Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

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. 

Throughout the years, Prince has maintained his Dominionist credentials, reaching out to the Catholic church while remaining a political ally and close friend of the mostly-Protestant Dominionist Right.  As a converted member of the Catholic faith, Prince is now a member of the Knights of Columbus, an organization dedicated to Christian conquest and inquisition that traces its roots to the crusades.  He also maintains active involvement with the Dominionist Family Research Council, a far-right organization which his family started.  Renewed by a commitment to his new faith community, Prince is literally a Christian crusader with an iron sharp focus on advancing Dominionist political goals. 

Nowadays, Erik Prince is arguably the most powerful Dominionist in the world, controlling the world’s largest and wealthiest mercenary army.  Blackwater’s complicity in the criminal torture of U.S. war prisoners has been well-documented for several years now.  Recent allegations of employee intimidation, threats of violence, and involvement in sex trafficking lend a further sinister glow to the organization’s already-disastrous “service” to the Pentagon. 

Even in the midst of the shocking allegations of murder as a means of dispensing with whistleblowers, it is important to keep in mind is that the United States government remains Xe’s most lucrative customer.  Indeed, the degree of legislative outrage that led to a ban on funneling government money to ACORN has never been directed at Xe in response to its far more serious offenses.  Whatever else it has done, Blackwater/Xe has made one thing crystal clear: When they have the power and resources to achieve their goals, Dominionist Christians aggressively promote a dark, oppressive, and horrifically violent future.  Such, it seems, is their New Jerusalem. 

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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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Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

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. 

Rushdoony today remains a popular figure among fundamentalist Quiverfull families.  He was an early proponent of the view that Christian families should homeschool their children in order to shelter them from secular schools in the United States.  Among other works, his Philosophy of the Christian Curriculum was heard as a rallying cry for parents who shared Rushdoony’s disdain for the evils of secular humanism.  For Rushdoony, the Christian homeschool was seen—almost literally—as a military training ground for the children who would become the foot soldiers in this war to replace the secular government of the United States with a fundamentalist one.  In defense of these goals, Rushdoony famously wrote that “Christianity and democracy are inevitably enemies.”

Today, most Christian homeschoolers have at some level been influenced by Rushdoony’s teachings.  Michael Farris’ Patrick Henry College for homeschoolers is a contemporary attempt to extend Rushdoony’s vision for Christian home education beyond the home—and into the realms of higher education.  It is a training ground designed to give students with homeschooling backgrounds the tools to achieve Rushdoony’s goals of extinguishing secular governance.  Despite its small numbers, Patrick Henry today fuels a higher percentage of graduates into federal internships and positions than any other university in the United States.   

Hardly the socially inept, awkward teenagers of common stereotype, these young people are armed with the intellectual tools to fight Rushdoony’s battle at the level of the federal government, and they have no intention of slowing down.  Indeed, today’s Christian Reconstructionists share a vision of state-sanctioned Christian patriarchy not unlike that evoked in Margaret Atwood’s now classic work, The Handmaid’s Tale.  Those of us with a commitment to democracy—and a will to subvert theirs—must familiarize ourselves with this belief system if we’re to have any hope of fighting it. 

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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.

NLQ Recommends ...

'Breaking Their Will: Shedding Light on Religious Child Maltreatment' by Janet Heimlich

‘Quivering Daughters‘ by Hillary McFarland

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

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4

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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NLQ recommended reading:

‘Quivering Daughters‘ by Hillary McFarland

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

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'Breaking Their Will: Shedding Light on Religious Child Maltreatment' by Janet Heimlich

‘Quivering Daughters‘ by Hillary McFarland

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