Is anyone familiar with something called the “Quiverfull Movement”?
It’s a movement among conservative believers that pushes for large families. We’re just now seeing its impact in the Churches of Christ, especially in some of our more conservative congregations.
There’s nothing wrong with wanting a large family. I have four sons — and am very happy that I have so many children. The problem arises when you take the joy of a large family and turn it into a command. It’s even worse when you take that alleged command and turn it into a political statement.
As you can see from the image at the top of this post, some within the Quiverfull Movement see having large families as a way to change the political landscape of the US for the sake of Jesus. It is, after all, so much easier to reproduce sexually than to reproduce evangelistically.
A Wikipedia article concludes from Rick and Jan Hess’s A Full Quiver: Family Planning and the Lordship of Christ —
Quiverfull’s principal authors and its adherents also describe their motivation as a missionary effort to raise up many children as Christians to advance the cause of the Christian religion.
The Movement is built on —
(Psa 127:3-5 KJV) 3 Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD: and the fruit of the womb is his reward. 4 As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth. 5 Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate.
(Psa 127:3-1 ESV) 3 Behold, children are a heritage from the LORD, the fruit of the womb a reward. 4 Like arrows in the hand of a warrior are the children of one’s youth. 5 Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them! He shall not be put to shame when he speaks with his enemies in the gate.
I’m no expert on the Movement, but this Wikipedia article on the topic appears to be well researched and fair. In fact, there’s a link to that article from Quiverfull.com, a popular website established in support of the Movement by some of its principal proponents.
Summary of teachings
The Movement advocates that–
* Birth control is wrong. Although the Movement is founded among Protestants, they adopt many of the same arguments as the Catholic Church on this point.
* Married couples should trust God to decide their family size and the timing of births.
* Infertility treatment is sinful. God alone should decide whether a couple has children.
* Sterilizations, such as vasectomies, should be reversed.
* Large families will allow the Christian church to grow and gain political power in the U.S.
* Christian parents should home school their children. (This view is popular within the Movement but not held as widely as the preceding positions.)
* There is also a subset within the Movement advocating for “patriarchy,” that is, the headship of husbands over wives taken to the point that women should be homemakers and not work outside the home.
* Some even argue that women should not go to college, as college is preparation for employment.
There is, of course, nothing at all wrong with having or wanting a large family. There is nothing wrong with a wife being a homemaker and not seeking employment. (My own wife does not work outside the home.) I like large families quite a lot myself. The error is in imposing a command to have large families. There is simply no such teaching in the Bible, and it’s wrong to take a personal preference and turn it into a law from God.
There are, of course, several proof text arguments asserted in favor of this point of view.
Argument 1: “Be fruitful.”
(Gen 1:28 ESV) 28 And God blessed them. And God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over every living thing that moves on the earth.”
The Jewish rabbis argued that Genesis 1:28 requires faithful Jews to marry and attempt to have children. However, Jesus and Paul disagreed.
(Mat 19:11-12 ESV) 11 But [Jesus] said to them, “Not everyone can receive this saying, but only those to whom it is given. 12 For there are eunuchs who have been so from birth, and there are eunuchs who have been made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven. Let the one who is able to receive this receive it.”
Commentators nearly universally interpret “eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven” as a reference to followers of Jesus who choose not to marry for the sake of Christian ministry. And, of course, most of the apostles did exactly that.
The command to be “be fruitful” is given to all of humanity, not just married Christians. And yet Jesus and Paul (in 1 Corinthians 7) make it clear that marriage is not required of a Christian — and so neither is having children. There’s just no way to reconcile New Testament teaching with the notion that Genesis 1:28 is a command binding on all today.
In fact, if Genesis 1:28 is a command binding on all today, it’s binding on the lost, too — and so we should not be trying to use reproduction as a means of growing the church faster than the general population grows; we should be urging all to marry and have large families.
