An Ethnographer Goes Inside the Quiverfull Movement

A Review of Emily Hunter McGowin's "Quivering Families"

Last week, we took the holiday weekend to take the kids to Dinosaur National Monument, and I was able to to read an astonishing three books over the course of our drive there and back (we did a lot of driving). Among them was Emily Hunter McGowin’s Quivering Families: The Quiverfull Movement and Evangelical Theology of the Family, which I’ve had my eye on since it came out in 2018.

What made me put Quivering Families in my Amazon cart? I have both a personal and professional interest in the Quiverfull movement for a long time. Much of my writing has to do with how gender impacts the lived Christian faith, so a movement where women’s primary expression of faith is childbearing and childrearing is of course intriguing to me. But it’s not just academic curiosity that leads me to want to know more about the Quiverfull phenomenon in the American evangelical world. I was born into the Quiverfull movement: I am the sixth-born of ten children, and my parents’ decision not to limit their family size was owing directly to the influence of Quiverfull literature.

Quiverfull - a shorthand for the belief that children are an unqualified blessing from the Lord and should not be limited through artificial or natural birth control - is often discussed in passing, subsumed into the conversation on the Christian patriarchy movement. They certainly do belong together, but I rarely see Quiverfull given the individual attention it deserves. In my upbringing, the Christian imperative - as my parents believed it was - to have as many children as God would allow, was the Christian family’s “prime directive” from which gender hierarchy naturally flowed, not the other way around.

Many outsiders looking at Quiverfull communities do not quite understand the motivations that cause the women, particularly, to choose this way of life, assuming (wrongly) that the women are having absolutely fantastic numbers children simply because their husbands told them to. This is an understandable conclusion to come to, since Quiverfull literature itself so consistently holds up an ideal where men lead, and women follow. Certainly men taking the lead in following “God’s design” for family size is the Quiverfull ideal, but the reality on the ground, as Hunter McGowin shows in her book, is much more complicated.

Hunter McGowin comes to her topic as an ethnographer. This means that, rather than taking a large group of people and asking them a relatively short set of pre-set questions, she is taking a very small group of people and spending a long period of time interviewing them in great detail. There are both advantages and drawbacks to this method, as the author concedes. The obvious drawback is that such a small group can hardly be taken as representative of the whole. A less obvious drawback is that women in this community who would be willing to say “Yes” to this process at all, are likely to represent a more moderate sampling of Quiverfull practice.

The fact that her three research subjects are on the more moderate end of the Quiverfull spectrum is probably the biggest weakness of the book. If this were the only book you read on the Quiverfull movement, you might get an overly-rosy idea of its outcomes. The three families that are shown in the book seem to provide a loving, safe environment for their children, and even the couples who formally hold to gender hierarchy have pretty egalitarian marriages in practice. Hunter McGowin’s close association with the three mothers she interviewed over the course of two years, and the trust she has built with them, understandably motivates her to take a more gentle tone than we usually see in critiques of Quiverfull and the Christian patriarchy movement.

This could be seen as a drawback, but in another way it actually strengthens the book’s arguments. Many of the voices writing on the Quiverfull movement are adult children of large, homeschooling families who want to tell the world about the abuses and educational neglect that tends to fly under the radar in the Quiverfull community. In short, there has been a lot of coverage of Quiverfull at its most extreme, ugly, and destructive. This kind of exposition is vital, but if it is all people know, it may backfire when people meet more moderate, down-to-earth Quiverfull families who dress in trendy clothes, practice gentle parenting, educate their children more-or-less responsibly, and seem, well, nice. The reality is, some Quiverfull families are nice - but people can be nice, and also be wrong.

The families that Hunter McGowin looks at may not manifest all there is see in the Quiverfull community - they don’t - but they are certainly representative of some portion of it, and probably the least problematic one. Sampling the “cream of the crop” may not give the most accurate picture of typical Quiverfull outcomes, but it allows the author to make the case that even at its best, Quiverfull theology has internal flaws that cause it to ultimately fall short of Christian orthodoxy, and even sabotage its own, stated goals. And, while Hunter McGowin does not get up-close-and-personal with abuse, she does show the reader how the ideological weaknesses of Quiverfull allow abuses to go undetected and unaddressed.

Hunter McGowin defines Quiverfull as existing in the overlap of a three-part Venn diagram. The three elements of Quiverfull are: pronatalism (intentionally having as many children as possible), gender hierarchy, and homeschooling. Any of these three may be practiced outside of the Quiverfull movement, and even outside of evangelical Christianity, but in order to fit into Hunter McGowin’s definition of “Quiverfull,” all three elements must be present. Homeschooling, particularly, is a non-negotiable of the Quiverfull model: “while there are many homeschooling families that are not Quiverfull, there is no such thing as a Quiverfull family that does not homeschool” (pg xviii).

Very early on, Quivering Families dispels the popular myth that Quiverfull is a male-driven, male-centric movement. As I mentioned, this may be the Quiverfull ideal, but it is not the Quiverfull reality. Hunter McGowin writes:

There is no doubt that women are the primary actors in the Quiverfull subculture. Quiverfull centers the bodies and work of women in a way that even complicates their patriarchal convictions. Women are the mothers, homemakers, and homeschoolers focused on birthing and nurturing “arrows” for the Christian “war” over American culture. The testimony of Quiverfull teachers is that their women are the most important agents of change, contributing to the goal of Christian dominion in the decades and centuries to come. (pg xxvii)

By way of demonstration: think for a moment how many of the Duggar daughters whose faces you would recognize, or how many you can name. Now, think of how many of the Duggar sons you know by face or name (besides Josh Duggar, who is more infamous, than famous). In 19 Kids and Counting, the Duggar women and girls are undeniably the ones that audiences tuned in to see, the ones who were courted for interviews and speaking engagements. Their courtships, weddings and most of all, their pregnancies and childbirth, were the main plot of the show, just as women’s actions are the main “plot” of the Quiverfull subculture.

