by Heather Doney
This may be the most important and most scary post on homeschooling that I have ever written. It feels like something out of a Margaret Atwood novel and I am numb as I write this, so please bear with me. The title of this post is not rhetorical. It is a question I am actively pondering at the moment. (more…)
Lori Alexander from the blog Always Learning – February 4, 2013
She is young and happy in love. She loves her job. If she is unhappy at home, she becomes happy when she goes to work. Having children frightens her. She will have to give up (more…)
by Geoffrey Botkin “The Reasons of Optimism, Part 5” of the Western Conservatory of the Arts & Sciences and Vision Forum – December 22, 2012
What this man understood was that women are impressed by real men who are going about doing what men were created (more…)
QUOTING QUIVERFULL is a regular feature of NLQ – we present the actual words of noted Quiverfull leaders and ask our readers: What do you think? Agree? Disagree? This is the place to state your opinion. Please, let’s keep it respectful – but at the same time, we encourage readers (more…)
QUOTING QUIVERFULL is a regular feature of NLQ – we present the actual words of noted Quiverfull leaders and ask our readers: What do you think? Agree? Disagree? This is the place to state your opinion. Please, let’s keep it respectful – but at the same time, we encourage readers (more…)
Note: Before reading this, please read the “Quiverfull and the Bible” FAQ. Like the “nobleminded Bereans” (Acts 17:11), we are entitled to study for ourselves, so that we may read the Biblical text in an informed manner. That FAQ provides the background for the method of informed Bible reading used here.
by Kristen Rosser ~ aka: KR Wordgazer
Q: Doesn’t the Bible say I was created (more…)
by Bruce Gerencser
(Cross posted from Bruce’s blog The Way Forward)
Over the past few years I have met countless people who have escaped authoritarian religions like the Independent Fundamentalist Baptist (IFB) church movement or your every day garden variety Evangelical church. Authoritarian ecclesiastical structures and authoritarian pastors dominate the lives of those who come under their spell.
Most authoritarian churches believe God ordained a chain of command, not only in the church but in the home. These churches almost always practice complementarianism.
Wikipedia defines complementarianism as:
A theological view held by some in Christianity and other world religions, such as Islam,that men and women have different but complementary roles and responsibilities in marriage, family life, religious leadership, and elsewhere.
Some authoritarian churches are more complementarian than others, but all of them believe God ordained a strict order in the church and home. An extreme form of complementarianism is Biblical Patriarchy.
The central tenets of Biblical Patriarchy are:
God reveals Himself as masculine, not feminine.
God ordained distinct gender roles for man and woman as part of the created order.
A husband and father is the head of his household, a family leader, provider, and protector.
Male leadership in the home carries over into the church: only men are permitted to hold the ruling office in the church. A God-honoring society will likewise prefer male leadership in civil and other spheres.
Since the woman was created as a helper to her husband, as the bearer of children, and as a “keeper at home,” the God-ordained and proper sphere of dominion for a wife is the household and that which is connected with the home.
God’s command to “be fruitful and multiply” still applies to married couples.
Christian parents must provide their children with a thoroughly Christian education, one that teaches the Bible and a biblical view of God and the world.
Both sons and daughters are under the command of their fathers as long as they are under his roof or otherwise the recipients of his provision and protection.
Some advocates of Biblical Patriarchy teach that women are “part of a chain of command. God is at the top, then Jesus, after that the husband, then the wife, and finally the children.” (above is taken from Vision Forum , The Tenets of Biblical Patriarchy)
Authoritarian churches spend significant time reminding church members that they are to submit to those God has placed in authority. Those who refuse or are unable to obey are often publicly exposed as being worldly, disobedient, carnal, or backslidden. Often pastors preach sermons about these people, not naming names, but leaving no doubt who the pastor is talking about. (more…)
by Kristen Rosser ~ aka: KR WordgazerThe founders of No Longer Qivering spelled “Quivering” without a “u“ because, as they say, “There is no ‘you’ in Quivering” – there’s no place for self – and they claim this is a bad thing. But Jesus said that a true believer must deny himself, take up his cross and follow after Him. Quiverfull women take the Bible’s admonition to die to self very seriously. We use the acronym J.O.Y., for true JOY comes from putting “Jesus first, Others second and Yourself last.” How can you encourage Christian wives and mothers to turn from Christ’s teachings by making “You” a priority?
The problem with the way Quiverfull followers use the J.O.Y. teaching is that while they claim the “Y” is for “Yourself last,“ what is often actually practiced is “Yourself not at all” – and this particularly applies to wives, mothers and daughters. Quiverfull women believe that in putting their husbands and children first, they are putting Christ first, and that they are not to consider their own needs in any other way than as a means to an end, giving themselves just enough minimal care that they can go on serving “Others.”
J.O.Y. for Quiverfull women, in practice, usually looks more like O.O. – “Others Only.” But is this what Jesus actually taught or practiced?
The story of Mary and Martha is the story of how two sisters understood Christian service. Luke 10:38-42 shows how Martha “received” Jesus into “her house” – which is interesting in and of itself, for Luke apparently didn’t think it necessary to identify Martha in relation to a male authority (such as her brother Lazarus, seen in John 11 and 12). No, it was “her house” that Jesus came to, and Martha did what any good Quiverfull woman would do. Forgetting about herself, she bustled around preparing a meal. But Mary went and “sat at Jesus’ feet and heard his word.” “Sat at his feet” had a particular meaning according to the understanding of that time, which was “to learn as a disciple.” In Acts 22:3, Paul identifies himself as a disciple of Rabbi Gamaliel by saying, “I [was] brought up in this city at the feet of Gamaliel.” (Emphasis added.) What Mary was doing in Luke 10:39 was making herself a disciple of Jesus, sitting at his feet to learn with the other disciples. (more…)
by Permission to Live
This post is part of a series of nine posts. Please click here to start with the series Introduction.
