Arkansas couple Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar are eagerly awaiting the arrival of their seventeenth child Jennifer Danielle, who is due on July 27. That’s seventeen children in 19 years; not a bad ratio, though I’d be more impressed if they’d been able to fit a few more births in to that crowded child-rearing schedule.
The Duggars home school their children at their 7,000-square foot home in Tontitown. The couple’s oldest child, Joshua, is 19, and their youngest, Johanna Faith, is 19 months. Their children include two sets of twins.Because the couple sees each child as a blessing from God, Michelle Duggar said they will, as long as she is able, accept each child they are given.
“Really, our heart is we would love to receive whatever gifts or blessings the Lord wants to give us,” she said. “But I love the baby stage and I can’t imagine life without having a toddler in the house.”
Neither can I. That’s what I routinely kidnap toddlers, let them wander around the house for a few months, then release them into the wild. But this post isn’t about me, it’s about Jim Bob and Michelle’s brood.
The willingness to accept any and all children as a gift from god is not new to fundamentalist Christianity, but for the last 20 years it has been the guiding precept of a movement within the larger fundamentalist strata called Quiverfull. Quiverfull, which the Duggars are a part of, rejects all forms of contraception and natural family planning, resulting in sexually-satisfied husbands and perpetually gestating wives. A robustly patriarchal mindset defines the movement, recognizing men as Biblically-mandated authorities of the family and wives as vehicles to propagate the Christian species.
Their understanding of basic biological functions is unique in the post-Enlightenment information era. As the Quiverfulls see it, God is a sort of divine uterine puppet master, opening and closing a woman’s womb on a case-by-case basis. Busy, busy. That doesn’t give him much time to make the sun revolve around the earth or plant false archeological evidence to test the faithful.