1 Cor 7:2-4 urges spouses to fulfill their sexual responsibilities to the other — but not based on the importance of having children. Rather, Paul argues from the need to maintain chastity and faithfulness to one’s spouse and the fact that our bodies belong to our spouses.
(1Co 7:2-4 NET) 2 But because of immoralities, each man should have relations with his own wife and each woman with her own husband. 3 A husband should give to his wife her sexual rights, and likewise a wife to her husband. 4 It is not the wife who has the rights to her own body, but the husband. In the same way, it is not the husband who has the rights to his own body, but the wife.
Odd that Paul should not just declare God’s insistence on having more children — if that were true.
I distrust all exegesis that operates outside the gospel and apart from the mission of Jesus. You see, God’s mission for us is to participate in God’s redemptive mission — his mission to bring the lost to Jesus and to redeem the brokenness of the world. And that doesn’t require having large families (or require that we not).
In the Acts of the Apostles, the church was driven by the Spirit to teach the gospel to the lost across tribal, ethnic, national, and racial lines, and there is no teaching that the church should have large numbers of children to grow the church biologically. The church grew through evangelism — which is not the same thing at all.
Argument 2: “the fruit of the womb is his reward”
Psalm 127 declares that children are a gift from God (amen!). But Rick and Jan Hess argue in A Full Quiver: Family Planning and the Lordship of Christ —
Behold, children are a gift of the Lord.” (Psa. 127:3) Do we really believe that? If children are a gift from God, let’s for the sake of argument ask ourselves what other gift or blessing from God we would reject. Money? Would we reject great wealth if God gave it? Not likely! How about good health? Many would say that a man’s health is his most treasured possession. But children? Even children given by God? “That’s different!” some will plead! All right, is it different? God states right here in no-nonsense language that children are gifts. Do we believe His Word to be true?
John Piper wisely responds,
… just because something is a gift from the Lord does not mean that it is wrong to be a steward of when or whether you will come into possession of it. It is wrong to reason that since A is good and a gift from the Lord, then we must pursue as much of A as possible. God has made this a world in which tradeoffs have to be made and we cannot do everything to the fullest extent. For kingdom purposes, it might be wise not to get married. And for kingdom purposes, it might be wise to regulate the size of one’s family and to regulate when the new additions to the family will likely arrive. As Wayne Grudem has said, “it is okay to place less emphasis on some good activities in order to focus on other good activities.”
A good harvest is also a gift from God, according to the Bible. But that doesn’t mean we must grow all the corn we can possibly grow or that we shouldn’t plan when and where the corn grows — leaving that up to the hand of God.
Argument 3: Power politics
This is from a thoughtful article in The Nation, summarizing Quiverfull thought —
Quiverfull women are more than mothers. They’re domestic warriors in the battle against what they see as forty years of destruction wrought by women’s liberation: contraception, women’s careers, abortion, divorce, homosexuality and child abuse, in that order.
… if just 8 million American Christian couples began supplying more “arrows for the war” by having six children or more, they propose, the Christian-right ranks could rise to 550 million within a century (“assuming Christ does not return before then”). They like to ponder the spiritual victory that such numbers could bring: both houses of Congress and the majority of state governor’s mansions filled by Christians; universities that embrace creationism; sinful cities reclaimed for the faithful; and the swift blows dealt to companies that offend Christian sensibilities.
“With the nation’s low birth rate, the high divorce rate, an un-marrying and anti-child viewpoint, and a debauched nation perhaps unable to slow down the spread of AIDS, we can begin to see what happens politically. A half-billion person boycott of a company which violated God’s standards could be very effective….”
Hence, there’s an element of the Movement that hearkens back to the old Moral Majority and Christian Coalition days, when many evangelicals wanted to control the political machinery of the country by power of the ballot.
In this case, however, rather than persuading our fellow citizens to join our cause with logic and reasoning, the idea is to out reproduce them and so gain control of the ballot box.
God says,
(2Co 12:9 ESV) 9 But he said to me, “My grace is sufficient for you, for my power is made perfect in weakness.” Therefore I will boast all the more gladly of my weaknesses, so that the power of Christ may rest upon me.”
