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description= Discussing spiritual abuse in Evangelical Christianity;
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d they are the christian virtues that our christian founders imbued in the words of our constitution the christian foundation of our nation without those virtues and inalienable rights america ceases to be a christian nation thus breaking the trust that our constitution once provided yesterday the figurehead and commander in chief of our christian nation formally denounced these virtues it was the art of deal breaking but we did collectively elect a moral deal breaking reality tv star i m sure most of his christian supporters cheered believing that his change in military policy after months of disregard for the rule of law brought our nation closer to being a christian nation based on studies of behavior and the history of similar events in other nations my heart aches because i know that 2 3rds of maga christians may never fully grasp the gravity of what just happened tweet posted by cynthia kunsman labels maga politics monday september 29 2025 a different kind of epitaph for voddie baucham i hope voddie baucham found whatever it was he was looking for and that his family finds comfort a former follower friend of his told me that he was basically a child inside who was desperately afraid of ending up alone powerless and desperately poor again like he was as a child in la summary of posts concerning voddie baucham i prayed often for his healing and i usually think of him when i read quotes and content from alice miller the child psychologist who opposed the black pedagogy of child abuse he read like a page out of her textbook that described wounded children who grew up to become intolerant of the behavior of children or outright abusers themselves he worked so desperately to be acknowledged seen powerful and important his wife has lupus pretty severely and i hope that she remains as well as she can but at the same time i feel like one of the biggest meanest most manipulative bullies of this genre is now gone the people whom he cruelly intimidated and manipulated lording his education and position over them in intimidation and what sometimes sounded like anger those people can feel free today they don t ever have to worry about running into him somewhere and they can know that he can no longer hurt them again in any way many people love him but they don t know what it s like to be someone he decided to use tearing them down as an example so he could feel powerful right and so much better than them he tried with me but never succeeded thanks to the grace of god and the power of truth how ironic that his death falls so swiftly behind kirk s i saw a comment in an announcement about baucham s passing that asked will they put me on a government watch list because they had nothing good to say about him he lied about me online and personally insulted me and then started writing to me lying to me and about me following that up with more lies as time went on he d told at least a dozen different people that he was suing me which was another lie he claimed that i lied about him which always went poorly for him he published a miserable fable about me in a book that others encouraged me to sue him over instead i said that he wasn t that important because he wasn t however when i read his emails the hair on the back of my neck stood up i didn t get any backlash from him when i wrote about him on no longer quivering in 2020 choosing to acknowledge him as a fellow believer with some aberrant beliefs and someone whose perspective and epistemology differed from mine i called for unity through love while still acknowledging the theological and philosophical differences between us but i affirmed him as a fellow believer i don t believe he ever responded if he ever took notice i will not see voddie in vahalla but i hope to be happily seated with him in unity at the marriage supper of the lamb one day soon after he slammed me on his blog i went there to see if i could find the post to quote it but he d deleted it he deleted all of them before it ever occurred to me that he would do such a thing instead i found a sweet picture of him holding a baby announcing that he d just adopted a little girl i found it commendable and rejoiced other cohorts of his would only adopt boys i m glad that he dared to do that back then and that s the picture of him that i ve continued to hold of him in my mind s eye he expressed great love in that photo with a tiny baby and i always prayed that god would multiply it it was lovely and seemed genuine our lives are but a vapor and in that sense i hope that i will soon see voddie as people tell of glimpses of heaven loved ones come to meet new arrivals when we make our way to that undiscovered country should i be found faithful i hope that voddie is among those who gather to greet me tweet posted by cynthia kunsman labels prophet priest king of the home monday november 6 2023 a critical review of quiverfull families a book by emily hunter mcgowin quiverfull families the quiverfull movement and evangelical theology of the family offers a favorably biased assessment of the evangelical protestant quiverfull movement including interviews with a minister apolo gist and two year longitudinal interviews with three mothers who discuss their lifestyle the now anglican author a former evangelical and graduate of baylor s truett seminary offers us her doctoral dissertation developed during her study at a catholic university i found the book s title misleading as it suggests a much broader focus on families instead of its tapered focus primarily limited to the self reported data of three subjects mothers who exemplified the quiverfull ideal during the study the author s compassionate ethnographic glimpse into the lives of these courageous and transparently candid mothers shines as the most valuable element of the book in keeping with the adage of considering the source i read the book from the perspective of a former christian reconstructionist who abandoned that position but remained an evangelical i spent a decade of my childbearing years as a wife in the quiverfull movement qf including four years as a church member who followed bill gothard s teachings eventually i became a vocal critic from both christian counter cult and thought reform perspectives and my presuppositional views about the nature of qf theology differ significantly from the author s own while i was overwhelmed with the aftermath of qf in my own life and the lives of my loved ones who suffered so much please note that the author s introduction to and experience with the sect differed profoundly from mine for the reader who seeks only to understand the mindset of qf mothers in good standing the book offers a glimpse into the concerns and beliefs of those mothers however the former follower who experienced emotional psychological abuse domestic violence a broken marriage estrangement from family ostracizing within their qf community shunning for leaving qf expulsion educational neglect as a child gender abuse spiritual abuse or pronouncement of their eternal damnation will find the book s assessment of qf difficult for example i found the descriptions of titus 2 encouragement problematic perhaps the author s limited pool of model citizen subjects lacked the painful experience of stress created by the milieu management practice though qf trains followers to speak of it in glowing terms only as one of its sacred systems underachieving members