Tag: quiverfull

  • It’s only going to cost you everything you have and everything you are

    Vyckie Garrison said something very important and clarifying in a public Facebook post just now:

    Quiverfull is not a cult. People like the Duggars who embrace the worldview and practice the lifestyle are not adhering to some unique, anomalous form of Christianity. Quiverfull IS regular Christian “family values” teaching writ large and lived out to its logical conclusion.
    True Believers™ are not the primary problem here … the only thing “extreme” about Quiverfull families is the degree to which they put Christian ideals into practice.

    Being in a personal relationship with Jesus Christ is a set up for dysfunctional game-playing and crazy-making head trips. According to Christianity, Jesus subjected himself to torture and death, so that we could have the “free gift” of eternal life … and by “free,” He means, it’s only going to cost you everything you have and everything you are.

    When the very definition of perfect love is sacrificing your children and martyring yourself, there is no place for emotionally healthy concepts like boundaries, consent, equality, and mutuality. There is no form of Christianity which is not inherently messed up and spiritually abusive.

    There … I said it.

    And said it brilliantly.

  • Biblical principles

    Vyckie was on CNN last night, so now more people know something about Quiverfull.

    //www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7kMGhaLUb8

  • No bearing on the validity of Biblical Patriarchy

    Libby Anne wonders if Vision Forum is collapsing altogether.

    There has been no public announcement, but the Vision Forum Ministries site now includes only the resignation statements and the Vision Forum Inc. site is no longer selling anything, or even listing any products. This suggests to me that Vision Forum has collapsed entirely, and that the corporate wing is disappearing in addition to the ministry wing.

    If this complete collapse is the case, as it appears, this is an extremely positive change. Vision Forum has been probably THE pillar of the Christian Patriarchy movement for the past decade, and is now gone. This is not to say that Christian Patriarchy is gone. It is not. There are still organizations like Bill Gothard’s ATI and No Greater Joy Ministries, not to mention leaders like Kevin Swanson, Doug Wilson, and R. C. Sproul Jr. Christian Patriarchy will go on, but Vision Forum was a major pillar that was extremely effective in promoting this ideology throughout the Christian homeschool community, and that pillar is now gone.

    I didn’t even know it had partly collapsed, so I looked for background.

    Julie Ingersoll provides background at the Huffington Post in November.

    There are important and disturbing developments in the Doug Phillips scandal that has rocked the Christian home school movement. As I noted in my earlier post, Phillips’ carefully parsed initial resignation statement admitting to an “inappropriate relationship” raised more questions than it answered.

    Now reports are circulating that the scandal may well have multiple levels including claims that the “relationship” was with a nanny, lasted between six and 10 years, and likely began when she was in her late teens. This would make biblical patriarchy’s emphasis on authority combined with the way in which girls are intentionally kept vulnerable, dependent and submissive, crucially important. The young woman may or may not have been technically old enough to consent in Texas, but the context of biblical patriarchy would make this an abuse of power if not a crime.

    Well yes, and that’s the whole point of the enterprise. Patriarchy is the core of it. Big up men and small down women, and there’s your heaven on earth – for people who like that sort of thing.

    So to that earlier post that Ingersoll linked to.

    His supporters are lauding his resignation letter as appropriately contrite repentance and arguing that this has no bearing on the validity of Biblical Patriarchy. But actually it does, making this more important than another hypocritical cheating scandal.

    Phillips is a key figure bringing Christian Reconstruction into the larger home school world. Building upon R.J. Rushdoony’s postmillennialism and “Biblical Philosophy of History,” he teaches home-schooling families to “exercise dominion” through 200-year plans, “multi-generational faithfulness” and “Biblical Patriarchy.”

    Aka let’s throw out all those modern ideas about equality and freedom and human rights and go back to the way people lived in Palestine three thousand years ago.

    Phillips’ infidelity is more than a private matter because, by design, his Biblical Patriarchy makes women vulnerable such that even with a husband repeatedly violating his marriage vows, practically speaking, a wife has no options.

