Creepy Christian Patriarchy Movement Shackles Daughters to Their Fathers and Homes
The stay-at-home-daughters movement encourages young girls and single women to forgo college and employment in favor of training as "keepers at home."
By Gina McGalliard, Bitch Magazine
“Daughters aren’t to be independent. They’re not to act outside the scope of their father. As long as they’re under the authority of their fathers, fathers have the ability to nullify or not the oaths and the vows. Daughters can’t just go out independently and say, ‘I’m going to marry whoever I want.’ No. The father has the ability to say, ‘No, I’m sorry, that has to be approved by me.’”
There’s a lot of talk in American mainstream media lately about the diminishing role of men -- fathers, in particular. Have feminism and reproductive technology made them obsolete? Are breadwinning wives and career-oriented mothers emasculating them?
No such uncertainty exists in the mind of Doug Phillips, the man quoted above. The San Antonio minister is the founder of Vision Forum, a beachhead for what’s known as the Christian Patriarchy Movement, a branch of evangelical Christianity that takes beliefs about men as leaders and women as homemakers to anachronistic extremes. Vision Forum Ministries is, according to its Statements of Doctrine, “committed to affirming the historic faith of Biblical Christianity,” with special attention to the historical faith found in the book of Genesis, when God created Eve as a “helper” to Adam. According to Christian Patriarchy, marriage bonds man (the symbol of Christ) to woman (the symbol of the Church). It’s a model that situates husbands and fathers in a position of absolute power: If a woman disobeys her “master,” whether father or husband, she’s defying God. Thus, women in the Christian Patriarchy Movement aren’t just stay-at-home mothers -- they’re stay-at-home daughters as well. And many of them wouldn’t have it any other way.
The stay-at-home-daughters movement, which is promoted by Vision Forum, encourages young girls and single women to forgo college and outside employment in favor of training as “keepers at home” until they marry. Young women pursuing their own ambitions and goals are viewed as selfish and antifamily; marriage is not a choice or one piece of a larger life plan, but the ultimate goal. Stay-at-home daughters spend their days learning “advanced homemaking” skills, such as cooking and sewing, and other skills that at one time were a necessity -- knitting, crocheting, soap- and candle-making. A father is considered his daughter’s authority until he transfers control to her husband.
It probably won’t surprise you to learn that the CPM shares much of its philosophy with the Quiverfull movement [See “Multiply and Conquer,” Bitch no. 37], which holds that good Christians must eschew birth control -- even natural family planning -- in order to implement biblical principles and, in the process, outbreed unbelievers. Although the CPM has been around for the past several decades, with its roots in the founding of the Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, and the teachings of religious leaders like Bill Gothard and Rousas J. Rushdoony, the stay-at-home-daughters movement seems to have gained traction in the last decade. Kathryn Joyce, author of the 2009 book Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, estimates the CPM population to be in the low tens of thousands, but the rise of evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity over the past several decades makes it difficult to predict how large the CPM following could eventually become.
Vision Forum, for its part, is fully dedicated to turning back the clock on gender equality. Its website offers a cornucopia of sex-segregated books and products designed to conform children to rigid gender stereotypes starting from an early age. The All-American Boy’s Adventure Catalog shills an extensive selection of toy weapons (bow-and-arrow sets, guns, swords, and tomahawks), survival gear, and books and DVDs on war, the outdoors, and science. The Beautiful Girlhood Collection features dolls, cooking and sewing play sets, and costumes. There’s no room for doubt about the intended roles these girls will play later on in life. Indeed, the Vision Forum catalog brims with yearning for a simpler, supposedly more secure, and presumably more pious time, with a number of items relating to Western frontier living, a “Grandfather’s Classic Toys” collection, manuals on medieval chivalry, and centuries-old titles about manners and modesty.
Integral to Vision Forum’s belief about female submission is making sure women are not independent at any point in their lives, regardless of age; hence the organization’s enthusiasm for stay-at-home daughterhood. The most visible proponents of this belief are Anna Sofia and Elizabeth Botkin, sisters and authors of the book So Much More: The Remarkable Influence of Visionary Daughters on the Kingdom of God (published by Vision Forum), and creators of the documentary film Return of the Daughters, which follows several young women staying home until marriage, and details how they spend their time serving their fathers. One woman, Melissa Keen, 25, helps put on Vision Forum’s annual Father-Daughter Retreat, an event that’s described on Vision Forum’s website in terms that are, in a word, discomfiting. (“He leads her, woos her, and wins her with a tenderness and affection unique to the bonds of father and daughter.”) Another, 23-year-old Katie Valenti, enthuses that her father “is the greatest man in my life. I believe that helping my father in his business is a better use of my youth and is helping prepare me to be a better helpmeet for my future husband, rather than indulging in selfishness and pursuing my own success and selfish ambitions.” (A video of Valenti’s 2009 wedding to Phillip Bradrick shows her father announcing into a microphone that he is “transferring my authority to you, Phillip.”)
In So Much More, the Botkin sisters claim women were much happier before being legally considered men’s equals, although, unsurprisingly, they reference no studies, scholarship, or evidence for this. They do, however, quote extensively from girls described as “21st-century heroines of the faith,” or “the young heroines of the underground feminist resistance movement,” who claim following submission teachings changed their lives. A stay-at-home daughter named Sarah, for instance, aspired to be an attorney before realizing that her career ambitions displeased God; Fiona left home for college at 18, only to return five years later having experienced much “grief and depression.”
Many of the Botkins’ fellow believers have taken to the web to extoll the virtues of the stay-at-home- daughter life, spreading their archaic views via the most modern technology. On stayathomedaughters.com, which recently ceased operating, Courtney, one of the authors of the website’s blog, describes herself as “learning to run and care for a home while under the training of my dear parents.” The section “What We Believe” states that “Stay-at-home daughters are defying cultural standards by purposing to fulfill their role at home, with their family, and under their father’s roof and authority until marriage. We are anti-feminism, and we are counter-cultural.”
