"I'd like to order a book please.""What's the title?""'Belching Out The Devil'. If you need the author's name, it's Mark Thomas""Oh...that sounds like an awful title. I don't like the sound of that one...."
Coke adds life, says British comedian Thomas, except in all the places where it brings death. The author, a pop-culture presence across the pond-when he started, he writes, "you didn't have to fuck a footballer or eat kangaroo penis on a reality show to appear on TV"-offers plenty of witty, humorous lines, but his purpose is serious.
It's a strange thing how sometimes what may appear to be laudable in one context becomes tainted, reconfigured and repackaged in such a way that you're no longer comfortable with it. For example, I believe there there is some fundamental calls for a higher order of respect that is due to a lady from a man. It might be old-fashioned, but those ideas were instilled in me very early. Hold doors, let the lady go first, and all of the other qualities were reinforced frequently. I just do those things under the spirit of politeness, not out of some fundamental inequality. I'm perfectly assured that she could open the door, or not go first and there would (by and large) be no problem with that.
But I did think of exactly those things when I read Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement by Kathryn Joyce. What happens when you are involved in a world where, under the guise of politeness and biblical stringency, one begins to control the entire life of a woman, calling it the duty of women to submit? This book answers that question, and the answers alternate between the horrifying and the depressing.
First of all, I need to express some bias. In the spirit of full disclosure, I'm a lapsed Catholic who has thought about, read about, or listened to nearly every religion or spirituality there is. I am prepared to show any belief respect, and any practitioner respect until they show me that they're not prepared to reciprocate. I also have a long libertarian streak in me, and it has a tendency to raise the hackles when I hear about someone being oppressed by any kind of dictatorship, whether it's in a country or whether it's in a home. The challenge in this particular review is going to be to maintain my objectivity on the subject, and limit the comments to the text.
Conveniently, this brings me around to the initial point that caused me some concern. I have a bit of leeway, as I'm just reviewing, but it seemed to me that there was not even a semblance of objectivity in Joyce's book. It was very clear from the beginning that there was going to be none, as well. In discussing the quote by one of the patriarchy movement's authors ("Ideas have consequences") she speaks of the movements response to the problems occurring in society today."...But they also mean a more general point: an all purpose "I told you so" to a society that has embraced, even to a limited extent, modern notions of women's autonomy, broad definitions of family and love, and a high valuation of individual rights and fulfillment that, as they see it, can threaten the good of a community at large. When the lumbering conventional wisdom of centrist politics gets around to registering the effects of these ideas - sexual revolution ideas, in short - Weaver's [the author being referred to] fans smile ruefully: they could have told you that feminism would lead to nothing good."
I have to confess that my criticism of a lack of objectivity is not a strong one, and it was simply intended to point out that if you are expecting such, you are not going to find it within these pages. Instead, you're going to hear stories that are deeply disturbing, especially when we see how close this country came to a world in which the "right wing" (a place where many of these ideas have a home) continued to dominate culture at large.
It would do to mention, at least in basic terms, what the beliefs of the patriarchy movement are. First, and foremost, the belief is one in the utter supremacy and instructions of the bible, which is to be followed absolutely. As a result, and citing the stories of Genesis, a woman's place is in submission to her husband. The prevailing notion is that she is not equal, but rather created as helper and follower. Trying to do jobs outside the home (except as last resort) is to be strictly forbidden, attempting to espouse any interpretation of events is denied, and it seems like the by-words consist of "seen and not heard" in the public arena. To define terms more thoroughly, the title of the book is derived from the name of a term used to describe one particular "packet" of thought within the Christian patriarchy movement. The Quiverfull set of ideas specifically relate to children, but they are a part of the larger patriarchy movement and are tied (I would argue inextricably) to it. Quiverfull families cite Psalm 127:3-5 as the basis for their beliefs on the practice of procreation.Lo, children are an heritage of the LORD:
and the fruit of the womb is his reward.
As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man;
so are children of the youth.
