Pendragons Princess

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102005062

In Quiverfull Movement, Birth Control Is Shunned
by Barbara Bradley Hagerty

March 25, 2009 · Among some conservative Christians, a movement is giving new meaning to the biblical mandate to “be fruitful and multiply.”

The movement, called Quiverfull, is based on Psalm 127, which says, “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.”

Those in the Quiverfull movement shun birth control, believing that God will give them the right number of children. It turns out, that’s a lot of kids.

‘We Actually Didn’t Want Children’

While cooking a typical predawn breakfast in the Swanson household in Shelby, Mich., 10-year-old Lydia Swanson cracks a dozen eggs laid by the family chickens. Her mother, Kelly, fries 3 pounds of sausage from the family’s own pig and toasts a 12-inch loaf of homemade bread.

If they didn’t raise their own food, Kelly Swanson says, they’d spend $1,000 a month on groceries for her gaggle of growing children, including 15-year-old Josiah and 13-year-old Elisha. But in listing their ages, Kelly gets Elisha’s age wrong.

“At least I remembered your name,” she says.

Kelly can perhaps be forgiven the lapse. The 40-year-old mom has seven children; the youngest is 6 months. And she’d like to have more.

The Swansons subscribe to the Quiverfull movement.

“When we first got married, we actually didn’t want children,” Kelly’s husband, Jeff Swanson, says.

But then the Swansons began to notice that the Bible was very high on big families. And Kelly says that she and Jeff decided that God knew how many children they could handle.

“We just started thinking, ‘God is sovereign over life and death. God opens and closes the womb,’ ” Kelly says. “That’s what his word says, so why we’re trying to fiddle around and controlling ourselves, we need to stop doing that.”

Eighteen years and seven children later, the Swansons live on Jeff’s dairy farm salary of less than $50,000 a year. And they’ve gotten used to the comments from outsiders, such as, “Do you know what causes this?”

“That’s always my favorite one when I’m pregnant,” Kelly says. “And my husband has a lovely response. Of course we know what causes it — we practice all the time.”
Their friends do, too. The average family at their evangelical church has 8.5 kids. They are children who the Swansons hope will spread the message of Christ.

‘Womb Is A Powerful Weapon’

That’s also the hope of Nancy Campbell, a leader of the Quiverfull movement and author of Be Fruitful and Multiply.

“The womb is such a powerful weapon; it’s a weapon against the enemy,” Campbell says.

Campbell has 35 grandchildren. She and her husband stopped at six kids, and it is her great regret.

“I think, help! Imagine if we had had more of these children!” Campbell says, adding, “My greatest impact is through my children. The more children I have, the more ability I have to impact the world for God.”

A Christian God, that is. Campbell says if believers don’t starting reproducing in large numbers, biblical Christianity will lose its voice.

“We look across the Islamic world and we see that they are outnumbering us in their family size, and they are in many places and many countries taking over those nations, without a jihad, just by multiplication,” Campbell says.

Still, Quiverfull is a small group, probably 10,000 fast-growing families, mainly in the Midwest and South. But they have large ambitions, says Kathryn Joyce, who has written about the movement in her book Quiverfull: Inside The Christian Patriarchy Movement.

“They speak about, ‘If everyone starts having eight children or 12 children, imagine in three generations what we’ll be able to do,’ ” Joyce says. ” ‘We’ll be able to take over both halls of Congress, we’ll be able to reclaim sinful cities like San Francisco for the faithful, and we’ll be able to wage very effective massive boycotts against companies that are going against God’s will.’ “

No Regrets

In a suburb of Grand Rapids, Mich., Misty and Seth Huckstead, both 31, are straightening up the living room for a birthday party. No small task with six kids and one on the way. With such a large family, they get by with one car. They shop at thrift stores and occasionally rely on the local seminary’s food bank.

Seth says it’s difficult having so many kids, but he and Misty have no regrets.

They didn’t always have this attitude, Seth says. When they were 23, already with four children, he had a vasectomy. But they searched the Bible and concluded that sterilization was an affront to God.

“He presents children as a blessing,” Seth says. “And so we started to evaluate whether our decision was ethically right. And we came to regret our decision.”

They turned to a ministry that raises money and finds doctors to reverse vasectomies at a bargain price. And their family grew. Misty says she’ll have as many children as possible. She loves having babies and believes it’s the proper role for women.

“It’s not individual, it’s not ‘I’m a woman, hear me roar, I’m going to go take on the world,’ ” Misty says. “Family has always been the foundation of church and society. It’s God’s design; it’s beautiful.”

Moments later, another Quiverfull family drops by, and for a few moments, they entertain themselves as would a large family 100 years ago.

