Arranged marriages for HomeSchoolers

[Chris]

This frightens me. But I'm not surprised. http://www.patheos.com/blogs/progressiv ... schoolers/

Does it occur to these people that there will be some gay fetuses in those quivers? And some kids who refuse to "accept Jesus as Saviour"? I know they think they're raising an "army for Christ".

[William Thornton]

I'm a former homeschooler but out of touch personally with current stuff. I do know that you can look to the hs move,ent and find some fringe, extremist views and practices. I thought the article was a bit of a hit piece but raises important issues. Not a practice I endorse, but If there are marriages that are arranged that violate state laws, then let's see evidence. The article offered none.

[Dave Roberts]

This is definitely on the fringe, but it is out there in the fear culture that doesn't believe young people can be trusted to marry or to get busy producing children soon enough. My problem here is that all Christians get painted with this extremist brush in the media.

[Sandy]

This is a fringe, even among homeschool families. And I don't think Quiverfull has much of a following, either. Patheos has a whole core of authors who dig this stuff out.

I don't agree with either their alleged "Biblical" premise (what do they do with I Corinthians 7:25-26 which is set in the same context as other verses they cite?) nor with the practice. However, most states allow underage marriage with parental consent. Unless they are marrying off an underage child to a legal adult, there's probably nothing legally that could be done about it.

I think there are some false impressions out there regarding "homeschoolers." Not all homeschool families are "fundamentalist" or even "evangelical conservatives." About half of them, depending on whose survey you look at, are not church-related at all. Their numbers in any given area are pretty proportional to the quality of the academics in the public school system close to them, or to the social atmosphere at the local public school. Even among the Christians who homeschool, there's a fairly high percentage of "mainline" Protestants who home educate their kids. In our area, the largest homeschool association is connected to the largest UMC church in the county seat, along with an ELCA congregation and a Disciples of Christ congregation. The other association is connected to two independent, former ABC-USA congregations. So they are hard to characterize or stereotype.

[Haruo]

I hope they are prepared to find second wives for their boys. We might never have had Jesus if Jacob had been stuck with just Leah...

[Tim Bonney]

In our area a major portion of the homeschoolers are connected to fundamentalism. Not all by any means. But it seems like the most vocal homeschoolers here are the ones with those views so they get the most attention.

[Sandy]

[KeithE]

Obviously one should not paint the whole homeschool or fundamentalist movements with this same brush.

But when one is a fundamentalist, these sorts of practices can result. Apparently these guys focus on selected verses (Jeremiah 29: 6; Judges 21: 7; Ezra 9:12; Nehemiah 10: 30 or portions thereof) to justify their strange practices. I guess they augment Gen 2:24 to say “A man shall be told to leave his father and his mother and cling to the newly breasted teenage girl (13-20) that was chosen and bought by his father; and they should become one flesh and do so quickly”.

[Ed Pettibone]

[Tim Bonney]

As said above, the "quiver full" theology is extremely problematic. Like Ed I certainly don't believe in predestination in the Calvinist sense of the word.

I do agree with Chris though that these people aren't thinking of that fact that once children are born into the world they'll make their own choices and will have their own personalities that may not fit the controls they hope to utilize to keep their children thinking like they do.

I'm not against homeschooling. But I see it as a problem when the purpose it to put blinders on their children in the hopes their kids won't realize that it isn't 1950 anymore.

Over-sheltering children can actually make them less able to cope with ideas that are different from their own or their family's.

[Chris]

[James]

I followed the link to the critical web site and followed their link to the conference web site. The message there said the site was shut down, because critics were misquoting the site. The home page summarized their main points. One of the points was that marriages would be arranged early, but none would take place before the legal age of marriage (as determined by state law).