us to stretch forth our hands and pray fervently for him.

Brownback, dubbed “God’s Senator” by Jeff Sharlet, was a near-perfect embodiment of America’s new civil religion. He was a syncretic marvel who could glide effortlessly between his (Fundamentalist) Topeka Bible Church, Roman Catholicism, and a smattering of Orthodox Judaism.  One cold winter Sunday, the pastor excitedly told us of the senator’s latest mystical experience: Brownback, the pastor claimed, had just been to Valley Forge with a group of prayer leaders.  There, he knelt at the exact spot where George Washington had once famously prayed.  While on his knees in the snow, Brownback had received “the spiritual mantle of George Washington,” an anointing which would send him to the Whitehouse in 2008—but only if God’s people prayed long and hard enough.

Growing weary of weekly political rallies, we soon dropped out of the church.

As the Iraq War went sour and the federal deficit went into the trillions under the “godly” Bush, I became increasingly disillusioned. Then came wave upon wave of varied Republican scandals; so many that they soon became an endless blur in my mind, and would have remained so to this day had Max Blumenthal not compiled them all under one cover in Republican Gomorrah. I realized that we’d been duped by the Christian Right: the politicians they promoted were not godly at all. They’d exploited a few causes that people felt passionately about, using them to con millions of voters.  It had nothing to do with God’s will, only the will to power.

In early 2006, I heard our daughter, a student at Cheyenne Mountain High School, make reference to “Meth City” in a conversation. When I asked what it meant, she said Colorado Springs has such a bad Meth (methamphetamine) abuse problem that her fellow students had aptly renamed their city.  (The things people learn from their kids!) At an elevation of over 6,000 feet, I was living in a Meth City on a Hill.  Speaking of which…

Ted Haggard’s famous New Life Church was a few miles up the freeway from my office; we’d visited on several occasions over the years.  On November 3, 2006, seized with morbid curiosity, I drove to New Life the day after Haggard had been exposed for his affair with male prostitute & bodybuilder Mike Jones, and for using Meth.  The parking lot was jammed with major media vans broadcasting their stories and interviews. Entering New Life Church’s “World Prayer Center” on the campus’s east side, I noticed that the homoerotic paintings (macho, muscular, semi-clad men; one a blacksmith, another in chains, and an African-American angel), which I’d seen just a few months prior, were gone. It looked like a hasty job. No new paintings were in their places yet, and the picture hangers were still lodged in the now-bare walls, which had scratch marks from the rubbing of the frames over the years.

But it was impossible to remove the heavy sculptures with the same haste. As I went from the World Prayer Center over to the vast foyer of the church, the huge sculpture of an angel named “Exalter” was still prominently on display. It had the appearance of a steroid-sodden bodybuilder. Its massive arms were raised in adoration of the universe’s ultimate Alpha Male: the super-macho Christ of the Religious Right. Haggard’s consort, Mike Jones, had a physique quite similar to this sculpted angel. Was it merely a coincidence?  Obviously, the people who’d scrambled to remove the paintings in the World Prayer Center either that morning or the night before knew it was not.

A few weeks before we finally left Colorado, a local news station did a major exposé on human trafficking in Colorado Springs. It turned out that kidnapped Asian women were stocking the city’s many massage parlors.  An expert on the show informed viewers that if they saw massage parlors with barred doors and windows, the women inside were probably being held captive.

Droves of sex-prisoners languishing in God’s own Paradise? How could it be?

During that season I also learned we’d been lied to.  Contrary to the jeremiads of the Christian Right’s propaganda industry, it wasn’t “America’s godless, secular intelligentsia” who had removed the Bible and the knowledge of God from our educational system.  In reality, Christians themselves had caused it nearly 200 years ago.  By the 1820s, America’s public schools were in a dilemma.  Calvinists wanted the schools to teach only Calvinism, but Arminians (mostly Methodists) wanted them to teach only their doctrines.  Several other sects were making demands of their own.  And all of them agreed that no matter which version of Christianity won out in the classrooms, it should never be Roman Catholicism, which they all abhorred with equal passion.  The endless infighting overwhelmed school authorities, who eventually gave up on the teaching of religion, substituting a vague, generic moral science in its place.[10]

The same thing goes for taking Bible reading out of public schools.  No, it wasn’t a cabal of Secular Humanists in the early 1960s, but Christians themselves who brought it about, through vicious infighting between Protestants (most of whom championed the King James Bible) and Catholics who could only accept the Douay-Rheims translation.  Speaking of the “Bible Wars” in the mid-nineteenth century, Stephen Prothero writes, “The most visible battlefield in these early culture wars was Philadelphia, where Protestant-Catholic riots over whose Bible would be read in public schools left over a dozen people dead and Catholic churches burned to the ground in 1844.”[11]  In addition to outright violence and murder, the endless polemical clashes between these groups caused school administrators to become weary and wary.

As a result, by the 1870s, public schools in many states had not only done away with Christian education, but Bible reading and hymn singing as well.  Contrary to what we’d learned from the Christian Right, the rulings of 1962 and ’63 were merely the final few nails in the coffin—not the beginning of a cultural decline engineered by Secular Humanists.

Speaking of Secular Humanists, were they really a threat, or were they mere boogey-men, the creation of our Christian Right overlords?  Veteran journalist and author Chris Hedges observes:

The obsession with the evils of secular humanism would be laughable if it were not such an effective scare tactic.  The only organized movement of secular humanists who call themselves by that name is the American Humanist Association (AHA), which has about 3,000 members… Its Humanist magazine has a miniscule circulation.  In terms of influence, as Barbara Parker and Christy Macy wrote, “these humanists rank with militant vegetarians and agrarian anarchists, and were about as well known—until the Religious Right set out to make them famous.”  But it is not important who is fingered as Satan’s agent, as long as the wild conspiracy theories and paranoia are stoked by an array of duplicitous, phantom enemies that lurk behind the scenes of public school boards or the media.[12]

A far cry indeed from LaHaye’s whopping 275,000 Secular Humanists who supposedly control the entirety of American life and polity!

Finally, what ever became of the angry young evangelical, Franky Schaeffer?  He eventually tired of the whole scene and converted to Eastern Orthodoxy.  Then, in 2008, he denounced the Christian Right in his book, Crazy For God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of it Back.  In a candid interview with Max Blumenthal, Frank (he no longer goes by “Franky”) said:

We [Christian Right leaders] thrived on bad news, we thanked God that education was falling apart and teen pregnancy was going up.  We couldn’t peddle solutions unless there was a crisis.  We were in business in the same way an oncologist was—if there was no cancer he’d be out of business.  Quite simply, we were trying to manufacture crisis.” [13]

In the same interview, Frank also said that his father Francis, on his deathbed, deeply regretted his role in founding the Christian Right.  “He was convinced that he had created a monster.” [14]

Living in Colorado Springs and learning what I did there was like Neo swallowing the red pill. I’d seen the truth about The Matrix. I could never go back; life couldn’t continue as it had before.

