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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."

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.