In the Quiverfull movement, children are pretty much metaphorical weapons born to shoot a degenerate modern society in the face. I was one of nine children, and our family was just on the large end of "normal" in size. Really, it was downright small: We didn't need to use all the seats in our 15-passenger van to get to church. I was brought up to be just one more weapon in this terrible faith-based arsenal, but I didn't quite hit the target. Here's what I can tell you about being a weaponized offspring.

My name is Hannah Ettinger, and I was raised in the Quiverfull movement . The term is taken from a verse in Proverbs, which says: "Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of arrows." We interpreted this to mean: "Blessed is the man who dies with the most kids."

5 It's Not a "Time-Honored Tradition" So Much as a "Super Racist Conspiracy Theory"

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When you think of crazy religious fundamentalists in America, you probably picture a hard-faced member of the Phelps clan. It's easy to write someone like that off as just another nut born into an extreme religious tradition, proudly carrying the family psychosis into the future. But this isn't true of the Quiverfull movement: We're only just now entering our second generation.

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Just like Star Wars fans, oddly enough.

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Most of the ideas that spawned the Quiverfull movement can be traced to books like The Way Home by Mary Pride (key quote: "My body is not my own"), an anti-feminist treatise published way back in the ancient days of 1985, when men were RoboCops and women wore shoulder pads. The first wave of Quiverfull families weren't born into anything. Like roughly 2/3 of people who join cults, they came into it as young adults fleeing shitty childhoods. Choosing this alternative lifestyle was their rejection of the "normal" world -- whether they were fleeing drug abuse, alcohol abuse, or plain vanilla no-frills physical abuse -- to right the wrongs of their parents. And for some reason they thought the best way to do that was to have kids the way other people buy Costco cheese.

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No, seriously. Here's the basic political idea behind the Quiverfull movement: The more babies we have, the more voting Christians we'll have to balance out the heathens. The individual babies really aren't as important as the quantity you successfully indoctrinate into the cause.

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Way to really half-uterus it.

I've heard people in the Quiverfull movement -- parents, pastors, homeschooling gurus -- say things like: "All children are blessings. It's godly to be fruitful and multiply. Look at the birth rates across the world -- the Muslims are the only people keeping up with us! They're going to outbreed the Europeans, and in the end we'll be all that's left of Western civilization."

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That is not a recent development. The only thing "new" about that statement is the ethnicity of the rivals. Before terrorism started to dominate the news in 2001, the Chinese were the international threat we had to fear. My family had a few primary news sources: One, called God's World News, was for the kids, and then there were World Magazine and Voice of the Martyrs (which really sounds more like a broadsheet you'd find in downtown Fallujah). They were filled with stories of Christian martyrs getting killed in various Asian countries. As a result of this and your average evangelism training classes in third grade, I came to believe that my life would be useful to God only if I did one of two things: either go to the "10/40 Window" (the non-Western world located between 10 and 40 degrees north of the equator) as a missionary (or the wife of one), or have as many kids as I could as a stay-at-home homeschooling mom, raising up more kids for the cause.

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The "10/40 Window," aka every country that needs Jesus more than clean water or a stable government.

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Now, having left the movement for the "real world," I'm utterly appalled at how blatantly racist/colonialist this attitude was, and how fundamental colonialist racism (called "dominionism" internally) was to the entire movement. My parents never voiced any of this xenophobia themselves, but everyone around us acted like it was the only reason we, as children of Quiverfull parents, existed in the first place.