Why am I so obsessed with Quiverfull, why, why

[sapote]

I jumped from the often incisive and quite often sprawling No Longer Quivering to the still-in-the-life-oh-God Cedar Generation, in which the blogger talks about having her eighth child with no pain relief because she can't afford an epidural (here) a handful of days before she returns to her normal topic of why socialized health care is bad (here). And the thing is, I know Quiverfull is an extreme example, but the thing is that this is perfectly internally consistent view of what you're supposed to do when you get sick if you're far far on the right wing. As Vyckie Garrison at No Longer Quivering notes, if you believe that righteousness is rewarded with financial stability, and you're dead set against government aid of any sort, you actually do decide to find some lady who goes to your church who's not certified and give birth at home rather than seeking medical care. Now, I am pro-home birth for people who have access to good prenatal care and want to give birth at home for reasons of their own. If I ever pop out a young'un it's probably something I'll at least try. But there's a difference between refusing medical care because you don't want that particular kind of medical care in itself, or because of a direct belief that God's supposed to intervene directly, and because your religious leaders told you that it's bad to let the government pay for medical care you would otherwise seek out. I feel like. I mean, I understand if God's supposed to miraculously heal your wounds, but there's a difference between getting God involved with the doctoring and getting God involved with the fines and billings department.

This is just observational, and an attempt to get my thoughts together since I apparently am going to keep reading Quiverfull blogs until I get this stuff figured out. I am not directly attacking people's rights to do these things, for sure; I think my problem is the assumption that getting a baby out of your uterus with no more medical care than you can afford to pay for out of pocket is a reasonable plan for other people than ones' own self.

I think a lot of my obsession with Quiverfull is how much it Venn-diagram-overlaps with my own subcultural obsessions. Like, I like organic food! I like (competent) homeschooling! I like farming and also stockpiling canned goods for the inevitable collapse of civilization! These all featured big in my upbringing and are things I'm perfectly into! A lot of things that Quiverfulls believe touch on voluntary simplicity/poverty beliefs held by a lot of other Christian groups (Mennonites, Quakers, Catholic Workers) who I really admire. And then you throw Christian Patriarchy into the whole deal and the whole thing goes from "more or less what I think in my granola hippie heart" to "oh my god it's The Handmaid's Tale".

I know no one reads me for my incisive blogging (and I feel like most of my flist is busy / in a non-shared fandom right now anyway) but it is my latest nonstop obsession, and that's what journaling services are for?

Comments

[onyxlynx]

Hi, I'm a perfect stranger in to comment and run.

You would never impose your beliefs or organizing principles on everyone else (you might become overly enthusiastic with friends, but you are far from mandating farming, stockpiling, organic food, or homeschooling for all).

They would. Happily, even.

And you might have gone that way yourself had circumstances shaken out differently. The alternate-universe fascination.

(I find the Quiverfull stuff sufficiently Edgar-Allen-Poe-at-night-when-I-was-a-kid that I refuse to go there, but mileage varies.)

[sapote]

Well, it doesn't help that I've got a minor fascination with High Demand Religious Groups in general, hah. People are just really interesting when they go slightly off the rails as a group - and I am very conscious of times when mob thinking has influenced my life, so I think I find cult survivors fairly sympathetic.

I think every ideologue on earth, myself included, has at some time thought to themselves that they know better than everyone else how the world should be run - and cults tend to be tiny tin-pot dictatorships of utopian thought, yes? I certainly said silly things like "I'm going to run away and start a commune where we do things the way we should" when I was in high school. So while I find the examples of why divorcing yourself too much from mainstream life is dangerous heartbreaking and frightening, they are also supremely instructive to me.

Also, hi, where did you come from? Pleased to meet you!

[onyxlynx]

To answer your last question, I substituted "network" for "read" in the reading page URL; in Live Journal that would be "Friends' Friends Page" and brings up a random assortment of the subscribers of people one subscribes to. Which was Interesting.

And I do have tin-pot dictator moments. It's been made clear, however, that nobody would follow me to the deli for a sandwich, let alone into a cult, so we're all safe. ;-)