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Most everyone has heard by now about the Blackwater corporation (recently renamed Xe due to bad PR) and the staggering criminal enterprise that it has perpetuated in the name of the U.S. War on Terror. Even such farcical news establishments as Fox have been unable to ignore the veritable shitstorm that has erupted in the wake of the Bush administration over Xe’s unholy alliance with the United States government. One thing that has not been widely reported, however, is Xe’s Dominionist allegiance, up to and including the fact that its former CEO—and now chairman—Erik Prince, is the biological heir apparent to the U.S. Dominionist community.
The son of Edgar Prince, whose family fortune funded such early Dominionist organizations as the Moral Majority and Focus on the Family, Erik Prince grew up hobnobbing the wealthy and powerful of members of the Dominionist Christian Right. Always his father’s son, Prince left his White House internship with the George H.W. Bush administration because he felt that it was too secular—and too liberal. Influenced by the politics of RJ Rushdoony, Prince felt that it was wrong for White House officials to have any contact with LGBT and feminist groups, including run of the mill lobbying meetings and focus groups.
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Born in 1916 to Armenian immigrants in the United States, Rousas John Rushdoony was a Calvinist theologian whose fundamentalist teachings would provide the intellectual foundations for Christian Dominionism—or Christian Reconstructionism—in North America. In his writings, Rushdoony laid the groundwork for the establishment of a Christian theocracy not unlike Calvin’s Geneva in the contemporary United States. Rushdoony’s multi-volume opus, The Institutes of Biblical Law, has provided much of the movement’s political framework.
Within these works, Rushdoony famously called for the executions of “homosexuals and unchaste women” as punishment for their alleged attempts to “subvert others and to subvert the social order by enticing others to idolatry.” A well-known racist and anti-Semite, Rushdoony also stated that “all men are not created equal before God.” Citing the controversial Biblical injunction against believers becoming “unequally yoked,” Rushdoony argued that interracial marriages should be banned under the law. Moreover, he suggested that employers ought legally to be protected for religious discrimination against non-Christians. Women do not even figure into Rushdoony’s injunctions for “Biblical employment,” for he felt that they should be legally barred from working and tasked with serving as “helpmeets” to their all-powerful husbands.
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by km
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In recent years, most popular culture discussions of the Christian Quiverfull movement center on the charming Duggar family of TLC reality fame. The Duggars—parents of eighteen children with another on the way—are seen by many as a wholesome—if quirky—example of a healthy family with astoundingly polite and well-behaved children. It is nearly impossible to have a discussion with a well-meaning Quiverfull-illiterate without hearing that familiar refrain: “They just seem like such nice people!”
It’s not uncommon to find secular people who find themselves drawn to the Quiverfull lifestyle based on what they perceive as such a healthy—and happy—home life on television. I decided to write this series in order to disabuse readers of the notion that this there is anything remotely harmless about the seemingly apolitical politics of this movement. It is in fact a dangerous—and alarmingly effective—political force. The unsavory political entanglements of the extreme Christian Right are too often downplayed on reality programs that popularize the lifestyle.
The overwhelming majority of Quiverfull families—who comprise a miniscule percentage of the American population—are followers of an extremist brand of right-wing politics called Christian Dominionism. Motivated by such writers as RJ Rushdoony and Francis Schaeffer, they want to establish a militant Christian theocracy in the United States. Not only that, but they have imperialistic designs on the rest of the world.
In this era of Christian Right ascendancy, there are at least three names that those of us who remain committed to transparent democratic processes should know: RJ Rushdoony (intellectual father of Christian Dominionism), Bill Gothard (Quiverfull’s figurehead for stealth political organizing), and Erik Prince (CEO of Xe—formerly Blackwater—and the first Christian Dominionist to amass a private army capable of successfully overthrowing a government). The rest of the posts in this series will show what each of these men is about and shed light on this often dismissed—but increasingly powerful—fringe minority. It appears as though TLC will continue to romanticize the Quiverfull lifestyle for the foreseeable future, and it’s up to those of us who know better to shed a brighter light on its politics.
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Biography: NLQ forum member, ”km” is a graduate student and activist who knew lots of Quiverfull families while growing up in the American South. Having flirted with the movement as a young adolescent, she is now a little bit obsessed with unrooting its stranglehold on the American political system and keeping what remains of church/state separation intact.
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