Another blog, Ah the Life, is written by “Miss Kelly and Miss Andrea,” who list among their interests “homemaking, theology, hospitality, and femininity.” Their favorite movies include Return of the Daughters and The Monstrous Regiment of Women, the latter a film that inveighs against feminism via soundbites from, among others, Phyllis Schlafly. (On Hillary Clinton: “She’s angry about a lot of things.”) And the blog Joyfully at Home was until recently maintained by Jasmine Baucham, daughter of preacher Voddie Baucham, whose 2009 patriarchy primer, What He Must Be If He Wants to Marry My Daughter, has chapters titled “He Must Be Prepared to Lead” and “Don’t Send a Woman Out to Do a Man’s Job.” Jasmine, who was featured in Return of the Daughters, wrote on her blog that she “chose to forgo the typical college experience so that I could live under the discipleship of my parents until marriage,” but her bio nevertheless notes that she is completing a degree in English literature.
The number of these blogs and their followers may be surprising to mainstream women, who would likely find the tenets the bloggers live by disturbingly retrograde, if not just plain disturbing. For instance, stay-at-home daughterhood means, among other things, subsuming one’s own identity into the family unit. The Botkin sisters write in So Much More that loving your parents means agreeing with all their opinions. “When your parents have your heart you will truly ‘delight in their ways,’” write the sisters in one blog post. “You will love what they love, hate what they hate, and desire their approval and company and even ‘think thoughts after them.’”
The Botkin sisters aim to validate living a life of confinement with staunch, if unfounded, opinions and beliefs regarding college. “College campuses have become dangerous places of anxiety, wasted years, mental defilement and moral derangement,” they write. Although neither of the sisters has attended college, they also claim universities are hotbeds of Marxism that forbid a free exchange of ideas and seek to indoctrinate students in leftist thinking. Elsewhere, they quote a document from the pro-patriarchy website Fathers for Life that states that the “prime purposes of feminism are to establish a lesbian-socialist republic and to dismantle the family unit,” echoing Pat Robertson’s notorious statement that feminism is a “socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.”
Learning critical thinking and immersion in a diversity of viewpoints and opinions -- a chief goal of the college experience -- seems to be what the Botkin sisters truly fear. Well, that and Satan -- the sisters use the age-old image of women as helpless to resist temptation as another argument against a college education: “Recall that Satan targeted a woman first, too. God’s enemies have recognized that women are not only the weaker vessels, and consequently more easily led, but they are incredibly influential over their husbands (think of Eve again) and children, and they make excellent and loyal helpers,” claim the sisters [italics theirs]. The story of one misled college attendee, the providentially named Evangeline, is instructive. A homeschool graduate attending a Christian college away from home, Evangeline recalls, “I will never forget the night I sat on my bed reading [So Much More] until 4 in the morning, weeping over it.” She continues, “My heart had ached for a protected mission, a biblically sound mission, an ancient mission. And here it was! What joy! What relief! I was not designed to be an independent woman, but rather a part of a man’s life, a helper.”
But not all stay-at-home daughters accept their lot so unquestioningly. A young New Zealander named Genevieve, profiled on the Botkin sisters’ blog, decided to live at home until marriage after trading in her dreams of becoming her country’s first female prime minister for ambitions to become a Christian homeschooling wife and mother. Now the author of the Isaacharican Daughters newsletter, Genevieve exemplifies how young women in this lifestyle are encouraged to subsume their own thoughts and identities into those of whichever male figure in their lives currently acts as the authority. In writing about the process of swapping her father’s “vision” for her new husband’s, she notes that a woman having independent thoughts is evidence of Satan gumming up the works.
My loyalties have had to undergo a change. I was used to thinking Dad knew best. Now I needed to learn to think that Pete knows best. I used to do things and invest my time in projects according to what I knew Dad would want me to do. Now I needed to be guided by what Pete wanted me to do. When faced with a problem or option I couldn’t think “What would Dad have done in this situation?” Now I had to think “What would Pete do in this situation?” These were exciting times and difficult as during this state of flux -- learning to replace one man’s vision with another -- the devil would come around and say, “But what about what you want? What about what you think?” [Italics hers.]
Genevieve’s words are worth noting because most stay-at-home daughters can’t truly be said to have chosen this lifestyle -- they are often brought up in homes where feminism, college, and a woman’s independent choices are vilified, and they rarely interact with those who think differently. One has to wonder if Genevieve, with her childhood dreams of national politics, bought into the myth that feminism is antimotherhood and antifamily, and thus feels she must choose between having a family and her own personhood, something most would consider a false choice.
Although submitting to either your father’s or your husband’s authority may seem like perpetual childhood -- or indentured servitude -- to modern, first-world women who value their ability to do things like vote, go on dates, and determine the course of their lives, the Botkin sisters have a different take. “The sign of our maturity and our adulthood is when we willingly submit ourselves to God-given authority and therefore to God Himself,” they write in one blog post. “This is a struggle, and it requires strength, wisdom, responsibility and spiritual maturity.” And though one presumes these women’s enthusiasm for submission means they come from safe, loving, and abuse-free homes, there are potentially chilling consequences to the spread of their beliefs to those who may not be so lucky.
Furthermore, the stay-at-home-daughter movement holds that girls are only ready to marry when they’ve completely tamed individualistic traits -- when, as the Botkins put it, they’ve learned to “submit to an imperfect man’s ‘whims’ as well as his heavy requirements. To order our lives around another person. To esteem and reverence [sic] and adore a man whose faults we can see clearly every day.” Fathers are never to be criticized or even teased: “When you speak of him to others, you shouldn’t talk about his mistakes, but of the good things he’s done. When you speak of him, instead of criticizing and nagging him for his faults, you should tell him how much you admire his strengths,” say the Botkins. Stay-at-home daughter Ruth says she honors her father by finding out his favorite colors and wearing them; Kelly says she finds that her father’s convictions “are becoming my convictions, his passions my passions.” Although it’s likely that many women would find such an existence frustrating and unhappy, if not completely infantilizing, within the context of the Christian Patriarchy Movement it’s not difficult to see the appeal. After all, women raised in the CPM are brought up to believe that the world outside their community is sin-filled, godless, and dangerous; opting for stay-at-home daughterhood represents a lifetime of safety.
