When I see today’s hardline right-wing Christians demanding more babies of their followers, it always makes me think of the old Quiverfull movement. Indeed, this movement contains a lot of similarities to today’s hardline crowd, the so-called Tradwife trend on social media, and more.

As we will see today, trends in Christianity never truly die. They just fade in popularity before whatever next big trend laps their ideas. Some Christians somewhere keep every trend’s flame alive. That’s what happened to Quiverfull. The trend has paled in popularity, but there are still Quiverfull Christians out there babymaxxing for Jesus. Today, let’s explore the trend and see where this movement’s biggest names are now.

(This post first went live on Patreon on 1/24/2025. Its audio ‘cast lives there too and is available now!)

Some quick definitions relating to the Quiverfull movement

In a nutshell, the Quiverfull movement is best exemplified by the Duggar clown-car family from 19 Kids and Counting. These Christians are fundamentalists (though often they call themselves evangelicals, but evangelicals are largely fundamentalists anyway). So they think everything in the Bible literally happened and its commands must be followed to the letter. Because of this misinterpretation of the Bible, they think they should have as many children as their bodies can possibly allow. In addition, they observe extremely strict gender roles. Often, only the father works outside the home. He provides all of the money for the family.

They call their movement Quiverfull because of Psalms 127:3-5, which refers to children as “arrows in the hand of a warrior” and declares:

Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. He will not be put to shame when he confronts the enemies at the gate.

Quiverfull Christians love the wordplay involved here.

Ironically, the Duggars aren’t technically Quiverfull. They’re Independent Baptists. But as you’ll see as we go through this story, there’s quite a lot of overlap between all these right-wing trends. When Jim Bob wrote about why he and his wife chose to have so many kids, he referred to Psalms 127. Really, Quiverfull isn’t so much a single specific movement as it is an add-on module to right-wing Christianity.

That’s why Quiverfull ideas have a lot of overlap with the Christian Patriarchy Movement. According to those in the movement, the term “patriarchy” means “father rule,” and oh boy do they ever—with iron fists if need be. Even some of the other hardline evangelicals find Patriarchy types unsettling and over-the-top.

I also find overlap between all of these movements and the Tradwife trend. Standing for “traditional wife,” this movement has young female influencers declaring their desire to be 50s-style stay-at-home moms with tons of kids and a husband-king ruling over them all. As one woman who left Christian Patriarchy noted, “These are not new ideas. It is the same old patriarchy wearing a different dress.”

(By the same token, “tradcaths” are “traditional Catholics.” They’re largely indistinguishable from hardline Calvinist Protestants, probably because a lot of them converted from that flavor of Protestantism to Catholicism. Of note, they absolutely hate Pope Francis for being way too cuddly!)

As one might expect, these movements all share the practice of religious homeschooling, which is a variety of homeschooling focusing on rigidly-indoctrinating children and keeping reality-based ideas—and mandated reporters—far away.

Quiverfull is an artifact of the past—but like all of them, it persists

I doubt most young adults today know much about Quiverfull or the Duggars. They and their lifestyle began getting attention in the late 2000s, exploding in the early 2010s—only to fizzle in the mid-2010s. Normies understandably seemed curious about this strange lifestyle!

But then, we all learned that Josh Duggar, the eldest son of the clown-car parents of 19 Kids and Counting, had molested some of his sisters and an unrelated underage girl who’d been loaned out to the Duggars to babysit and help the mother around the house. The entire scandal led their network to cancel the show, though a couple of the daughters married and had spinoff shows for a while.

It’s so strange to think that all of this happened ten years ago! But I shouldn’t be surprised. Christian trends and movements are like my first apartment in Kansas. Whatever was in it when I moved into it, it all stayed there forever and in largely the same place as I found it. As I added furniture and decorations, I worked around it all.

Out of everything about the Quiverfull movement, I want to stress this one point above all:

All of these trends are social experiments conducted by power-hungry evangelical leaders. Their first followers came from less-extreme flavors of Christianity. None of these movements work as promised, but their followers don’t care. Accordingly, their kids get no choice at all about believing and belonging or not.

