Opinion Top Three
I was raised as Christian pronatalist. The movement is white supremacist.
(RNS) — Yesterday's Quiverfull movement has been rebranded as today's pronatalist movement, and they're both rooted in the same white Christian patriarchal fears.
Author Tia Levings with her family during her trad wife years. (Photo courtesy of Tia Levings)
(RNS) — The woman in the front pew caught my attention. Her pink calico dress looked straight from the set of Little House on the Prairie. She was pregnant and holding a baby in her arms. Four other children stood next to her, end-capped by the father.
At 14, I was immediately fascinated by their cheerful courage to live a countercultural life in our church of working moms and the standard 2.5 kids. I loved Little House. I wanted to be a Christian wife and mother, and I decided then and there to be just like her. Five years later, I’d get my chance. Mentored by the calico-dressed trad wife, I would become pregnant nine times in 10 years, with five live births and four living children. I believed our lifestyle was nurturing and wholesome—devoted to God—and that when we suffered, we were aligned with Christ.
My mentor was among the first adherents of Bill Gothard’s Institute of Basic Life Principles (IBLP) at our Southern Baptist megachurch. Bill Gothard, now 91 and currently in the news again due to his recent heart attack and subsequent coma, never married or had children. But he and the Quiverfull movement he promoted had a lot to say about families, ultimately spearheading a multi-million-dollar organization that spread Christian fundamentalism across America through his stadium events, homeschool curriculum, and training academies.
Gothard often preached on the holy virtues of motherhood and procreation, teaching a patriarchal hierarchy known as the Umbrella of Authority (or Umbrella of Protection): husbands make all decisions, women submit, children obey. The hidden math was all-around us, along with sermons on the dangers of the Great Replacement—when immigrants and people of color would outpopulate whites, creating instability. White men must lead and protect; white women must provide as many godly children as possible. Our country’s salvation depended on it.
An illustration of the umbrella of authority. (Courtesy image)
The ideology manifests in every part of practical household management, from gender roles and Bible study to nutrition. Young people were simply to trust God and have babies. Refusing to do so reflected weak faith.
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When it came to contraception, persuasion looked like the following: Psalm 127: 4-5, “Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one’s youth. Happy is the man who has his quiver full of them.”
In short order, concerns such as maternal health, affordability, desire, mental capacity, climate impact, or maturity were swept away. Taught to obey, we did, living the realities of high-control family life with unlimited babies behind closed doors.
I escaped patriarchal domestic violence in 2007. In 2026, Gothard is old and disgraced, having resigned from leadership in 2014 following allegations of sexual abuse. But I hear echoes on repeat now.
At the 2026 CPAC conference, activist Isabel Brown urged women to “have more kids than they can afford, before they think they’re ready,” a call echoed by Erika Kirk at the TP USA conference. I shuddered to hear it. I doubt most 20-year-olds today understand the history, dangers, or context of this message.
Yesterday’s Quiverfull movement has been rebranded as today’s pronatalist movement. Pronatalists these days are not always faith-based. Silicon Valley has its own version of pronatalism, although it’s not lost on me how many tech leaders are from South Africa and their legacy of apartheid. But from what I’ve seen firsthand, I have no doubt that the fear driving much of today’s Christian pronatalism –the fear of white evangelicals becoming a minority — is the same fear that ran through so many churches in this country from the Civil War to the civil rights movement and the pews I’ve sat in.
From 1984-2000, I attended First Baptist Church in Jacksonville, Florida, which at the time was one of the largest Southern Baptist megachurches in the country. Established in 1838 on a local plantation as the Bethel Baptist Church, the congregation split along racial lines after the Civil War. White member went on to found what became First Baptist, roughly two decades after the Southern Baptist Convention formed to protect churches that supported enslavement.
The racism often came sugar-coated—Southern Christians were raised to be polite. It could seem coincidental that there were no Black leaders, and that all the trad wives and quiverfull homeschooling families were white. And yet, there were breakthrough moments where the warnings felt explicit.
Even in my 1980’s childhood, segregation still was openly supported from the pulpit. Our pastors often referred to our “sister churches” and said that “separate but equal” was kind. “Everyone is just happier this way,” I remember them saying.
The inner-city was predominantly Black. But our 11 blocks in the center were intended to be an island of wealthy, white hope. We even constructed an operational lighthouse that cast powerful beams of light into neighborhood windows until it was court-ordered to shut down. We proudly studied our church history every year and saw ourselves as a beacon. Our tagline was “sharing the love of Christ from the heart of downtown Jacksonville.”
Forced busing was a hotly contested issue in Jacksonville, Florida, and I sat through many sermons warning us about the dangers of mixed society and crime. The pastors and visiting theologians warned us of a time when whites would no longer be the majority. America would achieve racial balance between whites and non-whites by the mid 2020s, which would induce chronic instability and poverty. Other than godlessness, no other explanation was offered for this dire economic downturn, and no other solution was offered other than rapid procreation and conservative voting.
In retrospect, growing up in an affluent, white Southern evangelical church is what shaped me to accept the trad wife, quiverfull lifestyle. Now, in 2026, for the first time, white births are no longer the majority in the U.S., a study found.
While racial disparities and culture wars still top our headlines, the news can feel disconnected from the Christian trad wife and pro-natalist movements. But they’re not disconnected; they’re nesting, co-dependent ideologies, each needing the other to thrive. And they’re not new: what we’re experiencing today is less a regression and more of a rebrand, capitalizing on the same racist fears.
