[P2P-F] recommended read: My Life as a Daughter in the Christian Patriarchy Movement

Thu Sep 22 13:52:54 CEST 2011

*My Life as a Daughter in the Christian Patriarchy
Movement*<http://www.alternet.org/teaparty/152393/my_life_as_a_daughter_in_the_christian_patriarchy_movement_--_how_i_was_taught_to_obey_men%2C_birth_8_kids_and_do_battle_against_secular_america/?page=entire>
LIBBY ANNE - AlterNet
*I don't think people outside of these Theo-fascist movements fully
appreciate what they represent, and how medieval their thinking is. This
brave woman gives us a glimpse. *
Deep within America, beyond your typical evangelicals and run-of-the-mill
fundamentalists, nurtured within the homeschool movement and growing by the
day, are the Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull movements. This is where I
grew up.

I learned that women are to be homemakers while men are to be protectors and
providers. I was taught that a woman should not have a career, but should
rather keep the home and raise the children and submit to her husband, who
is her god-given head and authority. I learned that homeschooling is the
only godly way to raise children, because to send them to public school is
to turn a child over to the government and the secular humanists. I was
taught that children must be trained up in the way they should go every
minute of every day. I learned that a woman is always under male authority,
first her father, then her husband, and perhaps, someday, her son. I was
told that children are always a blessing, and that it was imperative to
raise up quivers full of warriors for Christ, equipped to take back the
culture and restore it to its Christian foundations.

Christian Patriarchy involves the patriarchal gender roles and hierarchical
family structure, while Quiverfull refers to the belief that children are
always a blessing and that big families are mandatory for those following
God’s will (some eschew birth control altogether). While these two belief
sets are generally held in common, they can technically exist separately.
Now, not everyone who holds these beliefs actually claims the term
'Christian Patriarchy” or 'Quiverfull.” My parents certainly didn’t. In
fact, I never heard those terms growing up. What matters is not the name
that is claimed, but the beliefs outlined above.

My parents were originally fairly ordinary evangelicals. Like so many others
--it's a common story -- it was homeschooling that brought them to Christian
Patriarchy and Quiverfull. They began homeschooling for secular reasons, and
then, through homeschool friends, conferences and publications, they were
drawn into the world of Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull. It starts
slowly, one belief here, a book there. For those who are already
fundamentalists or evangelicals, like my parents, the transition is smooth
and almost natural. Suddenly, almost without realizing it, they are birthing
their eighth or ninth child and pushing their daughters toward homemaking
and away from any thought of a career.

Why are these movements so enticing to evangelical and fundamentalist
homeschoolers? Simple. Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull offer the image
of the perfect family and the promise that you can make a difference and
change the world, raising up an army for Christ, without ever leaving your
home. Organizations like Vision Forum and No Greater Joy promise parents
perfect families in very explicit terms. If you follow the formula, you,
too, can be like that pretty picture or happy face in the catalogue. They
are the huckster traveling salesmen of the homeschool world, but they sell
dreams.

The actual experience for children growing up in the Christian Patriarchy
and Quiverfull movements varies dramatically because every set of parents is
different. I happened to have a mother with never-ending energy and a father
who was fairly laid back. That meant that my home life was pleasant and my
childhood happy. Others, though, have mothers who are debilitated by
pregnancy after pregnancy and fathers who quickly become tyrannical and
overbearing. These children may not have a very happy upbringing at all.

While my upbringing was fairly happy, it was anything but normal. For one
thing, I was homeschooled. For another thing, I grew up with a dozen younger
siblings. Other families commonly have seven, eight or nine children. A few
have as many as 18 or 19. While there are some fun things about growing up
with so many siblings, the sheer size of the family means that daughters of
Christian Patriarchy have little privacy and many chores. And since they
don’t go to school, their time with friends is limited and their time
working by their mothers’ sides is maximized.