But unlike some of my QF/P-escapee friends, I didn’t pay a heavy price for leaving.  No loss of friends or family, no painful divorce, and no “shunning” by fake former brethren in an abusive house-church.  The Christian group with which I’m affiliated has never endorsed QF/P. On the contrary, they aggressively promote the ordination of women. Nor are there any political litmus tests which members must pass. They range from very conservative to quite progressive.  A group closely networked with ours has orphanages and schools across Mozambique, and in mid-2007 my family and I spent six weeks there.

While a gentle breeze off the Indian Ocean kicked up tiny swirls of reddish-brown dust in the large Pemba compound, I asked the co-founder, a vibrant expat woman from southern California, her opinion of American politicized Christianity.  With a troubled look she replied slowly and deliberately, “Those of us who work among the poor have no fondness for the Religious Right.”  Being just one week off the plane from Colorado Springs, I couldn’t believe my ears.  But I had heard correctly, and most of the hundred or so other visitors we met during those weeks shared similar views.  A few weeks later I heard music and saw a crowd of Pemba residents gathered under a large tent on the compound.  When I asked the co-founder what the meeting was about, she replied that it was a UN-sponsored AIDS awareness program. “We let them use our place for free,” she said. “They’re trying to save peoples’ lives.”

Waves of relief washed over me as I came to a realization that should have been so obvious all along: “I don’t have to be fascist to be a Christian!”

Leaving, for me, was more an act of remembering; recalling what being a Christian was supposed to be in the first place.  It was like “waking up from the longest dream, how real it seemed…”

Now that I’ve renounced the politicized spirituality of fear and loathing, I am so very relieved. Sure, I still get angry at times, like when I read about Fundamentalist parents Kevin and Elizabeth Schatz, who, following Michael and Debi Pearl’s No Greater Joy child-rearing manuals, allegedly beat their seven-year-old adopted daughter to death with plumbing supply line because she repeatedly mispronounced a word during a home-schooling lesson.  In cases like this, there really is “A Time for Anger.”

But there’s a big difference. Because I deny Christian Right demagogues and their talk-radio allies access to my mind, I’m not simmering with anger and resentment. I really enjoy life again. This is not to say I’ve simply reverted to a facile Sunday School type of faith.  Such a second naivety is neither possible nor desirable.  Theologically, philosophically–and in every way really–I’ve been through many changes.  There was no “restore to default” button for me to click; no way to un-swallow the red pill once it was digested.

What I have been able to do, though, is make a return to a spirituality of awe and wonder, in which I no longer look to self-appointed authority figures and ‘experts’ for guidance. And I’ve utterly lost the Modern, Cartesian illusion of “geometric certitude,” which was so deeply ingrained through years of studying “Christian Worldview” materials. I now revel in the thought that the universe is, as the poet Robert Hunter put it, full of “mysteries dark and vast”; mysteries that my little ant-brain will never begin to fathom.

For these reasons I find a deep kinship with those (both female and male) who have fled the QF/P movement.  After all, they were once in that same pre-stocked Christian Right pond, swimming right alongside me.

And like them, I’ve also escaped that pond and know better now.  We’re no longer taking the bait.

Born and raised in northern California, Jonathan W. Rice is a freelance writer and teacher.

Discuss this post on the NLQ forum!

ENDNOTES

[1]Kathryn, Joyce, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement(Boston: Beacon Press, 2009).

[2] Tim LaHaye, The Battle For the Mind (Old Tappan, NJ: Revell, 1980), pp. 27, 74, 97, 179.  Summarized in George M. Mardsen, Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism ( MI: Wm.B. Eerdmans Publishing Co, 1991), p. 109.

[3] “I Want to Be a Clone” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_Want_to_Be_a_Clone). Accessed 23 February 2010.

[4] Max Blumenthal, Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement that Shattered the Party (New York: Nation Books, 2009), p. 203.

[5] James Dobson, Children at Risk (Dallas: Word Publishing, 1990), pp. 19-20.

[6] Albert Kim, “The Filmmaker Behind PBS’ ‘Civil War’ Steps Up To The Plate With His Epic ‘Baseball’” (http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,303684,00.html), accessed 25 February 2010.

[7] Dave McCoy, “The Civil War” (http://www.amazon.com/Civil-War-Film-Ken-Burns/dp/B000BITUE8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=dvd&qid=1267037976&sr=1-1), accessed 25 February 2010.

[8] Blumenthal, Republican Gomorrah, pp. 9, 10.

[9] Florida: Creation House, 1995.

[10] Stephen Prothero, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know—And Doesn’t (New York: HarperCollins, 2007), pp. 109-120.

[11] Ibid, pp. 121-127.

[12] Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America  (New York: Free Press, 2006), p. 27.

[13] Blumenthal, Republican Gomorrah, p. 30.

[14] Ibid, p. 27.

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Q: Are the Duggars Quiverfull?

By their own admission, Jim-Bob and Michelle were so “grieved” after reading the information pamphlet in a birth control pill package that they turned their fertility over to God. (“About Us” para.1 See also, Dallas News).  That decision has been the reason for their incredible family size of 19 children.

Recently the media has offered several profiles of just who are “Quiverfull” families.

Increasingly, the presence of such large, ideologically driven families is being documented through the medium of the age: reality TV shows and lifestyle cable channel specials, all of which campily depict Quiverfull life as like regular motherhoood, but amplified – more kids, more laundry, more merriment.  

The most famous of these families, Michelle Duggar and her husband, Jim Bob….  Their fame sprouts primarily from their novelty: in 2008 Michelle Duggar was pregnant with her eighteenth child so far.  ”So far” is a ubiquitous phrase in the movement… that cutely restates a Quiverfull family’s continuing trust in God’s control of the womb.  But such theological underpinnings are glossed over to make room for the novel details of large family life. (Joyce, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, pp 138-139).

Does the decision to trust God and not birth control in their family planning alone qualify them as Quiverfull? Yes. Here’s why:

The Duggars wrote:

As conservative Christians, we believe every life is sacred, even the life of the unborn. Due to our lack of knowledge, we destroyed the precious life of our unborn child. We prayed and studied the Bible and found a host of references that told us God considered children a gift, a blessing, and a reward. (FAQ #2 para. 3).

Among that “host of Bible references” is Pslam 127, verses 3—5, the verse on which the Quiverfull movement has been built:

Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD:
and the fruit of the womb is his reward.
As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man;
so are children of the youth.
Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them:
they shall not be ashamed,
but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate. (Pslam 127:3-5 K.J.V.)

The website www.Quiverfull.com says “We exalt Jesus Christ as Lord, and acknowledge His headship in all areas of our lives, including fertility.”(para.1). Mary Pride, a founder of the Quiverfull school of thought has written: “Family planning is the mother of abortion,” (Mary Pride, The Way Home, quoted in Newsweek, para. 4).

The Duggars frequently speak out about “causing” Michelle’s miscarriage by the use of birth control pills. They also adhere to Biblically-based abstinence for a set number of days following the birth of a boy or girl. This also supposedly ties in to the teaching of the Institute for Basic Life Principles, the pseudo-Christian organization founded by Bill Gothard. Gothard teaches couples to only have intercourse when the woman is at her “fertile” time each month.

