Welcome to Under Much Grace!
When I began blogging in 2007, I hoped to accomplish two specific and primary goals:1. Articulate necessary information about spiritual abuse to Christians who were involved with the Patriarchy/Quiverfull Movement
2. Communicate to the leaders in the movement that the beliefs and lifestyle that they encouraged were not Christian at all.
I was motivated to do so because of the many years I'd spent contributing financially to the religious and political groups that helped to establish the movement before I understood the dark underbellies of both Theonomic Christian Reconstruction and the national folk religion/ fertility cult that it birthed. While my previous attempts to address the aberrant aspects of this religious system went mostly unnoticed, when an audience of receptive listeners emerged from those who survived its wake, my husband and I decided that I should devote myself to the effort to expose its abuses.
We had unwittingly contributed to the foundations that established these aberrant and fringe aspects of Christian homeschooling and felt a compelling moral duty to communicate what we'd come to learn about the ideology as well as resources that were available to help those who had exited it. At the time of this writing, a dozen years have elapsed. Many of those ministries that served as mastheads for this patriarchy movement fell into scandals (Gothard; Phillips; Sproul, Jr; Wilson, etc.). A whole wave of new bloggers and authors have established themselves to attest to the ideology's errors in both word and deed. Moreover, more recently, the #MeToo Movement has further widened the safe place of liberty where similar abuses may be discussed – a locale within the marketplace of ideas that I hoped to foster at the outset.
As my original objectives came into fruition and as others have adopted similar objectives and works of their own, I now pursue different goals. The primary audience whom I intended to reach has also changed drastically as the discussion expanded into so many different tributary topics. As time allows, I hope to move even further away from the polemical tone of my writing in the past which I often intended as a message specifically for the ideologues in Christian patriarchy. As others find their own strong voices, I am happy to retire into the discussion of personal recovery. I've grown, healed, and changed right along with the landscape that motivated my original effort, so I hope to include aspects of my own journey as it continues.
mission/bio Jun2007
revised Sep2010; Mar2019
Cynthia Mullen Kunsman is a fifty-something nurse with more than thirty years of experience including a strong clinical teaching background. Though guided through recovery by the sound Christian instruction she received as a child which her seminary studies reinforced, she identifies as a Second-Generation Adult because of the Word of Faith influence imposed by her family. As part of her transition into a healthy faith, she and her husband sought exit counselling together after walking away from a Shepherding Discipleship group that embraced the teachings of Bill Gothard. Read more about Cindy, her background, and her journey here at ICSA.
Note: I like to use aurora borealis images as a reminder that God can bring us light and beauty in the dark of night. Many refer to the expression of St. John of the Cross to describe their spiritual abuse experience as their "dark night of the soul." On the recovery side of spiritual abuse, I find the truth that the darkness reveals to us to be inspiring and liberating, much like the miraculous beauty of the northern lights.
