{"id":26634,"date":"2015-09-02T08:17:30","date_gmt":"2015-09-02T12:17:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/?p=26634"},"modified":"2015-09-04T20:31:29","modified_gmt":"2015-09-05T00:31:29","slug":"a-quiverfull-of-definitions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/lovejoyfeminism\/2015\/09\/a-quiverfull-of-definitions.html","title":{"rendered":"A Quiverfull of Definitions"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

I\u2019ve increasingly seen the media use the word \u201cquiverfull\u201d used to describe the Duggars\u2019 entire subculture, and that\u2019s bugging me, because this use of terminology is\u00a0neither very accurate nor very helpful. In its purest definition, \u201cquiverfull\u201d means abstaining from using any form of birth control and instead letting God plan your family,\u00a0and yet\u00a0I\u2019m increasingly seeing it used as a label for an entire subculture.\u00a0There are several issues with this.<\/p>\n

First<\/strong>, \u201cquiverfull\u201d is usually a term used by outsiders looking in. The Duggars themselves have said they do not use the word to describe themselves, and honestly, it is fairly rare to find someone who does. My parents never used the term.<\/p>\n

Second<\/strong>, many people who are often included under the \u201cquiverfull\u201d umbrella\u00a0are not in fact\u00a0<\/em>quiverfull<\/i>. For example, Michael and Debi Pearl actively preach\u00a0against<\/em>\u00a0quiverfull teachings. They do not have a problem with couples using birth control.<\/p>\n

Third<\/strong>, one can be quiverfull without adhering to patriarchy (this is actually a thing that really does exist), but this gets completely erased when the term \u201cquiverfull\u201d is treated as a wholistic descriptor for people like the Duggars.<\/p>\n

The best way to implode some\u00a0of the overlaps and issues here may be to tell you a story about something that happened to my mother. First, a word of background. As a child, I grew up reading Above Rubies magazine, which we received regularly. While even she\u00a0does not use the term \u201cquiverfull\u201d to describe herself or her ministry, Above Rubies\u2019 Nancy Campbell is probably the closest you can get to pure\u00a0quiverfull, with her magazines full of stories of oversized\u00a0families and tubal reversals. Her magazines center on the beauty of large families and the value of motherhood and the importance of accepting as many \u201cblessings\u201d\u00a0as God has to send your way.<\/p>\n

Some years back my mother attended an Above Rubies conference. She\u00a0told me that when\u00a0the other women at the conference found out that she\u00a0had twelve children, they gathered\u00a0around her and called her blessed (that\u2019s Bible language for heaped her with praise and adoration). But when\u00a0they asked her if she was open to having more children, she told them she had recently had her tubes tied. As a result\u00a0result, she was shunned for the remainder of the conference.<\/p>\n

My mother was really upset when she told me this story, because, she explained, Michael and Debi Pearl taught that a woman must bow to her husband\u2019s will in areas like this, and it was my dad who had insisted on her getting her tubes tied even though she hadn\u2019t wanted to. She felt that she had been unfairly shunned by these women.\u00a0She<\/em>\u00a0wanted to have more children.\u00a0She<\/em>\u00a0hadn\u2019t wanted her tubes tied. I remember her crying over this decision. But my dad said he was going to lose his sanity if we had more children, and for all of the importance my mom put on welcoming every blessing God had to send along, she believed even more strongly in male headship and female submission, so she submitted and underwent a tubal ligation.<\/p>\n

Actually, there\u2019s one more thing I should\u00a0share about my parents as long as we\u2019re talking about definitions. My parents used birth control from time to time to space us children out a bit, but never methods they considered \u201cabortifacient.\u201d Yet\u00a0even though they sporadically used birth control, they talked about children as \u201cblessings\u201d and spoke of raising us out to send us into the world to win souls and retake it for Christ, all of which is classic quiverfull rhetoric. Were\u00a0my parents quiver full, then? Or were\u00a0they not? There\u2019s no real agreement on the definition of quiverfull, and there are plenty of homeschooling families that have more children than they might otherwise as a result\u00a0of exposure to quiverfull rhetoric, but still\u00a0use birth control to limit their family size. Where do they fit, exactly? Who is quiverfull, and who isn\u2019t?<\/p>\n