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. KJV
As a result of their interpretation of this, there are to be no preventative measures to children being born, up to and including non-"treatment based" abortive measures. Any notion of "family planning" that does not begin with and end with the idea of "the more the merrier" is absolutely forbidden. This aspect of the Christian Patriarchy leads to some ideas that make up the core of the movement. First, that every woman in the movement is considered a "fountainhead" for the soldiers of a vanguard of Christ (I'm tightly paraphrasing), and one day through their efforts the "faithful" will just outnumber those who are not. Also, it implies a very basic differentiation and stratifying of women in the Christian Patriarchal community. The tacit statement is if you can have children, you'd better be; if you are having them, you're wonderful; and if you can't have them, you are not a worthy part of the community. With the inescapable interweaving of those two concepts (Quiverfull, and Christian Patriarchy), there are some very real, and very frightening thoughts that exist in the world at large. The fact remains that I believe Joyce subscripted one part of her title in reverse - the Christian Patriarchy is her discussion point, Quiverfull philosophy is a part of that.
If those seem painful to any of you reading, I don't blame you. Frankly I've never considered myself much of a feminist reader or writer, but I had a hundred moments when reading this that I considered renouncing the connection I have to a gender, simply because of these forced situations. I, and I suspect others, cannot agree with any "divine law" that turns one person into an indentured servant, while the other gets absolute power. That is utter folly.
The power divide does not work either. I will forego a direct quotation here as it amounts to an entire chapter in Joyce's text, but I'll attempt to give the shortened version. A husband and wife are having marital problems. The husband is behaving madly, accusing the wife of fictional affairs, committing acts of verbal abuse, and other acts of cruelty. Eventually (it's terrifying that I had to write eventually there) the wife goes to her pastor, a person who, ostensibly, is trained to handle problems of a spiritual or emotional nature. She is told that it is her "lack of submission" that is causing her husband to falter, and that she should "try harder." She is made to take on certain written agreements that are notarized by other "leading families" of the church. These agreements read like a contract of war and state that the wife shall not talk about the husband disparagingly to anyone, for any reason. She shall follow his words in all instances. She is told that her options are to leave in shame and embarrassment from her community, or sign. She signs, in tribute to the power of a human spirit to be captured by the hypnotic sway of a voice that promises answers. The violence, abuse, and danger occurs more, and more, and finally in a state of absolute desperation, the wife returns to the pastor. The pastor yells at her, denounces her, and tells her she is sinning; that she is a "Jezebel." This accusation points to a biblical passage on that figure, but also means something more in the context of the Patriarchal movement. Though Eve was burdened with the "original sin," it is Jezebel for her rebellion and attempts at dominance THROUGH a man that ranks her as such anathema in the community that follows this belief.
It does not end there. Breaking any expectation of privacy that is to be expected between a spiritual leader and his congregation, their preacher told the entire congregation about the wife's failure. The community turned against them. They were persecuted for the mere fact that the wife wanted to get away from an abusive situation. Angry letters began to flood in. Phone calls were made. Persecution in return for belief, hatred when compassion was looked for.
This book was a difficult one to get through. It will be even more difficult when we consider the sense of scale of the population involved. The numbers, according to Joyce, while small are growing. She suggests that the increasing number of home-schooled children, while not always members of a Patriarchal movement, provides some benchmark as to the number of children being born into communities that will function exactly this way. To give a sense of scope as well as scale, one of the doctrinal messages of a patriarchal church was signed by Mike Huckabee. One of the most frightening ideas, especially to anyone who lives in absolute terror of anything that calls itself "Fundamentalism," is that the idea of the Quiverfull means two things. The first, numbers are going to swell until the more liberal thinking of us find ourselves outnumbered by sheer mass. The second - a quiver tends to have a very specific use, and that is almost universally martial. The ideology is a declaration of war.
The stories within are frightening, but as philosophers from Nietzche to Green Day (I'll reserve judgement on their philosopher status...) have said, one needs to know what you're up against when you're trying to make a change in the world. Frankly if it ever came to a point where the dominant ideology was the Patriarchy, even as a male (who in the cosmic coin toss came out on top, it seems) I would seek a new place to live. Either that or be considered a heretic. On that spirit of submission, I would like to offer to the Patriarchy movement one parting shot that I am sure they will appreciate, if only to cement the role in this psychodrama that I'd be only too happy to play.
"Better to reign in hell, than serve in Heaven"
