Quiverfull
Nov. 12th, 2011 01:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerThe subtitle of Kevin Roose's The Unlikely Disciple claims that Jerry Falwell's Liberty is "America's Holiest University," but it isn't by a long stretch. Liberty allows wild and crazy activities like hand-holding and those three-second hugs. Places like Pensacola, on the other hand, don't even allow men and women to look at each other for overly long. They call it "making eye babies."
You might think that Pensacola would mark the outer bounds of the far right, but you would be far wrong. In her book Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, Kathryn Joyce explores the Quiverfull movement, who would think sending their children to Pensacola a dangerously liberal and corrupting act. Quiverful believers abjure all forms of birth control and instead attempt to have as many children as possible in order to homeschool them up as good Christian soldiers.
The martial imagery here is not inapt: the movement's name comes from a Bible verse comparing children to arrows in a quiver. You need a quiver full of them, the idea goes, if you want to win the culture wars in America and defeat the Muslims abroad.
(Though it seems to me that Quiverfull leaders would find they have a lot in common with Iran's ayatollahs if they all sat down to a glass of tea. Theocracy guiding democracy! No more eye babies! Hair coverings! I think they would come to a fruitful interfaith understanding.)
Joyrce seems to have caught some of the cataclysmic urgency that drives her subjects, although in the opposite direction: "You GUYS, the crazy Christians OUTBREEDING us. We have to do something!"
On the one hand, this seems a little alarmist. On the other hand, if you go out and read some Quiverfull materials - like, say, So Much More or its companion website, written by Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin (who seem, leaving their beliefs aside, quite charming and thoughtful) to instruct young women how to be proper Quiverfull girls - well...
No college, naturally - too much chance for corruption. Not even missionary work is allowed, because it takes a girl's focus outside of her home. Defer to your brothers, even much younger brothers, to teach them how to be properly masterful men.
Read that, and it's hard not to feel a little alarmist about it.
You might think that Pensacola would mark the outer bounds of the far right, but you would be far wrong. In her book Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, Kathryn Joyce explores the Quiverfull movement, who would think sending their children to Pensacola a dangerously liberal and corrupting act. Quiverful believers abjure all forms of birth control and instead attempt to have as many children as possible in order to homeschool them up as good Christian soldiers.
The martial imagery here is not inapt: the movement's name comes from a Bible verse comparing children to arrows in a quiver. You need a quiver full of them, the idea goes, if you want to win the culture wars in America and defeat the Muslims abroad.
(Though it seems to me that Quiverfull leaders would find they have a lot in common with Iran's ayatollahs if they all sat down to a glass of tea. Theocracy guiding democracy! No more eye babies! Hair coverings! I think they would come to a fruitful interfaith understanding.)
Joyrce seems to have caught some of the cataclysmic urgency that drives her subjects, although in the opposite direction: "You GUYS, the crazy Christians OUTBREEDING us. We have to do something!"
On the one hand, this seems a little alarmist. On the other hand, if you go out and read some Quiverfull materials - like, say, So Much More or its companion website, written by Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin (who seem, leaving their beliefs aside, quite charming and thoughtful) to instruct young women how to be proper Quiverfull girls - well...
No college, naturally - too much chance for corruption. Not even missionary work is allowed, because it takes a girl's focus outside of her home. Defer to your brothers, even much younger brothers, to teach them how to be properly masterful men.
Read that, and it's hard not to feel a little alarmist about it.
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Date: 2011-11-15 11:27 pm (UTC)