Yes, you can find pretty much anything in the US to some degree. If you can think to ask, “Is there a group somewhere that worships goats and is waiting for Ronald Reagan to rise from the grave and complete his dissertation on how to prevent cyclical recessions and beat the Commies once and for all?”, the answer is probably yes, somewhere. They have a compound in central Nebraska. Or maybe it is in a small cove on one of the Aleutian islands. Or maybe they are in the old Community Hall in an abandoned Pennsylvania coal-mining town. But they are there.
So, what was the living situation? The way you describe all the babies and children being around it sounds like you lived in a commune-like situation. But then you say everyone lived on farms and that means far apart. Did you all live on farms and just spent a heck of a lot of time in the church building?
Where did your family’s foster children come from? How many did you have at once?
It was hard. She fell into a deep depression that lasted for about 5 years, and became very hesitant and unsure of herself for about that same amount of time. She had gone from being essentially a ‘kept woman’ with no expectations of understanding or handling finances or earning money to support a family to being alone with three kids and the support network (the church family) that she trusted would help her, had pushed her away.
We moved closer to her family, and she eventually found another husband to love, and found a new church which was a better fit for her personality and goals.
But yes. Those were a very dark few years.
This is very interesting.
The socializing exclusively with one another and the gossip reminds me of Jehovah’s Witnesses. The social cost of leaving makes it very difficult to get out, which gets worse the longer you’re in. I wouldn’t use the word “cult” for either group, but I’m curious whether you think that aspect is inadvertent or deliberate, and benign or malign?
Also, do you miss your childhood friends?
We were mostly homeschooled, but around middle school age for me, there were enough families and kids that the church started their own school. They used a system of very Christian self-paced paper booklets that you worked your way through with very little actual instruction. Once you hit your ‘natural ability limit’ as a girl, then that was pretty much it for you, whereever that fell. There weren’t grades as such, because they felt that grades were an artificial ‘state-imposed’ classification. I want to say the system was published by Bob Jones University Press, but I can’t remember for sure.
When homeschooling, the idea was that the fathers of each family selected the materials and learning styles that would best benefit that family. Certain materials were promoted or encoraged, but I don’t remember us being monitored or checked. We did have to be a little careful because my dad didn’t care, so mom was actually doing the picking out of materials, and we had to make it appear that she was acting on his instructions instead of independently.
I’ve often gotten the impression that there are more liberal journalists mocking “Quiverful” Christians than there are actual Quiverful Christians.
But I’ve been wrong before. So, just how many people do you believe are out there who actively identify with the Quiverful movement, if it even IS a movement?
Note, there are many conservative Christians of various stripes who are open to having 3, 4, or 5+ kids, but who don’t regard that as part of any political or religious agenda! They’re just happy about having a number of kids that seemed fairly normal when I was a kid but which now seems outrageous.
Did you ever watch the South Park episode “Hooked on Monkey Fonics” that covered homeschooling and patriarchy?
In our group, I think they were laid-back and informal enough that someone could have gotten a hysterectomy, but it would have been seen as a failure of faith. If your faith was true, then God would provide. There was a strong bias against the medical establishment, but despite that, most if not all of our babies were born in a hospital, not at home. I believe that is an oddity among quiverfullers, so that’s part of why I place our group on the fringes of the movement.
There would be no official proscription against marriage, but the church fathers would not be putting her name forward for the ‘good’ boys to marry her. Girl children were more often than not simply told who they were going to court and marry. It was partly her father’s decision, but the boy’s father and the church elders would have to approve, and if she were sterile or unable to have children, that would be seen as a special ‘cross to bear’ and she would likely be married to an older church man -a widower or an unmarried church elder, who would be able to help her bear the burden.
Men in our group did fairly well (as far as I know from the perspective of a child), so it wasn’t an issue for our group that I know of, but there were lots of family businesses, and lots of ‘grey market’ trading and money exchange going on. Tithing and giving offerings were strongly encouraged, as was donating to help with families facing tragedy or difficulty. As long as you were a member in good standing, the church really was like a family you could rely on for spiritual, emotional, and material help.
Homeschooling started at the same time as school desegregation. Coincidence…or God Incidence?
Thanks for your answers, Lasciel!
Wikipedia’s article on Quiverfull claims “several thousand”, but if you want a bigger Christian movement with ridiculous amount of kids there’s Laestadianism with “between 144,000 and 219,000” people. That one also shows it isn’t just an American thing.
I don’t know that I’d call it recruitment. As a child, it just seemed like a natural coming-together of likeminded people into a larger nebulous group that did things together to support each other. Looking back, I’m pretty sure the church leaders were actually recruiting a good church friend of my mother at the time, who already had like seven kids, and was super invested in homeschooling and homesteading. My mom had similar interests and fears, so I think now she just tagged along. We certainly weren’t the type of family they would want.
The core of our group was about 6 families, and I think at least 4 of them were related by blood or marriage. They were open that they had split away from a church that they did not feel was ‘one with the spirit’ any longer, and we all were a bit awed that they could feel the urgings of the Holy Spirit and be brave enough to strike out on their own as a little family church. The other families mostly drifted in through homeschooling associations, or like our family, through the mothers becoming friends and feeling people out at ‘obvious’ church and then inviting them to come to a meeting.