Even breast feeding, which can be a barrier to conception is not to be prolonged for this reason. Back when the couple had a mere 13 children, Jim-Bob was quoted in the New York Times as saying  he had “14 [children], really, since my wife is pregnant and life begins at conception’.” (New York Times, para. 11).  An admission of such beliefs by a politician in a paper with worldwide circulation can only mean one thing: He believes it.

The Quiverfull idea began in the backlash against feminism. Mary Pride’s book The Way Home and a book  A Full Quiver by Rick and Jan Hess are most frequently cited as giving birth to the Quiverfull lifestyle. Both reject birth control. These books, with the Bible, and often the teachings of Bill Gothard’s Institute of Basic Life Principles and materials from the dominionist Patriarch group, Vision Forum, constitute the “How-To” manuals for prospective Quiverfull couples. (Joyce, Nation, p. 11).

The Duggars have been eager and thorough students.

On their TV show, Michelle has always said “children are like flowers, you can’t have too many flowers.” Jim-Bob frequently has said that he leaves the decision of having another child up to Michelle…..but is that true? In Gothardite families the husband is the undisputed leader of the family. “[W]omen live within stringently enforced doctrines of wifely submission and male headship,” (Kathryn Joyce - Quiverfull Book, para. 1).   If he wants to have sexual relations the wife says “yes.” Since the wife is not able to use birth control or to refuse her husband is the decision to have another child really hers? Would he really forgo his pleasure if she said she couldn’t handle having another child? Maybe. Certainly in other times men have made such a decision.

Today, with birth control the norm, we find it hard to believe. Many a Catholic couple of years gone by have lived out a platonic marriage– at least until the wife’s child bearing years have ended. Given the frequent, enthusiastic kissing and other shows of affection on their TV show though, it is doubtful that he would agree to a platonic life. Given their fervent belief in the rightness of allowing God to control their fertility and that they clearly see “that a woman’s constant sexual availability to her husband is not only her wifely “duty,” but also at the heart of her “ministry” as a believing Christian”  (Byrnes, T A (Summer 2009). Patriarchy: the glue that holds the culture war together.  Conscience, 30, 2. p.52(2).

I doubt that a platonic marriage will ever exist between Mr. and Mrs. Duggar.

““Our bodies are meant to be a living sacrifice,” write the Hesses. Or, as Mary Pride, in another of the movement’s founding texts, The Way Home: Beyond Feminism, Back to Reality, puts it, “My body is not my own.” This rebuttal of the feminist health text Our Bodies, Ourselves is deliberate.” (Joyce, Nation, p. 11).

One reviewer recounts Kathryn Joyce’s relentless documentation of the Quiverfull lifestyle’s  “pretty distasteful practices… including early arranged marriages; constant pregnancy and childbirth; absolute female submission to male authority, whether in the person of a father, a brother, a husband or most cringe-inducing, a self-appointed pastor. Joyce recounts story after story of girls being raised for submission….. ((Byrnes, T A (Summer 2009). Patriarchy: the glue that holds the culture war together.  Conscience, 30, 2. p.52(2).

Joyce herself has defined Quiverfull families thus: “Quiverfull parents try to have upwards of six children. They home-school their families, attend fundamentalist churches and follow biblical guidelines of male headship—’Father knows best’—and female submissiveness.” (Joyce, Nation, p. 11).

Do the math on this alone and the Duggars add up to 100% Quiverfull.

Another aspect of the Duggar’s life that speaks plainly to being Quiverfull is the isolated life-style they have chosen and which they show us on their TV program. (I am told this, and their religious beliefs, were made very clear in the original airing of “14 Kids and Pregnant” which has since been re-edited. I have only seen the re-released version.) The family generally does everything together. Friends are discouraged except from like-minded families and in fully supervised settings. Children are not allowed to enroll in sports leagues or other activities that “disrupt” family life. The individual never comes before the family and reflects the Duggars oft-repeated maxim “Jesus first, others second, yourself last.”

When the Duggars made a rare made-for-TV-appearance at a local elementary school this was well illustrated: all of the Duggar children in attendance were below or above the age appropriate to the school. When one of the eldest girls was asked to recommend a favorite book to the children, she struggled to come up with a Quiverfull-favorite “Before You Meet Prince Charming: A Guide to Radiant Purity” by Sarah Mally—a book wildly inappropriate to the age and setting.

While we have seen the Duggars go to “broomball,” (a sport few have even heard of) they naturally went as a family and while there were a few outsiders on the ice, their interactions were very stiff at best. The “friends” we have been introduced to on “16/17/18/19 Kids and Counting” are all like-minded and most are openly members of Bill Gothard’s ATI/IBPL organizations. While we have been told the Duggars participate in home church (often another tell-tale sign of Quiverfull life) we have not been introduced to all the families. This leads me to believe that all may not be members of ATI, but are simply “like minded.”

The Duggar children have been shown to be clueless of such things as the rules of baseball or why Dolly Parton is famous.  They knew only that “Miss Dolly” promotes reading and likes kids! Right…. There are no minorities visible in their lives, although that is not a-typical of white middle class families in suburban and rural areas. Finally how many “average” teenagers would ask for quotes from “the Founding Fathers” to adorn their bedroom walls or to share a bedroom with siblings ranging in age from birth to 18? Probably none—outside of those educated in revisionist Christian Dominionist history and born into a Quiverfull family?!

On the TV special “16 Kids and Moving In” we met the Holt family. Jim Holt is a long-time friend of Jim-Bob and is also active in Arkansas politics. His similarly large family had been linked to the Duggars publically thru their “fellowship” gatherings and thru broomball at the local rink. Duggar and Holt campaigned for each other as well. In the show the children are shown mingling and talking with the adults—evidence of how well “socialized” they are compared to public school kids who spend all day with age-mates. Mysteriously, the friendship cooled after the Duggars TV shows began.

There have been unconfirmed rumors that the eldest Duggar child, Joshua, was “betrothed” to one of the Holt girls, but that betrothal never went forward into marriage, possibly due to some transgression of rules by Joshua Duggar. (Google “Duggar – sin in the camp.”)

Another family, the Forsyths, own Fort Rock Family Camp and were featured an the episode in which we were invited along on a Father/Daughter camping retreat. While the Forsyths have only two children, they clearly live a family-centered, Patriarchal lifestyle—as was shown on an episode of “World’s Strictest Parents.”  While on this retreat we also saw Jim-Bob being a “father to the fatherless–” reaching out to girls who had lost their father to death. This was to show that the Duggar children DO have friends beyond their siblings.

Then there is the Bates family. Gil and Kelly Bates are long-time friends of the Duggars who have recently become closer as their mega-families (all of similar age) begin reaching Courtship age. They have connected at ATI family events and the Duggars have been shown designing and helping build almost an entire new home for the Bates family. Like the Duggars, the Bates speak openly about changing their thinking to allow God to plan their family. In fact, Kelly Bates said “I always told my family I wasn’t going to have any children….I was very career oriented.” “[Kelly] said she wanted to work with special needs children or in some kind of ministry.”