They sing Psalm 127 — a song that seems written just for them.
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A few words to start off with: the core of Christian teaching is in the Gospels, not in Genesis 1:22 that says: And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas and let fowl multiply in the earth. Second, the only other scripture the Quiverfull movement likes to take out of context is Psalms 127. In whole, the chapter reads:

“Unless the Lord build the house, they labor in vain who build. Unless the Lord guard the city, in vain does the guard keep watch. It is vain for you to rise early and put off your rest at night, to eat bread earned by hard toil - all this God gives to his beloved in sleep. Children too are a gift from the Lord, the fruit of the womb, a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children born in one’s youth. Blessed are they whose quivers are full. They will never be shamed contending with foes at the gate.” (NAB)

The last statement, “They will never be shamed contending with foes at the gate”, refers to adversaries to the family in times of litigation. During Old Testament times, legal courts were frequently positioned by the front gate to a city, and held in open spaces. Yeah it is very convenient for the Quiverfull movement to leave out the last part. But then, what reputed church does not take scripture oout of context to quote its own needs? Chapter 127 on the whole refers to the social structure of families in the Hebrew community.

Now, let’s see what Jesus has to say about the matter. Since family to Jesus means a family of the spirit and not one of the flesh, it is no surprise that many fundamentalists claim that his mother Mary had other children after His birth. For this purpose they like to quote the following:

“While he was still speaking to the crowds, his mother and brothers appeared outside, wishing to speak with him. But he said in reply to the one who told him, “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?” And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers.”

Almost 100% of the time they love to leave off the last part of the text:

“For whoever does the will of my heavenly Father is my brother, and sister, and mother.” The entire scripture appears in Matthew 12:46-49. This of course is in reference to the spiritual family, not one that tells followers to have lots of babies.

There are plenty of places in the gospels where Jesus warns his followers not to think in the flesh, but in the spirit. Carnality has no place in early Christianity and consequently, a number of disciples became alienated from Jesus’ teaching because they could not begin to comprehend that there just might be a religion where the spirit takes precedence over the physical world. The Gospel of John Chapter 6 is just one difficult spot for the disciples.

Regarding Nancy Campbell, one can only imagine that Jesus would just shake his head if all he ever heard was “We must increase our numbers!” Maybe they forgot to read the part of the Bible where it says that only a handful of people will ever really be able to follow the path of Christianity (Matthew 7). Since Jesus never told his followers to “be fruitful and multiply” the entire time he was on earth, one can only wonder why a small segment of the population would call themselves Christain when they are not even making the basis of their beliefs on the Gospels. Instead, they take two quotes from the Old Testament completely out of context - the ones in Genesis, and Psalms. My guess is the founders of Quiverfull just wanted to find something in the Bible that might make legitimate plenty of running through the bedsheets to further their cause. After all, Joseph Smith believed that the Old Testament patriarchs and their practice of polygamy meant that it was okay for him, Brigham Young, and other early Mormon leaders to engage in the same practice, too. Again, Jesus never spoke about that issue except that marriage was between one man and one wife (Matthew chapter 19), not between one man and twenty plus wives. Back to Campbell for a moment, though: it is very clear that she had children just so she could program them into following her version of Christianity. This holds true of other Quiverfull families and ultimately, everyone who has grown up in a household who was programed to attend a certain church. The only problem with this, however, is the likelihood that these kids, once they grow up to be adults, could very well leave Quiverfull on their own volition. I guess breeding in numbers for religion is a sham after all. It happens to Roman Catholics, Protestants, even Muslims, only in their case they have to be silent about leaving the religion since Islam does threaten death to anyone who tries to leave the religion. Kathryn Joyce, like Campbell, admits to the political movement of Quiverfull with her statement:

“They speak about, ‘If everyone starts having eight children or 12 children, imagine in three generations what we’ll be able to do,’ ” Joyce says. ” ‘We’ll be able to take over both halls of Congress, we’ll be able to reclaim sinful cities like San Francisco for the faithful, and we’ll be able to wage very effective massive boycotts against companies that are going against God’s will.’ “

Ever since George W Bush left office, though, it is highly unlikely that Christianity in this form will take over the government: our Constitution prohibits any religion from being endorsed by the state on a federal level. Ultimately, some Quiverfull families will start to question the legitimacy of the movement. Seth Huckstead already has when he claims that it is “difficult having so many kids” and having to rely upon food banks. It makes one wonder how Americans get sucked into cults like Quiverfull. Educated folks won’t buy into a “family values” political movement (they only call it family values because they think they can recreate the Ozzie and Harriet tv show of 1955. The reality is, it’s making more followers for the movement who will wind up leaving the group later on.) without questioning the validity of the movement. In an Age of Whooppe, Quiverfull is just another whacky means for endorsing sex saturation in the name of religion, versus the name of Hollywood. Therefore, to a Quiverfull member, not all sex is created equal; it is only more equal to those who make babies for their so-called Christian movement. Quiverfull members would be much more honest if they could all admit that what they are doing is for purely political reasons and nothing else. It must be hard for people like that to even consider doing their own thinking - it’s better to have a particular self-appointed religious leader like Campbell and Joyce do their thinking for them. But it does give the cult’s members an excuse to have as much sex as possible without ultimately acknowleging the final consequences of their actions.