the road to fundamentalism

There seems to be a tsunami of women both rejecting the notion of Quiverfull fundamentalism and writing about it. I'm thrilled to bits about that. Although there will no doubt be some overlap as we each add our bucketful to that foamy tide, each woman has a story which is unique and worth telling. That's one of the reasons I've decided to begin telling mine here.

Princess Jo, author of the frank blog Finding Her Way, is the daughter of an old friend from a Reformed Baptist church years ago. I friended Jo on Facebook this week and began a conversation which prompted me to start this blog.

Taking a peek at Jo's blogroll and came across The Making of a Helpmeet - an extensive explanation of the key characteristics of the Quiverfull movement - by Hopewell on Vyckie Garrison's No More Quivering blog. If you are new to this kind of blogging you could do worse than start there.

I recognise the titles of all the books Hopewell mentioned and own most of them. I could relate to most of what she said although we were not at the extreme end of QF fundmentalism in large part because I proved to have a congential difficulty with submission.

Hopewell did a great job explaining QF. I don't have much to add but I do have some. Here are a few personal comments I'd just like to throw into the mix:

My then-husband and I were first introduced to QF thinking when I was pregnant with my first child. Until then, the concept of potentially unlimited numbers of offspring had not occurred to either of us. At that time a friend lent us Mary Pride's The Way Home. Later I added All the Way Home by the same author to my growing library of QF dogma literature along with Rick and Jan Hess's A Full Quiver.

Mary Pride had a large family and had gained what I thought was an admirable level of financial and social independence through home businesses, homebirth and homeschooling. I'll need another post to talk about the characteristics that made me a good candidate for QF but suffice to say here, raising emotionally healthy kids who loved God and were equipped to have wonderful, productive lives was a huge inducement. I suspect that being thought of as a super-godly candidate for Mother of the Century may also have held appeal.

So, anyway, for us that's where it started. I'd like to be able to say that it was my wretched, bullying husband who forced me out of shoes and left me simultaneously pregnant, breastfeeding and homeschooling in the kitchen but that would not be true. Married to a weak man, it was I in large part who drove us forward into greater and greater fundamentalism. But he was glad to come along for the ride and brought the flavour of his own particular brand of legalism with him.

I was never a great ambassador for QF. As was often pointed out to me I was not nearly floral frock enough, tended to be quick to speak my mind even (gasp!) to men and was, as I have said, a lousy submitter. Consequently, we didn't whole hog the thing. But not for lack of will. I admit with a sincere and sorry blush that most of it seemed a great idea to me at the time. I just wasn't quite cut out to be a dinky-di QF guru.

I think Hopewell may have missed canvassing some of the more radical extremes in the movement which are worth mentioning. Many families went even further than Hopewell wrote - beyond homebirth of a squillion children to adoption and - the holy grail and guaranteed QF kudos winner - foreign adoption. The first I heard of it was reading then-Australian-published magazine Above Rubies

This small-circulation 20ish-page magazine chanted the no-contraception, homeschool, homebirth, home business, home garden, home cooking mantra long and loud. Contributers to the magazine usually attached a photo of their huge tribe of blessings who mostly had names like Zerubbel, Zadok and Promise. With that level of visible accountability, if you didn't have the whole package in place, you didn't bother writing in. (This is a sad aspect of the movement. I know a dear woman who regularly volunteered as an administrative helper at an AR camp but stood outside during all the meetings because she had had a tubal ligation after the birth of her third child and so didn't feel she worthy of participating.)

A central theme of many AR articles was that floral-frocked, and sometimes veil-wearing, women with crappy, worthless husbands who somehow managed to submit to his every infantile whim in a sincere belief that this was how to build a half-decent man, would win small victories and wring thimblefuls of love and respect from the guy. Sometimes they would get a sofa or two by waiting on him to decide what to buy...but I don't recall anyone ever got a holiday.

New Zealand born Nancy Campbell, who, to my knowledge still runs the magazine, has, I believe, 6 grown children of her own most of whom have produced large families. Shots of the whole mob infest the editoral pages and have to be taken at 20 paces to squeeze them all in. The Campbell clan resided in Australia for many years before moving to a ranch in Tennesee. Nancy's three adult daughters are regular contributers to AR and boy do they qualify packet-wise: good breeders, furious submitters, knit their own yoghurt... In fact, it was they who I think were responsible in part for the upping the ante for those driven to achieve top Quiverfull cred.

From whence the notion sprang that having a dozen or so kids in quick succession was not a selfless enough life I do not know. But someone, somewhere, started the ball rolling on families 'opening their hearts to the possibility of foreign adoption'. The Campbell clan went for it big time. Within what seemed like only months their family photo shoots began to include a breathtaking number of beautiful brown-skinned Liberian children - some of whom were part of sibling sets and many of which were teenagers. While I applauded these families' compassion and enthusiasm, why nobody suggested that bringing half a dozen nearly-grown survivors of torture and trauma into a home already filled to bursting with young children was a recipe for disaster is a mystery to me. I cannot state this categorically but last I heard the wheels were pretty wobbly on this little red wagon. I often think of them and hope they all manage to pull their babies through with minimal damage.

Nancy Campbell and Above Rubies were - and perhaps still are - hugely influential with a mostly pentecostal/charismatic audience of Christian women in Australia and New Zealand. In addition to the magazine AR ran 'ladies' camps' and sent speakers to loungeroom gatherings all over both countries. A former staffer told me that she left the movement because what she called a 'Cult of Family' was replacing what had started simply as a desire to value and support stay at home mothers in their roles. Angry at ARs simultaneous departure from orthodox Christianity and increasing influence, she often angrily reminded me, 'Christ is returning for the *church* not the family'.

I personally know and love people who were drawn much deeper into QF fundamentalism than we were so would like to state for the record that most were intelligent, loving parents who wanted the very best for their children. Somehow, like me, they got swept up a the tide of legalism that took them to destinations unanticipated.

More on that later...