Quiverfull’s vision for womanhood has to compete with feminism’s vision for female empowerment, and it rises to the challenge. In a world where domestic and reproductive labor are often undervalued, Quiverfull provides women with a narrative where the work that only they can do - having babies - is actually the most important work of all. Hunter McGowin notes that, contrary to popular belief, it is overwhelmingly women who are the first to become “proselytized” to the Quiverfull way of thinking, who then drag an often-reluctant husband along with them. To say that women are the primary actors in the Quiverfull subculture does not negate the vulnerability of women within the community. Unquestionably, Quiverfull ideology deliberately disempowers women in relation to men. But shifting the narrative is important for understanding what draws women, particularly, to the Quiverfull lifestyle in the first place.

Because Quiverfull asks women to do so much, on a practical level it actually undermines one of the main supports of its “three-legged stool”: gender hierarchy. As much as Quiverfull mothers may aspire to let their husbands be leaders in the home - and perhaps even believe that they are doing so - the sheer magnitude of administrative work that they are expected do makes it so that many if not most Quiverfull homes are functionally matriarchal. The Quiverfull mother is the giver of life, the teacher, the nurturer, the spiritual guide of the next generation; the Quiverfull father is simply the one who funds her world-changing endeavors.

The emphasis on motherhood, however, has been changing in recent years. In The Way Home, Mary Pride asks why women would want to be pastors when they have “their own little church in their home.” This kind of rhetoric would not fly anymore, with the movement’s more recent emphasis on fathers as “family shepherds,” an idea especially associated with the Quiverfull-adjacent Family-Integrated Church movement. Hunter McGowin explains:

Put simply, FIC is a reaction against the practice of age-segregated teaching in Protestant churches and an attempt to reverse trends that show Christian families are increasingly less successful at keeping their children within the faith as they grow up. FIC adherents eschew any kind of special teaching for children and youth and prioritize the parents’ role (especially fathers) as the primary teachers of their children. (pg. 45)

The FIC movement teaches that the family does not exist for the church, but rather the church for the family. The modus operandi of family-integrated churches is for the church to disciple parents - and particularly fathers - so that they are equipped to disciple their own families. This may even take the form of fathers administering the sacraments to their families: baptizing their children, and in some cases even dispensing communion to both wives and children. This concept of the family as “a little church in the home,” and fathers as “little pastors” leads naturally to the question: if the home can be a church and a father can be a pastor, what do we need the church for at all?

In theory, Quiverfull parents almost universally believe they should belong to a local church, but historically, they have found this hard to put into practice. Hunter McGowin finds that although “one might expect their commitments to Christian formation to translate into faithful church participation … the opposite is often the case.” She posits two reasons for this: one, Quiverfull parents are committed to the idea of doctrinal purity, and purity in their minds entails pronatalism, homeschooling, and gender hierarchy - commitments that are not shared in most mainstream evangelical churches. Second, Quiverfull literature consistently prioritizes the importance of the family over against the church. From a Quiverfull parent’s perspective, what good is it to attend a church that has “accommodated the culture,” and might corrupt the children they are raising with such care? What can a pastor teach a father about shepherding his family, if the pastor himself is ignoring God’s command to “be fruitful and multiply” (and multiply … and multiply)?

I can attest to Hunter McGowin’s findings regarding Quiverfull’s relationship to the church: I know from experience that at best, the relationship between a Quiverfull family and the local church will tend to be fraught. I also know from speaking to other adult children of Quiverfull families that long periods of attending no church at all, or simply giving up and “doing church at home” in order to preserve ideological “purity” happens at very high rates in the Quiverfull community. From the other side, I’ve also spoken to pastors who have seen contention follow in the wake of Quiverfull families as they drift from church to church. In some cases, rather than leave, the Quiverfull element simply takes over: I’ve known of multiple cases where a church actually split within a year or two of the first Quiverfull family showing up. Certainly there are individual cases where Quiverfull families have been able to exist peacefully in a local church that doesn’t share its convictions, but the trend of division and isolation is too pronounced to be a coincidence.

Quivering Families concludes that the Quiverfull movement will never achieve its own goals of transforming the culture through “multigenerational faithfulness” - not because its vision is too radical, but because it isn’t radical enough. Christianity has survived and spread thus far through God’s providential use of local churches: actual bodies of specific believers where specific ministers (not men as a sex) are ordained to shepherd those whom God calls out of the world. The church does not transform secular society to be Christian through prolific childbirth or anything else, but rather provides, as Hunter McGowin puts it, “an alternative society” - one that transcends all other social ties and institutions, including the family. The priority of the spiritual family of God over the biological, human family was considered radical when Jesus first taught it, and it’s still radical today.

Although I don’t recommend that outsiders wanting to understand that Quiverfull movement only read Quivering Families, I do think that it’s an important book that tells a side of the story that we rarely hear. I also think that Hunter McGowin’s empathetic and measured approach brings an important re-humanization to a community that too often gets dismissed as irrational, faceless zealots. You can buy Quivering Families on Amazon or directly from the publisher here.

I am not being paid or compensated in any way by Fortress Press for this review.