By Kathryn Joyce

The Christian “Quiverfull” movement measures a mother’s spiritual resolve by the number of children she raises, each one an arrow in the quiver of God’s army.

[The following is republished with persmission from this week’s issue of <a href="http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061127/joyce" The Nation
. Kathryn Joyce is the former managing editor of The Revealer.]

When the Gospel Community Church in Coxsackie, New York, breaks midservice to excuse children for Sunday school, nearly half of the 225-strong congregation patters toward the back of the worship hall: the five youngest children of Pastor Stan Slager’s eight, assistant pastor Bartly Heneghan’s eleven and the Dufkin family’s thirteen, among many others. “The Missionettes,” a team of young girls who perform ribbon dances during the praise music, put down their “glory hoops” to join their classmates; the pews empty out. It’s the un-ignorable difference between the families at Gospel Community and those in the rest of the town that’s led some to wonder if the church isn’t a cult that forces its disciples to keep pushing out children.

But after the kids leave, Pastor Stan doesn’t exhort his congregation to bear children. His approach is more subtle, reminding them to present their bodies as living sacrifices to the Lord, and preaching to them about Acts 5:20: Go tell “all the words of this life.” Or, in Pastor Stan’s guiding translation, to lead lives that make outsiders think, “Christianity is real,” lives that “demand an explanation.”

Lives such as these: Janet Wolfson is a 44-year-old mother of eight in Canton, Georgia. Tracie Moore, a 39-year-old midwife who lives in southern Kentucky, is mother to fourteen. Wendy Dufkin in Coxsackie has her thirteen. And while Jamie Stoltzfus, a 27-year-old Illinois mom, has only four children so far, she plans on bearing enough to populate “two teams.” All four mothers are devoted to a way of life New York Times columnist David Brooks has praised as a new spiritual movement taking hold among exurban and Sunbelt families. Brooks called these parents “natalists” and described their progeny as a new wave of “Red-Diaper Babies”–as in “red state.”

But Wolfson, Moore and thousands of mothers like them call themselves and their belief system “Quiverfull.” They borrow their name from Psalm 127: “Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies in the gate.” Quiverfull mothers think of their children as no mere movement but as an army they’re building for God.

Quiverfull parents try to have upwards of six children. They home-school their families, attend fundamentalist churches and follow biblical guidelines of male headship–“Father knows best”–and female submissiveness. They refuse any attempt to regulate pregnancy. Quiverfull began with the publication of Rick and Jan Hess’s 1989 book, A Full Quiver: Family Planning and the Lordship of Christ, which argues that God, as the “Great Physician” and sole “Birth Controller,” opens and closes the womb on a case-by-case basis. Women’s attempts to control their own bodies–the Lord’s temple–are a seizure of divine power.

Though there are no exact figures for the size of the movement, the number of families that identify as Quiverfull is likely in the thousands to low tens of thousands. Its word-of-mouth growth can be traced back to conservative Protestant critiques of contraception–adherents consider all birth control, even natural family planning (the rhythm method), to be the province of prostitutes–and the growing belief among evangelicals that the decision of mainstream Protestant churches in the 1950s to approve contraception for married couples led directly to the sexual revolution and then Roe v. Wade.

“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. 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.

Pride argues that feminism is a religion in its own right, one that is inherently incompatible with Christianity. “Christians have accepted feminists’ ‘moderate’ demands for family planning and careers while rejecting the ‘radical’ side of feminism–meaning lesbianism and abortion,” writes Pride. “What most do not see is that one demand leads to the other. Feminism is a totally self-consistent system aimed at rejecting God’s role for women. Those who adopt any part of its lifestyle can’t help picking up its philosophy.” “Family planning,” Pride argues, “is the mother of abortion. A generation had to be indoctrinated in the ideal of planning children around personal convenience before abortion could be popular.”

Instead of picketing clinics, Pride writes, Christians should fight abortion by demonstrating that children are an “unqualified blessing” by having as many as God gives them. Only a determination among Christian women to take up their submissive, motherly roles with a “military air” and become “maternal missionaries” will lead the Christian army to victory. Thus is Quiverfull part of Mary Pride’s whole-cloth solution to women’s liberation: embracing an opposing way of life as total and “self-consistent” as feminism, and turning back the tide on a society gone wrong by populating the world with right-thinking Christians.

