Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement is out now
"Kathryn Joyce gives us a first-ever glimpse into the Christian patriarchy movement, and her riveting reporting makes it all the scarier. If you’ve been feeling complacent about women’s status—read this book!" —Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed and This Land is Their LandLast week I spoke with Deborah Harper, President of Psychjourney, about Quiverfull. Listen to the complete podcast here.
A new review of Quiverfull from Milton Gaither, author of Homeschool: An American History:
Joyce, a freelance journalist based in New York City, here pens an important book on one of the most dynamic subcultures within the homeschooling world: “quiverfull” families where father is patriarchal lord, mother is submissive breeder of as many children as God provides, sons are trained to be arrows used in battle against secularism, and daughters are given a sex-specific home education to prepare them to be obedient wives and dutiful mothers. …When I began the book I was expecting a hatchet job not unlike some of the anti-Theocracy books that came out a few years ago. But to my surprise and delight Joyce provides a remarkably sensitive and nuanced depiction of the movement, drawing not only on published works by movement leaders but on extensive interviews with Quiverfull women.
The service provided here is invaluable for those of us not intimately involved with the movement. I wish the book had been available when I was writing my own. It is very difficult to keep up with developments within this subculture–I’ve often felt a bit lost reading the polemics at various blogs because I didn’t understand the backstory. Joyce’s book gives the backstory.
What emerges gradually from Joyce’s in-depth reportage is a rich depiction of the complex and complete alternative culture that Quiverfull families have created for themselves.
I have a new story up at Newsweek.com about a rogue chaplain-endorsing agency in the U.S. military that has distributed Arabic-language Bibles in Iraq through U.S. troops, in violation of strict military prohibitions on proselytizing religion:
Ever since former president George W. Bush referred to the war on terror as a “crusade”in the days after the September 11 attacks, many have charged that the United States was conducting a holy war, pitting a Christian America against the Muslim world. That perception grew as prominent military leaders such as Lt. Gen. William Boykin described the wars in evangelical terms, casting the U.S. military as the “army of God.” Although President Obama addressed the Muslim world this month in an attempt to undo the Bush administration’s legacy of militant Christian rhetoric that often antagonized Muslim countries, several recent stories have framed the issue as a wider problem of an evangelical military culture that sees spreading Christianity as part of its mission.
A May article in Harper’s by Jeff Sharlet illustrated a military engaged in an internal battle over religious practice. Then came news about former Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s Scripture-themed briefings to President Bush that paired war scenes with Bible verses. (In an e-mail published on Politico, Rumsfeld aide Keith Urbahn denied that the former Defense secretary had created or even seen many of the briefings.) Later in May, Al-Jazeera broadcast clips filmed in 2008 showing stacks of Bibles translated into Pashto and Dari at the U.S. air base in Bagram and featuring the chief of U.S. military chaplains in Afghanistan, Lt. Col. Gary Hensley, telling soldiers to “hunt people for Jesus.”
In the aftermath of that report, the Pentagon responded that it had confiscated and destroyed the Bibles and said there was no effort to convert Afghans. But while the military dismissed the Bagram Bibles as an isolated incident, a civil-rights watchdog group, Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF), says this is not the case. According to the group’s president, Mikey Weinstein, a cadre of 40 U.S. chaplains took part in a 2003 project to distribute 2.4 million Arabic-language Bibles in Iraq. This would be a serious violation of U.S. military Central Command’s General Order Number One forbidding active-duty troops from trying to convert people to any religion.
Lawrence James Hammar, Ph.D. reviews Quiverfull at Feminist Review:
“I can’t forgive the Christian patriarchy movement subjects of this superbly crafted and deeply troubling new book, for their bad faith, cognitive dissonance, and behavioral misdeeds carry heavy consequences. Whether or not they know what they’re doing remains an open question. Kathryn Joyce’s gripping new account, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, is about Christians who want literally to take over and remake the world by outbreeding everyone else, warping the minds of school-children, justifying bigotry with transparent illogic, and systematically denying civil rights. That most of the violence is committed quietly and privately against women and girls, most of whom accede to it with joy and penitence, will give even the most devoutly and egalitarian Christian reader pause. ‘Forgive them for they know not what they do.’ Christian patriarchy movement members who feel imperiled by Jews, lesbians, Muslims, atheists, gay males, feminists, foreigners, and the less fecund seem conveniently to have forgotten these words.”
Read the full review here …
Watch here as I talk to GritTV’s Laura Flanders about Saddleback Church, domestic violence and Quiverfull.
I have a new story at the just-launched Slate spin-off, Double X:
On Sunday afternoons, Sheri Ferber, a 43-year-old mother of three, listens online to Rick Warren’s sermons, streamed from the 25,000-member Saddleback Church where she was a devoted member for ten years. Although Sheri, pictured here, now lives an hour away in Temecula, California, she hangs on the weekly sermons like a woman in exile. It’s the closest she gets to church these days.
