Allegories Gone Wild – Weapons Of War In A Quiver Of…Love?

Cross posted @ God Is 4 Suckers!

Sons are a heritage from the LORD, children a reward from him.
Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth.
Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.
They will not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies in the gate. – Psalms 127 3-5

One of the scarier movements is the Quiverfull movement. These people truly frighten me. If you watch the video from this article, you’d think, “Oh wait – but they seem to be such nice, religious people”.  (Yeah, right, as if religion improves people.)

Families with more than 10 children are becoming the norm among a group of traditionalist US Christians. The so-called Quiverfull families believe they are carrying out God's work, and providing a new generation of moral leaders. .

The way Psalm 127 talks about children has an almost military sound.

It describes them as "an inheritance, and arrows in the hands of a mighty warrior," adding, "happy is he whose quiver is full of them".

The standard apologist’s excuse would likely be, that this is in a ‘metaphorical sense’.

Many Quiverfull families do indeed sense looming battles for Christians, and often see their children as potential future leaders in fighting them.

Or potential cannon fodder. Remember, the religion is hierarchal by nature?

Rev James McDonald has 10 children, aged between four and 26 - an extraordinary fertility motivated by obedience to the Bible.

So, my question is – if this clown McDonald were infertile, would they be hitting the fertility clinic?  Would that make any kids conceived in that manner the ‘Snowflake Brigade’? “All in the valley of death rode the in vitro six hundred”?

"We believe that they are blessings… to be raised up in the worship of the Lord and they will be used by him in whatever way God will call them, to fulfill the Great Commission which we find in Matthew Chapter 28," he said.

And all it takes is one loon who knows how to re-interpret the wholly bibble to suit his/her ‘needs’ to turn the sheep into ravening wolves.

I’ll skip to the bottom:

Quiverfull families insist that the government cannot fix America's problems, but that their children could.

And to illustrate this with a proper counterpoint, here’s a review of Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, of which I will quote selected highlights:

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.

A nice big heaping helping of xenophobia. Why am I not surprised in the least?

The book’s twenty chapters are divided into three gendered parts—“Wives,” “Mothers,” and “Daughters”—in each of which Joyce deftly explores the bizarre ideology and political-economy of feminine subservience. The resulting dystopian communities in real-time and on-line in cyber-space rival those depicted in novels such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid's Tale, George Orwell’s 1984, and Sinclair Lewis’s It Can't Happen Here. This ain’t fiction, however. As befitting their understanding and practice of “complementarian theology,” as opposed to the alleged unnaturalness and godlessness of egalitarian gender relations, men and women in the Christian patriarchy movement believe equally (but differently) in the inherent inferiority of Eve (the Original Sin), females (on biological and spiritual grounds), Jezebel (in terms of sex) and women (who have hearts and minds). Sisters are in the process brainwashed into becoming meek and quiet supporters of their brothers, wives are instructed to remain sexually available to their husbands 24/7 (and forego any contraception), and mothers who don’t home-school their children commit them to Satan. Insofar as submissive females require degradation—the more public, the better—virtually every page is painful to read.

And gender biased – even gender bashing. ‘Unconditional love’ my homesick ass.

From another review:

Knowing that exposure to the wider world will be a serious temptation toward apostasy, Quiverfull families have crafted a totalistic environment that completely cocoons their kids off from influences their parents deem harmful.  This cocooning, for the girls at least, lasts a lifetime.  As children they are taught to shun the “feminist” message of self-actualization and instead, in the words of the Botkin sisters, to recognize that “we have no selves that are worth being loyal to.”  Girls are the property of their fathers until their fathers pass them to their husbands, sometimes even with a bridal price involved.

In my opinion, this is exemplary of the inherent problems of the obtuse and anachronistic religion called Christianity. It stimulates what I term a ‘servant culture’ – everyone’s a servant of some invisible patriarch, and being a hierarchy, and seeing as there are no instructions forthcoming from said mythological hierarch, it falls to whoever is viewed to be next in line. And usually it’s male, and whoever shouts the loudest, the most coherently (subjectively speaking), and the most enthusiastic, usually gets the vote. Let’s not forget the mob rule.

And the scariest point? Is that they intend to outnumber us – because in war, it’s hard to beat interlocked mass waves of infantry. Harder still when they’re loaded to the gills with endorphins.

The better question is, how to fight this? Education, of course. But then, there are some folks who refuse to learn different.

Scary thought, that.

Till the next post, then.