Still, they’re not safe from everything. Although the Botkins and their stay-at-home sisterhood believe that women have a duty to be obedient, if men fail in their endeavors -- their work, their marriages, their faith -- guess who’s responsible? “If our men aren’t successful, it largely means that their women have not made them successful. They need our help,” the Botkins write. Wives, claim the Botkin sisters, have the ability to “win” over their husbands with respectful and submissive behavior, for when the husbands observe this, they will become “ashamed and repentant.” (The sisters are strangely silent on what to do if this isn’t effective.) And daughters have the same responsibility: “Before you can accuse your father of being unprotective, ask yourself: ‘Do you make it clear to him that you are a woman of virtue, worthy of his special protection? If your behavior was more gentle, feminine, respectful and lovely would he be more inclined to be protective of you?’” Relationships with mothers, by contrast, get little consideration within the literature and blogs of the stay-at-home-daughters movement. Mother-daughter dynamics are mentioned in the Botkins’ book and film only in the context of readers becoming future mothers.
The stay-at-home-daughters movement has inevitably inspired controversy and dissent, much of it among dedicated Christians who consider the movement to be a dire misconstruction of their religion. According to Cindy Kunsman, a survivor of what she terms “spiritual abuse” and the author of the blog Under Much Grace, stay-at-home daughters who have exited the lifestyle are -- despite what the rest of us might presume -- usually well prepared academically, but lack certain key skills for success in life. “Those young women who received excellent training have an easier time acquiring job skills when pursuing college and healthcare training, as many of them have done quite successfully,” said Kunsman in an interview. “However, because [these young women] were required to abdicate all significant problem-solving to another agent while in their families of origin, they lack skill and practice in critical thinking and planning... They must work to build integrity, self-reliance, autonomy, and trust in themselves, which they were taught to derive from the identity of the family.”
One of the most outspoken counter-CPM blogs is Quivering Daughters -- the name a play on the phrase “Quiverfull” -- authored by Hillary McFarland. “Increasing numbers of women in their late twenties and thirties remain ‘safely’ at home, patiently waiting for husbands to find them,” writes McFarland in her book Quivering Daughters: Hope and Healing for the Daughters of Patriarchy. “As unmarried adult daughters continue to perfect the art of homemaking, help to mother and school young siblings, and learn to be a godly helpmeet, many through spiritual discipline strain to cauterize wounds made tender with disappointment.”
Despite the assertion of stay-at-home daughters that they are “protected” (albeit in a country where they have every legal right to walk away from their families and churches), it’s difficult not to view them as being extremely vulnerable. After all, men who grow up believing that women were created to serve their whims are generally the ones who are just as likely to abuse the women they see as “theirs” as to protect them from others.
Such sexist views of women’s roles are certainly not limited to the Christian Patriarchy Movement. But unlike other extremely conservative religious groups such as the Amish or fundamentalist Mormon polygamists, which are typically closed off from the rest of society, the stay-at-home-daughters movement and the CPM might be capable of seeping into the already-booming populations of evangelical and fundamentalist churches and Christian homeschoolers, which already advocate a less-rigorous version of female submission. In this sense, stay-at-home daughters might feel that they are the most pure, and most righteous, of Christians.
In a complex world where women have more choices than ever, perhaps the appeal of this lifestyle for both men and women is perpetual female childhood. Men make all decisions and are never told they are wrong, always getting their way, while women are free of any decision-making: a markedly different, albeit less complicated relationship than one between two equals. Only time will tell how far this new movement will spread. In the meantime, those of us who were lucky enough to have fathers who delighted in our accomplishments and growth as individuals -- rather than believing our existence was to serve their own needs -- should count our blessings.
Gina McGalliard is a San Diego–based freelance writer whose work has appeared in @UCSD, Sport Diver, Conscious Dancer, Dance Studio Life, San Diego City Beat, San Diego Family Magazine, and the San Diego Union Tribune. She would like to give a shout-out to her feisty Italian grandmother, who spent the 1970s and ’80s breaking down barriers for women, for raising her to be a good feminist, and introducing her at a young age to the writings of Gloria Steinem.
This article was found at:
http://www.alternet.org/story/149022/creepy_christian_patriarchy_movement_shackles_daughters_to_their_fathers_and_homes
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Barely Literate? How Christian Fundamentalist Homeschooling Hurts Kids
ReplyDeleteBy Kristin Rawls, AlterNet March 14, 2012
In recent weeks, homeschooling has received nationwide attention because of Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum’s homeschooling family. Though Santorum paints a rosy picture of homeschooling in the United States, and calls attention to the “responsibility” all parents have to take their children’s education into their own hands, he fails to acknowledge the very real potential for educational neglect among some homeschooling families – neglect that has been taking place for decades, and continues to this day.
While the practice of homeschooling is new to many people, my own interest in it was sparked nearly 20 years ago. I was a socially awkward adolescent with a chaotic family life, and became close to a conservative Christian homeschooling family that seemed perfect in every way. Through my connection to this family, I was introduced to a whole world of conservative Christian homeschoolers, some of whom we would now consider “Quiverfull” families: homeschooling conservatives who eschew any form of family planning and choose instead to “trust God” with matters related to procreation.
Though I fell out of touch with my homeschooled friends as we grew older, a few years ago, I reconnected with a few ex-Quiverfull peers on a new support blog called No Longer Quivering. Poring over their stories, I was shocked to find so many tales of gross educational neglect. I don’t merely mean that they had received what I now view as an overly politicized education with huge gaps, for example, in American history, evolution or sexuality. Rather, what disturbed me were the many stories about homeschoolers who were barely literate when they graduated, or whose math and science education had never extended much past middle school.
Take Vyckie Garrison, an ex-Quiverfull mother of seven who, in 2008, enrolled her six school-age children in public school after 18 years of teaching them at home. Garrison, who started the No Longer Quivering blog, says her near-constant pregnancies – which tended to result either in miscarriages or life-threatening deliveries – took a toll on her body and depleted her energy. She wasn’t able to devote enough time and energy to homeschooling to ensure a quality education for each child. And she says the lack of regulation in Nebraska, where the family lived, “allowed us to get away with some really shoddy homeschooling for a lot of years.”
