Privilege and the Quiverfull Movement

Many years ago, our family unwittingly became tools of the quiverfull movement. I didn't know it at the time, and believed we were in the middle of a good church family, but we were young, and we homeschooled, and as we had children, we were encouraged to have more. In conversations, we heard terminology about "having a full quiver" and about God directing the size of our family that I would come to realize much later was part of a well organized propaganda campaign of the movement.

Now, don't get me wrong; we are and ever will be fully responsible for our own actions and decisions, and do not regret them. But ion the climate where I was a low paid factory with nothing more than a high school education, it was probably not best to encourage us to have more children. The ensuing years gave us challenges that I embraced, but they also saw us thin of resources that had to be spread carefully across the large family. And we find ourselves, mid career, holding our own, but without retirement savings with shorter years left to catch up.

As I watch people admire and emulate families like the Duggars and look back on our own lives, I have to recount that we weren't admired, we weren't emulated. As a matter of fact, in some of the same circles where families would turn on the Duggars faithfully, they held us at a distance. And while we struggled, we faced a general attitude that we had made our own bed, and we were welcome to lie in it. And in some cases, we even faced quite nasty retribution from church members who felt it their Christian duty to try to relieve us of the burden of so many children.

It is one of many reasons I do not trust the church any more. I have not abandoned my Christian faith, but experience is teaching me that a church body of Christians seeking to serve the Lord in sincerity is extremely rare; in my experience, in fact, it doesn't exist. I trust that it does merely out of hope.

But I am thinking of this and how it speaks to privilege. We worship large families who are wealthy, we hold them up as heroes. But large families that struggle through from paycheck to paycheck are chastised as entitlement seeking leeches, while the irony of church members that consider themselves "prolife" escapes them.

The Church will not escape the criticism of those who stand outside it as long as they remain inconsistent on their views of life. It is either sacred or it is not. And if it is sacred, it is always so, and working families deserve as much encouragement and support as wealthy ones.