(1Co 2:4-5 ESV) 4 and my speech and my message were not in plausible words of wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit and of power, 5 so that your faith might not rest in the wisdom of men but in the power of God.
Reflect on Gideon, Jericho, and the many other accounts in which God insists that true power comes from relying on God, not numbers. The desire to control others, rather than to serve and sacrifice for others, is one of the great dangers of misunderstood Christianity.
Conclusions
Not all Quiverfull advocates take erroneous or legalistic positions. In fact, many simply want to have large families. I have no complaint with those who make that choice.
On the other hand, there are those who want to turn the idea of a large family into a command from God. And that’s not simply error, but like most other error, derives from a core misunderstanding of what Christians are called to become and to do and the nature of God.
God does not call on Christians to seize power and impose Christian values on an unwilling world by the power of the sword — or the ballot. Rather, God wants the lost to voluntarily and in love respond to Jesus in faith — a very, very different thing.
And Christians are called, when necessary and when gifted to do so, to sacrifice family and even marriage when necessary for the kingdom (Matt 19:12; 1 Cor 7). The call into kingdom mission is paramount — even over family (Luk 14:26).
We do much better when we see God and his commands through the lens of gospel and mission, rather than fertility and political power. Indeed, when we make women and men feel inadequate, even disobedient, because they don’t want to have a dozen children or wish to work outside the home, well, we’ve sinned against our brothers and sisters by presenting them a false image of God and their place in his kingdom.
In regard to the political aspect of this movement their assumption that children will necessarily have the same political instincts as their parents is faulty. The son of our patriot Benjamin Franklin was the royalist governor of New Jersey and spent the latter part of his life in England. Differing generational politics have been a part of our national life ever since. Many of the youth who loved Ronald Reagan in the 80’s now have children of quite different political persuasions.
I have to admit that the first thing that came to my mind was the statement by King Edward Longshanks in the movie Braveheart regarding Scotland. He said, “The trouble with Scotland is that it is full of Scots. If we can’t move them out, we’ll breed them out”. So now we have conservatives thinking, “The trouble with the country and the church is that it is full of liberals. If we can’t teach them out, we’ll breed them out”.
I do wonder if the religious and political right ever wonder themselves why most of their political champions over the last few years have crashed and burned. Either in debates, news conferences or speeches behind closed doors, most of them made some of the most uninformed, bizarre statements ever made, even by politicians. The truth is, it was more than a streak of bad luck; they were saying exactly what they and their followers believed. But, it became an embarassing tongue tied moment for them when the rest of the country said, “Wait, stop right there. What did you say?”
So, they are now trying to gain a majority the “natural” way. But what they forget is this: There is no guarantee that these children will eventually think and believe like their parents. Only young couples take literal, “Train a child in the way it should go and when it is old it will not depart”. When children become teens and young adults the pain and disappointment that often accompanies free will makes parenthood nearly unbearable.
I am sure these folks will give it a good try, but like most movements that do not reach first and foremost for the heart and mind it will become lost and forgotten by the second generation.
Maybe then we would out breed the Muslims that are practicing that same multiplication thinking in the USA for religious and political purposes. The Mexicans are doing a pretty good job of it too. We already in a short time have so many things that have to be spoken in both languages to be correct.
What a different USA our children and grandchildren will see in 20-30 years, both religiously and politically.
Change is good A. John, the bible says REPENT 🙂
Oh by the way, most Mexicans are Christians.
I am not familiar with the Quiverfull movement but much of what might be read above could have easily came from the pen of Reformed authors a few hundred years ago. Whether it be the raising of large, godly families, children being our heritage and future, fulfilling the interpretation of Scripture as Christianity fills the earth, etc.
