One of the questions I get asked a lot when people find I don't have a TV is do I feel I am missing out a lot? Actually, no. There is quite a bit that I am aware of, even without a TV. And one of them is the continuing saga of the Duggar family now in its second generation.
Now, I have not watched any of the shows featuring said family (frankly, I much prefer fictional Downton Abbey's family to the Duggars) so I can't comment on them directly. But because they have been so much in the news lately, it brought me to an awareness (thanks to the Internet) of some aspects of the Christian culture that they live in. Namely, two concepts that I have been exposed to but were never named. And that is Extreme Purity and Quiverfull.
Quiverfull is nothing more than the Catholic doctrine of allowing God to choose how many children a couple will have dressed up in Evangelical clothing. I first heard my former pastor preach a sermon on that a couple of years ago, and I blogged about it at the time. What I did not realize at the time, because he never mentioned the name Quiverfull, was that this idea was not just simply his interpretation of a Scripture verse about children being like arrows in a quiver, but comes from an organized national agenda. Unless you are really, really, really into Evangelical circles, you aren't going to know that either. It's an inside secret, just like the existence of atheist and other specialty forums are inside secrets on the Internet.
Extreme Purity goes along with Quiverfull. I first encountered it in the 1980's with the publication of Elisabeth Elliot's "Passion and Purity". Extreme Purity goes well beyond no premarital sex. Any kind of physical contact between an unmarried couple is forbidden. No hand-holding, no kissing. This is the culture of virginity pledges, purity rings, and balls. And yes, this idea is circulating around my old church as well, even though it is not openly talked about. Because I am not married and have no children there were a lot of discussions I was not privy to, plus it was fairly obvious that I wasn't buying into a good deal of what was being said in the pulpit even though I tried not to make it an issue. Still, when there are books in the church library with titles like "I Kissed Dating Goodbye", you kind of get the feeling of what is going on behind the scenes.
Now I've written quite a bit about living the abstinent lifestyle that these folks advocate so I'll try not to repeat myself here, but apparently there is a new trend now where Evangelical parents arrange marriages for their children. As a survivor of the abstinence philosophy, I can understand why they are doing so. It is the logical next step, if they want their children to marry in the faith. In order for abstinence to work, to be successful, you MUST marry young. The longer you put off marriage, the harder it becomes to find a partner who has bought into the premarital abstinence idea, let alone Extreme Purity (which can only be practiced if you live in an extremely sheltered bubble--not all of us get to have a choice about what kind of physical contact, whether it be hand-holding, kissing or full-blown sex, that we will allow others to do. I certainly did not have much choice in the matter!). I used to get extremely frustrated with the leaders of the local abstinence group precisely because I was no longer a starry-eyed innocent teen. I would ask them over and over "Well, do you know any single young men who are practicing this lifestyle?" And they would say no. That was, of course, when I bought into Purity Culture.
See, people like me who have never married because there is no one available to marry that meets certain artificial requirements (and they are artificial) are not exactly the best advertisement for a system promoting those requirements. And the Purity Culture folks have come to realize this, that the old way of leaving it up to each individual to find a partner does not work when you are insisting on something that 90% of other people don't follow. If being a wife and mother is God's ultimate role for women, a woman like myself who is neither wife, mother or grandmother doesn't fit in. The very fact that we exist is disturbing to those who want to sell the Purity Culture myth. While there is much I could say about this new trend of Christian arranged marriages, I will say that in some respects it is an improvement over the old "Well, that's just the way things are sometimes" that I used to get when I talked about being single and not being able to find someone. At least these people are being proactive and they are looking around their communities to see who might be a good match rather than shrugging it off as not their problem.
Now, I have not watched any of the shows featuring said family (frankly, I much prefer fictional Downton Abbey's family to the Duggars) so I can't comment on them directly. But because they have been so much in the news lately, it brought me to an awareness (thanks to the Internet) of some aspects of the Christian culture that they live in. Namely, two concepts that I have been exposed to but were never named. And that is Extreme Purity and Quiverfull.
Quiverfull is nothing more than the Catholic doctrine of allowing God to choose how many children a couple will have dressed up in Evangelical clothing. I first heard my former pastor preach a sermon on that a couple of years ago, and I blogged about it at the time. What I did not realize at the time, because he never mentioned the name Quiverfull, was that this idea was not just simply his interpretation of a Scripture verse about children being like arrows in a quiver, but comes from an organized national agenda. Unless you are really, really, really into Evangelical circles, you aren't going to know that either. It's an inside secret, just like the existence of atheist and other specialty forums are inside secrets on the Internet.
Extreme Purity goes along with Quiverfull. I first encountered it in the 1980's with the publication of Elisabeth Elliot's "Passion and Purity". Extreme Purity goes well beyond no premarital sex. Any kind of physical contact between an unmarried couple is forbidden. No hand-holding, no kissing. This is the culture of virginity pledges, purity rings, and balls. And yes, this idea is circulating around my old church as well, even though it is not openly talked about. Because I am not married and have no children there were a lot of discussions I was not privy to, plus it was fairly obvious that I wasn't buying into a good deal of what was being said in the pulpit even though I tried not to make it an issue. Still, when there are books in the church library with titles like "I Kissed Dating Goodbye", you kind of get the feeling of what is going on behind the scenes.
Now I've written quite a bit about living the abstinent lifestyle that these folks advocate so I'll try not to repeat myself here, but apparently there is a new trend now where Evangelical parents arrange marriages for their children. As a survivor of the abstinence philosophy, I can understand why they are doing so. It is the logical next step, if they want their children to marry in the faith. In order for abstinence to work, to be successful, you MUST marry young. The longer you put off marriage, the harder it becomes to find a partner who has bought into the premarital abstinence idea, let alone Extreme Purity (which can only be practiced if you live in an extremely sheltered bubble--not all of us get to have a choice about what kind of physical contact, whether it be hand-holding, kissing or full-blown sex, that we will allow others to do. I certainly did not have much choice in the matter!). I used to get extremely frustrated with the leaders of the local abstinence group precisely because I was no longer a starry-eyed innocent teen. I would ask them over and over "Well, do you know any single young men who are practicing this lifestyle?" And they would say no. That was, of course, when I bought into Purity Culture.
See, people like me who have never married because there is no one available to marry that meets certain artificial requirements (and they are artificial) are not exactly the best advertisement for a system promoting those requirements. And the Purity Culture folks have come to realize this, that the old way of leaving it up to each individual to find a partner does not work when you are insisting on something that 90% of other people don't follow. If being a wife and mother is God's ultimate role for women, a woman like myself who is neither wife, mother or grandmother doesn't fit in. The very fact that we exist is disturbing to those who want to sell the Purity Culture myth. While there is much I could say about this new trend of Christian arranged marriages, I will say that in some respects it is an improvement over the old "Well, that's just the way things are sometimes" that I used to get when I talked about being single and not being able to find someone. At least these people are being proactive and they are looking around their communities to see who might be a good match rather than shrugging it off as not their problem.
