Quiverfull by Kathryn Joyce

Author:Kathryn Joyce
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2011-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

PART TWO. MOTHERS

Chapter Eleven. Be Fruitful and Multiply

When the Gospel Community Church in Coxsackie, New York, breaks midservice to excuse children for Sunday school, nearly half of the 225-strong congregation patters toward the back of the worship hall, including the five youngest children of Pastor Stan Slager’s eight, Assistant Pastor Bartly Heneghan’s eleven, and the Dufkin family’s thirteen. The Missionettes, a team of young girls who perform ribbon dances during the praise music, put down their “glory hoops” to join their classmates; the pews empty out. It’s the sort of unignorable difference between the families at Gospel Community and those in the rest of the town that’s led some Coxsackie residents to wonder if the church isn’t a cult that forces its disciples to keep pushing out children.

But after the kids leave, Pastor Stan doesn’t exhort his congregation to bear children. Slager, a kindly Bronx-born blue-collar pastor in his sixties who labored for twenty years as a clam digger in Long Island before moving north, explains that “we’re just a body of believers that loves children, that’s very supportive of children, so that sets a certain atmosphere.” But in addition to the atmosphere, there is a message for those that can hear: Slager reminds his congregants to present their bodies as living sacrifices to the Lord, and he preaches to them about Acts 5:20, instructing them to go tell “all the words of this life.” In Pastor Stan’s subtly guiding translation, this means to lead lives that make outsiders think, “Christianity is real,” lives that “demand an explanation.”

Lives such as these: Janet Wolfson is a forty-three-year-old mother of eight in Canton, Georgia. Tracey Moore, a thirty-nine-year-old midwife who lives in southern Kentucky, is mother to fourteen. Wendy Dufkin in Coxsackie has her thirteen. And while Joanna Stoors, a twenty-six-year-old Illinois mom, only has four children so far, she jokes that she and her husband plan on bearing enough to populate “two teams.” All four mothers are devoted to a lifestyle that the conservative columnist David Brooks praises as a new spiritual movement that’s growing fast among exurban and Sunbelt families. Brooks calls these parents “natalists” and describes their progeny as a new wave of “red-diaper babies”—as in “red state.”

But Wolfson, Moore, and thousands of mothers like them call themselves and their belief system “Quiverfull.” They take their name from Psalm 127: “Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. 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.

Quiverfull parents try to have upwards of six children; many have more. They homeschool their families, attend fundamentalist churches, and follow biblical guidelines of male headship—“father knows best”—and female submissiveness. They refuse any attempt to regulate pregnancy. Quiverfull, as a contemporary movement, began with the publication of Rick and Jan Hess’s 1989

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