Do Religious Families Actually Have More Kids?
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(ANALYSIS) Confession time: My wife and I watch a lot of reality TV. I’ve always loved it, really. Even back to “The Osbornes” and “Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica” on MTV. When I was in college, we had “Survivor” night. It was always Thursday. We would gather around in someone’s apartment, watch the show, complain about who got eliminated, then walk to the Vespers service across campus.
Those were great memories. We don’t get a whole lot of time to watch TV by ourselves anymore with late night practices and travel schedules, but when we settle down to watch something it’s usually from Bravo. Yes, I know — I’m a very cultured human being.
One of our all time favorite subjects for reality television was a huge family who lived in Northwest Arkansas named the Duggars. Their first iteration of their show was “14 Kids and Counting.” A later iteration? “19 Kids and Counting.” Of those 19 children, 13 are currently married and there are at least 40 grandchildren so far.
It’s a family that is not without controversy. Their oldest son, Joshua, had an account on the infamous cheating website Ashley Madison. He was subsequently convicted of possessing child pornography and is currently serving a 12.5 year prison sentence for the crime.
Another Duggar child, Joseph, has also been arrested for molestation of a child under the age of 12. One of the daughters has accused their father of financial exploitation because he demanded that his adult children agree to be filmed for the television series without compensation. There’s a lot of drama there.
But what’s always in the background of any discussion about the Duggars is their religious beliefs. They were adherents to the Institute for Basic Life Principles, an extremely conservative evangelical organization.
The IBLP, founded by Bill Gothard in the 1960s, teaches a strict hierarchy of authority in the home: children submit to parents, wives submit to husbands, and everyone submits to God. Gothard’s organization discouraged dating in favor of parent-guided courtship, promoted homeschooling through its own curriculum, and placed enormous emphasis on female modesty. (Gothard himself resigned from the ministry in 2014 after dozens of women accused him of sexual harassment).
But the teaching that made the Duggars famous was the family’s embrace of what is often called the “Quiverfull“ ethos, drawn from Psalm 127 — children are arrows in the hand of a warrior, and “blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.” No birth control of any kind. Every pregnancy is a blessing from God, and family size is left entirely in His hands. That’s how you get to 19 kids.
And that’s the image that pops into most American minds when they see a family with a whole bunch of children at the grocery store or piling out of a fifteen-passenger van in the church parking lot. They assume that mom and dad are deeply devout people who are having all those kids for Jesus. It’s a tidy little stereotype. The only problem is that the data doesn’t really back it up.
You can read the rest of this post on Substack.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.