In addition to Jay’s comments on Gen. 1:28, there are other qualifying passages such as giving birth in times of war and famine — not that it should not be done, but that it will be painful for those that do. I didn’t see Jay deal with whether Gen. 1:28 is still applicable to men living today. Is it or not? And with respect to the “lost”, they are not interested in other Biblical commands, why would we press them with this one? Why are we using what the “lost is not doing” to say we are not being consistent in our application, or even worse, that it doesn’t apply because we aren’t being consistent?
What I don’t see addressed is what I have heard on more than one occasion, in the many places that I have lived.
“Why, he has too many children, he won’t be able to do anything with his live because he’ll be taking care of all those kids.”
“We have too many people in the world. We need to look at reducing populations not increasing them.”
“I don’t want more than one child, I want to do things with my life other than raise children.”
Where in the above article did Jay address the issue of IDOLATRY? Putting self before God?
It is true that it is better that some do not marry, and that some do not have children or even cannot (eunuchs), but these are all EXCEPTIONS to the general command of Gen. 1:28.
One can hardly read the Old Testament and see the rise and fall of Israel and not recognize the positive and negative implications of whether Israel obeyed Gen. 1:28.
One can also have great difficulty in arguing for traditional marriage as being for having children against same-sex marriage while then turning around and implying that ‘having children’ means my one or two as I see fit.
To live for Christ under the New Covenant means we give our lives to him, including our children, however many we may have.
Ask your neighborhood Mormon how well obedience to Gen. 1:28 has worked out for them.
While the West whittles away their heritage with their sin idolatry of self, the Muslim world is united with a weapon that until now has never posed the threat it now does — the Muslim womb. When in the past Christians recognized the need to propagate their kind, as did the Muslim, the West is now so enamored with individualism and other forms of idolatry that we will soon reap the benefits of our selfishness.
Martin Luther on the “Estate of Marriage”:
http://pages.uoregon.edu/dluebke/Reformations441/LutherMarriage.htm
Regarding the application of Gen. 1:28 and Jay’s comments:
As to whether Gen. 1:28 contains a command:
“For this word which God speaks, “Be fruitful and multiply,” is not a command. It is more than a command, namely, a divine ordinance [werck] which it is not our prerogative to hinder or ignore. Rather, it is just as necessary as the fact that I am a man, and more necessary than sleeping and waking, eating and drinking, and emptying the bowels and bladder. It is a nature and disposition just as innate as the organs involved in it Therefore, just as God does not command anyone to be a man or a woman but creates them the way they have to be, so he does not command them to multiply but creates them so that they have to multiply. And wherever men try to resist this, it remains irresistible nonetheless and goes its way through fornication, adultery, and secret sins, for this is a matter of nature and not of choice.”
Regarding eunuchs:
“As to the first category, which Christ calls “eunuchs who have been so from birth,” these are the ones whom men call impotent, who are by nature not equipped to produce seed and multiply because they are physically frigid or weak or have some other bodily deficiency which makes them unfit for the estate of marriage. Such cases occur among both men and women. These we need not take into account, for God has himself exempted them and so formed them that the blessing of being able to multiply has not come to them. The injunction, “Be fruitful and multiply,” does not apply to them; just as when God creates a person crippled or blind, that person is not obligated to walk or see, because he cannot.“
After spending so many years defending my large family, you might think I would be encouraged by this sort of movement. Alas, this is not so. Again, lacking individual direction from God, or even the concept of it, some have reduced a very individual issue to a doctrinal/political position. As the father of eleven children, I can speak to the idea of large families with some degree of authority on the subject. I am clearly in favor of large families, and am incredibly blessed by my own, but that is a personal calling, not a rule which can be applied generally. Children are not tools given to ambitious parents. They are not means to an end. We ourselves were not born again for the purpose of evangelism, we were reconciled to God because that is what He wanted. He wanted us to be with Him again. It is a distressing and mechanistic view of family to see parents taking up a vision in which children are devices to be built and equipped for other purposes. The unfortunate arrogance found here is that no one can “create” even a believer, much less an effectual one. Only God does this.