But let\u2019s talk for just a moment about what I just described as \u201cclassic quiverfull rhetoric.\u201d The term quiverfull is adapted from Psalm 127:3-5, which reads as follows: \u201cLo, children are an heritage of the\u00a0Lord<\/span>: and the fruit of the womb is his reward.\u00a0As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth.\u00a0Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them.\u201d From this verse comes both the rhetoric about children being a blessing (or a reward, or heritage) and the more militant rhetoric that positions children as a weapon and\u00a0their\u00a0father as a warrior.<\/p>\n

Even here, within these rhetorics, different\u00a0leaders\u00a0place the emphasis differently. Nancy Campbell of Above Rubies focuses\u00a0on the babies as blessings rhetoric and rarely uses\u00a0rhetoric with a more militant focus.\u00a0When I read her magazines as a child, her focus was always on mothers and\u00a0childbearing. In contrast, Michael Farris of the HSLDA focuses heavily on military rhetoric when discussing the importance of having large numbers of children.<\/p>\n

\"Farris\"<\/a><\/p>\n

In fact, you might very well argue that quiverfull has two separate rhetorics, one mother-focused and one militant-focused, which sometimes overlap and sometimes don\u2019t. But more than this,\u00a0neither of these rhetorics requires a full rejection of birth control<\/em>. There are many many many families that use these rhetorics\u00a0and also use birth control.<\/em>\u00a0In some sense, quiverfull rhetorics have invaded the Christian homeschooling\u00a0culture\u00a0more generally, and in so doing have become at once more diluted and more widespread and pervasive.<\/p>\n

Even when using the purest definition of quiverfull (abstaining from birth control), you are going to find variations in emphasis between families. These variations will often depend on what Christian leader and ministry one became quiverfull through. \u00a0Bill Gothard preaches quiverfull within an authoritarian patriarchal family structure and through a ministry (ATI) that is often described as cult-like. Nancy Campbell preaches quiverfull through a ministry that is mother-focused and centered around babies and children. Campbell\u00a0is still patriarchal, but the articles in her Above Rubies are written by mothers, not male pastors or authority figures. While\u00a0both\u00a0might\u00a0be rightly described\u00a0as quiverfull (though neither uses the word), the two ministries have very different feels and position their rejection of birth control differently.<\/p>\n

The Duggars\u00a0are followers of Bill Gothard. Their social circles\u00a0(including both church and homeschool conventions) have\u00a0long centered around\u00a0Gothard\u2019s Advanced Training Institute, and until recently, even their curriculum was ATI. The Duggars eschew birth control based on the teachings\u00a0of Bill Gothard. In fact, essentially every one of the Duggar\u2019s beliefs, from JOY (Jesus first, Others second, Yourself last) to the umbrella of authority, comes from Bill Gothard. Yes, the Duggars fit the technical definition of quiverfull (though they do not use that term themselves),\u00a0but their essence is ATI<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The wider Christian homeschooling\u00a0subculture the Duggars belong to is best understood as a cluster\u00a0of overlapping circles, each circle representing a specific leader and\/or ministry. There is Gothard\u2019s ATI, there is Nancy Campbell\u2019s Above Rubies, there is Michael and Debi Pearl\u2019s No Greater Joy, and Michael Farris\u2019s HSLDA, and Doug Wilson\u2019s Credenda Agenda, and Jonathan Lindvall and others, and until recently there was Doug Phillips\u2019 Vision Forum. These various groups and leaders may sometimes overlap, but they also have points of disagreement and position their various emphases differently.<\/p>\n