“I’ll admit it,” she confesses. “Because I was so overwhelmed with my life… It was a real struggle to do the basics, so it didn’t take long for my kids to fall far behind. One of my daughters could not read at 11 years old.”
At the time, Garrison was taking parenting advice from Quiverfull leaders who deemphasized academic achievement in favor of family values. She remembers one Quiverfull leader saying, “If they can do mathematics perfectly but they have no morals, you have failed them.”
The implication, she says, was that, “if they’re not doing so well academically, well, then they can catch up on that later. It’s not such a big deal. It was a really convenient way of thinking for me because I wasn’t able to keep up anyway.” This kind of rhetoric, Garrison notes, provided a “high-minded justification for educational neglect. I would not have gotten away with that if I’d had to get my kids tested every year.”
Over time, Garrison lost faith in her fundamentalist ideology and became aware that her children’s education was being neglected. Eventually all but one of her six younger children ended up entering and excelling in the public school system.
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ReplyDeleteWhy did she stick with homeschooling for so long, despite her difficulties? “We were convinced that it would be better for our kids not to have an education than to be educated to become humanists or atheists and to reject God,” Garrison says. “We became so isolated because the Quiverfull lifestyle was so overwhelming we didn’t have time or energy for socialization. So the only people we knew were exactly like us. We were told that the whole point of public school was to dumb down the children and turn them into compliant workers – to brainwash them and indoctrinate them into this godless way of thinking.”
Garrison believes that homeschooling has become so popular with fundamentalist Christians because, “there is an atmosphere of real terror among some evangelicals. They are horrified by the fact that Obama is president, and they see the New Atheist movement as a vocal, in-your-face threat. Plus, they are obsessed with the End Times, and believe that the Apocalypse could happen any day now...They see a demon on every corner.
“We homeschooled because we wanted to protect our children from what we viewed as the total secularization of America. We listened to people like Rush Limbaugh, who told us that America was in the clutches of evil liberal feminist atheists.”
*
Just how common are stories like Vyckie Garrison’s? Unfortunately, it’s hard to know. The federal government only maintains very broad demographic statistics about homeschoolers in this country; federal data only keeps track of what kinds of people are homeschooling and why. You can find plenty of information about homeschoolers according to race, family income or highest education obtained by the parents. But as regards neglect related to homeschooling? The government cannot tell you -- and there is no systematic state-by-state record of the percentage of truancy convictions (possibly the best measure of educational neglect at present) that involve homeschooling families versus those involving enrolled students and/or their parents.
Capturing that kind of data is essential to understanding the scope of this problem, but getting real numbers will always be complicated by the fact that many homeschooling families choose not to comply with the law by submitting to state homeschool regulations, or even report their homeschool activity to the state. While it’s possible that some forget, others intentionally fail to report because they fear too much government intervention in their lives. For many conservative Christians, this is a key aspect of their decision not to report.
Given the scarcity of numbers on this issue, the best one can hope for at this point is anecdotal information about the problem. But because homeschooling is such a highly politicized issue, it is often difficult to get a clear sense of what is happening from homeschooling parents themselves. And because many parents see themselves as advocates of homeschooling, they are not always very eager to discuss potential gaps in homeschooling education.
Luckily, more than a few adult homeschool graduates are eager to talk. And as I talk to more and more people who recount first-person stories of homeschool-related neglect, it becomes hard to write off what homeschool advocates would call “exceptions” simply as fringe outliers.
Erika Diegel Martin’s story is particularly haunting. A homeschooling graduate of the mid-1990s, and an ex-Quiverfull daughter I have known for many years, Diegel Martin was pulled out of public school at 14. Because she was old enough to remember several years of public schooling, she says she never really believed her parents’ dire warnings about it. Her younger brothers were another story. “When the school bus would come by, my youngest brother would go, ‘There goes the prison bus.’ Our parents had them believing that public schools were these horrible places, just dens of iniquity.”
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ReplyDeleteThe narrative about public schools, she says, went something like this: “How would you like to get stuck in a building with no light – and secular, godless, atheist teachers for seven hours of the day without even being able to see your parents or go out to play?” As a result, she says, “My brothers were terrified of the public schools.”
Like Garrison, Diegel Martin recounts notable educational gaps in her own family, where there was little academic encouragement. One of her brothers decided to quit school at 16 and faced no parental opposition. The youngest, Diegel Martin says, ceased his formal education at the age of 12, when she left home and was no longer available to teach him herself. And though she was fortunate enough to receive sex education before leaving public school, her siblings were not so lucky. Their parents never taught the three other children about sex, and Diegel Martin remembers giving her 21-year-old sister “the talk” the week before she got married. She also had to intervene to ensure that her younger brothers learned about sex.
As for herself, when she completed her schooling, she says her parents did not allow her to obtain her GED as proof of high school graduation. Their reason? “The girls weren’t allowed to get a GED because we were told we wouldn’t need it. It would open up opportunities that were forbidden to us. We would work in the family business until we got married, and then become homemakers.
“When I talked about wanting to go to college, my parents said, ‘Well, you’re a girl. You don’t go to college.’”
Melinda Palmer, 29, is another homeschool graduate who is forthcoming about the problems she encountered as a homeschooled child. She had no experience of public education, and quickly came to fear it. Her father cast the local school as a corrupt example of the dangerous world outside the home. The family’s isolationism created an environment in which everyone was so terrified of the outside they saw no choice but to submit to her father’s abusive rule for many years. She says they had come to believe that the tyranny of their father was preferable to what might await them on the outside.
The oldest of eight children, Palmer grew up in an extremely conservative family that ultimately went entirely off the grid. They lived in a rural country home in Vermont without running water or electricity. Though she says homeschooling started out with good enough intentions, it ultimately fell by the wayside, in part because of the sheer amount of work it took to subsist in Vermont without basic amenities while also maintaining the large family’s produce and livestock. It took so much time and energy to complete each day’s chores that they rarely had enough time to study.