It is my belief that a few ideas have been “road tested” for the Duggars by the Bates. One such is the idea of grown unmarried daughter continuing her education after her GED. In the last season of “18 Kids and Counting” we were introduced to the tremendous musical talent of Erin Bates and were informed that she had turned down a chance to study music in college. Apparently this did not go down well with viewers. Erin was allowed to take a music theory course at a local ultra-conservative Christian school—Crown College. One of the older Duggar girls even got to go along to see the college. The second “test drive” by the Bates is the possibility of college study on a larger scale than merely a necessary class. They have acknowledged that that their eldest son “Zachary earned a high score on his ACT test, has a high school degree and is now immersed in college-level studies.”  Could this be testing the waters for a Duggar boy or Girl? Not likely, given Gothard’s teachings, but still a possibility.

Another way we know the Duggars are Quiverfull is by their children’s pat answers. In each of the episodes when a new baby has been announced the kids are always “thrilled.” So, too, are the Bates children—shown “celebrating” Mom’s positive pregnancy test early in the morning on the long drive to the Duggar’s home.  We were treated to a family “vote” on the new baby’s name, too [for Jordyn].  It is very telling that the older girls speak of “our little kids” in ways normally only a mother would speak. A hallmark of such families is to have the older children (especially the older girls) help out with the housework and child care. The little children are routinely shown being helped, instructed, scolded and comforted by their big sisters.  Still, it is “Daddy” whose word is law. The command “Daddy says no one is to play outside,” was shown in one episode to elicit immediate obedience.

The Duggar children, after age 8, are expected to help their younger siblings thru the family’s “Buddy System.” The “big Buddy” helps the little one get dressed, do school work and even help them learn to play the piano or violin. Jim-Bob has written in their book that “The buddy system brings much joy to our home.”  The family also uses what they call “jurisdictions” which divide the household chores among the children. “Many hands make light work,” is a favorite Duggar saying. The most arduous chores—such as meal preparation and the never-ending laundry, however, are in the hands of the elder girls and have been since they were pre-teens. [“14 Kids…” “16 Kids…” “Raising 16 kids”]. In the early Duggar TV specials the older girls were visibly exhausted and shown bizarrely wearing dress coats and carrying diaper bags and shoulder purses all before reaching their teens.

The older children also are expected to uphold the teachings and standards imposed by the parents. Viewers were recently treated to Joy-Anna Duggar [a preteen at the time] covering a TV screen and using the family code word “Nike” to prevent her younger brothers from seeing something inappropriate. She did not want them to be “defrauded” by the image on the screen, but  could not really define the term “defraud.”  Her sheepish Grandmother explained that Joy-Anna had been taught to do this. Very recently we saw Josh Duggar and wife Anna back home helping care for his siblings while Michelle and baby Josie were hospitalized. He spoke of having to reassert his authority as the eldest sibling.

Various Duggar children were shown at the San Antonio Independent Christian Film Festival enjoying “wholesome” family entertainment, such as the movie “Fireproof” and speaking out about how badly this is needed.  Strangely, many of the Duggars watching these films were way below the target audience age, but being a Quverfull and Patriarchal family, they all went together.

The kids have all been shown participating in activities at an ATI family event in Big Sandy, Texas and, we have been told, Josh Duggar met his wife, Anna, in a concession line at one such event. While the boys mostly went off to enjoy themselves rappelling and doing other fun things, the older girls were volunteer helpers with all the little children’s activities at the event and only enjoyed a break for the combined orchestra’s practice and performance. Later in the same year, the oldest girls earned a break from housework and child care and attended an ATI girls retreat designed to reinforce the teachings they have grown up with.

The Duggars are also part of the “debt free” and “self supporting” wing of the Christian right. Jim-Bob gives credit to ATI’s financial guru, Jim Sammons–even linking to Sammon’s program on the family web site. The Duggars and their most visible friends eschew jobs in favor of family-owned businesses. Keeping the family together in the home, in homeschool and in family- and home-based business is essential to Quiverfull thinkers.

Jim-Bob Duggar has been very “blessed” by some of his real estate deals. Examples shown on their show were land rented out for a cell phone tower as well as a former chicken hatchery that is leased as commercial and warehouse space. In their book he gives even more details of fortunate real estate deals. Michelle explained on the show that they worked “really hard” when they were young to be able to “relax” now.

The Duggar sons are expected to follow this line of thinking in their own careers. To date 3 sons are now done with their “education,” have a GED and are in business. Josh, following in his father’s footsteps, has a used car lot. John David, again in his father’s footsteps, has a towing business. Joseph, who is currently at the family home with elder brother John, has not been identified as having his own business but is said to be helping John. To mainstream America, these boys are not educated to the point of having a job at much more than McDonalds. In fact you cannot even enlist in the U.S.Marine Corps with a GED! But in Quiverfull families, this is normal.

The Duggar friends all have similar business—the Stanleys have a construction company, the Bates own a tree service company, the Maxwells have a family business producing materials for family scheduling. In their book, the Duggars provide mere lip-service to the idea that their children could realistically aspire to more:

“If one of our children is called to a specialized field, such as medicine, we will help him or her prepare for it. But our main educational goal is to give them as much knowledge and as many skills as possible to prepare them for adult life. While we value academics, we also want to prepare them to run a household or support a family with skills such as cooking, sewing, carpentry, plumbing, electrical, mechanical, money managing, negotiating, and sales experience.”

The Duggar daughters have been shown via the Discovery Health Channel’s web site to have career goals. The joke is on the readers however, as each girl has chosen a Gothard-approved goal like nurse, midwife, missionary, beautician. Helpfully, ATI has training programs in each of these areas. The Duggars also have shown how they teach the girls to change the oil in the car or change a flat tire as well as showing the boys learning to cook or doing some housework. This particular episode of the show seemed hopelessly “staged.” Especially when the girls were shown in the garage learning about the car—all while little Johanna toddled about in such an inappropriate setting!

The Duggars show up consistently as visitors for “fellowship” with other openly Quiverfull families on their family blogs. The Maxwells, a family who sings and ministers together and whose adult children continue to live with their parents and under their authority, have not only been seen visiting with the Duggars, but have had their “Chore Packs” and “Managers of Their Homes” Scheduling product featured on the Duggar’s show. Links to other family visits:

Maxwell Family: Fellowship on the Road

Joel’s Journey: Visiting the Duggar Family…

Staddon Family: Meet the Bates Family

Dotrignac Family: March 14th 2006

Sam Baldwin: Duggars and Baldwins

Jim-Bob and Michelle Duggar, their friends Gil and Kelly Bates and others would not be speaking at ATI/IBLP events unless they fully toed the “party line” of Bill Gothard. The Duggars are the “cash cow,” the “draw” for the organization. That party line is “Quiverfull” with a capital “Q”.  Do they agree with the idea of “militant fecundity”—i.e. “outbreeding” the liberal right? (Newsweek, para. 6-7).   I believe so. After all Joyce writes:

Quiverfull women are more than mothers. They’re domestic warriors in the battle against what they see as forty years of destruction wrought by women’s liberation: contraception, women’s careers, abortion, divorce, homosexuality and child abuse, in that order. (Joyce, Nation, p. 11).