The gentle manner of Deidre Welch, another Coxsackie mom, with four boys, seems at odds with Quiverfull’s militaristic language, which describes children as weapons of spiritual war, as arrows shot out by their parents. But she describes the movement toward larger families in the same way: “God is bringing revelation on the world. He wants to raise up His army. He wants His children to be.”

Angel Mays, a 31-year-old mother to three in West Virginia, spoke with me just before she was to have her tubal ligation reversed in order to make her body “God’s home” again. Mays suspects a divine purpose to her change of heart and believes the Quiverfull and home-schooling movements are signs of a revival. “It seems the Lord is preparing for something, and I’m wondering if He’s doing something big. There’s so much selfishness, with people thinking they need to make their lives easier. But we’re to seek the Kingdom of God first. The further the nation gets away from God, the starker the Christian contrast grows. The darker the world gets, the more we stand out.”

In his 2004 column for the Times, David Brooks concluded that mothers like Welch and Mays are too busy parenting to wage culture war. A home-schooling mother of nine on the 2,700-family-strong online forum Quiverfull Digest (www.quiverfull.com) responded in irritation to Brooks’s misunderstanding of the movement’s aims. Raising a large family, she replied, was itself her “battle station,” as deliberately political an act as canvassing for conservative candidates, not to mention part of a long-term plan to win the culture war “demographically.”

Population is a preoccupation for many Quiverfull believers, who trade statistics on the falling white birthrate in European countries like Germany and France. Every ethnic conflict becomes evidence for their worldview: Muslim riots in France, Latino immigration in California, Sharia law in Canada. The motivations aren’t always racist, but the subtext of “race suicide” is often there.

Pastor Heneghan of Gospel Community Church sees the issue of population growth in more biblical terms, specifically those taken from Genesis and Revelation. “Some people think that what I’m doing–having eleven children–is wrong. I don’t really get into that much. The Bible says ‘be fruitful and multiply.’ That’s my belief system. They don’t believe in God, so they think we have to conserve what we have. But in my belief system, He’s going to give us a new earth.” Overpopulation isn’t a problem in a universe where God promises a clean global slate.

As a movement, Quiverfull has grown in a grassroots style. There’s little top-down instruction or organization from church leaders; instead it spreads through community Bible studies, home-schooling forums, “prolife” activist circles or small ministries such as “Titus 2” wife-mentoring groups, which instruct Christian women in biblical wifehood. Supporter Allan Carlson, an economic historian who heads the Howard Center for Family, Religion and Society and advises conservative legislators like Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, sees Quiverfull’s most significant roots in the home-schooling movement, and as with the early days of home-schooling, he sees Quiverfull as a populist movement with “a wonderful anarchy to it.”

But while home-schoolers may be more receptive to the idea of unplanned families, most prospectives actually learn about the Quiverfull conviction through the movement’s literature: Pride’s and the Hesses’ books, Nancy Campbell’s Be Fruitful and Multiply, Rachel Scott’s Birthing God’s Mighty Warriors or Sam and Bethany Torode’s Open Embrace. And most people find these books after hearing the theory that birth-control pills are an abortifacient (that hormonal contraception such as the pill can cause the “chemical abortion” of accidentally fertilized eggs). This belief is something the Quiverfull conviction has in common with the larger Christian right, which has recently embraced a radically expanded “prolife” agenda that encompasses not just abortion but birth control and sexual abstinence. Taking a page from the antiabortion movement, anticontraception activists have gradually broadened their aims, moving from defending individual “conscientiously objecting” pharmacists who refuse to dispense contraceptives on moral grounds to extending the same “right of refusal” to corporate entities such as insurers, to an out-and-out offensive against birth control as the murder-through-prevention of 3,000 lives a day and also as the future undoing of Western civilization.