Though she says all of the children in her family are literate, she tells me that, in math, she never made it past the start of pre-algebra, and that she has not yet obtained her GED. Since leaving the Quiverfull movement, she has found success as an artisanal cheese-maker, but many opportunities remain unavailable to her because of her upbringing. She speaks hopefully of continuing her schooling at some point, but feels self-conscious about working toward the GED at 29, when some of her younger sisters have already earned theirs. “I study and read things all the time,” she says, “but I haven’t done anything official yet.”
Palmer insists that her family was not alone in homeschool neglect. Among the various fundamentalist families that ran in her family’s social circles, she says, “I knew several families whose children were not very literate.” Moreover, she points out, education is “more than just learning math and science and the facts of history – it’s learning how to interact with the kids around you, and figuring out what different kinds of personalities bring to life.
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ReplyDelete“You can do homeschooling right if you’re very careful,” she acknowledges. “Know all the ways it can go wrong and guard against these; have outside interaction; get help with what you need help with and use a decent curriculum.” But most homeschoolers, Palmer points out, “are woefully lacking in every area” of their education.
Palmer sends me a note after we talk that reads, “I know of a family right now in pretty much the exact same situation we were in back then. They reported [their homeschooling status] to the state once, eight years ago, and never after that, to my knowledge. The state never caught on... They are one of the families I know whose children are functionally illiterate. Their 18-year-old daughter can read, but can barely write a paragraph… and the education goes significantly downhill from there. Her youngest brother, almost 11, has barely learned to read.”
I follow up to find out if anyone has reported the family to social services. She says they have been reported, but very little has changed.
*
Still, this is not to say there aren’t many homeschooling parents who are doing an excellent job of ensuring that their children receive a quality education. Most parents realize they are taking on a tremendous amount of responsibility when they commit to homeschooling a child, so I am not surprised to find many – secular and religious – who are doing well by their children.
Maria Hoffman Goeller is one of those. A lifelong family friend, Goeller is a homeschool graduate raised in a conservative Christian home, where she never lagged behind in academics. Now she has a son with special needs in the California public school system but educates two other school-age children at home. “Part of the reason we homeschool is because I’m choosing what worldview or what subjects I want to introduce my child to,” she says. But she understand the limits of her own skill, which is why she placed her special-needs son in public school. “While I can teach my children reading, writing and arithmetic, I am not trained in special education,” she says. “I want my child to have the best education he can get, which at this time is public school.”
Though she considers herself conservative, Goeller does not demonize public schools as some families do. And contrary to stereotypes about Christian homeschoolers, Goeller is adamant that she will not sacrifice academic rigor, or shield her children from views different from her own. In fact, she says she would welcome more opportunities for them to interact with public school students, for example, in sports and even in certain classes now and then.
Certainly, Goeller is not alone in the care and thoughtfulness she takes with her children’s homeschool education. But in light of what Garrison, Diegel Martin and Palmer tell me, it seems irresponsible to assert, as many homeschooling parents do, that homeschooling neglect is just a fringe element in the homeschooling world. And getting a straight answer about the scope of the problem from people who champion the cause is difficult at best.
Take Kelly Hogaboom, a secular “unschooling” mother who maintains a popular homeschooling blog called Underbellie, and boasts of having “two terminally truant children.” Hogaboom is an advocate for homeschooling and “unschooling,” a type of homeschooling that often foregoes curriculum in favor of more child-directed education. She is dismissive of the cases of neglect that I bring up, saying, by way of shutting down my inquiries: “Like yourself, I too had…a deep fear of religious fundamentalism and an erroneous belief state institutions could and should stamp it out.”
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ReplyDeleteOf course, her response misses the mark; the issue of “stamping out” religious expression isn’t the point here. The issue at stake is educational neglect -- which is, as the anecdotal evidence shows, an actual problem. My hope is that by looking to homeschooling parents for insights, they will be able to provide an honest assessment of their own successes and failures -- in order to paint a more textured picture of the actual potential for neglect.
But in the end, Hogaboom declines to discuss the topic at all, urging me instead to read alternative theories of education she thinks I may have missed. And just in case I don’t understand that she has dismissed the concerns I raise, she concludes our email discussion by saying: “I get a laugh [at] how many grownups enjoy talking amongst themselves about what's best for children” – and following it up with a smiley emoticon.
Though I am frustrated by her failure to engage with me, on some level, I understand her irritation. Homeschooling parents are probably called upon to apologize for neglectful homeschoolers quite a bit. But apologies are not what I’m looking for. I want to know about their experiences – positive and negative -- as a way of understanding how to better prevent neglect.
Of course there are parents who are qualified to teach their children at home, and who do an excellent job of it. And there are children who excel in homeschooling environments. These families may well constitute a majority of homeschoolers. But this does not mean that all children do so well, and just as public schools are obligated to educate children who fall behind, so are parents who opt out of the system.
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Kathryn Joyce, author of Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, confirms that there are legitimate reasons for being concerned about a lack of oversight among homeschoolers. She acknowledges the diversity of the homeschooling movement, but notes, for example, that, “among the Quiverfull community, there are families that homeschool in such a way that education begins to diverge between boys’ education and girls education around the time they hit puberty.”
Sometimes, Joyce says, girls, “stop receiving the same education as their brothers and are trained instead to fulfill the role that they’re going to have, which is to be a Quiverfull mother and a submissive wife.”
She recalls an anecdote from Quiverfull leader Geoffrey Botkin, who suggested that girls should be taught to use the tools of the laboratory they will inhabit: the kitchen and the nursery. Girls’ education should prioritize “learning how to be mothers, learning in the kitchen, helping their mothers – not merely as chores that are a part of growing up. Rather, the point was that this should be a key part of their education because this was going to be their chief role.” Though Joyce says many homeschoolers go on to do exceptionally well once they go to college, she has also encountered problems with basics like literacy.
Given these sorts of issues, I am unconvinced when Rachel Goldberg, a secular homeschooling mother from Charlotte, North Carolina, echoes what I hear from homeschooling parents of every stripe on the subject of government oversight. “I don't think there should be any regulation of homeschooling,” she says. “I'm not a libertarian or a conspiracy theorist, but I am fiercely protective of my kids and my choices about how to raise them. It's none of the government's business how I teach them. Just as I wouldn't want the state to require me to submit menu plans and quarterly nutritional assessments (even though I believe nutrition is vitally important), I don't want the state to require curricula plans, portfolios, etc.”
