Kathryn Joyce’s smart new book, Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement, chronicles patriarchial fundies who express their contempt for women in exquisitely calibrated doublespeak. Joyce writes about groups that espouse “wifely submission,” encourage virtuous dress and behavior, discourage women from entering the paid labor force, frown on female friendship, and believe women should have as many children as possible for God and Republicans: to get more conservatives in Washington, writes one believer, the movement needs more “arrows for war.” For each family, a quiverfull.

Others promote high birth rates as a solution for “demographic winter,” which sounds a little like reverse ethnic cleansing: if the right kind of  (radical Christian nutjob) people have more babies, the right kind of population growth will follow. And the scary part is, they’re doing it: Joyce describes families of 12 and 15 in which under-educated teenage girls (home- schooled in curricula no serial mom has time to oversee) are drudges in training to serve men who can barely support them, in substandard conditions. “Ladies, instead of fighting this,” says Doug Phillips, founder of Visionforum, a huge proponent of these values, “..realize you’re not losing anything…..And if you say ‘I love this, I love this,’ God will change the world before your very eyes.”

Christian wife abusers are easily vindicated through circular reasoning. According to James Dobson, founder of a group called Focus on the Family, some uppity wives goad their husbands into violence because they aren’t properly obedient or sexually subservient; others deliberately provoke men in order to gain a “moral advantage” in the relationship, an excuse for divorce, or attention in church. Who knew the old blame-the-victim mentality inflicted on rape survivors could be repurposed for abused wives?

Obedience, even to deadbeats who don’t deserve it, is justified as service to Jesus. Thus, the most disturbing passage in this book—a quote by a woman who left this lifestyle and later realized that her abuse by her own father was “the perfect setup” for religious submission: “…it felt so right because I was doing what I’d always done, but now I was being rewarded and loved for it instead of punished.”