    The Family, in Biblical Patriarchy, is the primary institution through which God has delegated authority entirely to men. Women are to be “in submission in all things,” first to their fathers and then to husbands, chosen by fathers. The purpose of the family is the exercise of the patriarch’s dominion, especially through procreation. Women are to bear as many children as is possible. Anything short of that is deemed selfishness, accommodation with the “culture of death” and rebellion against God’s will.

    Education is solely a family concern and no other institution may intervene. That they oppose even with the smallest of regulations preventing child abuse is a point pressed by Phillips’ home schooling opponents.

    Education for girls within Biblical Patriarchy is focused on training them for domestic duties. Vision Forum’s catalogs, Beautiful Girlhood Collection and the All American Boy’s Adventure Catalog, stated purpose is to teach “Biblical” gender norms: meekness, submissiveness and dependency for girls; chivalry, curiosity and adventurousness for boys.

    What does that look like? A recipe for molding all women into helpless dependents or slaves, and men into their permanent bosses.

    What could possibly go wrong?

     

     

     

  • Meeting Vyckie

    I just spent a couple of hours talking to Vyckie Garrison of No Longer Quivering, who is in town on a visit. It was a great conversation.

    We talked about her transition from the Quiverfull life to freedom, and the worries about putting her children in school for the first time. Were they too sheltered, were they too angry? But they flourished. Her third-grader Andy had an especially good teacher, Mrs Bloom, who showed Vyckie a paper he’d written; the assignment was to write about “changes.” One classmate wrote about how life changed when the family got a kitten. Andy had rather more profound changes to write about.

    Everything she said amounted to an endorsement of secular life as opposed to theocratic (meaning, here, pervading every aspect of existence) life. Before she left her children were neither happy nor compliant – it’s not as if they exchanged freedom and joy for harmony and order. Before she left she didn’t know her children as people, or individuals; now she knows how very different and interesting they all are.

    She’s a lifeline for women who want to escape. She is one impressive woman.

  • Defiantly wholesome

    Want to splash around in morbidity for a moment?

    There’s always the new season of 19 and Counting.

    And Counting – geddit? It’s not really “and Counting” now because Michelle Duggar miscarried #20. The new season is kind of morbid that way.

    And not just that way. I find it kind of morbid overall. “Morbid” isn’t really the right word, I suppose – the Atlantic’s “creepy” is better – but it is, in a way – what’s dead is the mind. The whole atmosphere is Stepfordish. Yes they’re all very cheery and smiley and friendly and warm – but so would programmed pod people be.

    This is, at least on film, a defiantly wholesome family; these kids aren’t constantly moaning about shopping malls and video games, cellphones and parties. Maybe that stuff factors in off-air, but in TLC’s carefully edited version of the Duggars’ world, all children, ages 2 to 18, are happy to be gamboling about together in a cornfield. That’s fine! It’s a little weird, of course, but why would anyone watch TLC if they didn’t want something a little weird?

    Yes but the weirdness isn’t really fine, given what we know about how this weirdness is achieved. As Richard Lawson goes on to say.

    And then of course there was the infusion of religion that probably earns the series a fair number of looky-loos (ahem). Michelle Duggar, the broodmare who gave birth to this baseball team, was invited to speak to a ladies group at a nearby church, and though what we saw of the speech was mostly a series of platitudes about family and children and all that, there was a single shot that said much more — the camera panned over a handout that Michelle brought to the event, and the content was pretty unsettling. TLC maybe included this shot for people like us, who of course paused it and advanced the frames to read as much of it as we could, and, whooo boy, was it unpleasant. It was all about how to make your husband happy in a marriage, which is of paramount importance to patriarch-dominated Quiverfull families. There were things about how wives shouldn’t refuse their husbands’ sexual advances, about how self-reliance is what kills marriages, about not stepping out of bounds in terms of what your responsibilities are as a wife (do too much and you emasculate him, you see). It was all reeeeally gross stuff that you never really hear the Duggars talking about on the show, but is absolutely the unspoken (on camera, at least) foundation of their family.