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ReplyDeleteAccording to Joyce, among extremist Quiverfull families (quite unlike Goldberg’s) there is often “a sense of persecution” when it comes to oversight; many families that refuse to report their activities do so because they fear state intrusion. But their fear may have very little basis in fact. “Often, people have to look outside the United States, to countries like Sweden, where homeschooling is much more heavily regulated, to make this argument,” Joyce notes. “There isn’t as much evidence that persecution is happening here, but I think they get a lot of organizing value and activism mobilization out of the argument that they’re persecuted.”
Erika Diegel Martin, whose parents were anti-government extremists, agrees. Her parents did not report their first year of homeschooling to the state out of fear, but because she lived in a small New Hampshire town, the neighbors eventually noticed when the children weren’t in school. Finally, a truancy officer showed up to inquire, and as a result, the family reported their homeschooling status. “Look, any other parents [in] a public school would be charged with truancy if their kids didn’t show up at school,” Diegel Martin points out. “Why should it be any different for a homeschool family that isn’t reporting their children? It’s our government’s responsibility to make sure that our children are getting a proper education.”
My old friend Maria Hoffman Goeller is a bit more cautious about the need for oversight. With one child in the public school system and two learning at home, Goeller insists that she has not experienced over-regulation in California, one of the more tightly regulated states. But she is always on the alert, she says, for any government mandate that might try to determine “what I can and cannot teach.”
Goeller tells me that her apprehension about over-regulation stems from the arrests of homeschooling parents she knew during childhood, before homeschooling was well-understood in the United States. She remembers at least a couple of parents being arrested for truancy, and she remains unconvinced that they deserved this. Some families she knew opted not to report because of these cases. For those children, this meant not answering phones and hiding in the house if a stranger knocked on the front door.
No one I speak to who is homeschooling today mentions that this sort of oppressive regulation is a reality for current homeschooling families. Instead, they say that today’s regulation consists mostly of bureaucratic paper-pushing – hardly the kind of homeschool persecution some fear. It may be annoying, but so far as I can tell, it’s not trampling on anyone’s rights – though that doesn’t keep homeschoolers from worrying.
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Ultimately, the women who report neglect in homeschooling want their experiences to serve as a warning that either greater restrictions on homeschooling are needed, or states need to do a better job of enforcing existing regulations.
For 18 years, Vyckie Garrison says, she continued homeschooling even though it became increasingly evident that “we should not have been homeschooling. It was a really bad idea for us, but we believed firmly that it was our obligation, that it would be sinful to send our children to public schools, which we called ‘Satan’s indoctrination centers.’” She tells me that yearly testing requirements “would have made a huge difference for our family. It would have either convinced us to quit homeschooling, or to do a much better job of meeting those minimum requirements.”
I don’t believe the answer is to end homeschooling altogether, and neither do any of the women I talk to, no matter what their experience with homeschooling. But neither is it acceptable to allow more homeschooled children to fall through the cracks. And since no one should be deprived of an education, we have a duty to listen to those who were overlooked.
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ReplyDeleteMelinda Palmer has become a vocal critic of homeschool neglect since leaving her home about six years ago at the age of 22. She cites “the grace of God” as the reason for her survival, as well as the support of her mother and siblings. She is still a Christian, but says her family believed in a “warped understand of God.” Today, she is no longer a fundamentalist and no longer afraid of living out in the world. She has also gotten involved in advocacy on behalf of better homeschooling regulation.
Of all my sources, Palmer has the most concrete ideas about what needs to change in order to make homeschooling safer for all kids. “First,” she says, “we should not reduce the oversight. Second, we need to make sure every child who is not in a public school is either on a private school roster or is on the homeschool watch list. I know of many in Vermont right now who are not even registered as homeschoolers, and no one pays attention…When kids are far below grade level, it should raise red flags, and someone should be looking into it.”
Furthermore, as a sister to several children with cognitive disabilities, Palmer highlights the particular attention that homeschooled children with special needs deserve. “If kids have disabilities, the government needs to make sure that the disabilities are being addressed either by the parents or by an intervening agency.…A child with disabilities,” she notes, “has as much right to an appropriate education” as any other child.
Just before we hang up the phone, she makes a final request: “Please spread the word that it is really necessary for the government to make sure children aren’t being robbed of an education… Kids have rights too, and one of them is the right to an education appropriate to their age and ability.”
It’s an important point, and I conclude with it because it is one of the more incisive analyses I’ve heard on this topic yet. There is simply no justification for allowing cases of educational neglect – wherever it exists – to go unchecked. We need not imprison more parents to make sure this happens, but improving state and local oversight of those who opt out would be one step in the right direction. As Garrison, Diegel Martin and Palmer acknowledge, better checks on their own home education would have made a vast difference for them. This is why, they say, they will continue to speak out.
Kristin Rawls is a freelance writer whose work has also appeared in the Christian Science Monitor, GOOD Magazine, Religion Dispatches, Killing the Buddha, Global Comment and elsewhere online.
to view the hyperlinks in this article go to:
http://www.alternet.org/story/154541/
The Quiverfull: The evangelical Christians opposed to contraception
ReplyDeleteBBC News May 17, 2013
A Christian evangelical movement where followers avoid contraception and have as many children as they can is spreading to the UK. They are The Quiverfull, writes Cat McShane.
"Get married. Have a quiver full of kids if you can."
So said unsuccessful presidential candidate and father-of-five Mitt Romney in a recent speech to graduates. It was a conscious echo of Psalm 127.
The psalm - where children are compared to arrows for war - is the inspiration for the Quiverfull movement.
"Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They shall not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies in the gate."
Christians in the movement believe in giving up all forms of contraception and accepting as many children as God gives, both as a sign of obedience to God and in a bid to ensure the future of the faith.
In the US, Quiverfull families frequently reach up to a dozen children with the numbers of adherents in the tens of thousands. But now the movement is gaining popularity in other countries.
Continue reading the main story
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Start Quote
Get married, have a quiver full of kids if you can”
Mitt Romney's speech to Southern Virginia University graduates
In the UK, where the average family size is 1.7 children, this makes couples who follow its teachings stand out.