The Duggars, in years past, were active in the Right-to-Life movement, attending protests as a family. Recently the tabloid press has reported that Michelle’s elder sister is a partner in a long-term lesbian relationship. While that sister has been shown on the TV show there was no discussion of her lifestyle.

Jim-Bob has been active in politics for years. Eldest son, Joshua, was once known as “the Little Governor” for trailing his Daddy around the Arkansas State House. Josh has also stated his goal of entering politics, although that has not been mentioned on the TV show. For a while at least, Joshua had a part-time business doing “communications” work for politicians.  Sadly, his name is the only thing that will help him compete against homeschoolers graduating from Patrick Henry College and other conservative political training grounds.  Even his once stated-goal of attending Bill Gothard’s online law school would not help him. Graduates of that institution are  reportedly allowed to sit the bar exam in only a few states—possibly only in California. Even the oldest Duggar girl’s have had political experience on the campaign for their Dad and for former presidential candidate and family friend Mike Huckabee.

So, how does all this mesh with a TV reality show? Not very well. There are a few possibilities here.

• First, that Jim-Bob and Michelle, like most parents, have moderated their standards and expectations over time. A household with kids ranging from birth to early adulthood has very, very different needs than a family of under-5s. That the kids, especially the oldest 6, are sporting trendier, but still modest clothing, and better hairstyles is a sign of growing up and of more prosperous financial times for the whole family.

• Second, that they are “white washing” or “soft pedaling” on the Gothard part of their lives to be more attractive to a wider audience. This may also be a requirement in their contract with TLC. Gothard’s true membership figures are not known and the Duggars could be a great recruiting tool to other like-minded families who would not otherwise learn of the organization. Things like the “family uniform” put off “seekers” who might be enticed to become ATI and Quiverfull families. So too are many of the disciplinary practices touted by Gothard’s organization. These would not appeal to a broader audience

• Third, they may have “given” a little on dress in order to conduct “friendship evangelism.” The family’s stated goal in going on TV was to reach others for Christ. As then 15-year old Jana Duggar put it in one interview: “’We’re able to share with others about Christ and what he’s done in our lives,’ she said, stressing the family’s primary message: ‘Children are a blessing and not a burden.’” Out-of-style clothing and bad hair are noticed in all the wrong ways. Looking like “everyone else,” if a bit more modest, helps newcomers to see their lifestyle as attainable and enjoyable.

Which is the truth? While nay-sayers will quickly vote for “selling out for commercial gain,” it’s likely some of each is a possibility. Still, the Duggars would not be invited to speak at all kinds of ATI/IBLP or Vision Forum events without being card carrying members of the Quiverfull party. I believe Jim-Bob and Michelle, as the world’s most visible adherents to Gothard’s teachings, have the organization’s permission to style themselves in a more mainstream mode.

If it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck …

So, bottom-line time:

Quiverfull is not a denomination – there are no membership rolls or doctrinal statements to sign.  Quiverfull is a philosophy and its consequent lifestyle which Jim Bob and Michelle have demonstrably adopted.

Are the Duggars Quiverfull? You bet your life!

Are they Patriarchal? Of course!

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Please note: This post has been modified to clarify the point I want to make which is this:

I have no problem with making a buck ~ earning an honest living. In fact, that’s exactly what I’ve got in mind in running the NLQ website, writing a book, etc. ~ I do not apologize for these efforts to support myself and my children.

What makes me sick is that the “need” which the Quiverfull philosophy and lifestyle are being marketed to fill is manufactured and exaggerated in order to sell the product.

A friend recently put it this way: It’s like buying insurance to protect you from the boogeyman under the bed.

Exactly.

Selling books and materials which address an ACTUAL need is one thing ~ but creating fear and then capitalizing on those fears is better suited for the Mafia than for Christian entrepreneurs.

by Vyckie

I’ve had a sick feeling in my stomach lately.  It’s the feeling that comes along with a growing realization that the Quiverfull worldview and lifestyle which I felt that I had carefully considered and thoughtfully adopted is, in actuality, a product called “biblical family values” which is being aggressively marketed as an investment to safeguard our loved ones from becoming collateral damage in today’s war against the family.

That’s right ~ Quiverfull is a product and we bought it big-time.

What got me started thinking this way is a bit of information which I came across recently while doing market research for my book proposal (which, btw ~ is shaping up rather nicely ~ I’m feeling pretty good about what I have so far):

Created To Be His Help Meet by Debi Pearl currently has an Amazon sales rank of 1,891 in books ~ that’s up from a rank of 4,120 at the end of August (’09 ~ less than a month ago).

I should have figured this out much sooner

Seems that I should have been immune to the marketing strategies of those who ruthlessly engender fear and dissatisfaction so they can offer their products as the remedy for the very malady which they themselves created.  After all, one of the first “family values” books I read is All The Way Home: Power for Your Family to be Its Best ~ in which author, Mary Pride explains that happy, well-adjusted families are not very profitable.  In order to sell self-help books, couple’s retreats, therapy sessions, etc. ~ husbands and wives (mainly wives) need to be convinced that something’s wrong ~ something’s missing ~ they need help!

Exactly.  That’s why we didn’t watch television, read popular magazines or otherwise expose ourselves to the endless barrage of advertisements calculated to instill feelings of discontent in our hearts ~ sure saved ourselves a lot of money that way.

And I was vaguely aware of the same principle in operation during my years as publisher and editor of a “pro-life, pro-family” newspaper.  I kept current on all the latest skirmishes in America’s on-going Culture War.

“I’m sure these organizations have the best of intentions when they push legislation to remove the marriage penalty from the tax code, force cable companies to offer ‘a la carte’ subscriptions on premium channels, introduce competition into the education system by promoting school choice and vouchers, demand that merchants who profit from the commercialization of Christ’s birth acknowledge ‘Christmas’ in their promotional advertisements, etc.,” I wrote in a March 2006 editorial.

“But I can’t help but notice how out of touch some of these ‘pro-family’ organizations appear to be with real-life families in America.  A lot of money and manpower has been spent in the ‘battle for America’s families’ – yet little has changed and in fact, in the years since the launch of the ‘Moral Majority’ our families have gone from confusion to chaos to crisis.”

Back then, it was dawning on me that the whole idea of a “culture war” has been artificially manufactured to create fear and insecurity so that we will take out our checkbooks and purchase “protection” for our families.  Kind of similar to war in general ~ it’s a big money-making business and a lot of people have a vested interest in keeping it going.

As Chris Hedges, author of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, points out, “All radical movements need a crisis or a prolonged period of instability to achieve power,” ~ and, I would add ~ make lots of money.

