The Quiverfull Families Next Door: Part 4
Because Quiverfull communities like CFC preach patriarchy as the only biblical framework, individuals who challenge the gender hierarchy must be labeled rebellious and sinful.
The Quiverfull Families Next Door: Part 3
Homeschooling can be a dangerous tool in the hands of abusers and those who believe they have a God-given right to exert total control over another human being. Children who are homeschooled have very little access to mandated reporters. Sometimes homeschooled children are also “home-churched,” further isolating them, or participate in churches where abuse or neglect is endorsed or will go unreported.
You Are the Author of Your Story
When I first left, I didn’t tell many people about my past or background. I wanted to put it all behind me and move on with my life now that I had my freedom. But I had experienced so much disempowerment that I was struggling to move on. I slowly began writing down my story, and I discovered great healing in the process of putting my experience into words.
Why I Was Told to Make Them Worship
Too often, spiritually manipulative leaders want to ramp up worship in order to take the focus off what’s really going on underneath. Abusive leaders can use the worship time to keep their congregation preoccupied, to keep their eyes off the abuse occurring in the church. They use God’s name to lend authority to their own narcissism.
The Quiverfull Families Next Door: Part 2
For all the Quiverfull movement’s claims about children being blessings, it is fundamentally not about the children. Instead, Quiverfull ideology uses children as a tool or weapon. Quiverfull families see children as extensions of the family, weapons in the culture war, and a means to an end, rather than as autonomous people.
The Quiverfull Families Next Door: Part 1
In addition to valuing pronatalism, homeschooling, and gender hierarchy, many Quiverfull families also view the world through a dominionist lens, placing great emphasis on “filling the earth and subduing it.”
News Conference: Gary’s Statement
Today the New York State Council of Churches stands in solidarity with our sisters and brothers
who advocate for the passage and enactment of the CARE Act legislation in New York State.
Broken Arrows: Abuse is not love
CFC explicitly teaches that physical violence, emotional neglect, and isolation are necessary tools if loving parents want to make their children become faithful disciples of Jesus.
News Conference: James’ Statement
Clergy are called to be a pastoral presence and to journey with people during their trials and tribulations. We also need to know the limits of our calling and work with other professionals to stop harm. Therefore, I support the CARE Act to make clergy mandated reporters of abuse.
News Conference: Judy’s Statement
Christians are mandated reporters. We are mandated by Christ to care for the “least of these” among us - meaning the most vulnerable. In this case, the children.
News Conference: Tim’s Statement
This bill does not require clergy to report information reported to them during their duties as a faith leader. It would require them to be mandatory reporters for the same reasons that teachers, day care workers, doctors, and nurses are already mandatory reporters: because they are the trusted authority figures an abused child may rely on for help.
News Conference: Michelle’s Statement
Church should be a place where children are safe. Where children are protected and where the evils of the world stop at the door. Pastor, elders and leaders are the gate keepers. They have an obligation to protect the least of these. During this divisive political climate it's important to stress that reporting CSA is not now nor has it ever been a political issue.
Broken Arrows: Our Emotions
By “othering” personal thoughts, CFC trains children and adults to be constantly at odds with themselves in a state of passive indecision that looks for outside direction. CFC leadership then offers church-approved philosophies, practices, and opinions as though they are God-ordained truth, keeping members trapped in the vicious codependence of high-control authoritarian communities.
Broken Arrows: Our Bodies
When parents deny children basic human rights of bodily autonomy, agency, and privacy, their children learn that their bodies are not their own but always under the authority of someone else. The practice of deliberately humiliating and breaking a child’s spirit lays harmful groundwork for their future relationships as adults, teaching them that love means submitting to abusers who claim authority over their bodies.
Broken Arrows: Obedience
Training children to respond to instructions with nothing but immediate and cheerful obedience (under threat of physical and emotional harm) leaves no room for a child to question whether the instructed activity is safe for them.
Training children to obey adults without questioning the why behind the command prepares them to do the same with any authority figure in the future.
Broken Arrows: High Control Religious Communities and Abuse
The Broken Arrows series names and identifies the layers of harm contained in CFC’s approach to child training. This type of child training sets children up for abuse by teaching them erroneous beliefs about themselves and their place in the world.
The Lord is my courage
Honesty about our hurt empowers us to hope in God who stretches out a staff to comfort us. Courage is a continuous choice to be honest about the reality of harm while reaching for hope, even when it is inconvenient and even when it bristles against cultural and religious expectations that equate goodness with niceness.
We are all complicit
One of the most complicated truths to acknowledge is that we have harmed others, yet this is an essential step in the journey to wholeness. There is freedom in acknowledging that we have been complicit in harm. It allows us to seek forgiveness, offer restitution, and find grace for ourselves and for others.
Rethinking Discipline
As parents emerge from CFC, one of their common laments is that they spanked their children. At the same time, learning how to parent without fear and physical pain can be daunting if that is all that you have ever known. If you have been spanking your children but would like to stop, here are some places to start.
Why we support the CARE Act
The Child Abuse Reporting Expansion (CARE) Act is a proposed New York State law that eliminates the mandated reporting loophole to include members of the clergy.