outliers within qf and former members know well the policing and chatter of women peers concerning their compliance and punishment by elder enforcers who demand submission qf adapted the well practiced high demand mentoring system from prior waves of shepherding discipleship in spiritually abusive evangelicalism limitations of ethnography or the nature of the subject my criticisms of the book may concern the limitations of ethnography for this particular religious group given its convoluted hidden curriculum and broad demographic across different denominations i was disappointed that the author did not include the battery of questions prepared for subjects in her dissertation which prevents the reader from understanding more about the research and the veracity of its focus while much material in the book discusses the benefits of ethnography in a theoretical sense which seemed worthy of a separate book i found it necessary to consult many other sources to ensure that i was fairly evaluating the work rather than the research modality as someone experienced in academic research i found these elements to pose an unfair burden to the general reader mcgowin defines qf families as those who practice the intersection of three ideals homeschooling gender hierarchy and pronatalism these converging interests are not the distinctions that define the ideology as expressly qf evangelicals have historically and ubiquitously embraced the values of family pronatalism also a necessity for pioneering agrarian culture the home education of children the domesticity movement along with those denominations that long pursued patriarchy christian reconstruction became the catalyst that caused the much smaller subculture of qf to coalesce i assert that the control mechanisms of manipulation and systems of control set qf followers apart from other evangelicals as illustrated by personal testimony and decades of conflict which the book does not mention e g ecclesial courts lawsuits exclusivism etc the author notes her aversion to criticism of the qf belief system and thus rejects consideration of many critical assessments of qf in her disseration qualifying different varieties of critics by assigning all to a single strawman category of misinformed people who denigrate qf adherents to the contrary research from these neglected sources shows that people join high demand ideological sects like qf not because they are deficient in some way but because they are ethical responsible discerning and intelligent while the ethnographic method may have prevented extensive exploration of critical sources i m disappointed that the author deems the disciplines that study high demand spiritually abusive or aberrant christian organizations illegitimate excluding their mention the study ignores this literature from christian counter cult apologetics a protestant christian discipline that evaluates theological orthodoxy praxy of bible based religion cult education organizations and decades of peer reviewed research by men like paul martin and larry pile both of whom were former members of the great commission a bible based sect that differed little from and shared visionaries with qf references to a matter of basic principles the watershed biblical critique of gothard s program by don veinot and ron henzel now in its second edition and decades of their midwest christian outreach critiques of gothard and vision forum are also notably absent from the book if the ethnographic theological study design precluded citation of this material a qualifying statement could have clarified that for the reader critical engagement i share far more common ideas about qf with the author than disparagements which she elucidates in her personal summary she uses the term family blueprint to describe qf s formulaic cookie cutter preference for uniformity i also found the eclipse of the church section very astute and well reasoned the section noting the pitfalls of privatization of the family leading to isolation points out how families most vulnerable members may become predisposed to domestic violence i m grateful for the inclusion of these insights as they provide balance which does speak to the subject of families the author concludes by stating despite their lofty goals however the quiverfull movement produces an idealization of the family that leads to social isolation the eclipse of the church and in some caes the cover up of sin while i agree this statement is a weak assessment failing to do proper justice to those who have suffered devastating harm while practicing the lifestyle while the map is not the territory in any such survey i believe the reader merited a more thorough well defined map concerning decades of practice and belief that go unmarked in the book and one from a broader theological evangelical perspective i cannot get past the author s statement near the end of the work which declares that qf s religious practice exposes important weaknesses in evangelical theology my subject position leads me to contexualize quiverfull within evangelicalism and offer observations on its continuity and discontinuity with what i understand to be american evangelical norms though from a different set of evangelical roots within a smaller subset of evangelicalism than the author i arrive at a different conclusion while perhaps intentionally vague because of the limitations of ethnography i cannot determine if the author views qf as a fair exemplar or perhaps a microcosm of all evangelicalism i don t know whether she s aware that informed evangelical counter cult apologists reject qf as a pagan belief system even if she personally rejects them as unhelpful such a strong statement deserves a robustly defended thesis from a theological perspective but the author offers what i found to be more personal generalizations about the culture to vet the statement i wish the author had been more specific about her meaning and the rationales though perhaps the generalizations were meant to be charitable may the varieties of our religious experiences concerning the quiverfull movement continue in ongoing discussion and through expanding research as our one god and one mediator saves us and brings us together into the knowledge of the truth as fellow christians may we all find the hope and healing we need may we also endeavor to find that greater understanding and compassion for one another with god s help 1 tim 2 1 7 tweet posted by cynthia kunsman monday october 30 2023 on ghosts and other undue influences some evangelical christians talk more than others about evil influences in the spiritual realm and different denominations believe different things about evil spirits some believe that people and even christians can actually be possessed while others think that demons can only create oppression and opposition that impede an individual christian s efforts there are many different ideas about how to resist and overcome all of that my husband who grew up in a liturgical church would add some balance to some of these ideas by saying that the spirit of man and human nature usually give us plenty of cause and a means of explaining most problems we often don t need any supernatural creatures to serve as our scapegoats job said that man was made for trouble as my clock approaches midnight on october 30 th i found myself thinking about the many kinds of would be ghosts we face in life i like the following description that henrik ibsen offers in his 1881 play better than most ideas a quote from ghos...
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