Our group was a little weird. There were several local churches that people went to as their ‘obvious’ church, and then in addition to that, we had our ‘homeschooling group’ real church meetings at people’s homes or places of business. The location always shifted, depending on how many people we were at the time (and as I realize now, which families were successfully currying favor with the church elders). So we had normal church that was all we were supposed to admit to authorities, to be our ‘beard’ in case of persecution, and then this second secretive layer where we worshiped and communed with each other, and socialized as a group.
Are you living life by a “psychological negative-response,” for lack of a better way to put it? That is, “Thing A had a negative effect on me, so I’ll always have a negative view of Thing A?”
But homeschooling is NOT confined just to fundamentalist Christians, even though they get the most publicity.
Here in Austin, I know quite a few homeschoolers, and only about a quarter of them are devout Christians. There are a lot of old hippies (and neo-hippies) who homeschool because they think public education is too rigid and structured. There are a lot of super-smart high-tech types who homeschool because they think the local school curricula aren’t difficult or challenging enough. There are still more ordinary folks who can’t afford a private school but HATE their local publoic schools for one reason or another.
This is a specific point I ought to make. The movement (as a named and purposeful movement) is actually only about as old as my parents, so MOST people my parents’ ages that are Quiverfullers explicitly joined these types of groups - there wasn’t anything there before for them to grow up in.
My family was a bit peculiar in that they already had a reasoning, school-age child (in public kindegarten!) when they joined. The core families had broken away while their kids were still very little, or in some cases before the kids were born. “Recruited” families were either already homeschooling fundamentalist Christians, or had infants to toddlers.
My generation is really the first ones that have had the opportunity to ‘grow up’ inside the movement, and that is going to be an interesting group to watch. Will they be like the Amish and (mostly) the Mormons and stick with it? Or will they be more inclined to rebel because it was their parents’ choice of lifestyle, not theirs? The religious underpinnings seem to work very well to keep people from thinking critically about their living situation.
I’m imagining you find them by following the lines of children who are sent out to forage for food.
Pretty much like you find an anthill.
I know this is a joke, but you might be surprised. I have a feeling that Katniss (or a heavily interpreted version of her that does not include the final book of the trilogy) is a perfect hero for some girl Quiverfullers and their parents.
What does she want? To provide care for her mother and sister. Everything she does is to that purpose, and it is a totally feminine purpose. Now, the fighting might cause a bit of trouble with some really strict groups, but the lifestyle of the District 12 people is exactly what quiverfullers aspire to - hunt, grow, trade, live, all without interference from a powerful, sinful, depraved central government. Katniss allows them to show a woman acting more powerfully, but still within the sphere assigned to her - protecting the children. That gives more active or less nurturing girls a chance to be happier and feel like they are understood and allowed a chance to contribute in their own ways.
In addition, the psychological damage inflicted by the Games and the Capitol can be used to show how hard it is for a girl to act outside of her nature to kill and fight (as opposed to hunting, which is good and natural).
So, it is a funny joke, but I think that clever parents and church leaders use Katniss to help their own ends, and it isn’t even that much of a stretch to do it.
In general, yes, the medical community is very much distrusted. Our group wasn’t very strict, so our kids were vaccinated, our babies were hospital-born, and routine medical care (especially dental care or emergency care like broken bones) was encouraged. However, mental illness wasn’t considered real, and it and deadly diseases like cancer were believe to stem from demonic assault, and were properly treated as spiritual afflictions rather than as medical ones.
My father did receive traditional medical care, but his type of cancer made recovery unlikely from the start, which I learned after the fact was conveyed very clearly to my parents. My mother refused to accept this, and ‘bore witness’ that he would be healed. She fought him continually about the medical treatments, which he undertook to extend his life a bit, and she thought of as a failure.
I wasn’t old enough (and when I was old enough, I was occupied by his illness) to be aware of medical procedures for things like fibroids. From research later, it seems you are correct that less-strict groups are more open to assistive medical technology. It also seems that the more strict groups are joining the current anti-vaxx stupidity.
WHY did your family join this group? Were you 6 or 7 when your family joined? You said your dad wan’t especially … diligent in his belief? So was it your mom – did she want to pop out kids like popcorn?
Oh lord.
Ok, here’s the deal. Lots of quiverfullers are in it for the surface trappings. They want to be with people who aren’t going to give them shit over wanting umpty-million little Juniors and Misses running around, who understand what it is to want to live simply off the land - either farming or being as simplistic as possible in their work and home lives in towns or cities - and who understand that a little concern about government oversight isn’t paranoid.
That’s most of them, and that’s very much the image they want to portray - see the Duggars and the other related family shows.
That said, the explicit concept at the center of the movement is to raise up children to be an army of the Lord. For most people, that army is a spiritual one, but for the people at the center of the movement, it is a very real, very practical idea.
Quiverfullers need kids to offset the population boom by non-white, non-Christian (Catholics don’t count) people in America and throughout the world so that Christians can take over the land and receive the blessings of God.
It’s called Dominionism, and the basic concept is that God promised the world to his children, and then we mucked about for a while before the Founding Fathers got it nearly right with America, but they failed by being too merciful and not copying the Hebrews from the Old Testament and slaughtering the Natives and by allowing other non-Christians in. God’s still willing to hold up his end of the bargain, as soon as we get with the program and take Dominion over the land like we’re supposed to do, He’ll swoop in with spiritual firepower and help us conquer our enemies from then onward.
Lovely philosophy, isn’t it?