Reality cannot be used to gauge these movements’ effectiveness. But reality matters not at all. If the hucksters selling these movements have enough Jesusy language and Bible verses to pad out their ideas, some Christians somewhere will fall for their patter.

So yes, there are still Quiverfull people out there. Some of them are just using more modern trends’ names, sure. But the ideas behind Quiverfull are still cognitohazards for a certain kind of extremism-prone Christian.

Where are they now?

The Duggars themselves lost millions of dollars over Josh Duggar’s scandal. The parents still live in their tiny town of Tontitown, Arkansas, with the younger kids. They were royalty in that town and probably still are, with Jim Bob (the dad) having a great deal of influence over its powers-that-be. That’s how Josh’s sex abuse could be an open secret for years without anyone doing anything about it.

Quite a few of the kids of these families have left Quiverfull and right-wing Christianity. In the case of the Duggars, several of their kids escaped the cult: Jill (last name now Dillard), Jinger (last name now Vuolo; in addition, she’s the face of the excellent Free Jinger forum—so I guess she did eventually get free?), and Jessa (last name now Seewald). Their niece, Amy Duggar (now King), also left the family.

Josh Duggar, of course, rots in prison where he belongs. After his conviction in 2021 for possessing really gruesome child porn, he was sentenced to 12.5 years in federal prison. Observers expect him to be released in 2032. Until then, he lives more comfortably in prison than a lot of people do in freedom.

Josh’s wife, Anna, remains loyal to him. She and the couple’s seven kids live on the Duggar parents’ large property in Arkansas. This entire situation upsets the Duggar kids who got free.

Many children who grew up in Quiverfull and similar movements talk publicly about how it hurt them. They share these stories on various spiritual-abuse sites like:

And some of the women still in the movement who talked up a storm about the wonders of their beliefs simply got bogged down by the demands of having huge families. Indeed, that’s why the Duggars borrowed a spare daughter from another family. But less-powerful couples don’t have that kind of pull.

The big names in Quiverfull keep exploding into scandals

As well, the biggest names in Quiverfull and adjacent movements keep running into scandals.

For example, let’s look at Doug Phillips. He’s a Calvinist hardliner and the former leader of Vision Forum Ministries. In 2013, his scandals caught up with him in a uniquely Quiverfull way. It seems that he and his wife had borrowed another family’s spare daughter to babysit and help out around the house (sound familiar?). In his crocodile-tearful resignation letter, he sobs that he was unfaithful to his wife. But the situation is way worse than that. If rumors I heard are correct, he regularly sexually assaulted that babysitter. She lawyered up—good for her!—but I never heard about further action, so she probably settled out of court with him. (That’s what a Homeschoolers Anonymous writer thinks too.)

Though he was initially defiant, Phillips eventually lost his cushy job over what he did. So did Bill Gothard, the authoritarian guru who ran the Institute in Basic Life Principles (IBLP). This group taught religious-homeschooling parents how to raise children. Quiverfull might never have started without this guy!

But Gothard turned out to be a serial molester of young women. As the allegations kept mounting, he finally resigned in 2014. In 2016, eighteen of his victims filed a lawsuit against him. Unfortunately, it didn’t go far. According to the Font of All Knowledge, he’s still alive at 90. His official website still shills various things he’s written. On one page, we can even read this alleged sexual predator’s very compelling explanation for these accusations: See, eighteen women accused him in court of sexual abuse because Yahweh was pissed at him for not Jesusing hard enough.

But don’t worry! He’s doing even better now! He made his own IBLP with hookers and blow! Those ickie IBLP women can just pound sand!

One lesser-known but still important voice within the Quiverfull movement is R.C. Sproul, a Calvinist pastor who got booted from one Presbyterian denomination for abuse of authority in 2006. That wasn’t enough to scare off another Presbyterian hardline denomination, which happily accepted him in 2010. He founded the super-Calvinist site Ligonier in 1971, and its sister organization Reformation Bible College in 2011. (Reformed theology is another name for Calvinism. There do exist some differences, ones that the two groups in question argue about constantly. But for our purposes, they’re synonyms.)