Ferber is a petite strawberry-blonde with a pretty, round-cheeked face, and a voice that sometimes sounds hesitant. Four years ago, she approached a Saddleback pastor for protection against her husband, who’d violently attacked her while they were driving home from church. Instead of protecting her, Ferber says, the pastor called her husband to warn him that Ferber had been “gossiping about their marriage.” Ferber, it seems, had run into Saddleback’s teaching that the sanctity of marriage prohibits divorce in all but a few circumstances, and domestic violence is not one of them. Abused wives could separate from their husbands, Teaching Pastor Tom Holladay explained in audio clips once available on the church website, but only with the intent to reconcile through church counseling. Read all …
Ignore the Rod: the Parental Rights Amendment Isn’t About Spanking
Several weeks ago, a Politico story gave a glimpse into the long-shot movement to create a new “parental rights” amendment to the Constitution, citing the debate as “the new wedge issue” that will reignite the culture wars (or perhaps more appropriately, reinvigorate media coverage of the ongoing, un-extinguished culture wars).
The proposed amendment, led by Rep. Pete Hoekstra (R-MI), has garnered 81 supporters in the House to date. Hoekstra has created a website, parentsrights.us, to organize support and house his numerous recent media appearances in support of the bill, which holds that “The liberty of parents to direct the upbringing and education of their children is a fundamental right” which no treaty or international law can supersede. Since its introduction, the bill has been covered heavily by Fox, ranking coverage from Bill O’Reilly, Mike Huckabee and other conservative anchors, fanning outrage over the idea that parents will be forbidden from disciplining their children or dragging them to church. However much church attendance and spanking may have been the focus of recent coverage, from both supporters and opponents of the proposed amendment, neither is the most potent issue in this fight.
In a heavily footnoted essay, fundamentalist homeschooling ministry Vision Forum, publisher of “Manly Men Write Manly Letters,” “Be Fruitful and Multiply,” “Passionate Housewives Desperate for God,” and “Manliness,” awards me the “2009 Vulgaria Child Catcher of the Year Award” for following the greatly-missed feminist writer Ellen Willis in trying “to destroy biblical patriarchy and the Christian family.” Here’s an excerpt:
But to really understand the genesis of Joyce’s obsessive passion to debunk patriarchy and prolific parenting, one needs to understand her philosophical origins. Joyce was personally mentored and trained to become a cultural revolutionary by one of the most significant radical feminists of the 20th century, Ellen Willis. Joyce and Willis were both at NYU, where Joyce was a student and Willis served as head of NYU’s Center for Cultural Reporting and Criticism. A founder of the ultra-fringe Redstockings of the Women’s Liberation Movement, Willis would later state that “Redstockings’ dominant political tendency was a kind of neo-Maoist materialism” and that her personal politics were a “blend of cultural radicalism, populism, and Marxism.”
Like the book that Joyce has just authored, Willis’ mission was to destroy biblical patriarchy and the Christian family. “In my view,” Willis wrote, “radical feminism did exactly what its opponents accuse it of: it played a key role in subverting traditional values and destabilizing the family…” She expressed her hope that the debate over marriage would result in “an implicit revolt against the institution of marriage into the very heart, further promoting the democratization and secularization of personal and sexual life.”
Update: Feministing’s Courtney Martin weighs in on the momentous occasion.
Update II: Beacon Broadside and Killing the Buddha cross-post my acceptance speech:
I’d like to thank Doug Phillips and Vision Forum Ministries for awarding me and Beacon Press their “2009 Vulgaria Child Catcher of the Year Award” for the publication of my recent book, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, a journalistic investigation of a growing fundamentalist lifestyle that opposes all contraception and women’s careers, proudly affirms biblical patriarchy, commands wives’ and daughters’ submission to husbands and fathers, and teaches homeschooling followers that feminism and gender equality– even women’s suffrage– is the root of all modern social ills.
As Phillips movingly writes, nothing captures the image of this feminist bogeywoman better than the Vulgarian Child Catcher, the bloodthirsty enforcer of the “self-indulgent” child-free state documented in the historical work, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. This Child Catcher, who seems possibly on loan from The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, “with his net, hook, crooked black hat, odd funeral clothing, and protruding snozzola,” sniffed out offending children and killed them. According to Phillips, I’ve done the same in my book (a “little book,” he writes), which has been called by numerous critics (including evangelical flagship, Christianity Today) an empathetic and respectful entry into a lifestyle that would be easy to mock. Apparently, it takes someone with Phillips’ “vision” to see that most of those reviewers are also “feminist leaders and ‘child catchers’ of many stripes,” and that even Christianity Today has aligned itself with anti-family forces on a mission “to destroy biblical patriarchy and the Christian family.” Read all …
Gretchen Peters, a reporter for The National, a new English newspaper in Abu Dhabi, writes about Quiverfull in her article, “More the merrier for Christian movement.”
Also, an author interview with Allison McCarthy at Girl With Pen.