It was the end of 2010. I was starting to question the existence of God while my spouse was as Christian as ever. Sometimes I did not understand how he could keep believing in a God who had made him this way and then said that he couldn’t do anything about it. I couldn’t understand how it was god-honoring for a person to live their life “the way god wanted them too” while being miserable and secretly hoping that they would get into an accident somehow that would force the removal of the hormone producing organs that caused them so much mental anguish. The thought reminded me of some Quiverfull women I had encountered who in their exhaustion wished that a horrible labour and childbirth would cause a uterine rupture or something, nothing too drastic, but enough to cause the removal of their reproductive organs and the reassurance that they would be done having kids without ever having to “disobey” God’s command to be fruitful and multiply. But the idea of limiting children through artificial means to save their life or their sanity wasn’t acceptable? It was better to live life trying to glorify God with the lot he had given you? I used to think that people like that just had a bad attitude and needed to find a way to be happy with whatever God had decreed for them, now I was starting to wonder if they were just stuck in a sick system.
My spouse often asked if he should stop talking about transgender questions and issues. He worried that maybe this was too much for me and that he should just fight this alone. But I had seen how healing it was for me to talk about my own issues and to let my kids express their feelings, and I didn’t want him to have to go back to bottling it all up. So I encouraged him to continue processing as much as he needed too, and told him I would always be here to listen. Now instead of being distant or depressed on a regular basis he tried to talk about the overwhelming gender dysphoria, trying to sort out who he was and where he fit.
He had begun to relax and be himself more. He started letting down his guard and not double checking how he was moving his hands when he talked or worrying that the way he crossed his legs was “too feminine.” He started buying his own clothes, choosing colors and styles that were closer to his sense of self than the pants and polo ensemble he had been letting me buy for him. We joked that he had enough style for both of us; I tended to be very practical in my clothing choices, comfort being my highest priority, but he actually cared about how he looked and that began to be reflected in his sense of style.
The dad who used to come home and usually disappeared into the basement to play video games had turned into a parent who played on the floor with the kids every day. He wanted to be involved in their day to day lives. He was learning how to feed them and dress them, he started taking them for bedtime walks bundled up in the wagon in the pajama’s each clutching a bedtime snack and their blankies. He would talk about how 3 babies seemed to be more work than 2, and I would laugh at him and explain that to me this was the easiest parenting period yet, because he was parenting them alongside me for the first time. He stopped complaining that grocery shopping was women’s work and began going with us to the store on his day off, I didn’t have to shop alone with multiple babies and toddlers anymore.
Genuine smiles had been few and far between during the last few years, I used to have to tickle him to get him to give a real smile for pictures. Now he was smiling all the time, and laughing. Instead of shrugging and vaguely referencing a life led by whatever ministry dictated, he was dreaming about the future again. Crazy loopy dreams, like driving out to Alaska or teaching English abroad or becoming a makeup artist in the movie industry. He was getting piles of books out of the library and reading sections of them aloud after years of saying he was too busy reading theology to check out anything else. It was as if his world had become more 3-dimensional. He was swimming regularly and had lost a lot of excess weight and had started letting his hair grow longer. Sometimes I caught him in front of the mirror, he would look at his reflection and say in wonder “For the first time I am starting to like what I see.”
It seemed so natural for him, that it didn’t feel strange to see him painting the kids toenails and then painting his own. It wasn’t out of the ordinary to see him in a bubble bath at the end of the day, I laughed at how happy it made him. Choosing anniversary cards and birthday cards was easier. For the first time I felt like I knew how to really love him. A flower left on his desk or watching a movie while playing with his hair meant more to him then the silly sex ambushes all the marriage books recommended. After being married to someone who had kept part of themselves so mysterious for so long, it was a relief to be getting to know all of him. I didn’t want to lose that ever again.
That Christmas was the best we’d ever had. For the first five years of our married life I had wracked my brain every Christmas and birthday, trying to figure out what to get him. It was always bewildering to try and pinpoint what he would enjoy, and when I asked him what he wanted he couldn’t really come up with anything that sounded cool. I usually went with a book or some article of clothing in the end, but this year for the first time, I knew exactly what he wanted. I knew what he liked for the first time. I bought him a hair dryer and curling iron, tools for a trade that he told me he had always been interested in. We had hopes that going into cosmetology would get him involved in enough feminine things that he would be happy living as a male. He had experimented with some of my eye shadow, so I bought him a kit of his own to have fun with. And the pink fuzzy socks I threw in his stocking became something he wore almost every day they were clean.
It was a good Christmas.
Discuss this post on the NLQ forum. Comments are also open below.
You can read more about Permission To Live at her blog – Musings of a young mom.
Part 1 ~ Part 2 ~ Part 3 ~ Part 4
NLQ Recommended Reading …
‘Breaking Their Will: Shedding Light on Religious Child Maltreatment‘ by Janet Heimlich
‘Quivering Daughters‘ by Hillary McFarland
‘Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement‘ by Kathryn Joyce
No Longer Quivering
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Quoting Quiverfull: Real Men Marry?
Vaughn has been busy making new friends lately with his charm and wit over on Free Thought Blogs “Butterflies and Wheels”
Here’s his entire thoughts on men marrying. (more…)