Vagina: Actually, Maybe It Is A Clown Car

Jeff Sharlet sent us this link to a Nation story about the "Quiverfull" movement among fundie Christian women who consider their vaginas God's house and having babies as a way of populating God's army. All kinds of terrifying quotes like these: "Tracie Moore, a 39-year-old midwife who lives in southern Kentucky, is mother to fourteen. Wendy Dufkin in Coxsackie has her thirteen."

Sharlet had this to say about the piece:

My friend and colleague Kathryn Joyce has just published her first major magazine article in The Nation, a portrait of a new Christian fundamentalist "avant-garde" of women who wage "spiritual war" by birthing as many soldiers for God as they can.

They call their babies arrows, and their movement "Quiverfull," and they're thinking long term: "if just 8 million American Christian couples began supplying more "arrows for the war" by having six children or more, they propose," writes Kathryn, "the Christian-right ranks could rise to 550 million within a century."

Men are in on it, of course: Kathryn writes of one husband who abandoned plans for a vasectomy urged even by his pastor when he "saw a warrior angel in his dream. A "large, worrying warrior angel" with a flaming sword that he pointed at Christopher's genitals, telling him, "Do not change God's plan.""

Scariest of all, conservative Democrats are in on it too -- the latter part of the article reports on a Democratic Leadership Council study of the "return to patriarchy" to figure out how Democrats can do just that as a path to victory.

Kathryn's been working with me on The Revealer.org for several years. A piece she wrote for the site led to a book contract with Beacon, and this piece is the first step toward that book. I'm pretty skeptical about the potential of blogging, but in this case I've seen it done -- a blogging item has evolved into something real. I'm more excited about it than anything I've published myself in recent memory; I think it's the kind of journalism that's needed right now.

What neither Sharlet nor Kathryn Joyce say, however, is that it's very unlikely that all those babies will turn out a). straight, or b). Christians. As the New York Times recently reported, fundie teens are leaving in droves, and they aren't even voting age yet. So perhaps these Quiverfull women are merely populating the US with the seeds of the next major countercultural movement.

Comments

[Jeff Sharlet]

Thanks for blogging this, Noel. You're right, of course, that at least some of those 550 million spiritual warriors will be meth-lovin' massage freaks, and some of em will even use their real names when they buy time with a callboy. But the link to the NYT piece is misleading. As it happens, I've been reporting on the same movement, Battlecry, as that NYT piece for the last three months. Goodstein, I think, took their bait -- kids aren't leaving the movement in droves, but movement leaders are declaring that to be the case as part of the organizational drive. You have to understand, too, that when they say 4% of this generation will be Christians, they mean hardcore fundamentalist, Bible believing, missionary Christians -- most members of Ted's church wouldn't even qualify.

[Aaron Retka]

I think "Quiverfull" is the creepiest word I've heard in a long time, and there's something deeply and profoundly wrong about looking at kids as political commodities: "If we can't vote 'em out, we'll breed 'em out." Scary.

[darksandal]

Yeah, Jeff, and I didn't mean to cite the NYT piece as gospel, so much as point out that those children will be living in a free society where rebellion is culturally valued and you simply can't control that many children!

[andrew]

I say we dust off and nuke the whole site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.

[Megynn]

Please see my blog for comments on this and other cultural spectacle. http://megynn.blogspot.com/ I'm thinking of becoming a vessel for gay babies. Any gay sperm out there?