The latter two points were recently made in Illinois by British demographer Andrew Pollard, a speaker at the pioneering “Contraception Is Not the Answer” conference in September. That event served as a sort of coming-out party for the anticontraception movement, following an August cover story on “The Case for Kids” in the evangelical flagship magazine Christianity Today. Pundits warning of a coming “demographic divide,” wherein fecund red staters will far outnumber barren blue state liberals, are further ratcheting up interest in fertility politics. But before the movement made this mainstream splash, a quieter opposition to birth control had been building for years.

Among the first contemporary Protestants advancing the theory that contraception is anathema to Scripture was Charles Provan, an independent Pennsylvania printer, lay theologian and father to ten who was until recently deeply involved in the Holocaust revisionist movement. In 1989 Provan, whom both Pride and the Hesses name as an inspiration, published The Bible and Birth Control, which has been called the authoritative source for Protestants seeking scriptural guidance on contraception. In it, Provan traces Protestant opposition to birth control to three main scriptural bases: Psalm 127, the Genesis command to “be fruitful and multiply,” and the biblical story of Onan, slain by God for spilling his seed on the ground (seen by Provan as a form of birth control).

No Protestant denomination accepted birth control until 1930, when the Anglican Church endorsed contraceptive use among married couples. Quiverfull author Rachel Scott sees that moment as the beginning of a biblically prophesied era of “70 years in Babylon”–in this case a spiritual Babylon that declared children to be a “choice”–that ended (rather inexactly) with 9/11, seventy-one years later.

The fall of the Twin Towers is a popular turning point in the Quiverfull narrative. Becca Campos, a 34-year-old Nebraska mother of five who works as an administrator for a sterilization reversal ministry, Blessed Arrows, explains: “The Bible says that if a nation humbles itself and prays together, God will turn the hearts of the fathers back to the children. After 9/11, people started looking inward.” Campos sees the schedule change of her 2001 tubal ligation reversal in Mexico–from September 10 to September 8–as God’s provision that she shouldn’t be stuck south of the border during her recovery, unable to board a plane home. The references aren’t so much Falwellian bombast–9/11 as God’s judgment on a sinful country–as the magical thinking that goes along with a faith strong enough to convince poor families, who are struggling to make ends meet as it is, that God will provide for them unequivocally.

“Lean not on your own understanding,” Quiverfull mom Tracie Moore tells me, describing the scriptural foundations she’s discovered for the movement: Children are a blessing, a reward, an inheritance. Don’t worry about money–the Moores have never had much of it–because God will provide for his flock.

And in its most innocuous self-explanations, this is what Quiverfull is about: faith, pure and simple. Faith that God won’t give women more children than they can handle, and faith that by opening themselves up to receive multiple “blessings,” they will bring God’s favor upon them in other areas of life as well: Their husbands will get better jobs; God will send a neighbor with a sack of used children’s clothes just when the soles on Johnny’s shoes fall out. God, many Quiverfull women say, deals with their hearts about birth control, and if they submit, they are cared for.

This last equation–submit, and be cared for–is a fitting summary of the social logic of the Quiverfull life. While most Quiverfull families appear to be solidly working class or low income, even those in the middle-income brackets struggle with the financial challenges of caring for a ten-person family. But for many Quiverfull mothers, this struggle is still preferable to the alternatives they see society offering working-class women–alternatives they see as the fruit of secular feminism. For poor women, the feminist fight for job equality won them no career path but rather the right to pink-collar labor, as a housekeeper, a waitress, a clerk. The sexual revolution did not bring them self-exploration and fulfillment but rather loosened the social restraints that bound men to the household as husbands and fathers. Even for women who stayed in the home, the incidence of women in the workplace led employers to stop offering a “family wage” that could sustain both parents and children.

Mary Pride puts it in biblical terms–feminism made wage slaves out of women who had once been slaves to God; it made “unpaid prostitutes” out of women who should have been godly mothers and wives. Yet there’s something deeper here than standard antifeminist backlash. While economic and cultural complaints may attract believers to Quiverfull, conviction, and the momentum of a growing movement, are what sustains them.

Rachel Scott, who calls herself a “one-woman Quiverfull activist,” describes her conversion moment…

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Kathryn Joyce, editor-at-large of The Revealer, is working on a book about women in Christian conservative movements.