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.
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