Why Are Cultists Obsessed with Underwear?

Fundies in No Undies. What's up with that?

I have a series of videos called “Ordinary Parenting Things My Gothard Fundie Mentors Said I Could Skip to Have a Quiverful.”

The series title refers to:

Ordinary Parenting Things: practices, costs, and assumptions about childbearing and rearing that modern parents can expect to participate in to raise a healthy thriving child into adulthood.

My Gothard Fundie Mentors: a group of older women in my church when I was a young bride who followed Bill Gothard’s Institute of Basic Life Principles, a Christian Fundamentalist program promising a Biblical lifestyle. These women took me under their wing and mentored me Titus 2-style. “Let the older women train the younger women to love their husbands and their children, to live wisely and be pure, to work in their homes, to do good, and to be submissive to their husbands. Then they will not bring shame on the word of God.”

Said I Could Skip: the fundamentalist women pursuing the Biblical lifestyle found that if they skipped these modern, “ordinary” parenting things, they had more time and focus on the “things of God,” namely to be always sexually available to their husbands, always open to having as many children as possible, and always outside of the world’s system of accountability.

To Have a Quiverfull: this word also refers to a Bible verse, Psalm 127: 4-5. “Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are sons born in one's youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them. They will not be put to shame when they contend with their enemies in the gate.” Christian Fundamentalism Bill-Gothard-style (also Rushdooney, MacArthur, Doug Wilson, and others) believes in Dominionism—that Christians will take over the country and the world through population dominion, which will give them the ruling power and usher in the second coming of Christ. The kids are arrows, objectified as numbers and future perpetuators of the evangelical patriarchy.

The list is somewhere around fifty. One of the items was Pants. My mentors schooled me on modesty, which was crooked and mind-bending enough when they started with the warning my toddler would develop sexual fantasies for me if I continued wearing jeans.

But one of them quipped at the end a line about panties. Specifically, not wearing them.

The others concurred and giggled.

They were letting me in on a wives’ “secret,” the kind that was as open as their wombs.