It was somewhat bewildering for me to realize that so much of our lives and our choices are really all about some other guy making obscene amounts of cash ~ and most of us only have a vague idea that we are being used in this way.

I well remember recognizing this principle in operation during my years as a staunch, pro-life advocate. (Please note: the purpose of my including this here is NOT to start up a “pro-life” vs “pro-choice” debate )

Check it out ~ I just happen to have a PBA graphic on hand in “My Pictures” ~ a left-over from my Religious Right newspaper publishing days ~ ugh ‹(ô¿ô)›

The first time I saw actual pictures of aborted babies ~ all bloody and dismembered with recognizable tiny little baby fingers amongst the horror ~ I had a strong physical reaction which cemented my determination to fight for the unborn. BUT … after a while, I could look at those same pictures and not be much affected. So then, the pro-lifers come out with the partial-birth abortion graphics ~ showing a fully-developed baby ~ delivered except for its head ~ with a pair of scissors stabbed into the base of its skull ~ a vacuum hose is inserted into the resulting hole and the baby’s brains are sucked out ~ the baby goes limp ~ OMG!! I totally freaked! I was SHOCKED out of my apathy and renewed my efforts on the behalf of the unborn. AND I SENT MONEY ~ plenty of it ~ to those pro-life organizations which were on the “front lines” of the battle to rescue the babies. BUT … it wasn’t long before the idea of partial-birth abortion didn’t stir me quite so violently … And a while later, I began to hear about the pain which unborn babies feel during an abortion ~ and there was a campaign to force abortion clinics to inform their clients of the pain their about-to-be-killed babies would suffer ~ and to offer the mother pain-medication for the baby prior to the procedure … As I read the pro-life medical professionals’ expert testimony regarding the evidence that aborted babies feel pain … Well, to tell the truth, by this point, I was beginning to catch on to the escalation-of-horror tactics used by these right-to-life organizations and it just made me mad to realize the manipulation.

I remember discussing this with Warren ~ and I told him that we were unlikely to get rich in our newspaper business simply because I was unwilling to print the most sensational news items which might scare our readers into sending more money. I would do everything I could do in good conscience to promote the pro-life cause ~ but I would not resort to terrorism ~ and that is exactly how I had come to view the more extreme fund raising tactics of these organizations.

Where there is an actual need ~ I’m all for enterprising people making and selling their products and solutions. Just don’t invent a need ~ and certainly DO NOT perpetuate a WAR ~ the Culture War ~ just to make a buck.

Oddly enough, though I understood this in regard to the “Christian Right” in general ~ I completely overlooked the profit-driven nature of the phenomenal growth I witnessed in the Quiverfull movement.  I would often remark that “this family vision is spreading like wildfire” ~ all the while, oblivious to the fact that, of course it’s growing ~ there’s big money to be had in selling family stability and security to desperate moms and dads who’ve come to Christianity as refugees from dysfunctional homes ~ parents who are confused and scared for the future and they’re looking for answers as they scramble to raise their children in a healthier environment than that which they had experienced as kids.

According to this Salon article by Lynn Harris, Michael and Debi Pearl are “part of the booming religious publishing and products market, which hit $7.3 billion in 2005 — a 28 percent increase since 2002. … Among Christian books, the ‘Christian Living’ subcategory, which includes parenting, is one of the most popular sub-segments; products for children are expanding as well. The Packaged Facts report, titled ‘The Religious Product Market in the U.S.,’ cites ‘the culture wars’ as being one reason for this overall growth. ”

Quiverfull is clearly a specialization of the “family values” niche market that has proven so lucrative for the Christian publishing industry in general. Truthfully~ it’s turning my stomach as I’m contemplating the fact that my family ~ and tens of thousands of Quiverfull families like ours ~ have been duped and exploited for profit.

Duped and exploited.  For profit.

I’m sure the Pearls and other merchants of QF/P are sincere in their belief that there really is a Big Bad Enemy “out there” who wants to devour the children of Believers ~ but I’m also discovering that there are plenty of “family values” peddlers with not-so-pure motives. Dogemperor has done a ton of insightful research on this subject: (read here ~ and that’s just for starters).

So yeah ~ it is all about money. And that wouldn’t be so much of a problem except that the practice of QF/P is actually a sort of circular predicament in which the proffered “cure” actually feeds and accelerates the disease.

By the time it was all over for us, I had amassed an unbelievably enormous library from the Pearls, Vision Forum, Grace & Truth Books, Inheritance Publications, and similar peddlers of the Quiverfull vision ~ bookshelf after bookshelf stuffed to overflowing with “how to have a happy family”-type books, audio tapes, CDs and DVDs.  I used to make jokes about the fact that the biggest category in our budget after food was BOOKS.  But I’m not laughing about it now.

“I’ve been thinking recently about a scene from the animated Disney classic, Bambi in which the forest animals are hiding ever-so-quietly as a group of hunters pass by.  No-one moves a muscle and they’re hardly breathing and tension builds as the background music escalates and the danger draws closer until one terrified duck can’t stand it another moment.  “I can’t take it!  I can’t take it!” she screams and frantically flies from her hiding place seeking an escape and a place of safety only to be shot dead in the next instant.

 

“The reason this poor, dead bird comes to mind just now is that the intensity and anticipation of that scene seems a vivid picture of life at our house lately.  It’s been tense and overwhelming because of the current trials we face and the perceived nearness of the enemy.”

And here’s the part that really makes me sick ~ “The Enemy” ~ the “World,” which for so many years I had feared and shunned, has turned out to be a paper tiger ~ and in most cases, not just harmless, but even benevolent and beneficial ~ same thing goes for just about everything which my fundamentalist/quiverfull beliefs led me to guard my family against: television (Spongebob!), secular music, public school, peer pressure, boy/girl relationships, fashionable clothing, feminist values, convenience foods, teen rebellion, social workers and professional counselors, youth groups … and even the really big spooks: homosexuals and atheists.

Soaring Arrows Christian HOME’s Cool ~ sharpening our arrows and shooting them straight into the heart of The Enemy

So I’ve spent over a quarter century fighting with all my might in this war that has mostly been all in my head.  We were on the front lines with our family newspaper ~ and in homeschooling we were preparing our children to enter the battle too.  The war may have been imaginary ~ but the wounds inflicted are all too real. Seeing the severity of my daughter’s suffering was the impetus which moved me to lay down my weapons of warfare and walk away from the fight.

It’s not my war anymore.  If there is a God, He’s going to have to fight His own battles ~ I’m done offering up my children as ammunition for His crusades.

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Michelle Duggar with her children after the birth of baby #18

The news at People.com is that the Duggar family is joyously anticipating the arrival of their newest baby in the spring.

“I love all of this, it is so fun,” says Michelle. “Anna and I will have babies five months apart.”

According to the article, there are “no health concerns” for 42-year-old Michelle.  “Some women are made to have babies, and Michelle is to the nth degree,” ob-gyn Amy Sarver told PEOPLE in December. “She is in terrific health without any strain on her uterus.”

So Michelle Duggar is “made to have babies” ~ huh?