    We know. We know this thanks to Libby Anne and Vyckie Garrison and others. 19 and Counting is morbid because of the death of potential and freedom and exploration.

     

  • 18, 19, 20!

    Oh hey, what exciting news, the Duggars are going to have child # 20 – that is, Michelle Duggar is pregnant with child # 20. Quiverfull strikes another blow for theocracy.

    The Quiverfull movement places emphasis on the importance of women submitting to their husbands and fathers, and is often recognized as a backlash to the gains made in women’s rights by the feminist movement. It is an anti-feminist backlash that holds that gender equality is contrary to God’s law and that women’s highest calling is as wives and “prolific” mothers. In line with other fundamentalist Christians, they believe a woman’s place is in the home, breeding children and serving her husband.

    The movement embraces misogyny as God’s law. Women are reduced to breeders. Children reduced to metaphorical cannon fodder in to be brainwashed and sent out as cultural warriors, fighting for Christian dominion over America.

    Yes yes yes, but let’s don’t be a party-pooper – they’re going to have another baaaaaaaybeeeeeeeeeee for Americans to watch on tv. Isn’t that cute?

  • She rebelled herself to death

    There’s a terrifying piece at No Longer Quivering, by a former believer in the child-rearing methods of Michael Pearl. She followed the plan; it didn’t work; she did what Pearl said to do, and followed it harder. Hit harder, was what you were supposed to do when it didn’t work. Hit harder, and blame the child. She had a hard time with that, but her ex-husband didn’t.

    My ex-husband got angry with the kids for thwarting the Pearl method, but he remained coldly self-controlled. He also left bruises. A lot of bruises.

    Why didn’t I stop him? I finally did, but early in my marriage I was paralyzed by fear and brainwashed by bad teaching. We both feared raising ungodly kids. We were looking for confirmation that some part of this system worked, and my ex-husband began to get results. The children flinched when he even moved. Cowered when he reached for a spanking implement. Had semi-seizures on the carpet following “biblical correction.” We got compliance with our wishes. Eventually, there was immediate and unquestioning compliance. My ex-husband had quelled the rebellion in three kids. He had created unfocused, freaked-out little robots who obeyed.

    That last sentence chills me.

    To Train Up a Child is a manual of progressive violence against children. Not only are there no stopgaps to prevent child abuse, the book is a mandate to use implements to inflict increasingly intense pain in the face of continued disobedience. The part about not causing injury is vague and open to interpretation, but the part about never backing down or shirking your parental duty to spank harder and harder is crystal clear. The Pearls’ teachings will lead, inescapably, to extremely strong-willed kids being abused and sometimes murdered by fundamentalist parents who are determined to “break” those children.

    Like Hana Williams.

    The only way to break the wills of children like this is to kill them. The 911 call that Carri Williams made to the police dispatcher says it all.

    “Operator: What’s the emergency?

    Carri Williams: Um, I think my daughter just killed herself.

    Operator:  Why do you say that?

    Carri Williams, Um, she’s really rebellious, and she’s been outside refusing to come in, and she’s been throwing herself all around, and then she collapsed.”

    And died of exposure, with her mouth full of mud. Because she was so rebellious.

  • Iphigenia in America

    Vyckie Garrison reviews a Quiverfull classic, Me? Obey him?

    I am no less rational than my (ex)husband.  He also is gifted with a strong intuition and emotional intelligence.  Convinced as we were that I was more susceptible to Satanic deception, our family was deprived of my reasonable input in decision making.  My intelligence was squelched, my intuition was distrusted and my feelings were denied.  My husband developed an artificially inflated sense of his own powers of logic.  I can’t count how many times he said to me, “What you are saying sounds reasonable, but how do I know that Satan is not using you to deceive me?”  I had no good defense.  According to the Scriptures, we had every reason to believe that I was indeed being used to lead my husband astray.

