Those who adopt any part of its lifestyle can’t help picking up its philosophy.” “Family planning,” Pride argues, “is the mother of abortion. Feminism is a totally self-consistent system aimed at rejecting God’s role for women. “What most do not see is that one demand leads to the other. “Christians have accepted feminists’ ‘moderate’ demands for family planning and careers while rejecting the ‘radical’ side of feminism - meaning lesbianism and abortion,” writes Pride. Pride argues that feminism is a religion in its own right, one that is inherently incompatible with Christianity. 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. 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. ![]() “Our bodies are meant to be a living sacrifice,” write the Hesses. 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. 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. Women’s attempts to control their own bodies - the Lord’s temple - are a seizure of divine power. 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. They refuse any attempt to regulate pregnancy. They home-school their families, attend fundamentalist churches and follow biblical guidelines of male headship - “Father knows best” - and female submissiveness. Quiverfull parents try to have upwards of six children. 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. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. Brooks called these parents “natalists” and described their progeny as a new wave of “Red-Diaper Babies” - as in “red state.”īut 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. 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. Wendy Dufkin in Coxsackie has her thirteen. Tracie Moore, a 39-year-old midwife who lives in southern Kentucky, is mother to fourteen. Lives such as these: Janet Wolfson is a 44-year-old mother of eight in Canton, Georgia. ![]() 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.” ![]() But after the kids leave, Pastor Stan doesn’t exhort his congregation to bear children.
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