Vicki and Phil have just had their sixth child. "I feel this is the normal [situation] God created and God initially wanted, and that actually society has gone a little skew-whiff," says Vicki, of south London.
Vicki and Phil were both raised as Christians, but came to Quiverfull ideas after they were married. Early on, they used contraception, but after Vicki responded badly to the contraceptive pill, they began merely avoiding sex during Vicki's most fertile time of the month. From there they decided to do without contraception completely.
"Over time, we realised that actually if He [God] wants to conceive a baby during that time, and he made her naturally desire her husband more, maybe that's what he'd prefer us to do," she says.
In common with other Quiverfull families, Vicki had to wait for her husband to come round to her ideas.
"He saw it wasn't such a scary thing to do after all, and that God wouldn't overwhelm us with more than we could handle. One baby at a time arrived, and we were handling it, so we felt our marriage was being blessed by this choice and we continued."
The movement is growing in the UK through informal social networks and the Christian homeschooling community. Doug Philips, a leading American Quiverfull figure, is behind the organisation Vision Forum, a major provider of home education materials.
Vicki and Phil were encouraged by the teachings of Nancy Campbell, a Tennessee-based preacher influential in the movement. Her ministry, Above Rubies, advocates motherhood as a woman's highest calling. Its magazine is distributed to more than 100 countries worldwide, with a circulation topping 160,000.
Vicki found out about the ministry through a blog by a mother and began subscribing to the magazine and attending Campbell's annual retreats. This year's European tour saw Campbell visit six countries in a month, preaching at women-only and also family retreats attended by like-minded couples and their burgeoning broods.
Campbell believes that many women have forgotten their biological, and for her, God-given function. "He created her with a womb. And in fact that's the most distinguishing characteristic of a woman. In the American Webster's 1928 dictionary, it says that woman is combination of two words: womb and man. She is a womb-man."
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But there's more to the Quiverfull mindset than a love of big families. It's based on a backlash against the growing acceptance of birth control and feminism within Christianity.
ReplyDeleteSarah Dawes, 34, from Derbyshire, has six children. She had worked in an office and a shoe shop before embracing the Quiverfull life. "I always wanted a big family, but when I read Above Rubies it was like drinking when you're thirsty," she says.
Dawes says that her career didn't offer her any comparable fulfilment. "If you look at the children you're filled with so much love for them that even if it's a rough day there's nothing better. You don't get that from a job."
Quiverfull ideology also advocates a return to "traditional" roles in the home, where women are wife and mother first of all. They are their husband's "helpmeet", designed to support him as head of the household and primary breadwinner.
Dawes's husband Damian, who is self-employed, admits the pressures of raising a large family on a single income can be stressful. "They're all great kids, but sometimes it's a bit overwhelming and you think, how am I going to pay?"
He has doubts about continuing to follow Quiverfull teachings on family planning. "I don't want any more at the moment. I'd like to have a break."
One woman who tested her faith in Quiverfull to the limit is Vyckie Garrison, a mother of seven. Once a cornerstone of the Quiverfull movement in the US, she left in 2008. Her website No Longer Quivering is described as a "place for women escaping and recovering from spiritual abuse".
Garrison suffers from a rare bone condition that made pregnancy dangerous. Her husband had a vasectomy after baby number three. But after reading Campbell and other Quiverfull authors, her ideas and the vasectomy were reversed.
Garrison continued to get pregnant against all medical advice, almost dying with the birth of her last - and seventh - child. But for a true believer, dying in childbirth is supposedly a noble act, she says.
"I really believed that I wouldn't die unless God willed that I die, and if he did then I would accept that, because obviously he's the smart one, and has the big picture and knows the whole plan."
There are plenty of critics of the Quiverfull beliefs. Heather Doney, who grew up in a Quiverfull household in the US, says the emphasis on men leading the house is a problem.
"Absolute power corrupts absolutely. In these situations you're giving the man ultimate power - you're saying the only one that can check his power is God," she says.
Within the Quiverfull movement, having larger families is part of a broader plan.
"Mothers determine the destiny of the nation," Campbell says. "We're in a battle for the kingdom of God and the kingdom of darkness. And our children are all part of that battle."
Campbell believes there are specific groups of people with high birth-rates that she is worried will soon outnumber Christians. "We are limiting our children. And then we are allowing other cultures to come into our nation who are having a lot more children than us.
"Gradually, down the line, the culture is going to change, without anyone doing anything except having children, or not having children," she says.
Back in south London, affecting the destiny of the nation was something Vicki could identify with. "I do think I'm raising my children to be future voters, and possibly to be future politicians, the MPs."
The Womb as a Weapon will be broadcast on the BBC World Service on 18 May at 19:32 GMT. Listen back via BBC iPlayer radio or download a podcast.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-22526252
Sex Scandal Rocks the Duggars Christian Patriarchy Movement
ReplyDeleteby Amanda Marcotte, The Daily Beast April 16, 2014
The far-right Christian Patriarchy—brought to American audiences by the Duggar family—is on the verge of collapse after a series of alleged sex scandals involving the movement’s leaders.
Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar have put many years and a lot of work into putting a smiling, nearly normal-seeming face on the extreme Christian right. The couple adheres to a fringe strain of fundamentalist Christianity dubbed the “Christian patriarchy” or sometimes the “Quiverfull” movement, and while there is a lot of internal diversity to the movement, they generally preach a combination of beliefs that run counter to mainstream America: absolute female submission, a ban on dating, homeschooling, a rejection of higher education for women, and shunning of contraception in favor of trying to have as many children as humanly possible. The movement is controversial even within Christian right circles, but the Duggars have tried to counter that with their popular reality TV show 19 Kids & Counting, where they present themselves as a wholesome everyday family that just happens to be a little more fecund and conservative than average.
The strategy has been surprisingly effective, with Michelle Duggar being able to act like she’s just like any other reality TV star, giving sex tips and sharing recipes. Jim Bob has also been able to turn their fame into an opportunity to get political power, chumming around with presidential candidates and speaking at more mainstream conservative events. While many in the Christian right are still skeptical of Biblical patriarchy’s extremism, this charm offensive has clearly softened up resistance and is giving this fringe an ability to throw their political weight around. The fact that Republicans have started to step up the anti-contraception rhetoric lately appears, in part, to be the result of this tiny group of extremists Christians putting a smiley face on absolutist anti-contraception sentiments.