    What a horrible, sad, tragic way to live. How heart-breaking that Vyckie was convinced that she was susceptible to Satanic deception.

    But it gets even more so.

    When a concerned friend reported our family to Child Protective Services, my ex-husband lost custody of the children due to his abuse.  The social worker told me that I was guilty of “failure to protect.”  The only thing that prevented me from having my parental rights terminated and my children placed in foster care was my willingness to submit to a full psychological evaluation, undergo individual and family counseling, and cooperate with random unannounced home visits by Social Services.

    My older children rightfully blame me for not protecting them against their father’s abuse.  Even though they know that I was influenced by books such as “Me? Obey Him?” to believe that it was God’s will to submit to the abuse, my children cannot be fooled into thinking that I was not really responsible for their suffering.  I have apologized for my neglect.  Most of my children have forgiven me — still, the damage is done and some things can’t (and shouldn’t) be forgotten.

    Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum. (That was about a parent abusing a child too. Iphigenia.)

  • When it’s a problem

    Libby Anne gets responses from people saying “yes but we home-school and we follow Jesus but we don’t fit your description.” She gently points out that if they don’t fit the description then she’s not writing about them…and goes on to provide a list of the genuine problems with “the various teachings of Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull” [italics hers], not having a large family or homeschooling. Among them –

    • When parents teach their daughters to dream of nothing but homemaking and seek to kill any other desire or dream, that is a problem.
    • When parents teach their daughters that boys are to go out into the world and take dominion while girls are to take dominion by doing laundry, that is a problem.
    • When parents teach their daughters that women are created to serve men, that is a problem.
    • When adult daughters are expected to obey their fathers and remain under their fathers’ authority, that is a problem.
    • When parents insist that they control their adult daughters’ romantic relationships and can’t trust them to be adults and make their own decisions, that is a problem.

    She knows this from the inside.

  • His brazen feminist mother-in-law attacked him with vegetables

    Digging.

    No Longer Quivering has a section for nlq stories. There are a lot of stories. I’m reading chapter 2 of one story, by Tess Willoughby.

    It was the year when we went to a conference and met a pastor who advocated corporal punishment for wives, and Nate took to his teachings like a duck to water…

    Nate and I were part of the Christian separatist movement of the late ’80s and early ’90s, rooted in the belief that liberals and “secular humanists” would destroy the moral fiber of America. Christian separatists— right-wing religious splinter groups including white supremacists, Y2K survivalists, secessionists, reconstructionists, and so on—believed that the upstanding patriotic Christian Americans needed to separate themselves and create a fortress of Christian homes where the true leaders of tomorrow would be raised…

    When I was eight months pregnant with Jack, Nate ordered me to pick a paperwad up off the living room floor. I refused, and he took me by the forearm and “lovingly compelled” me to pick up the paperwad, while murmuring sweetly in my ear, “I’m sorry, sweetheart, but you need to learn obedience.”

    …

    I was enjoying a cozy kitchen chat with my mom when Nate interrupted with this remark: “A woman is to be under a man at every stage of her life—her father, her husband, and then, if widowed, her son.” I looked at Nate in stupefaction.  The idea of a son’s authority over his widowed mother was a new one, even for me.

    My mother had been shelling her garden peas during Nate’s little speech. She stopped, repeated “under. . .a. . .man,” and began hurling fresh peas at Nate’s balding head. Then she stalked out of the kitchen. I was ordered to gather the peas and pack the car—my visit home was over.

    Incidents like these had convinced Nate that my Mom and Dad were not Christians—at least, not biblical Christians. They were a bad influence on his family.  They needed to be shunned.

    And that’s the fun part. Then she gives birth to Jack, and Nate wants to sleep but newborn Jack keeps crying so Nate –

    Read on.

  • If they will ever, like me, break free

    Libby Anne is, naturally, worried about her siblings.

    …it is hard for me to watch my siblings being raised with beliefs and methods I have come to so oppose. I have to watch my sisters being taught that their only role is in the home, and to see my siblings expected to obey and conform. The hardest part is watching my sisters. I hear them talk about the blessing of fatherly protection against the evils of the world and their future plans to eschew all kinds of birth control and have as many children as possible. I watch them and wonder if they will ever, like me, break free.

