More the merrier for Christian movement

Gretchen Peters, Foreign Correspondent

• Last Updated: April 26. 2009 11:38PM UAE / April 26. 2009 7:38PM GMT

DENVER // When the author and conservative Christian sage Nancy Campbell advises her followers to “be fruitful and multiply”, she means it.

Mrs Campbell, a mother of six and a grandmother to 34, is a leading light in the Quiverfull community, a growing conservative Christian sect that calls on its adherents to forgo birth control and produce large families.

“Psalm 127 says children are the heritage of the Lord,” she said, quoting the biblical verse that gives the Quiverfull lifestyle its name: “As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man, are sons born in a man’s youth. Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them.”

Mrs Campbell, a New Zealander who lives in Tennessee, believes US society, where the average couple bears just 1.8 children, has strayed far from God’s intended path.

“Contraception and limiting family size has not strengthened the family, which was the strength of our nation,” she said in a telephone interview. “Now I think many people are opening their eyes, opening their hearts and seeing what is right for families.”

Although Mrs Campbell and her husband stopped at six – a decision she now regrets – it is not unusual for Quiverfull families to produce a dozen or more children. The most well-known Quiverfull couple in the United States is Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, parents to 18 and counting, who have their own reality show on the Learning Channel.

No one knows how many families adhere to the lifestyle, but Kathryn Joyce, author of Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, puts the numbers in the low tens of thousands.

“No question about it, it is a burgeoning movement,” said Kevin Swanson, a radio preacher based outside Denver. “I travel all over America and probably speak to 40,000 people a year.”

In an age when half of US women prefer to work outside the home, the Quiverfull lifestyle puts motherhood and home-making on a pedestal. Mrs Campbell’s ministry, called Above Rubies, describes motherhood as a woman’s “highest calling”, and one to be embraced with a full heart.

Quiverfull families typically home-school their children, and girls often get specialised training in the arts of homemaking, including cooking, sewing and child rearing.

“Children in public school are going to be brainwashed in feminism and socialism and humanism,” Mrs Campbell said. “Most families who are conservative and Bible-believing don’t want their children infiltrated with this junk.”

Modest dress is considered virtuous; some Quiverfull women shun trousers. Many families live on farms and produce their own food, or budget tightly to manage the costs of feeding so many mouths.

“There have been a few times when I worried that we weren’t going to have what we needed, but I just ‘pray it in’,” wrote Becca Beard, a Quiverfull wife in Dallas in an e-mail. “I tell God what we need, and He sends it our way.”

Quiverfull adherents refuse to call their lifestyle a movement – preferring to describe it as the way God wants them to live. However, their philosophy is based in part on a fear that white, European Christian populations are dwindling dangerously while Muslim populations are growing.

“Western nations are on a suicidal bent,” Mr Swanson said. “I think what we are doing is not political, but we are salvaging western civilisation. This is a biblical world view, that morals, family, children and babies are a blessing.”

To read Quiverfull blogs – where many families detail their daily routines, and list recipes and tips for keeping the kids and house clean – is to find people determined that their children, like them, will also reproduce in large numbers.

Ms Joyce argues it is this aspect of the Quiverful movement that makes it distinctly political – the idea that today’s parents will populate tomorrow’s world with offspring who carry on their conservative version of Christianity.

“They plot out how many sons their sons will have until they have 50,000 offspring,” Ms Joyce said. “There is a point when it becomes self-aggrandising and almost humorous.”

Quiverfull believers tend to speak about their mission in more personal terms. And although they sometimes acknowledge their chosen path is not simple, it is one to which they are devoted.

“We want to be hard-core,” Mrs Beard wrote. “God doesn’t always ask for the easy things so if we truly want to be counted as His children, we have no choice but to obey His teaching.”


gpeters@thenational.ae