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Question:
Can
you elaborate on the experiences you've heard from survivors of the
QF cult? The lack of healthcare, emotional and physical abuse, risks
of so many pregnancies and births, girls being robbed of their own
childhoods, shame surrounding bodies and sex et cetera. It would be
great to flesh those as a little so the readers can really understand
the terrible impact of these on the women that you've helped.
Younger
daughters often experience educational neglect, not only because
their beleaguered mothers and older siblings are too tired and busy
to teach them, many in the movement believe that daughters are not
worth educating because their “kingdom mandate” involves a
domestic role.
R.C. Sproul, Jr. describes on pages 110-112 of his book When You Rise Up that the parents of a nine year old who cannot yet read need not be concerned if she can care for younger siblings, make breakfast, and tend to gardening. Parents are counseled against college for daughters in many cases, and resources tend to be channeled towards families’ sons who are permitted to work freely in society.
R.C. Sproul, Jr. describes on pages 110-112 of his book When You Rise Up that the parents of a nine year old who cannot yet read need not be concerned if she can care for younger siblings, make breakfast, and tend to gardening. Parents are counseled against college for daughters in many cases, and resources tend to be channeled towards families’ sons who are permitted to work freely in society.
Women,
even if adults, are said to be at
risk of spiritual and physical harm if
they move freely in the culture “without a male
covering.” And for some like
the Jackson Family whose brothers sexually abused their sister
over a period of ten years, such abuse often goes unreported because
of ignorance, entitlement, and personal shame. As we see in the
scandal
involving the Duggar Family of the cable TV show about their
family of nineteen children, the subculture struggles with proper
handling of this kind of abuse, particularly because of the excessive
focus placed on purity, sex, and gender.
Particularly
as a nurse and as a naturopath, I am deeply concerned for young women
who have no means of support apart from their families and who are
not offered health care coverage. Some families participate in the
medical cost sharing programs that are popular with some within the
homeschooling community, but many do not. Children are doused in
kerosene to treat lice infestations. Rather than pay for inexpensive
soap, in Luddite fashion families will go to great lengths to make
their own soap, and many seek to stay “off the grid” by surviving
without hot water, heat, and electricity.
Children in the South have
told me of awakening to find rats eating their hair as they sleep in
bed. A notably large family in a rather famous “family integrated”
church for homeschoolers “simplified” their lives by moving to a
mobile home to be close to one of the QF/P leaders, but their
property did not have potable water. The church venerated their
sacrifice for their children’s daily work of carrying water from a
generous neighbor’s property, as though this constituted suffering
for Christianity itself. In a recent report
about the Naugler Family, their family also relied upon a
neighbor for drinkable water which they obtained without their
blessing.
~
Cynthia Kunsman
The
view of Quiverfull from my vantage
August
2015