My parents primarily followed Michael and Debi Pearl, Doug Phillips, and Michael Farris. But even then, they were not as close Pearl followers as those who go to the Pearls\u2019 Shindigs, and they were not as close followers of Doug Phillips as those who attended his various conventions, and they were not as close followers of Michael Farris as those who sent their children to Patrick Henry College. In other words, there are those\u00a0families who sample from a variety of these leaders and ministries, and there are those families who lock onto one and refuse to let go, joining an inner circle of sorts.<\/p>\n

There are some ideas that these various individuals and organizations\u00a0tend to share, but each leader and each\u00a0ministry is\u00a0slightly different, not only in focus but also in belief.\u00a0These overlapping circles all tend to\u00a0be patriarchal, though Farris encourages parents to send their daughters to\u00a0college while Phillips argues against sending daughters\u00a0to college and Gothard tends to be against\u00a0anyone<\/em>\u00a0going to college. They all tend to favor large families, though Gothard is against birth control while\u00a0Wilson is not, and Campbell\u2019s reasons for opposing birth control are different from Farris\u2019s. Perhaps the greatest point of commonality between these groups is the belief that children must be sheltered from the world and carefully trained in Christian beliefs.<\/p>\n

Attempts to describe this constellation of groups as \u201cquiverfull\u201d run into serious definitional problems. While quiverfull rhetorics pervade many if not most of these overlapping circles, the number of families that give up birth control entirely is small, and even these don\u2019t generally use the term \u201cquiverfull\u201d to describe themselves. One might\u00a0argue that this subculture\u00a0is\u00a0better termed \u201cpatriarchal\u201d than \u201cquiverfull,\u201d but even then I am given pause when I remember my mother\u2019s experience at\u00a0the\u00a0Above Rubies conference she attended, and when I think of all of the letters the Pearls receive from women who desperately want to leave their childbearing up to God only to face resistance from their husbands.<\/p>\n

In some sense\u00a0this loose constellation of individuals and ministries is most united not by its emphasis on large families (to stretch the definition of quiverfull to its breaking point) or its emphasis male headship (which is a widespread belief among fundamentalist and evangelicals in general) but rather by its emphasis on using homeschooling to shelter children and train\u00a0them up to follow God. Yet\u00a0even that isn\u2019t specific enough, because there are evangelical and fundamentalist\u00a0homeschoolers who seek\u00a0to shelter their children and give them a Christian education but don\u2019t follow any of the leaders discussed above or become involved in the alternate universe that is this subculture. Perhaps it is the creation of a parallel culture in pursuance of this goal that is its most defining feature.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not entirely sure where that leaves us. At the moment, we do not have a term that adequately describes the overlapping circles of leaders and organizations that make up the subculture that is conservative Christian homeschooling. Perhaps that is what we need\u2014a new label. If nothing else, though, I hope I have given you\u00a0a better grasp on the term \u201cquiverfull\u201d and the issues surrounding its definition, use, and meaning.<\/p>\n

See also\u00a0Quiverfull Is\u00a0an Ideology, Not a Movement or a Cult<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’ve increasingly seen the media use the word “quiverfull” used to describe the Duggars’ entire subculture, and that’s bugging me, because this use of terminology is neither very accurate nor very helpful. In its purest definition, “quiverfull” means abstaining from using any form of birth control and instead letting God plan your family, and yet I’m increasingly seeing it used as a label for an entire subculture. There are several issues with this.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":845,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[57],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26634","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quiverfull"],"yoast_head":"\nA Quiverfull of Definitions<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"I've increasingly seen the media use the word "quiverfull" used to describe the Duggars' entire subculture, and that's bugging me, because this use of terminology is neither very accurate nor very helpful. In its purest definition, "quiverfull" means abstaining from using any form of birth control and instead letting God plan your family, and yet I'm increasingly seeing it used as a label for an entire subculture. 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