For someone who is an outsider to this kind of ideology – a mainstream or liberal Christian, an atheist or agnostic, anyone from a non-Abrahamic faith – this book will be a point of curiosity, interest, and possibly anger. For someone who grew up with it, it will be profound.

If you’re not interested in reading about my past and my personal emotional reaction to the book, go to the next section.

I came from this background – sort of. My family was conservative, my parents homeschooled my siblings and I, we had modesty rules and a purity obsession and the expectation that my sisters and I would marry (specifically, marry men), have children, and be stay-at-home mothers and homemakers. But we were also allowed to wear shorts and tank tops, expected to go to college, and told that we would probably have to work outside the house before we had children because of the economy. It was in college that I bought into the extreme beliefs that Quiverfull explores, spending a solid month forcing myself to accept that I had to forget my career ambitions and content myself with raising children.

I normally wouldn’t talk so much about myself, but this background is important to understand my reaction to Quiverfull. Because I don’t believe this anymore. I am no longer a patriarchy-believing Christian. And reading this book was a strange experience for me.

Quiverfull was an in-depth, unemotional look at this culture from the perspective of an outsider. There was no passion and no condemnation, just anthropological curiosity. Which made it strange. On one hand, it was an engaging read about a fascinating subculture and while reading, I had nothing but unemotional curiosity. But it stuck with me.

I have a lot of pain that stems from being raised in this culture, and this book brought some of it back. (I actually had to take a break from writing this review to process some feelings about it.) But more than anything, it made me miss the community. Sure, Quiverfull spent a lot of time on community gone wrong, women attacked and ostracized for refusing to assist in their own subjugation. But it also brought back memories of a community of like-minded people, who all believed the same things and at least acted like they cared about one another. Though I am no longer Christian and do not wish to go back to it, it made me miss when I had a “church family” that seemed like they cared about me.

If you’re skipping my personal story, read from here on.

There’s a lot in Quiverfull. It covers a lot of different topics, from church discipline to the outbreeding-the-competition mindset to individual experiences of people who have left and interviews with people who haven’t. There are some very powerful stories, such as a woman who was not only excommunicated but harassed, attacked, and sabotaged for years by her church for daring to divorce her abusive husband. There are histories of how influential figures in the Quiverfull movement came to power. And there are also stories of women who seem perfectly content and believe in this ideology wholeheartedly.

Overall, though, this book is a look at the Quiverfull ideology through examples. These people believe that their brand of Christianity is the only true religion. They believe that they are in a literal war with the forces of Satan, that feminism and abortion are tools Satan is using to turn America away from God and their way to win is demographically, by outbreeding the secular people. (Their ideology’s name comes from the metaphor that children are like arrows in a quiver for fighting the spiritual war.) They believe that a woman must always be under the power of (in some interpretations, owned by) a man, whether that’s her father or her husband. They believe that the sole purpose of every woman’s life is to be a mother and homemaker.

Quiverfull tries its best to be neutral and not condemn these beliefs, but anyone who isn’t entrenched in it will find a lot to condemn.

This is a very informative and in-depth book. If you’re looking for a quick overview or something light, Wikipedia might be your better bet. Quiverfull is engaging, yes, and you won’t get bored reading it, but you really need to have a lot of curiosity or a desire to know all the details to be interested (or have left that ideology and want an unemotional look at it).

Quiverfull is an excellent book, but you have to be in a specific audience to read it. If you’re interested in religions in general, want to know more about fundamentalist Christianity, or want an uncritical, unpassionate, and/or super in-depth look at Christian fundamentalism, this is your book. If not, you’ll probably be very bored.