BeLIEfs

The principal Quiverfull belief is that Christians should maintain a strongly welcoming attitude toward the possibility of bearing children. With minor exception, adherents reject birth control use as completely incompatible with this belief.

Most Quiverfull adherents consider children to be unqualified blessings, gifts which should be received happily from God. Quiverfull authors Rick and Jan Hess argued for this belief in their 1990 book.

"Behold, children are a gift of the Lord." (Psa. 127:3) Do we really believe that? If children are a gift from God, let’s for the sake of argument ask ourselves what other gift or blessing from God we would reject. Money? Would we reject great wealth if God gave it? Not likely! How about good health? Many would say that a man’s health is his most treasured possession. But children? Even children given by God? "That’s different!" some will plead! All right, is it different? God states right here in no-nonsense language that children are gifts. Do we believe His Word to be true?

Quiverfull authors such as Pride, Provan, and Hess extend this idea to mean that if one child is a blessing, then each additional child is likewise a blessing and not something to be viewed as economically burdensome or unaffordable. When a couple seeks to control family size via birth control they are thus "rejecting God's blessings" he might otherwise give, and possibly breaking his commandment to "be fruitful and multiply".

Charles D. Provan's 1989 The Bible and Birth Control is credited as strengthening the theological justification for the Quiverfull movement.

Accordingly, Quiverfull theology opposes the general acceptance among Protestant Christians of deliberately limiting family size or spacing children through birth control. For example, Mary Pride argued, "God commanded that sex be at least potentially fruitful (that is, not deliberately unfruitful).... All forms of sex that shy away from maritial fruitfulness are perverted."

Adherents believe that God himself controls via Providence how many and how often children are conceived and born, pointing to Bible verses that describe God acting to "open and close the womb" (see Genesis 20:18, 29:31, 30:22; 1 Samuel 1:5-6; Isaiah 66:9).

Hess and Hess state that couples "just need to trust God to provide them with the perfect number of children for their situation."

Rejection of birth control by some Quiverfull adherents is based upon the belief that the Genesis creation and post-Noahic flood Bible passages to "be fruitful and multiply" (see Genesis 1:22; 9:7) are un-rescinded Biblical commandments. For example, Charles D. Provan argues,

"Be fruitful and multiply" ... is a command of God, indeed the first command to a married couple. Birth control obviously involves disobedience to this command, for birth control attempts to prevent being fruitful and multiplying. Therefore birth control is wrong, because it involves disobedience to the Word of God. Nowhere is this command done away with in the entire Bible; therefore it still remains valid for us today.

Quiverfull advocates such as Hess and Hess, Nancy Leigh DeMoss, and Rachel Giove Scott, believe that the Devil deceives Christian couples into using birth control so that children God otherwise willed to create are prevented from being born.

A Quiverfull adherent quoted in 1991 in the Calgary Herald made the statement: "Children are made in God's image, and the enemy hates that image, so the more of them he can prevent from being born, the more he likes it."