So, I'm listening to NPR this morning and they feature this piece about the Quiver(full) Movement, a fundamentalist Christian sect largely centered around having tons of children and, in general being anti-feminist (or, as it sees itself, maybe pre-feminist, or as Quiver author Mary Pride [Can that really be her real name?] calls it, "Beyond Feminism.") The families they interviewed in the story had an average of 8.5 children, which, well, wow.
Note: The author is aware that this is not the only religious, or indeed secular, group that has this type of belief system, just the one he's most recently heard about.
Okay, you're saying, fringe religious group. Why does this merit a response? First because I'm bored, and second, because one Jeff Swanson of Shelby, Mich., a Quiverer, made me angry when he said that he and his wife Kelly didn't initially want to have children until they realized that "the Bible's big on large families."
Fine.
The Quiver movement is based on Psalm 127, which says, in part, "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." A "quiver" is apparently a sack full of arrows (commentary withheld).
Just a few points here. (1) Psalm 127 is said to have been written by King Solomon (or at least by King David about/for his son Solomon), himself an ambitious empire builder, and who, (2) by the way, supposedly had 700 wives and some equally impressive number of concubines. (3) The world's population in Solomon's time--the 10th Century BCE--is estimated at about 50 million, give or take. Current world population is now approaching 7 billion. And an estimated 5 billion of them do not have very nice lives. Let's not even start to consider how the lack of real pre- or neo-natal medical care in the 10th Century BCE meant that (5) the infant mortality rate was probably scarily high.
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