Of course, a seemingly logical question for those who are considering the quiverfull lifestyle would be, “What about the women who are not made to have babies?”  It’s a question which I asked early on ~ because after 3 c-section deliveries, I was convinced that my body was not cut out for childbearing.

The answer which I found from leading quiverfull proponents such as Mary Pride and Nancy Campbell was “trust the Lord.”

Pride goes so far as to say that many Christians risk their lives as missionaries ~ and if one should be killed in service to the Lord, that true believer will be found faithful ~ they will be rewarded with the Lord’s approval, “Well done, thou good and faithful servant … enter thou into the joy of thy lord.”  Considering this eternal perspective, Pride argues, why would any Christian woman shrink back from an opportunity to earn a Martyr’s Crown?

Even after 7 tremendously difficult pregnancies with dangerously low blood pressure throughout, 5 c-sections and finally, a partial-uterine rupture, I was so convinced of my obligation to “trust the Lord” in my reproductive life that I still could not let myself off the hook ~ after all, I was still alive, still fertile.  Having once put my hand to the plow, why would I even consider looking back now?

I have to say, as I read that part of the article in which the doctor declares, “She is in terrific health without any strain on her uterus” ~ my eyes were rolling and I’m thinking ~ 19 kids without any strain on her uterus ~ yeah right.

The truth is ~ QF women develop a dangerous tendency to think of themselves as invincible.  Having narrowly escaped death on numerous occasions, I honestly believed that “I survived another horrendous delivery ~ the next one isn’t likely to kill me either.”

Amazingly, even after suffering a partial uterine rupture, I was not convinced that pregnancy and childbirth could be a life-threatening condition for me.  My uncle once wrote to me, “You have been extraordinarily brave in the face of real threats to your health and that of your newborns. How great was your fear of dying that you would risk it?”

This was my response:

I am actually rather fearless ~ much to the consternation of those who love me. My mother has pleaded with me more than once not to get pregnant again ~ and poor Warren ~ he is so much more afraid for me than I am.

Anyone who has already been to Hell and has found some good there is unlikely to be terrified of unknown or difficult things.

And besides ~ mine is a calculated risk. I know my health could be so much improved if only I didn’t subject myself to continual hardship ~ but I don’t believe that I’m risking my life. During my last delivery, when my uterus split open and I might have died (but didn’t ~ I think that counts as something more than just good luck) ~ the surgeon, who has liability concerns and is financially motivated not to take any risk with my life, spent almost two hours carefully stitching me back together all neat and tidy. Why didn’t he just give me a hysterectomy? He could have done it in ten minutes and made some extra profit. He’s been my doctor for nearly two decades and he knows how I believe about birth control ~ so he knew full well that if he left me my uterus there’s every possibility that I might put it to use again. I say, future pregnancies couldn’t be all that risky ~ or the doctor, a man in the position to know, would not have taken the risk. To me, this is not the same as blindly putting my trust in doctors and medicine ~ all factors considered, I do have confidence in the surgeon’s assessment of the risk to my life.

Sure, I could die ~ but we all could whether we insulate ourselves from the possibility or not.

As a fully-convinced QFer, I often wrote and spoke about my experience of enduring extremely difficult pregnancies and deliveries ~ and my message to other women was always this:  If I can trust the Lord with my reproductive life, anyone can.  “A tough conviction, yes ~ but well worth the trouble considering the Lord’s promised reward.”

Recently, a friend mentioned that she had watched a marathon of Duggar programs on TLC.  Being familiar with my own experience with the quiverfull philosophy and lifestyle, she was fully expecting to find serious extremism ~ but the programs showed a regular family doing run-of-the-mill stuff which all families do ~ only times eighteen.

“They seem pretty normal,” my friend said.

That’s the trouble right there.  The Duggar family is portrayed as “normal” (okay, what’s “normal” about having 18 children and another on the way?) ~ a loving, whimsical family.  The quiverfull lifestyle can be extremely enticing for any woman who longs to be fulfilled and appreciated in her roles of wife and mother ~ what woman wouldn’t be drawn to such an idyllic picture of abundant and joyous motherhood?

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‘Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement‘ by Kathryn Joyce

 

While I no longer consider my 7 kids to be a “reward” from God for my many years of faithful service to Him ~ I emphatically DO still believe that each and every one of them are undeniably a blessing.

We’re halfway through the summer, and part of the reason that I’ve slowed down considerably on the number of postings to the blog is that the kids have been home and they’re keeping me occupied. We’ve been having quite a lot of fun together ~ which is something that I didn’t get to experience as much as I’d have liked to back when I was completely drained from perpetual pregnancies and childbearing.

These days, I am thoroughly enjoying my “blessings” ~ they are far from perfect as they’ve gone from passive, obedient little robots (a couple of them were more like zombies ~ and, Chassé ~ my “spirited” child ~ really reminded me of a jack-in-the-box gone bonkers ~ no matter how many times she was stuffed into the box and the lid slammed down on her, she had this quirky way of popping back up with a crazy, intimidating, you-can’t-get-rid-of-me smirk) ~ to “normal” kids with their own unique personalities, feelings, thoughts ~ and … every single one of them now has this idea in their heads that their particular experience and perceptions of life matter.

I say they are “far from perfect” ~ but actually, they’re very good kids ~ not Duggar-like with neat, matching outfits, always helpful and obedient and smiling ~ they are taking full advantage of their new freedom to discover themselves which means that they don’t always say, “Yes, Mom” ~ and they’re pretty likely to disagree with me and not one of them still believes that I know everything and have all the answers.

When I was reading Above Rubies, I would have been utterly mortified if one of my kids back-talked me, didn’t immediately jump when I told them to do something, made a complete mess and left it for someone else (me) to clean up, picked on a younger sibling, cussed out the older sibling for picking on them, stayed up past midnight playing video games, took food in their bedrooms or ate half a dozen popsicles without asking, disobeyed me, ignored me, got right in my face and yelled at me. Wow ~ children like that would be no blessing at all, huh?

(This is not to say that none of my kids did any of these “bad things” Q.D. ~ but mostly they behaved and when they didn’t, they weren’t so blatant in their disobedience ~ so we at least had the appearance of well-behaved children.)

Actually, I’m finding out that my less-than-perfect kids truly are a blessing ~ and the blessing is in their individuality, their free-thinking, their freedom to stand up for their own personhood.

In a recent radio interview for Interfaith Voices, I described my kids these days as “zombies coming alive.” It can be a little scary ~ there’s a lot of “doing their own thing” ~ a lot of experimenting with ideas and activities which previously, they’d never even heard of, let alone seriously considered (more than one of them is currently wondering if they might be gay or bisexual) ~ a lot of anger ~ and sometimes that anger is directed at me.