TP USA’s promotion of Head of Household voting is directly related to Gothard’s Umbrella of Authority, where the husband makes every decision for the home, including birth rate and vote. And, many of the same people pushing women toward bigger families also tend to support the SAVE Act, which would disenfrancise married women voters, the gutting of the Voting Rights Act and tough anti-immigration policies. Grow the white Christian patriarchal families, and shrink the electorate that can check them–I don’t think any of that is coincidental.
Tia Levings. (Photo by Hannah Joy Photography)
What I learned as a fundamentalist housewife in Christian patriarchy is that changing laws takes a long time; changing hearts and minds in a culture war is faster. The calico dresses may be gone. But the fear remains, and many white Christians are fighting against it by growing large white Christian families they aren’t equipped to raise or afford.
Tia Levings is the author of the New York Times bestseller, A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy, and I Belong to Me: A Survivor’s Guide to Recovery and Hope after Religious Trauma.
When It Reigns: White Supremacy in America
Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
Let me make one thing clear at the outset. I do not hate Americans who identify as white people. To do so would in part be a form of self-hate and socially backwards. I am not a self-hater, preferring to look at social dynamics rooted in economics and politics. On that note, I do think that self-hate is connected with white supremacy, the practice and theory of human inferiority and superiority based on the policies and politics linked to one’s skin color. There’s a lot to unpack here, without question.
Political dissatisfaction and economic dislocation created the conditions for President Trump’s two terms in the Oval Office. As he openly supported white supremacist groups riding the coattails of his MAGA agenda, this movement in part gains strength from scapegoating brown and black people in a bid to normalize skin color animus. Division of the working class, the majority, is the name of this game. Divide and conquer via disunity.
Take the white supremacist group Patriot Front, masked and riding the metro in Washington DC, recently. This is a public show of white supremacy politics, continuing a toxic trend. A month shy of nine years ago a Unite the Right rally occurred in Charlottesville, Virginia. It resembled a KKK gathering of yesteryear. The Old Order of white segregationists never ended, borne of a late-stage capitalist growth industry: income and wealth inequality.
In the slow-motion unraveling of American society underway since the end of the Vietnam War (1973-1975) and the postwar economy (1945-1975), there have been dramatic changes of income and wealth distribution, thus in household dynamics. The family wage that enabled males to financially support females to stay home and rear children via unpaid caring labor disappeared.
At the time, and I came of age in the mid-1970s, such changes were beginning, though dramatically under-covered in classrooms and newsrooms. Women flooded into the labor market to compensate for the decline in male wage-income as corporate America outsourced manufacturing abroad. Automation and computerization propelled corporate globalization. As Professor Richard Wolff notes, American workers received loans not raises. The financialization of the economy spread.
Corporations waged class war, successfully, against labor unions. The working day lengthened. Real wages stagnated. Nonunion employment rose. Rent inflation and tuition for higher education grew. The incarcerated population, disproportionately black and brown, mushroomed.
The waning of stay-at-home adult female caregivers entering the labor force to help pay bills meant that children lost nurturing adult guidance. Male and female children alike suffered. For reasons, some more clear than others, male children disproportionately experienced the negative impacts of fathers and other male adults reeling from the loss of status as family breadwinners. Self-hate, blaming one’s self for losing family-wage employment, flows from the corporate restructuring of the U.S. working class.
The attainment of a middle-class lifestyle became more not less difficult. The bipartisan political perpetrators of the disappearing American Dream, building on the backlash against the Black Power and Civil Rights movements of the 1950s and 1960s, demonized African Americans as the villains, oppressing and threatening whites. A more recent version is the right wing demonization of migrants, with President Trump showing the way. His characterization of migrants as criminals and miscreants generally was and is intentional. The weakness of his anti-migrant messaging is evident in the rhetorical change to demonizing anarchists and communists as threats to his supporters. Red-baiting characterizes the narrative of Roy Cohn, the president’s mentor.
Apparently, migrants are to blame for the cost-of-living crisis. The 1,000 U.S. billionaires grabbing bigger slices of the national economic pie are blameless. Migrants are visible and politically powerless. Billionaires are politically powerful and mostly invisible.
According to a RAND Corporation report of March 5, 2026: “Since 1975, $79 trillion in wealth has been redistributed from the bottom 90% to the top 1% in the United States. This represents the cumulative cost of lost wages to workers below the 90th percentile due to rising inequality from 1975 through 2023. Average real income in the top 1% grewby 321.6 percent from 1975 through 2018, nearly three times the 118 percent growth of real per capita GDP over the same period.”
Working class division is the foundation of racial polarization. President Nixon’s racial politics of attacking minorities as threats to white Americans paved the way for California Governor Reagan’s election to the White House in 1980, riding his targeting of black, female welfare recipients as scapegoats for white voters’ economic struggles. Black, female welfare queens driving Cadillacs threatened the household budgets of whites, according to this falsification.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party of FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s shifted to a GOP-lite political alternative under President Clinton six decades later. A Democratic president and former Arkansas governor spearheaded this anti-New Deal agenda, which President Obama perpetuated. Misnamed free-trade pacts like the 1994 NAFTA putting American factory workers into job competition with lower paid labor in the Global South took a toll stateside. So did President Obama bailing out the Big Banks that caused the Great Recession instead of working class families evicted from their homes. In brief, U.S. economic restructuring has nurtured growth in the party of non voters, and its evil twin, white supremacy, the political scapegoating of nonwhites.
The politics of resignation, non voting, are connected with the resurgence of white supremacy. Not that voting is a measure of working-class strength. As historian Howard Zinn writes, what working people do outside the voting booth is what matters. The demobilization of the working class, politically speaking, is the soil that nurtures a false ideology of white supremacy.
The ruling class is chuckling all the way to the bank. Elon Musk, a trillionaire, at least on paper, is leading this pack of capitalists. Time for a working-class movement politics?