    That would be very difficult.

  • He taught me critical thinking

    Another escapee is Libby Anne. She gives a ten-part account of being a good child of Patriarchy and then of being turned around.

    The childhood is by no means all horrible, even seen from the outside. Much of it is quite appealing.

    I also enjoyed gardening. We always had large gardens, and we children did a great deal of the tending and weeding, sometimes waking at dawn in the summer months to weed before the summer heat. In addition to learning to garden, I found books at a homeschool convention about edible plants and medicinal herbs and set out to teach myself these important skills. I learned that dandelions could be eaten in salads, that plantain was good for mosquito bites, and that raspberry leaves made an excellent tea for pregnant women (such as my mother). I even tried to make flour out of clover. I loved walking through marshy areas or abandoned lots looking for plants that matched the pictures in my books, becoming excited at each new find. I knew that a proper wife should be able to forage for food and prepare herbal remedies, especially if the government collapsed and the country descended into anarchy as we always feared it would.

    The proper wife bit and the descent into anarchy bit are a downer, but then that’s apparently what it was like: a mix of patriarchal doctrine and pleasantly industrious rural life.

    But the patriarchal doctrine had some thorns even then.

    My mother was constantly reading books like Me? Obey Him? as she strove to be a better, more submissive wife. This was difficult for my mother, for she was a very strong woman. I watched her war with herself as she tried to reconcile her strong spirit with the submission she believed in so steadfastly. I watched her cry over it, watched it eat away at her. My father, usually a reasonable man, became quite upset with my mother if he felt she was infringing on his authority. His most common response was to give her the silent treatment, and that was enough. In response, my mother generally first felt indignation and then blamed herself for not submitting enough and resolved again and again to do better. While my parents loved each other dearly, this tension added strain to their relationship, and I could see it.

    The sad thing is that it’s an artificial strain, a worked up strain. A reasonable man has no need to think he has an authority that his wife shouldn’t infringe on. If both had thought of each other as partners and equals, they would still have disagreed about things, but without doctrinal anger or resentment or guilt. Nonsense about authority and submission is an extra element. It’s truly sad that people mess themselves up this way. It’s a disaster that they teach their children to do the same.

    In addition to teaching me about theology, politics, and current events, my father taught me to think. He taught me critical thinking, and told me never to believe something just because someone says it, but to always question everything and follow truth wherever it leads. He taught me to never trust authority for authority’s sake and to never be afraid of truth. He taught me logic and how to recognize logical fallacies. Of course, the context of all this was learning to rebut worldly ideas and bogus concepts like global warming and evolution.

    Not patriarchy or submission or god.

    But then Libby Anne went to college…and as so often happens, the doors opened.

    I began to have theological and political conversations with a number of non-Christians. I worked hard to show them the perfection of the Bible, the evidence of young earth creationism, the evils of abortion, and the love of God.

    Strangely, I found a surprising number of my arguments rebutted by arguments I had never heard before. I was told that there were serious problems with creationism, ethical issues with the Bible, and more affective ways to decrease abortion than banning it. I turned to my resources, my books and websites on creationism, theology, and conservative politics, and I tried again. And again. And again. But some things just didn’t add up. I paused my arguments to do some serious research, and I was astounded by what I found.

    An open door.

     

  • He knew what God wanted, and what men wanted

    Woho, looky here – the opposition looks at Vision Forum.

    A former stay-at-home-daughter and now stay-at-home wife and mommy says she wishes she’d gone to college.

    All of these books taught that the world was a very dangerous place for a woman. God had designed her to be at home, creating a peaceful haven for her husband and children. The books said that any girl who left her father’s protection and went out into the world to get an education or job would end up sad and alone, because she was not living the life God willed for her.