I told a little story during that interview which was cut out due to lack of time ~ I’ve shared this over on the forum already, but I would also like to include it here:

When I put my kids in school, I was especially worried about my then-10 year old Andrew. He was so far behind academically ~ plus, he was so angry because after Angel left home, he became the main focus of Warren’s abuse. He was so beaten down and dispirited that he would scurry about the house like a mouse ~ trying to stay off of his father’s radar because as soon as Warren noticed Andrew, he’d spend hours lecturing and preaching to him until the poor boy was in tears. I remember many, many nights when I would lay in bed and think to myself that Andrew had not spoken a single word all day.

So when I talked to the elementary school principal, I expressed my concern, “I’m afraid Andrew will go to school and beat everyone up.”

Well ~ it didn’t turn out anything like what I imagined. Although Andrew was the most fearful and reluctant of all the kids when we talked about public school ~ he is now totally loving it.

I think the key factor in how well he’s doing was his teacher ~ she is amazing ~ absolutely “pro-Andrew” and that made all the difference for him. At the second parent-teacher conference, Andrew’s teacher was beaming with pride as she told me how Andrew was excelling in every area ~ academically and socially. She told me that at the beginning of the year, they were struggling to get him to write the “d” in his name rather than a “b” ~ but soon he was writing pages of really good stuff.

She asked Andrew to read one of his reports for me titled “Changes.” In his story, Andrew told about the divorce and how, at the beginning he really didn’t want me to divorce his dad ~ he didn’t believe that Warren was really so bad and he felt sorry for him because he’d lost his family. But, after getting away from him and seeing how other people live, he knows now that before the divorce, he was not even a real person. Then he told how happy he is to be able to think and learn and have his own ideas and opinions. He concluded by saying that he is grateful that I divorced his father because he knows it was a very hard fight for me but I did it so that he could have a life and now he can be anything he wants to be.

When Andrew was done reading his report for me, his teacher was all teary-eyed and she told me that when she gave the assignment, the other students wrote about how, “My life really changed when we got a new kitten,” and such ~ but when Andrew got up and gave his report, the class listened with total interest, and when he was finished, there was absolute silence ~ and then they started clapping ~ and then the whole class gave Andrew a standing ovation.

Hang on a second while I wipe my eyes …

Just seeing the difference in my children (not only Andrew ~ they are all doing remarkably well) makes it totally worth the trouble ~ and in fact, I can see now that it is no trouble at all ~ single parenthood is EASY compared to living in the oppressive, crazy-making atmosphere ~ the prison which our home used to be.

Part of what makes it easier for me to allow my children to just be regular kids ~ even dreaded teenagers! (something I never thought I’d have to deal with as a QFer) ~ is that I no longer feel like their misbehavior, bad manners, and poor choices are a direct reflection on me. Back when I believed that it was appropriate for parents to direct and control every facet of their children’s lives, I also believed that if the kids didn’t turn out well ~ it must be because the parents had failed to “train up” their children according to the Lord’s precepts ~ otherwise, they would never depart from His way, right?

Recently I was talking to a woman ~ who’d never heard of “quiverfull” ~ about how and why I left the QF lifestyle. Towards the end of our conversation, I confessed that now that I don’t have chapter and verse for every detail regarding how I’m raising my kids, “I feel like I’m just making it up as I go ~ doing the best I can, but really … I’m just winging it.”

“Welcome to the real world,” she laughed. “That’s what most parents do!”

Mary Pride called it “no-fault parenting” ~ and for many years, I’d have seriously pitied any mother with kids like mine ~ kids who don’t always praise me and who are not absolutely certain about God, Jesus, and just about everything.

A couple of weeks ago, I noticed that my 9-year-old, Lydia Jean’s long hair was looking rather scraggly ~ she’d never had a haircut, only trims ~ and her naturally wavy hair was so long and beautiful. BUT ~ it definitely was not looking so good ~ so I decided to cut off about 8 inches which made her hair look really nice again. A little while later, Lydia came to me ~ all smiles ~ to show me that she’d taken the scissors and given herself bangs. UGH!!

I was so upset! And I realized later that the reason I was angry is that she’d just decided she wanted bangs and cut them ~ totally without consulting me or asking permission. When I was explaining this to my mother ~ she just laughed as though that’s something that kids just naturally do ~ she told me that my sister had done the same thing to my hair when I was a toddler. My older daughter, Berea expressed my thoughts exactly when she said, “That’s not something that ever would have happened in this house before.”

Before ~ everything was highly organized and scissors were never left laying around for the children to help themselves to ~ plus, they were all so closely supervised that they wouldn’t have a chance to do whatever they wanted like that. So ~ with 7 children, we’ve never had one of them give themselves a haircut ~ until now. Now I’m laughing too ~ because I’d rather have a few mishaps (okay, a lot of mishaps) because we’ve relaxed and the kids are acting independently ~ than to have a perfectly controlled home where no-one is allowed to be an individual. And actually, Lydia Jean did not do too bad of a job on her hair ~ perhaps we’ve discovered a new talent ~ her future career? LOL

Yesterday, 13-year-old Hazelle (our newest teen) was having a meltdown. She’d stayed up too late while on a sleepover at a neighbor girl’s house ~ she was getting cranky with everyone and they were all getting mad at her in return. Before long, she was screaming about how everyone hates her and then she went off to her room to pack her suitcase. When I asked her where she was going, Hazelle yelled, “Anywhere but here!!”

We talked for a while ~ I didn’t insist that she mustn’t be angry or make her quit calling her sisters “bitches” ~ I just listened to her and then held her while she cried. After she got all that anger and frustration out, she laid down and took a much-needed nap.

That is totally NOT how I’d have handled a similar situation “Q.D.” ~ in fact, no such incident would ever have occurred before ~ because 1) we didn’t do sleepovers and everything was so regimented that the kids never stayed up too late, and 2) it used to be that Hazelle just didn’t talk to anyone. She kept to herself and never caused a bit of trouble because she just was not the type (unlike “spirited” Chassé) to have a contrary opinion or to get angry when she felt misused and unappreciated.

After a good night’s rest, Hazelle is in a much better frame of mind. She started the day by preparing a nice breakfast without being asked, and having her little brother (whom she totally hated yesterday) serve it to me on a pretty tray. She’s playing cooperatively with her sister without bossing or taking offense at every perceived slight. She’s cracking jokes and smiling when her siblings laugh. She has unpacked her stuff and is not planning to run away from home any time in the near future.

Life is good.

Early in my correspondence with my uncle Ron, I explained to him why I never referred to my children as “kids” ~ preferring instead to think of them as “little lambs.” I imagine that my unbelieving uncle rolled his eyes as he read my words, but he was gracious in his reply: Little lambs yes, Vyckie. But if you’re lucky you may have a rambunctious billygoat or two in the bunch.

Lucky. Fortunate. Blessed. That’d be me.

Yes ~ children are a blessing. And I’m truly grateful to be blessed seven-fold. At times it is total chaos at our house ~ but I wouldn’t trade the messiness of the clashing of all the various personalities of my “rambunctious billygoats” and the pandemonium of willful “kids” practicing their freedom of thought on one another for the quiver full of neat, orderly, compliant “precious lambs” which I used to imagine my kids to be.

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‘Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement‘ by Kathryn Joyce

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