PHOTO BY KYLE MONK Eight is not enough? Quiverfull members Theron and AnneMarie Johnson have seven kids of their own and have adopted one other. If they follow their religion’s teachings, more may be on the way. Advertisement



West Sacramento resident Theron Johnson has a vision for an ideal society. In it, racism is eliminated. The United States disbands its large standing army and refrains from engaging in unjust wars. People live within their means and accrue no debt. The weak are protected, taxes lowered and inflation is considered theft. Government agencies stop encroaching on our daily lives, doing little more than protecting homes and property from fire or theft. Personal liberty and freedom reign supreme.

In his ideal society, women do not have the right to vote.

Male politicians fill government posts, as women seek higher personal meaning through submission to their husbands. Parents raise little girls not to attend college but to marry godly men and bear as many children as the lord gives them. Abortion, same-sex marriage and divorce: illegal.

This, to Johnson, is a Christian society.

Johnson’s vision reflects a growing cross-denominational Christian theology that has recently come to be known as the Quiverfull movement, comprised of evangelical and fundamentalist Protestants. Followers typically home-school their children, operate home businesses and attend home-based churches. The movement takes guidance from many Bible passages, including Psalm 127: “Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They shall not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies in the gate.”

Under this ideology, followers understand the Bible as the divine word of God and follow the book’s literal meaning, including the Old Testament’s strict gender divisions. Wives must submit to their husbands and stay at home and raise children, passing on the same values to their progeny.

The movement touts complementarian roles of female submission and male headship. In this arrangement, a woman provides unending service to her husband.

One such service is to bear children, as ministers advise women to “reject women’s liberation in exchange for the principles of submissive wifehood and prolific stay-at-home motherhood. … Women’s bodies and lives did not belong to them, but to God and his plans for Christian revival,” writes Kathryn Joyce in her book Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement.

The ills of modern society and the need for a new Christian vision lies, largely, in confusion over sex roles brought by increased gender equality. The culprit: feminism.

Although the loosely tied Quiverfull movement goes by other names, such as family-integrated churches, the Christian family-renewal movement or the practice of biblical family values, followers of its central ideology are estimated to number in the tens of thousands, primarily in the Midwest and Bible Belt of the United States. Their numbers are steadily growing, according to Joyce, who has spent the last few years intensely following the movement.

Here, in Sacramento, a handful of these churches exist, in rented rooms and halls, including Church of the King, of which Johnson is a founding elder, located in downtown Roseville. Johnson, his wife, AnneMarie, and their eight children live in West Sacramento.

Meet the Johnsons

Except for the soft sound of crayons neatly filling in black-and-white drawings, the Johnson house is nearly silent. It’s an amazing feat, since there are nine family members now occupying this immaculate five-bedroom suburban home. The home is filled with modern furniture and appliances. A screen saver dances across the computer screen in the kitchen. Costco goods fill the cabinets. Theron and AnneMarie sit at the table in their bright sunlit dining room.

As soon as the morning alarm rings in the Johnson’s home, Bible-based teachings lead the day. The routine begins with prayer, making beds and getting dressed. Sometimes, a few of the children rise early, eager to get a head start on their schoolwork for the day. At 8:30 a.m., the family reads the Bible for 15 minutes. Then, the home schooling begins.

The children learn about grammar, science, history and geography. Mom does the majority of the teaching for continuity’s sake, because the children’s dad works as an airline pilot, often spending nights away in Hawaii.

As the couple explains their reasons for keeping the children out of public school, one daughter approaches AnneMarie with a question, pointing to a page in book, God’s Gift of Language. The mother responds, and her daughter jumps back to her spot on the carpet in the living room.

While AnneMarie, 32, was home-schooled during her upbringing, Theron, 47, earned his education in public school and later the United States Air Force Academy. Theron, an African-American man, remembers being held back from advanced classes in school because of his skin color. So when the time came to decide how to educate their own children, it was a no-brainer: Mom would home-school them.

The Johnsons cite several reasons for home schooling, which includes not wanting to be separated from their children for hours at a time, taking a direct interest in their children’s education and establishing a moral code.

“Knowledge in itself is not enough,” Theron says. “You need a moral compass to hold you up.”

Additionally, by using a Christian-based curriculum, they don’t waste time countering lessons taught in public school, such as the theory of evolution.

The children’s education isn’t entirely home-based, either. Home schooling gives them the flexibility to visit the Joshua trees in the California desert or the Jelly Belly factory in Fairfield. The children also participate in a music cooperative where they play instruments with fellow home-schooled students.

But the Johnson’s choice to home-school is based on more than the drawbacks of the public school system. Their take on education, along with other Quiverfull families, is also biblically inspired. Not only does scripture teach that parents maintain primary responsibility for the education and development of their children, but, according to Church of the King’s Web site, the U.S. Constitution doesn’t contain any “provision for schools financed and run by the civil state,” which means followers see the American public school system as unconstitutional.

The U.S. Department of Education reported that in 2003, 1.1 million students between the ages 5 and 17 were home-schooled, up from an estimated 850,000 home-schooled students in 1999. In the same 2003 survey, 30 percent of parents cited “religious or moral instruction” as the primary reason for home-schooling their children.

Vision Forum Ministries, a nonprofit organization based in San Antonio, is one of the leading resources for Christ-centered home-schooling curricula and is dedicated to the preservation of “our covenant with God through biblical patriarchy and multigenerational faithfulness.” To reverse what it sees as the long, steady erosion of biblical standards for men and women, Vision Forum advocates teaching history as the province of God and training character through home education.