    God wanted us to dare to live differently. His plan for women involved getting back to the family principles the home was founded on. Girls needed to be brought up knowing instinctively how to care for babies and keep house. They needed to be taught to be quiet, submissive, and modest and pure. The only way to do this, was to keep separate from the world. So my parent homeschooled and kept me from doing much of anything outside of our family circle, so that I would never get used to experiences outside the home, and I would learn to be content in my homemaking role.

    It sounded so romantic when I was ages 10-13. I was going to be amazing someday! My husband was going to be pleased that I was so good at caring for children and keeping house. I was practicing submission to my father, taking it very seriously whenever he pointed out some behaviour of mine that “would infuriate my husband someday.” He knew what God wanted, and what men wanted. If I wanted to be successful and happy someday, I had to start by pleasing my Daddy.

    In other words…….it’s just what it always sounded like: a scheme for making men happy. (It seems like a radically flawed scheme, to me, because the price of all that obedience and submission is living with an idiot. I would think an adult companion, however independent, would be immeasurably better than a kind of animated doll. But the patriarchs don’t seem to see it that way.)

    So it’s a scheme for making men happy by training girls to be slaves to the men they marry. It’s a sick little system for obliterating women so that men can use them in any way they feel like.

    Sometimes I wished that I had the chance to study more than just cooking, cleaning and sewing, and I did ask my parents if I could take some classes while living at home, but I was reminded that it would only be a waste of time and money to go to college when none of that education would apply in the home. A college atmosphere could take my focus off the Lord, and fill my head with thoughts of career and rebellion. After some begging on my part, Dad said he would permit me to take a few online courses from a very conservative school if I insisted, but it was clear that this was not what he felt was wise. He also said that I had to finish all my high school material first, and that my school work could in no way interfere with my household duties. I was so overwhelmed at the thought of trying to keep both my father and a school happy, that I gave up on the idea of further education.

    “Dad” would be a credit to the Taliban.

  • To impose the lifestyle of Manhattan and Hollywood

    Meet the Population Research Institute. It sounds respectable, doesn’t it. But

    Founded in 1989, the Population Research Institute is a non-profit research and educational organization dedicated to objectively presenting the truth about population-related issues, and to reversing the trends brought about by the myth of overpopulation. Our growing, global network of pro-life groups spans over 30 countries.

    It’s dedicated to objectively presenting its pronatalist antifeminist views as truth, so that’s an oxymoron, innit.

    Its mission is to

    Debunk the myth of overpopulation, which cheapens human life and paves the way for abusive population control programs

    Expose the relentless promotion of abortion, abortifacient contraception, and chemical and surgical sterilization in misleadingly labeled “population stabilization,” “family planning,” and “reproductive health” programs.

    Defund these programs by exposing the coercion, deception, and racism inherent in them.

    And they did; they got the Bush administration to defund the UN Population Fund.

    PRI’s so-called “investigation” of UNFPA’s activities in China (whose most spectacular finding was that there was a desk with a UNFPA sticker on it inside an official Chinese family planning office), was cited by members of Congress and the Bush Administration as rationale for reevaluating U.S. support for UNFPA in general. A subsequent U.S. State Department investigation found no evidence to support PRI’s claims of wrongdoing by UNFPA—in fact, it even commended their work in China. Nonetheless, the Bush Administration blocked all US funding of UNFPA in 2002 and has withheld more than $125 million from the agency through the end of 2005.

    They don’t like feminism – which they call “radical feminism,” laughably.

    “The pro-life pro-family movement should absolutely oppose the creation of a UN super-agency dedicated to radical feminist goals, which undermine marriage, weaken the family, and thus endanger children both born and unborn,” says Steven Mosher, President of the Population Research Institute.  “What is being proposed is a very powerful agency with a global mandate to restructure relations between the sexes.  If the past is any indicator, it will be used to impose the lifestyle of Manhattan and Hollywood feminists on family-centered countries and cultures.  It is cultural imperialism at its worst.”

    Oooooh Manhattan and Hollywood – you know what that means, Precious. [whispers] It means Jewish.