Fighting Western
Contraceptive Mentality
Families with more than 10 children are becoming the norm among a
group of traditionalist
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".
Many Quiverfull families do indeed sense looming battles for
Christians, and often see their children as potential future leaders in
fighting them.
Rev James McDonald has 10 children, aged between four and 26 -
an extraordinary fertility motivated by obedience to the Bible.
"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 fulfil the Great Commission which
we find in Matthew Chapter 28," he said. (Amen!!!)
The "Great Commission" (Requires boots in the
field just as Joshua was required to but lacked enough boots in the field to
Conquer and inhabit the promised land, so they stopped and the nations around
them became pricks to their eyes, and thorns in their side) - the duty to spread the Christian
message throughout the world - is among a number of challenges Mr McDonald sees
facing his family.
Among others, he cites divorce, adultery, abortion and internet
pornography.
"The societal ills that we have, the challenges we have...
we have rampant disease and bankrupt health systems because we don't know the
truth of the Bible. But as these truths are lived out in the lives of God's
people, society changes," he said.
Declining congregations
The McDonalds are being joined in the battle by a growing number
of very large traditionalist Christian families equally committed to promoting
Biblical values.
When the
They say his Christian example has already led his comrades to
behave better.
When Garrison and the rest of his family drew up in a 15-seat
minibus to be greeted by the McDonalds, a crowd was instantly created on the
gravel outside the McDonalds' house.
The
The siblings address their father as "sir", and their
esprit de corps is enhanced by wearing similar clothes.
Quiverfull families tend to believe in male headship - the
principle, also derived from the Bible, that men should lead households.
Feminists are perhaps the fiercest critics of the budding
Quiverfull movement.
They accuse it of trying to undo the equality and freedom won
for women over decades of struggle, and claim that the idea of automatic male
leadership is anachronistic.
But Robert Sanford sees his approach to family life both as
authentically Christian, and as the best training for children to take on what
he sees as the moral decay afflicting American society.
"I think we should as Christians lead in that way, and we
can teach that character and teach those morals," he said.
"To me the Bible is the best way of doing it. In my estimation,
the Bible is the only way of doing it."
At
There are several very large families here, their 15-seat
mini-vans scattered across the car park.
James McDonald, the pastor here, uses the service to baptise a
boy, immersing him bodily in a bath-type pool set up on the raised floor at the
front of the church.
The boy's parents watch and wrap a towel around him as he
emerges.
Pastor McDonald looks out on a sea of children, mostly
conservatively dressed, many of the girls with their hair covered.
But, given what he sees in other churches, he is not complacent
about their numbers.
"In denomination after denomination their children are
leaving in mass exodus, and this is a major major problem especially when most
families only have two or three children," he said.
"Who's going to fill those pews in the next
generation?"
There is a wider concern too that going beyond the
'Race suicide'
Simply filling the world with white Christians is not what
motivated either the Sanfords or the McDonalds - for them having large families
was a matter of faith.
The
But many of the traditionalist Christians who make up the Quiverfull
movement are perplexed by the low birth rate of their co-religionists.
There is no overt talk
about the need to boost white populations (Here they fall into
greiveous error, salvation is freely given by Jesus Christ to the Jew and the
Greek to the slave and the free, to male and female, all Christian Households
regardless of its racial make up is commanded to be fruitful and multiply, to
fill or to flood the earth with people that Love Jesus Christ and God the
Father and joyfully and joyously become lights in the great darkness of our
day. There is no room in the kingdom of heaven for “white” Christians or of any
other race or group for the sake of that race or group alone. Empty households, empty Sunday schools
and empty churches declare death and extinction await all
that walk in disobedience. Marriage,
sex, having multiple children, and raising Godly households are about as basic
and core to the Gospel of Jesus Christ as it gets. This is why the Lord has had
us speak to this so many times) but, according to authors who have studied the movement, there
is an underlying worry about "race suicide".
Allan Carlson favours larger families of any background, even
though he says he is, as he puts it, a "radical secularist".
Dr Carlson heads the
He says many Quiverfull
families want to undermine what they regard as a "contraceptive
mentality" in the West. (Actually its not the contraceptive
mentality, it is society as a whole beleiving and following the lying and
deceptive words written in the book “The Population Bomb” so that we have the
whole of westernized society walking in obedience to this one book, and the
worldly earthly and carnal church follows in lock step regardless of whether
they are evenagelical, fundamentalist, pentecostal or charismatic. All march in
lockstep to the destuction of their households, their greater households, their
local community and their nation. – This is the epidemy of takning ones talant, wrapping it in a
napkin and burying it, while thinking all the time that they are righteous, in
the end they discover that they have comepletely undone themselves and wasted
their entire lives and all that God gave them. What would one think that will
happen to such a disobedient and lazy servant?)
"The historic
Christian view, Protestant and Catholic, prior to 1930, was that both
contraception and abortion were incompatible with Christian faith," he said.
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There is a sense in which these
intentionally created large families are seeing themselves as the… foundation
of a counter-culture, which could grow, and should grow 
"We're starting to see some sense among
conservative Protestants in
Many of those families are linked into the wider population of
traditionalist Christians by the home-schooling movement, by which it is estimated
that more than two million American children are taught at home.
They share concerns particularly about "life" issues -
such as abortion and stem-cell research, but about promoting other
traditionalist Christian values too, in areas such as marriage.
Mr Carlson - who advocates a reversal of the industrial
revolution and a return to home-based businesses centred on the family - says
there is a strategic motivation behind the Quiverfull movement.
"There is a sense in which these intentionally created
large families are seeing themselves as the… foundation of a counter-culture,
which could grow, and should grow," he said.
This counter-culture is still small, in the thousands or tens of
thousands perhaps, but it does seem to be emerging as a determined force.
Quiverfull families insist that the government cannot fix