PHOTO BY KYLE MONK Church of the King Pastor John Stoos preaches that men should be fruitful and multiply. Women should facilitate the process.



Theron shares Vision Forum’s view, as do other Quiverfull proponents.

“As Christians, we gear everything we’re doing toward our faith,” Theron says. “It’s how we conduct ourselves, how we define ourselves. It’s the core.”

For Theron and his family, while the core of their faith lies within the home, they find support, fellowship and guidance in a small rented hall in downtown Roseville.

His kingdom come

It’s late Sunday morning, and music flows down the narrow stairwell into the street. Climb the wooden steps and the music grows louder. Sixty people stand on their feet, singing from the Book of Psalms:

Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord

And the fruit of the womb is His reward

As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man

So are the children of the youth

Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them:

They shall not be ashamed,

But they shall speak with enemies in the gate

As the hymn ends, the congregation—men wearing shirts and ties and women in long dresses and hats—sit down in stacking chairs. Pastor John Stoos, a balding man of medium height, stands and addresses his predominantly Anglo congregation about the Annunciation, the morning of Jesus Christ’s resurrection.

Pastor Stoos and his family formed Church of the King five years ago. They began, like so many modern churches, in humble circumstances. Stoos and a few families met in a rented room at the Days Inn off Watt Avenue. Church ranks soon swelled, however, and now about 80 members meet each Sunday in the upstairs room of Eagles Hall on Vernon Street in Roseville. The location may be less than ideal—a disco ball hangs from the ceiling and the hall shares building space with a smoke shop on the corner—but for now, it’s home.

Until five years ago, Stoos and his family, including his daughter AnneMarie Johnson, attended Covenant Reformed Church in Sacramento. CRC touts itself as “pro-family.” But, over time, Stoos confronted a serious doctrinal issue: The church barred children from communion. Stoos found no biblical justification keeping children “from the table,” referring to the practice of families taking bread and wine from a table each week. Stoos raised the sacramental issue to CRC elders, but they wouldn’t budge; CRC’s denomination, the Reformed Church in the United States, had previously found “no conclusive evidence favoring either infant or young child communion in either the Old or the New Testament.”

Stoos disagreed. And so, in 2004, he and a few families split.

They had a few options when it came to finding a new place to worship. There are churches in the Sacramento region that preach conservative, pro-family values. Among them: Living Hope Christian Church and The King’s House, both in Citrus Heights. The National Center for Family Integrated Churches identifies these congregations within its network (churches could not be reached for comment by deadline). However, neither of these fulfilled their vision. Faith Baptist Tabernacle in North Highlands is also listed in the network, which came as a surprise to church Pastor Mike Rodgers, who says although his church is “very much for the family,” it doesn’t specifically identify as “family-integrated.”

Faith Baptist Tabernacle resides in a large white building off Watt Avenue. It sits across the street from a vacant lot, a towing-and-repair facility and some campers. Roosters cock-a-doodle-doo nearby. Pastor Rodgers calls his church “fundamental” in relation to “mainline Protestant denominations that have become more liberal.” He believes in Christian home schooling, but doesn’t demand his congregation subscribe to this practice.

Unlike Quiverfull churches, Faith Baptist Tabernacle offers Sunday School, but similarly, the church promotes female submission. The church’s Web site states: “The wife is to submit herself to the Scriptural leadership of her husband as the church submits to the headship of Christ.”

The men who became the founding elders of Church of the King also considered All Saints Reformed Episcopal Church in Vacaville. But Stoos and his wife had been impressed by their visits to the Reformation Covenant Church in Oregon City, Ore., and, with that church’s support, started their own place of worship.

Stoos served part time as Church of the King’s pastor until retiring from his job with the state of California in 2005. Stoos says his weekly service differs from most evangelical churches. Church of the King includes traditional practices such as a call to confession and weekly communion, and services focus more on adhering to biblical principles than maintaining tradition.

“We don’t believe that women should teach in the church; you wouldn’t see a woman leading services or leading prayer,” Stoos says, adding that the policy prohibiting women from speaking in church dates from the Garden of Eden to the apostle Paul’s epistle to the Corinthians, which states that women should not speak in church.

The church’s emphasis on childbirth and child raising is also biblical, according to Stoos. In fact, there’s no separate Sunday school for children; little ones stay with their parents at all times.

“Again, it starts at the beginning, at the time of creation and even after the fall,” Stoos said. “God told man that he should be fruitful and should multiply and replenish the Earth.”

Indeed, members of Church of the King are multiplying. Each Sunday, church elders announce the birth of a new child. One middle-aged woman tells the story of her daughter, also a Church of the King attendee, who is expecting her ninth child. Even though her daughter’s pregnancy is fraught with complications, she beamed about welcoming yet another grandchild.

PHOTO BY KYLE MONK This way is up: Church of the King’s humble meeting place at the Eagles Hall in Roseville.



Church of the King belongs to the Confederation of Reformed Evangelical Churches, a denomination that split from the Presbyterian church in 1998. The split was partly due to that church skewing more liberal on some issues; Presbyterianism was becoming more concerned with addressing social-justice issues than with bringing sinners to repentance.

For self-described traditionalists, Presbyterianism’s break from Calvinism proved alarming. In their interpretation of Calvinism, religion and faith inform not only Sunday sermons but every aspect of a Christian’s life. So in 1998, some traditionalists formalized their split from Presbyterianism and formed the CREC.

The return to Calvinism is not merely a religious revival; to followers, it’s a push to restore biblical principles to their rightful place at the forefront of society. That Christian restoration begins not in the courts or in the legislature, but in the home.