But right as the Duggars are beginning to cash in on all this hard propaganda work, it seems the world they come from—the tiny but growing world of strict Biblical patriarchy—is in real danger of collapsing. While adherents to this form of Christianity, like the Duggars, like to paint an uber-wholesome face on their families and beliefs, ugly truths are finally starting to leak out regarding the problems of infidelity and alleged sexual abuse in the community.
The latest scandal is a doozy. Back in November 2013, Doug Phillips, who, in his capacity as the president of Vision Forum Ministries, is probably the most important leader in the world of Biblical patriarchy, confessed to cheating on his wife and resigned as president of his ministry. “I engaged in a lengthy, inappropriate relationship with a woman,” he wrote. “While we did not ‘know’ each other in a Biblical sense, it was nevertheless inappropriately romantic and affectionate.” Shortly after his confession, Vision Forum Ministries closed up shop, unable to continue with the stink of sex scandal upon them.
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It is hard to underestimate the importance of Phillips in the small world of extreme fundamentalists. His father is one of the most critical founding fathers of the Christian right movement generally, and Doug extended his work by largely building this culture of the far Christian right as we know it, especially if you watch 19 Kids & Counting. The Duggar family are friends and acolytes of Phillips, and Vision Forum, in turn, has used Michelle Duggar in their efforts to demonize contraception, including giving her an award for “Mother of the Year” for having so many children.
ReplyDeleteOn Tuesday, it was revealed that there may be more to this entire scandal than the typical minister-caught-cheating story. The woman with whom Phillips confessed to an “inappropriate” relationship, named Lourdes Torres-Manteufel, filed suit in Bexar County, Texas, accusing the powerful Christian right leader of pushing her into a multi-year abusive relationship that allegedly featured frequent sexual assault. While the complaint never mentions sexual intercourse, it does claim that he repeatedly groped and masturbated on her while she protested. The plaintiff alleges she was basically moved into Phillips’ house with his wife and children, taken on many family vacations, and given work as a caretaker for the family, all while secretly being bullied into sexual encounters without consent. She even claims that Phillips told her that they would marry soon, as he believed that his wife was about to die.
Torres-Manteufel’s lawyer provided me with a copy of the complaint. It is searing in its criticisms of Doug Phillips. “Phillips’s patriarchal movement teaches that men are, and should be, in the absolute control of women,” reads the complaint, claiming that Torres-Manteufel was therefore bullied into believing she had no choice but to submit to Phillips’ alleged sexual abuse, even though she feared it made her “damaged goods.”
“In other words, women within this movement are perceived to exist only for the end-goals communicated by the male leaders that perceive themselves as the ‘patriarchs’ of this world,” the lawsuit reads. The conclusion is that a woman who truly believed this—whose boss, mentor, and father figure taught her that total submission was her duty in life—was not able to effectively plot an escape from a sexually coercive relationship.
Torres-Manteufel’s lawyer, David C. Gibbs, is a light of the Christian right himself, having worked for Terri Schiavo’s parents, and most of the initial coverage was handled by the Christian right media rather than the secular media—suggesting that the Christian right itself is ready to boot a leader whose behavior has made him a liability.
Phillips has not publicly responded to the lawsuit but several weeks ago, when rumors of the suit began to circle, his attorney called Torres-Manteufel’s legal claims “false, defamatory and made with malicious intent,” according to The Christian Post.
Unsurprisingly, Phillips himself seems to be spiraling out of control. The Christian Post reports that Phillips’ lawyer has been sending out letters to former employees, accusing them of trying to destroy him and Vision Forum Ministries. Even though Phillips did confess to an inappropriate relationship, he has also signaled that he intends to deny some of the more shocking accusations leveled by Torres-Manteufel.
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The scandal around Phillips is just the latest in a long line of ugly shocks to the far Christian right that threaten to destabilize and possibly capsize the community. As The Wire reported in early March, Bill Gothard, the leader of the Institute in Basic Life Principles, resigned his position in the wake of a series of accusations of alleged sexual abuse from dozens of women in the organization. IBLP, like Vision Forum Ministries, is a major clearinghouse for adherents to Biblical patriarchy, teaching members to shun contraception, embrace extreme forms of female submission, and, of course, use homeschooling to shelter young people from the outside world. Unsurprisingly, IBLP is also associated with the Duggar family, who participated in the organization’s many training seminars on embracing Biblical patriarchy and who called Gothard their “number one recommended resource” for family advice. He has exerted political influence in other ways, as well, befriending Sarah Palin and bringing her in for his International Association of Character Cities conference.
ReplyDeleteSimilarly, both Bob Jones University and Patrick Henry College—schools that were established in no small part to give these homeschooled and sheltered kids from far Christian right backgrounds a place to go to college—have been at the center of accusations of indifference and even of allegedly covering up reported sexual abuse on campus. BJU received a lot of heat when they fired an outside firm that had been brought on to investigate accusations of sexual abuse, only to rehire them when it looked like they were punishing the firm for being too thorough in exposing the problem. Patrick Henry College was the recent target of an exposé in The New Republic that explored how young women who brought sexual abuse complaints to the school were frequently drummed out of the college or made to felt that they had somehow brought the abuse on themselves.
The “pitch” of Biblical patriarchy, as epitomized by Michelle Duggar, is that women will be coddled and worshipped in exchange for giving up their ambitions and the autonomy to practice an extreme form of female submission. The unpleasant truth is that a culture that teaches that women are put on Earth for no other purpose but to serve men is not going to breed respect for women. Instead, these incidents show a world where men believe they can do whatever they want to women without repercussions. Is it any surprise that a subculture that promises absolute control over women will attract men who want to dominate and hurt women? Don’t believe the TLC hype. Biblical patriarchy is a sour, dangerous world for women, and luckily, that reality is finally being outed.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/04/16/sex-scandal-rocks-the-duggars-christian-patriarchy-movement.html