By the time I was 12, I could fix meals for the entire family, keep the
laundry going, and essentially run the house single-handedly. When I was 15
my parents went out of town for a week, leaving me in charge of the younger
siblings. Later when I was in high school, my mother had a hard pregnancy
and was completely incapacitated for a month. I ran the house and
homeschooled the younger children without a problem. I practically raised
some of my younger siblings. This endless list of chores and expectations
and responsibilities is seen as the natural order of things, rather than as
a problem.

Families in Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull place extreme importance on
maintaining their daughters’ sexual and emotional purity. Sex before
marriage is held to be sin, and sex before marriage also damages a
daughter’s marriage prospects. Girls are told that the best gift they can
give their future husbands is their virginity. And we’re not just talking
sex here: Most couples in Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull circles don’t
kiss before marriage, and some don’t even hold hands or embrace.

This virginity is more than just physical; it is emotional as well. Girls
are urged not to 'give away pieces of their hearts” by becoming emotionally
entangled with boys their age. Every teenage crush becomes suspect and
dangerous. Dating is out of the question, as it is considered to be
'practice for divorce.” Instead, daughters of Christian Patriarchy and
Quiverfull find husbands through parent-guided courtships, trusting their
father’s guidance and obeying his leadership. Marriage is seen as a transfer
of authority from the daughter’s father to her husband.

Daughters of Christian Patriarchy are essentially servants in their own
homes, but this does not mean they are necessarily miserable and unhappy.
While some daughters of Christian Patriarchy rebel and inwardly resent how
they are being raised, most don’t. Most accept what their parents teach them
as true, and look forward to their wedding day as the beginning of their
lives.

This was me. I was perfectly happy to help with my younger siblings and cook
for a dozen and do load after load of laundry. At age 10, 12 or 14, I was
being trained to be a 'helpmeet” to my future husband, preparing for my
life’s role by working alongside my mother and serving as junior helpmeet to
my father. I dreamed of my wedding constantly, and thought of what a
wonderful wife, mother and homemaker I would be. A wife and mother was all I
wanted to be, because any dream of anything else was nipped in the bud
before it ever took root. I truly believed that this was what God wanted of
me, and that serving my family and raising my siblings was serving God. And
I gloried in it.

Growing numbers of parents in the Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull
movements are keeping their daughters home from college. They argue that
college is wasted on daughters who are never supposed to hold jobs or have
careers anyway, and that it distracts them from serving others and learning
homemaking skills. Furthermore, they contend, college corrupts daughters and
fills their heads with ungodly thoughts of equality and careers. This
phenomenon is called the Stay-At-Home-Daughter movement.

I, however, was sent to college. Yet this did not initially mean that I
dreamed of anything outside of the role I was taught God had laid out for
me. Rather, I felt that college would prepare me to be a better wife and
mother, and especially, a better homeschool parent. For this reason, in
those families in the Christian Patriarchy movement who do send their
daughters to college, nursing and teaching, which are seen as naturally
feminine and excellent skills for future mothers and homeschool parents, are
favored courses of study. And, it is understood that even daughters who
attend college remain under the authority of their fathers and must obey
them, even after they turn 18. After all, their fathers are their godly
authority. God speaks to daughters through their fathers and daughters are
bound by God to obey their fathers.

You have to understand just how deeply these beliefs are implanted. Even
though I began questioning my parents’ beliefs halfway through college, I
was so inculcated into their mindset that I did not even think of having a
career or being other than a stay-at-home homeschool mom until four years
later. Even though I have been out for years and am now in my mid-20s, I
still feel like I am a failure because I only have one child. I feel that if
I don’t have five or six kids, I am somehow a flop. In my brain, my worth as
a woman is still tied to the number of children I have. I know these brain
patterns are bullshit and I’m working on eradicating them, but they are
still there. And in my conversations with other daughters who have left, I
have found that I am not alone in this.

By now, you may be wondering, how is this possible? How can parents
indoctrinate their children in this way? The answer, I would argue, is
simple: homeschooling. By homeschooling, these parents can control every
interaction their children have and every piece of information their
children come upon. My parents called it 'sheltering.” The result was that I
knew nothing of popular culture or the lives of normal teens, besides that
they were 'worldly” and miserable while I was godly and content. I had no
idea that normal teens would see the amount of chores I did as unfair and
oppressive, and even when I did realize this, I took pride in it, for the
amount of chores I did and my cheerfulness in doing them showed my
godliness.