In 2016, Sproul’s son—R.C. Sproul Jr.—got popped in Indiana for drunk driving with minor children in the car. After he pleaded guilty to the felony count, Ligonier ever-so-graciously allowed him to resign from his various positions within Reformation Bible College and Ligonier. His dad died the next year in 2017.

Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar, of course, keep getting hit with various accusations of financial misdealings with their kids and, of course, concealing Josh’s sex abuse.

Trying to escape the tainted brand of Quiverfull

Of the Christians who’ve stayed within the movement, they don’t like using “Quiverfull” as a description of what they’re doing. As one Quiverfull blogger notes on her testimony:

Since writing this post nearly 10 years ago [in 2006; this note was added around 2015], the term “quiverfull” has become tainted with horrendous stories of abuse and families in shambles. As with anything, when humans make something an idol (even having a lot of children) and find pride in their worship of that idol, there will be consequences.

That’s an interesting take, but not a surprising one. You’ll never hear any current trend member in Christianity saying anything negative about their beliefs. That said, the term “quiverfull” wasn’t tainted with “horrendous stories of abuse and families in shambles.” It was tainted with abuse that left many families in shambles. That’s what tainted it, not stories of those things. The stories are just testimonies of the movement’s failure to deliver on its promises. Its string of constant failures is what taints it. Not people talking about those failures.

And blaming that abuse on idolization is cruel. There is no objective way whatsoever for a Christian to evaluate whether or not they’re idolizing anything. The way this blogger writes about her beliefs certainly makes me think she’s committing idolatry herself. But really, literalists tend to do that. They put their beliefs and their identification with the ingroup above the safety of their fellow group members.

They always have.

The normies have noticed why Quiverfull really exists

As I mentioned earlier when we were talking about “babymaxxing,” right-wing Christians have tacitly given up on any illusions of reversing their decline through vast numbers of conversions of non-Christians. That’s been a completely gobsmacking, mind-blowing change in their culture.

In the past, such a shift in strategies would have been utterly unthinkable. And yet, here they are: Pushing harder than ever on having babies, while evangelism campaigns barely get lip service as growth strategies.

The normies have noticed, too.

I loved loved loved this Tweet from last year:

Over-reproducing and the “Quiverfull” mindset are rampant in Christianity because indoctrinating children is easy whereas convincing grown-ass, unindoctrinated adults that the absurdities of Christianity are true is a much more difficult exercise.

Similarly, an atheist said this over at r/Christianity:

Well, they can’t convince people of their views, so that leaves them with outfucking everyone else instead, and most normal people don’t turn their breeding kink into a worldview.

Another notes that lost coercive powers inevitably led to the entire concept of outbreeding the heathens:

Now that conversion at the point of a sword is generally frowned upon, the only reliable way to get more Christians is to indoctrinate them from birth. Thus, those who believe that they have a duty to maximize the number of Christians in the world use the strategy of birthing to bring that about.

All of this is true.

Cherchez la femme

However, I must add this observation to these observers’ excellent points:

The subjugation of women might just be the only one that today’s white evangelical men can still feasibly achieve. Total iron-fisted control of their homes might also be the last bastion of control that today’s entitled, power-hungry, angry white evangelical men can reliably maintain.

And that brings us to a very interesting problem that these men face:

Their preferred way of life depends utterly upon women playing along with their god-man charades. They cannot exist without women’s cooperation.

It’s just so interesting to me that so many of these movements adopt strikingly similar ideologies that are all designed to induce women to give their power and voices to bottom-of-the-barrel authoritarian men, then trust those men to always treat them the way these movements promise they will.

American culture stands on the brink of big changes. On one side, an ongoing steady stream of young women depart from right-wing Christianity. On the other, young men drill down harder and harder on the Christian Right’s culture-war values.

Meanwhile, movements like Quiverfull fold into the general misogyny of right-wing Christianity. There, Christian leaders spin its ideas into other similar ideologies. With enough Jesus frosting and Bible verses, the flocks won’t notice anything amiss.

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Captain Cassidy

Captain Cassidy is a Gen-X ex-Christian and writer. She writes about how people engage with science, religion, art, and each other. She lives in Idaho with her husband, Mr. Captain, and their squawky orange tabby cat, Princess Bother Pretty Toes. And at any given time, she is running out of bookcase space.

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