Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement Book

A very clear, readable book about the rise of separatist Christianist movements which emphasize wifely submission to the husband as the wife's way to gain eternal glory, the husband's leadership as family priest, and the rearing of large families as gifts to God and a way to take the world back from gays, feminists, and liberals. Without pretending to be a believer, Kathryn Joyce has met with and attended meetings of many of these small, fundamental American Christianist sects (which are beginning to pull away even from the churches where they began, calling them as being "non-Biblical") to form multi- or even single-family church cells, practicing homeschooling, courtship (a boy must gain a father's approval before he can approach a girl with a view toward marriage dating), husband priesthood in the home, and feminine submissiveness. Joyce attended seminars and retreats in which this feminine submissiveness was taught, and she attended world conferences in which faiths with the view of increasing white, Christian populations with such families would enable all Christians, including Catholics, to take back Europe and the Americas from non-whites.

It's a very scary book by the time you reach the end, yet Joyce is never sensationalist or alarmist. She gives the history of the growth of America's Christianist right following WWII and goes on from there, only getting into the day-to-day rules and existence of the women's submission and birth aspects in the second half of the book. Most of the time she lets the leaders, particularly the women, speak for themself. This is no rabble-rousing supermarket book: this is a thoughtful, well-researched, intelligent study that I recommend to anyone who is interested in what is going on with the Christian right and what is going on with the women who are entering the marriages in groups like the Dominionists' and the most fundamental of the Assembly of God and Baptist sects, not just the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints and the Quiverfull Christianists.