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Constance Cumbey

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Constance Elizabeth Cumbey (born 29 February 1944, nee Constance Elizabeth Butler) is a lawyer and Christian author who, after converting to the Baptist faith, first exposed what she saw as the dangers of the New Age movement. She currently resides in Lake Orion, Michigan.

Life and work

Cumbey was born to a family of mixed European ancestry in Fort Wayne, Indiana, United States, and raised as a Seventh-day Adventist.

She graduated from the Detroit College of Law Michigan State University College of Law in 1975 with a Juris Doctor degree. Prior to her graduation she served as a legislative analyst to speaker of the Michigan House of Representatives, William A. Ryan from 1969 to 1970. In 1971 she was selected as one of 24 National Urban Fellows finalists in a national campaign to find promising urban administration talent.

Cumbey began law school in 1972. While attending law school, she was employed as a consultant to the Governmental Efficiency Subcommittee of the Appropriations Committee for the Michigan State Senate. She was the first Charter appointee as Executive Assistant to the mayor of the City of Highland Park, Michigan, from 1970 to 1972.

Cumbey has been a practicing attorney since 1975, has served as a national officer for the National Association of Women Lawyers, and was before writing her books, an active a member of the American Bar Association. Since returning to the active practice of law in the 1980s, she is an active member of the Macomb and Wayne County Bar associations as well as the mandatory State Bar of Michigan affiliation. She was appointed in 2003 to serve a 3 year term by the president of the State Bar of Michigan, Tom Ryan, to plan future State Bar meetings. She has continuously served by appointment on the Public Advisory Committee of the State Bar of Michigan since 1978. They rate judicial candidates for Wayne County and statewide for the Michigan Court of Appeals and Michigan Supreme Court.

From 1992 to 2004, she hosted a popular Detroit radio program known as Law Talk. She does frequent national and international radio interviews, i.e., Israel National Radio, on various topics.

Writing careers

Cumbey began a secondary career as a researcher and writer in 1981, to write about the New Age movement. She gave up her law practice for a while to dedicate herself to writing and public speaking to this end. Her books have been translated into German, Norwegian, and Dutch.

She created controversy with her belief that there was a conspiracy within the broad New Age movement concerning the antichrist. She has globally circulated a CD Rom with the title Javier Solana: Mystery Man of the New World Order and is publicly making links between biblical prophecies, in which she firmly believes, concerning the antichrist, the 10 member Western European Union, Solana and a November 22, 1995 earthquake in Eilat, Israel.

Cumbey's work is presently in the process of archival by the University of Michigan's Bentley Historical Library. She has been listed in Who's Who in America and Who's Who in the World since the 1980s.

Critical assessments

Cumbey's book The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow was one of the earliest writings from a fundamentalist Christian perspective concerning New Age spirituality. Her rejection of New Age spirituality was grounded in her understanding of Christian teachings about the role of Christ as saviour, and also of Bible prophecy. Her argument centered on an interpretation of Bible prophecies about the end-times, and presented through the prism of conspiracy theory. She maintained that the Aquarian Conspiracy that New Age writer Marilyn Ferguson referred to was part of a systematic scheme to bring about an apostate one world religion. Her argument also consisted of allegations of New Age influences on various Christian authors within the evangelical tradition.

Some evangelical apologists in the Christian countercult movement such as Elliot Miller (Christian Research Institute), Eric Pement (Cornerstone Community, Chicago), various staff writers at the Spiritual Counterfeits Project (Berkeley, California) and Douglas Groothuis, challenged Cumbey's theory and interpretation of New Age. While these people shared Cumbey's rejection of the New Age as untenable and incompatible with Christian belief, they argued that her interpretation of a plot to produce the Antichrist was implausible. Groothuis and Miller drew attention to weaknesses in her interpretation of New Age literature, and pointed to problems inherent within her conspiracy model. They also faulted her allegations about various evangelical writers.

Cumbey revisited her arguments in light of these criticisms in her second book A Planned Deception. She insisted that her position was generally justified, and raised her own criticisms and allegations about various countercult ministries. These allegations led to further exchanges between herself and her critics. Her allegations were also examined and rejected by Bob and Gretchen Passantino in their book Witch Hunt.

Christian scholars of new religious movements, such as Irving Hexham, John Drane and John Saliba, have rejected Cumbey's position on the New Age movement as being implausible and inaccurate.

Published work

  • The Hidden Dangers of the Rainbow: The New Age Movement and our Coming Age of Barbarism (1983)
  • A Planned Deception: The Staging of a New Age Messiah (1986)

References

Assessments

  • John Drane, What is the New Age Still Saying to the Church? (London: Marshall Pickering, 1999).
  • Irving Hexham, "The Evangelical Response to the New Age," in Perspectives on the New Age, James R. Lewis and J. Gordon Melton, eds., (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), pp. 152-163.
  • Elliot Miller, A Crash Course on the New Age Movement (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1989).
  • Bob and Gretchen Passantino, Witch Hunt (Nashville: Thomas Nelson, 1990).
  • John A. Saliba, Christian Responses to the New Age Movement: A Critical Assessment (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1999).
  • SCP Staff, "The Final Threat: Cosmic Conspiracy and end times speculation," in The New Age Rage, Karen Hoyt and J. Isamu Yamamoto, eds., (Old Tappan: Revell, 1987), pp. 185-201.
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