For those of you who have read The Lord of the Rings, consider Sauron and Saruman, busily making children unto themselves for purposes which seem wise to them. There is a difference between fathering children and manufacturing soldiers.
All this said, do not be surprised to find me on the other side of the argument when I hear people offering their limp and carnal arguments against having “too many kids”.
Laymond,This out breeding is old hat to me, me and my family are well acquainted with how the whites out bred the Indians who invited and saved many from starvation when they came to this country. Look at it now, how many are wiped out and most of the others living on a reservation and living very poor.
Jay said, “There is, of course, nothing at all wrong with having or wanting a large family. There is nothing wrong with a wife being a homemaker and not seeking employment. (My own wife does not work outside the home.) I like large families quite a lot myself. The error is in imposing a command to have large families. There is simply no such teaching in the Bible, and it’s wrong to take a personal preference and turn it into a law from God.”
Have they imposed any command or are they merely advocating their beliefs?
Jay also said, “On the other hand, there are those who want to turn the idea of a large family into a command from God.”
Who has turned the idea of a large family into a command from God?
Thanks for your excellent article.
You may be interested in my analysis of Quiverfull use of Bible verses, and their interpretation (with my critique drawing on Augustine and other ancient Christian writers) – it is free to download at:
http://research-archive.liv.ac.uk/11333/
I notice one commenter here cited Martin Luther, and the above also includes a chapter assessing modern pronatalist use of Luther.
John,
Thanks for the link. That’s a very thoughtful, thoroughly researched article — and thanks for making it available for free. (So many scholarly works are only available via JSTOR at outrageous prices — resulting in a segregation of the Christian academic community from the rest of the Christian church.)
Jonathan asked,
Go to http://www.quiverfull.com.
From the Wikipedia article “Quiverfull” linked from http://www.quiverfull.com —
I wonder if these folks who insist that others “trust God” regarding their children,–which in essence forbids birth control– take the same approach to trusting God to protect their car or home from a hailstorm. Or have a freezer in which some other day’s daily bread is stored. Or have a 401k account. “Trust in God” does not always manifest in exactly the same ways in every believer. And the belief that God providentially controls now often children are conceived and born does not really mesh with the inference that we are powerful enough to thwart that divine control with a pack of condoms.
Hess and Hess make a valid statement, but then insist that the only way a couple can trust God is to just wait and see what happens. I am perfectly content with those who have followed this path– I am one of them– but if my neighbor goes to God and the Holy Spirit leads them to use birth control, who am I to challenge their revelation? Many believing parents seek an answer to how to trust God for the children He would give them. When they ask me, I encourage them to seek God for themselves, not just to do what we did.
It is not comfortable for me to take this contrary position. I indeed have my “quiver full” and am of all men most blessed because of this. But in my view, this is just one more in a long line of legitimate revelations which people have inflated into generic principles, which then overlaid with scripture references and petrified into doctrinal positions.
Jay, 4 sons is a start on a large family. Large families have at least a dozen children of different ages. Or more. Christians will do well to aim at having a large family, if God permits. How to afford it when it’s so expensive to have a child and buy presents for many is a mystery. But some have found ways to do it. Our nation is doomed if every couple uses birth control and stops at one or two children!
God gave humans both reproductive capabilities and a brain. He expected humans to use them both wisely.
I think He rather hopes we will ask Him. We have brilliantly-deduced opinions going in all directions, so I personally don’t see a lot of connection between that process and the will of God.
One group that steadfastly refuses to use birth control and generally has large families is the Amish. I heard someone quip years ago that, if current Amish birthrates continue, 90% of America will be Amish and the other 10% will be drivers!
I get asked all the time if I am Catholic or Mormon. Nobody asks me if I am Amish. Maybe if I get one of those hats…
Seems young couples cant win. If they choose to have one child they get the “So when are you going to have another? You cant let them grow up without siblings!” Or if they have 4 then its “You’ve lost your mind! How will you afford it!” Maybe everyone should mind their own business.