The honor of oppression

Perhaps it is my degree in religious studies.

Perhaps it is my innate curiosity about the inner workings of other people's minds.

I am bewitched by stories of a good hard core extremist cult. I am fascinated by the FLDS, smitten with Satmar, dazzled by Opus Dei, and generally enraptured by various evangelist Christian sects. In which lies my new favorite sociological possession, the Quiverfull movement.

The Quiverfull movement refers to the part of Psalm 127 (NKJV):

Behold, children are a heritage from the Lord,
The fruit of the womb is a reward.
Like arrows in the hand of a warrior,
So are the children of one’s youth.
Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them;
They shall not be ashamed,
But shall speak with their enemies in the gate.

And so they let that Lord plan their families for them, hence the extreme sized, yet quaint and celebrated Duggar family of "18 kids and counting" on the TLC network.

One of the tenets of the quiverfull movement is that women's bodies are as living sacrifices to the Lord. Their bodies are, most conspicuously, not their own.

If the Lord has seen to give one family more than another, it is only proof of how the woman has sacrificed herself to her savior. As a member of this movement, she not only sacrifices her body to a decades long series of pregnancies breastfeedings but her time and intellect to homeschooling the children with the movement's "curriculum" and her self determination to the practice of being a helpmeet in female submissiveness. Submitting first to her god and then to her husband.

As Kathryn Joyce writes in The Nation, "Women's attempts to control their own bodies--the Lord's temple--are a seizure of divine power." Joyce has a new book out about the movement, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement which I am going to order eventually to add to my ever growing library of books on cults where women give themselves over to having multitudes of children, are essentially isolated from the greater society, tend to dress in anachronistic fashions and often completely eschew much of modern technology such as the internet, cell phones and television.

Part of my fascination with the women living in these sects is that when one hears an account from them, they often feel special and chosen. The entire culture of the sect is supposedly based on placing women on a pedestal for the submission to oppression. Their dress, especially, sets them apart from the rest of society. The burden they take on, whether of homeschooling their 10 children, of keeping the mitzvah of family purity, of being in a polygynous marriage and sharing their husband with upwards of 3 other women, is, they feel and are told, is a great honor.

I often have what some therapists call the "Heaven's Reward distortion". Sometimes I believe, when I am at my most distorted, that if I suffer now, good will come to me later (not in the afterlife, since I don't believe in one, but eventually, in this life). I live with a distorted value of asceticism, judgments of what is good and bad, not for others, but for myself.

I realize in reading the accounts of these women submitting to the "joy of suffering" that I relate more to these women who live in external manifestations of these issues, than I like. There is part of me that is envious of their situations, if only that I live with the internalization of the denial and cannot leave the cult that I have created in my own brain.