Vyckie Garrison

Biography

Garrison was born in Yuba City, California on December 14, 1965. At 16, in the early 1980s, she married a high school boyfriend and moved to Carson City, Nevada subsisting on Job Corps positions. Garrison began listening to a Christian radio station and attending a Pentecostal church. Garrison’s marriage ended, and she became pregnant with her oldest daughter during a short-lived affair. She moved to Iowa to be near her mother and met Warren Bennett at a church picnic. She was married to Bennett for 18 years, and had six children with him. Garrison followed a new pastor’s counsel to homeschool her growing family, which eventually led her to the Quiverfull movement.

She and her husband wrote and published a newspaper for families that adhered to the Quiverfull philosophy, and wrote articles for various publications for Christian homeschoolers. Her husband, Warren, was blinded in a work accident and, she says, had trouble keeping a job. She says she founded their paper in part to create a sales position for him, to maintain the illusion of his heading their family. She includes an example of her writing for the Quiverfull movement in the blog entry "Vyckie's Tour de Crap: Quiverfull and the Life of the Mother."

The Bennetts were named Nebraska’s “family of the year” in 2003 by the Nebraska Family Council, a nonprofit that works "to uphold biblical principles in society."

Her third child was born by caesarean section. Her doctor at the time advised her that her life would be endangered by future pregnancies, so her husband had a vasectomy. Shortly after the vasectomy, she was introduced, via her Christian homeschooling friends, to Mary Pride's "The Way Home: Beyond Feminism and Back to Reality" and "God's Plans for Families" by Nancy Campbell. She shared the anti-birth control, pro-natalist views she'd gleaned from those books with Warren, who subsequently underwent a vasectomy reversal.

Her seventh child, Wesley, was born by emergency caesarean section, at the Faith Regional Hospital. She had planned to give birth at home, without attendance by a medical professional, but her uterus partially ruptured during labour, almost killing her. Her doctor advised her that her life would be in danger if she continued to conceive, but her friends in the Quiverfull movement said otherwise: “I was told that a woman shouldn’t shrink back from supposed dangers and that we should honour God with our bodies,” she says. “Jesus died for us, we should be willing to die for him.” She became pregnant twice more, suffering two miscarriages.

Garrison asserts that her then-husband beat and emotionally bullied their children. “I started seeing my kids completely break down. I recognised how abusive my husband had become as a result of this patriarchal teaching, which gave sanction to some of his worst tendencies. I had to step in and protect my kids because I didn’t want to see them getting hurt.” She says that one of her children attempted suicide. Garrison began corresponding with an intellectual atheist uncle whose gentle questions helped her acknowledge her mounting crisis of faith. When, during a brief separation, Garrison’s husband sent her a list of the ways in which she had been disobedient, she filed for divorce and won custody of all seven children.

She now calls herself an atheist. In 2015 American Atheists named her the 2014 Atheist of the Year.

Activism

She co-founded the blog No Longer Quivering, an online resource for women leaving Quiverfull or similar movements, in 2009. In her first blog, on March 12, 2009, she writes "to those godly, dedicated Christians" who know her from her many articles and testimonies that appeared in various Christian homeschool publications, to explain why she has left the movement.

On Easter Sunday, 2014, and again in April 2015 she addressed the American Atheists conference about her experiences.