The womb is such a powerful weapon; it’s a weapon against the enemy.

So said Nancy Campbell in an NPR piece about the Quiverfull movement that aired yesterday.

Maybe it’s not fair to start with the most alarming quote from the entire story, but trust me, I felt alarmed when I heard it.  The womb is a weapon?  What on earth was this woman talking about?

It turns out that the Quiverfull movement is an extreme manifestation of a trend among evangelical Christians to have as many children as possible.  They shun birth control (generally even natural family planning) as improper meddling with God’s will.  They are also all over the blogosphere these days, thanks in large part to a new book by journalist Kathryn Joyce called Quiverfull: Inside The Christian Patriarchy Movement. The publishing house’s blurb about the book asserts that

In direct and conscious opposition to feminist calls for gender equality and marriage equity, women live within stringently enforced doctrines of wifely submission and male headship. They eschew all contraception in favor of the philosophy of letting God give them as many children as possible-families of twelve or more children that will, they hope, enable them to win the religion and culture wars through demographic means: by reproducing more than other social groups.

Let me start by saying, before anyone yells at me, that I do believe that every couple has the right to make the very personal decision about how many children to have, so I need to respect the individual families that choose this path.  Just as I respect people who choose not to have children, or to adopt, or to limit their family to the number of children that seems reasonable and healthy to them.  And I do see the similarities between the Quiverfull philosophy and the Roman Catholic prohibition on artificial means of contraception.

But as a former Roman Catholic, even one who strongly disagrees with the Church’s position on family planning, I have to wonder if this isn’t a different kettle of fish altogether.  First of all, the approach to the Bible on which it is based is both fundamentalist and literalist, which the Roman Catholic tradition is not.  And I certainly don’t recall ever being instructed to have as many children as possible in order that we might populate the world with more good Catholics.  Nor was I ever exhorted to imagine my womb as a weapon.  (I mean, really!  Ick.)  There is also a decidedly patriarchal, possibly even misogynistic, slant to much of their thinking, even if one filters out the more extreme accusations of their detractors.

Turning the righteous desire to follow God’s will into a movement that is about evangelization through procreation is a little scary to me.  If Joyce’s assertions are accurate, these true believers are consciously increasing the number of people in the world who are just like them in order to combat “the enemy” (see the quote above).  It’s not clear to me what they mean by “the enemy”: the devil himself or just anything at all that strikes them as non-Christian? (The spread of Islam was mentioned in the story.)  Their rhetoric is inflammatory and their logic is more than a little off: how can they be so sure their children will all turn out to be the stalwart Christian soldiers they are so intent on producing?

All children are a gift from God, of that I am sure.  As such, they have minds and wills of their own and need to be treated with respect.  And whether you as a parent grant them the freedom to make up their own minds about their religious beliefs or not, in the long run they’re likely to find a way to grab that freedom and run with it.  I guess the bottom line is that it feels like an affront to the idea of the inherent dignity of all persons for people to produce babies like they’re creating an army, lumping all children into this one single all-encompassing purpose, rather than allowing each child their God-given right to discern his or her own purpose over the course of a lifetime.  It seems to me that God’s purpose in creating us is to make manifest God’s overabundant and uncontainable love, and that we would do well to follow God’s example in this. To the best of our limited human ability, of course.

Newsweek has also covered Quiverfull recently, in what is arguably a more positive light.  If you want to learn more, a quick Google search comes up with hundreds of hits, both from people who promote the movement and from those who denounce it.  I’d be especially interested in comments from readers who have some firsthand experience of this phenomenon.

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