Babies as Bombs: Quiverful Dominionism is Not New
What the WaPo got wrong about Project 2025's Manhattan Project
The Washington Post published an article on how the group behind Project 2025 wants a “Manhattan Project” to make more babies. From their caption on Instagram:
The conservative group behind the Project 2025 governing playbook for President Donald Trump’s second term is set to propose sweeping revisions to U.S. economic policy meant to encourage married heterosexual couples to have more children.
That idea is part of a five-page executive summary of a forthcoming Heritage Foundation position paper titled “We Must Save the American Family.” It calls for a “Manhattan Project to restore the nuclear family” and induce couples to have more babies. A copy of the summary was obtained by The Washington Post.
The Heritage Foundation’s paper rejects what it calls “extraordinary technical solutions,” including subsidies for egg freezing, in vitro fertilization, surrogacy and genetic screening, deriding them as a form of pronatalism that “envisions a world of artificial wombs and custom labor-created babies on demand.”
Instead, it suggests that “the answer to the problem of loneliness and demographic decline must begin with marriage,” and blames “free love, pornography, careerism, the Pill, abortion, same-sex relations, and no-fault divorce” as culprits behind the decline of American marriages.
This, of course, is frighteningly accurate, and more people need to realize it and understand the far-reaching implications. This project is targeted and strategic; it is designed to generate more of a certain kind of baby born to a certain demographic. This goal is behind a number of policy changes that might seem, on the surface, to be unrelated. The sum total restructures our society according to the ideologies held by The Heritage Foundation.
However, the Republican support of the end goal is not new.
Republicans didn’t wade.
It’s not recent.
It’s not their insertion into the pronatalist movement (which isn’t inherently religious and racist. For example, Elon Musk is a secular pronatalist. He’s not a Christian Fundamentalist.)
What The Heritage Foundation espouses, and what Republicans accepted through their co-sign of Christian Nationalism, is dominionist theology, which teaches that God endows Christians with a mandate to rule the earth. They will do this through population dominance, known as “having a quiverful” of children.
The word “quiverful” comes from the Bible. It equates children to weapons to be used in war; to the modern American Christian Patriarchy, this means in a culture war against Western civilization.
Psalm 127:4-5:
"As arrows are in the hand of a mighty man; so are children of the youth."
"Happy is the man that hath his quiver full of them: they shall not be ashamed, but they shall speak with the enemies in the gate."
Basically, if you’re going to war, you want as many arrows as possible. If your war requires population, you want as many babies as possible.
The Quiverful Movement predates pronatalism. The second (ever) “Natal Con” was held this year and welcomed about 200 people. The Quiverful movement began in the late 1970s, is international in reach and footprint, and claims tens of thousands of adherents.
I think it was maybe 12 or 13 years old the first time I heard a sermon laying out that, if we didn't have to have our tax dollars go to Head Start or childcare programs for single parents, that we would be able to direct that money back to heteronormative white families.
They didn't say it quite that way out loud. They said, “Good Christian families like ours.”
This occurred in the 1980s at a Southern Baptist megachurch with thousands of members and a pastor who also led the Southern Baptist Convention. Evangelical pastors were scrambling back then, especially in the South, where the courts were forcing them to desegregate their schools. The push for private Christian academies was a recurring theme in Sunday sermons.
I wrote about the impact I felt as a sixth grader in the opening chapters of A Well-Trained Wife: My Escape from Christian Patriarchy. Not much has changed, except for scale, because, back then, their pastoral reach was limited to their congregants. They needed a critical mass in government to enact real change, so the push shifted to politics, including single-issue voting, appointing Christian judges, and starting at the bottom of the elected office ladder with a strategy to work their way up to the White House.
The plan to access tax dollars and public policy to advance Christian dominionism is such a long game that to suggest it’s new, recent, or “wading” into a secular movement is dangerously inaccurate. We can’t afford such ignorance of the adversaries to civilization and democracy. It’s past the eleventh hour to “know our enemy.”
Maybe it’s thrift store information. Somebody in the educated liberal masses, perhaps many individuals, may have encountered new information. And so they think this is new because in their isolated, (fortunately, blessedly) educated bubble, not only is it ludicrous, but it’s also weird and novel. The desire to inform is sincere; the level of research was skin deep. The intrusion into northeastern environments may feel new. I’m not knocking education, which is essential. I’m knocking the arrogance that suggests when something is “new to us” that it’s therefore “new,” when actually, it’s so established that it’s vintage and antique. It’s become a legacy.
This is the dangerous consequence of thinking that conservative Christian idealism was a cult on the fringe, and not part of real society. While the quiverful families were often seen as weirdos in their churches, or revered as super-devout, they spanned multiple denominations, from Independent Baptists to Doug Wilson’s flavor of Presbyterian to “trad” Catholics.
When they weren’t being fringe and alternative like the Duggars and the families highlighted in Shiny Happy People on Amazon Prime, they flew under the radar of sweet innocence. It’s tempting to diminish the quiverful and pronatalists both as “Oh, they're just a nice family. They don't want to take over the whole country. They don't want everybody to live the way they live. They can’t impact democracy or public policy.” But these are not just “nice Christian families.” They are fighting a war to end America as we know it.
Pretty babies and propaganda imagery that removes any sign of trouble, struggle, or reality is the entire point of the trad wife movement online. It’s to sell young parents on how attractive their ideas are so they’ll buy in.
They have preached this out in the open every single Sunday. It is interwoven into the fabric of their families for generations. In many ways, the view on natalism has become part of the cultural divide. Evangelicals are so accustomed to the equivocation of having babies, and having babies for God to have dominion, that they think criticism of trad patriarchy is an “attack on the American family.” Instead of supporting IVF, diverse families, and policies that actually result in more babies, they voted for Project 2025, without realizing the high-control patriarchy that comes with it.
Frankly, it’s irresponsible at this point, with this much information available to us, science, data, and testimony, to get this wrong. Suggesting it’s new, recent, nice, innocent, fringe, isolated to a cult, or novel is to ignore decades of outcomes and survivor-generated evidence, as well as deeply funded strategy. Our policies are changing now.
The same ideology is behind the vaccine bans (which will kill off part of the population) and the education “reforms” (which will end public, secular education free from religion,) as well as moves to end access to contraception, divorce, education, and employment for girls, and a diverse, evolving society.
How do we know for sure? Because The Heritage Foundation and those like them already live this way. The way the patriarchy rules their homes is how they want to rule the country. When the patriarchy takes over the country, as they are trying to do, we need to take a close read at what it’s like to live in their homes. And probably, what they say in church on Sunday, too.
You’re absolutely spot on here and I’m grateful to hear words put to something I have felt but haven’t been able to articulate.
I am the oldest of nine in a (relatively small) quiverfull family. It is horrifying but not surprising to hear so much of the rhetoric I grew up with be now part of the mainstream conversation. This was the plan all along, which you know.
Thank you for your work!
Oh, Tia. This is so achingly true. It frustrates me to no end as a journalist and a pastor. Thank you for raising this truth.