The fundamentalist threat, writ large

Contrary to what you readers (both of you) might think of me, I honestly don't have a problem with religion per sé. However, I strongly feel that the fundamentalist Christian movement, both as it pertains to politics and otherwise, is a threat to American ideals and values, by perverting the positive aspects of Christianity and demonizing everything that doesn't fit within its incredibly narrow worldview.

If you need proof of this, you need go no further than Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, by Kathryn Joyce. Even in this brief excerpt, which I will distill even more below, you can see some really disturbing facts about the Quiverfull movement, which seeks to produce large families of painfully obedient -- even subservient -- children steeped in fundamentalist doctrine. Actually, "disturbing" might be too weak a word -- maybe "creepy" is more appropriate.

[C]hildren of the movement should have “little to no association with peers outside of family and relatives” as insulation from a corrupting society. Daughters shouldn’t forgo education but should consider to what ends their education is intended and should place their efforts in “advanced homemaking” skills.

Concretely, Geoffrey Botkin explains, this means evaluating all materials and media that daughters receive from childhood on as it pertains to their future role. The Botkin sisters received no Barbie dolls — idols that inspire girls to lead selfish lives — but rather a “doll estate” that could help them learn to manage a household of assets, furniture, and servants in the aristocratic vision of Quiverfull life which Botkin paints for the families around the room. The toys the girls played with were “tools for dominion,” such as kitchen utensils and other “tools for their laboratory”: the kitchen.

Isolation from the outside world ... a woman's place is in the kitchen ... toys as idolatry. Sounds like a recipe for psychological disaster to me. (Servants? Really? Does this mean "Slave Auction Barbie" is a bad idea?)

But you ain't seen nothin' yet. Later on, it's a veritable Freudian field day:

The extent to which Botkin views his daughters as his ambassadors, or extensions of himself, is perplexingly hinted at when both he and Doug Phillips slip during the conference and refer to So Much More as Geoffrey Botkin’s book. This could seem either an indication of his daughters’ total identification with their father, or else, perhaps, indication of the heavy paternal hand guiding the virtuous daughters’ movement—as present in the writing of the book as it feels in every frame of the film and every still photograph taken of the two sisters.

Such lessons are repeated wide-scale at the father-daughter retreats, where daughters are given object lessons alongside the sermons through a series of ideological games, including a blindfolded obstacle course, where chains of blinded daughters were guided solely by relying on their fathers’ verbal commands; contests for fathers “wooing and winning the hearts of their daughters”; and intimacy-building “unity games” that teach daughters to serve their fathers by shaving their faces, grooming their hair, and knotting their shoes and ties. As three of Phillips’s young daughters, Jubilee, Liberty, and Faith, explained on a video posted on Vision Forum’s Web site, “Each of the games was designed to teach us a principle about our relationship with our fathers.”

Or as Doug Phillips explained to the fathers in attendance, he who “tells the story controls the culture,” and storytelling—setting up the basic architecture of your children’s worldview—is “one of the most significant patriarchal duties that God gives us.” So, he tells fathers, it’s imperative to start teaching your daughter now all “the stories she needs to know” because—in an alarming revelation about the young marriages patriarchs support—the nine-year-old before you now may, in six years’ time, be not just older, but married as well.

It’s a short window of opportunity for a father to guide his daughter where he wants her to go, and a short time for him to experience what Phillips calls “the greatest privilege of the ages: to have someone look at you and say, ‘Father, I love you. Father, shepherd me.’ Father, father. The very words we call our God and savior. God has given you fathers the opportunity to look at these girls and say, ‘You are mine. You are mine.’”

Before I go any further, I must point out that I went to college with Doug Phillips, and that he was just as batshit crazy back then ... except more in the political realm than religious. (I mean, "Jubilee," "Liberty," and "Faith?" Jesus H. Christ in a horse-drawn carriage, that's bizarre.) His father, Howard Phillips, is (or was) a leading anti-taxation and Ayn Rand type (don't get me started ...), and as I recall, Doug was quite active in my college's Federalist Society. Obviously, somewhere along the way he found Jesus ... only it was the vengeful, weird, batshit crazy Jesus who wants His followers to have a thousand great-grandchildren, not the compassionate, loving, DFH Jesus that, you know, is described in the Bible. But I digress ...

How fucked up is it that these daughters are shaving and grooming their fathers? You don't suppose there are other things going on behind closed doors, do you? It would be irresponsible not to speculate ... I mean, purity balls are bad enough, but this is fucking insane. Scary, even. How long before one of those daughters goes all Sweeney Todd on dear old Dad, anyway?

Look, worship however your little batshit crazy heart desires. But, for God's sake (literally), don't screw up your children for life by dragging them through this bullshit.