By homeschooling us, my parents could completely control what we learned. I
studied from creationist textbooks and learned history from a curriculum
that taught 'His Story,” beginning with creation, Noah and the flood, and
Abraham and his covenant with God, showing the hand of God moving through
the 6,000 years of the earth’s history. I never had anyone tell me to dream
big, or to think outside the home, or that with my talent and intellect I
could have a brilliant career. Everyone around me believed the way my
parents did, including all of my friends, who, after all, were without
exception children of my parents’ friends. They encouraged me in my
steadfastness of beliefs and held me up as a paragon of virtue. Why would I
desire anything else?

It didn’t help that I was taught that those outside of our beliefs,
including humanists, environmentalists, socialists, and feminists, were
evil, selfish people who were destroying our society, and that Christians
who did not share our beliefs were 'wishy-washy” and 'worldy.” There is a
very 'us versus them” mentality in Christian Patriarchy. They were the
enemy, the agents of Satan out to destroy belief in God and pervert the
world. They cared only for themselves and their own desires and were not to
be trusted. I was taught that the world outside was a scary and dangerous
place. If I stayed under my father’s authority, I would be protected and
safe.

You also have to remember the sense of purpose that accompanies the
Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull movements. We were raised to fight the
enemy, be that Satan or the environmentalists, socialists, and feminists, to
come against them in spiritual warfare and at the polls. This is why Michael
Farris, a proponent of Christian Patriarchy and the leader of the Home
School Legal Defense Association, founded Patrick Henry College in 2000 to
train homeschooled youth in the law and government. There were more interns
from Patrick Henry College in the Bush White House than from any other
college. Put simply, their goal is to take over the country, instituting
godly laws ruling according to Christ’s dictates.

While the goal is to take back the world for Christ through the polls, force
is never completely ruled out. I was taught that someday the government
might take away our rights entirely, become a dictatorship, and crack down
on everything we believed in. My father used to point out the armory to us
and tell us that that is where we would mount the resistance when this
happened. Force, though, was to be a last resort. In the meantime, my family
campaigned tirelessly for conservative political candidates and attended
marriage rallies, pro-life marches, and second amendment rights meetings. I
dreamed of someday being a politician’s wife, supporting him in his bids for
office and attempts to restore the country to its godly foundation. The
world was framed in terms of good versus evil, and I had a role and a
purpose.

Taken together, these beliefs comprise a comprehensive worldview that gives
those within it a sense of purpose and provides simple answers to complex
problems. It can be very attractive. While the world is a complicated place,
Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull explain exactly what your role is and
what you must do to please God and carry out his will. It provides you with
a formula for raising perfect children and upholds order and hierarchy. You
know what your role is, what you are to do, and where you are going.

One last point to make is that evangelicals believe essentially the same
things as the Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull movements, they just don’t
take it to the same extreme. Evangelicals believe that husbands are to to be
their wives’ spiritual heads, but in practice their marriages are generally
fairly egalitarian. Evangelicals believe that children are a blessing, but
in moderation. Evangelicals believe that children should receive a godly
education, but most of them send their children to public schools.
Evangelicals believe that adult unmarried daughters should honor their
parents and listen to their advice, but they don’t expect them to always
obey it. Evangelicals believe that men and women are different, and that
children need their mothers at home, but most evangelical women work outside
the home. Christian Patriarchy and Quiverfull simply take these beliefs to
their natural – and radical – conclusions.

Perhaps now you have a better understanding of the world of Christian
Patriarchy and Quiverfull and the minds of those within it. While some like
me leave, many stay. I watch my younger sisters echo my parents’ beliefs,
speaking of the importance and protection of fatherly authority and planning
to eschew birth control entirely, and my heart breaks.

-- 
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