More than ten years ago, the Christ-o-sphere was rocked to its foundations over divorce. As it turned out, evangelical couples divorced each other more than those from any other religion. Worse still (from their standpoint), atheists divorced at a lower rate than any other religious group!
In the intervening years between then and now, evangelicals haven’t actually improved their situation much. In fact, more and more revelations keep emerging about the horrifying state of evangelical marriages. These revelations certainly make their divorce rate look way less surprising!
Recently, I began to wonder how evangelical leaders are responding to all of these factors. Yes, they certainly want to lower the tribe’s divorce rate. However, they don’t want to change their marriage rules. It’s an interesting set of completely contradictory demands. And those always draw me in like pollen does a honeybee. If you want to see the utmost in pants-on-head, crazymaking religious thinking, this right here is the exact best collision course to observe.
So today, we’ll look at how evangelicals adopted their current marriage rules—and how that went for them until the late 2010s.
(This post first went live on 10/18/2024 on Patreon. Its audio ‘cast lives there too – and available to anybody!)
SITREP: Both marriage and divorce rates are declining in general
Today’s topic bloomed from some stuff I dug up on the website of the US Census. For non-Americans, the US runs a census of everyone living here every ten years (so the next one will be in 2030). Its questionnaire doesn’t ask about religion anymore, but it does ask a number of questions about household makeup, ages, occupations, and the like.
In 2020, the Census site revealed that overall, marriage and divorce rates had declined in America. The rate of decline varied by state to state, but overall that held true in most states. Interestingly, Texas and a number of evangelical-dominated Midwestern states had higher marriage rates than the national average of 16.3 new marriages per 1000 women aged 15+.
Also interestingly, Texas and a number of other states known for their religious pandering had higher-than-average divorce rates, too: Utah, Oklahoma, Alabama, Georgia, etc. Meanwhile, California and those godless heathens up in the Northeast had lower divorce rates than the national average of 7.6 new divorces per 1000 women aged 15+.
An update in 2024 (of data up to 2022) indicated that these trends were continuing. In this update, we learned that the marriage rate rose slightly to 16.7, and the divorce rate declined to 7.1. As well, the states that had higher-than-average rates of both marriage and divorce hadn’t changed much.
Gosh, it’s almost like being in a super-religious authoritarian environment has nothing whatsoever to do with making marriage last a lifetime!
But nobody who’s had an eye on the Christ-o-sphere will be overly surprised by this news. After all, evangelicals have known about their astronomical divorce rates since at least the late 2000s!
Uh oh, Spaghettios: When evangelical divorce rates began to tank
It’s a pity that most of the websites talking about this trend are gone now. Gone, gone, gone, like tears in the rain lost media that exists only in the minds of those who saw it. Or suborned and warped, in the case of one large, sprawling site that once discussed the more culty and abusive sides of Christianity. So some of this is a little trust me bro, but here’s the general gist of it:
In the 1990s, evangelicals fused with fundamentalists. For many reasons, this was a epoch-level fusion for evangelicals. It married scrupulous, scholarly evangelicals to the ultra-authoritarian, literalist, Low Christianity end of fundamentalism. And just like many mixed-breed dog owners discover, the fusion brought out the very worst traits in each group.
In this case, fundagelicalism was supposed to produce top-tier Christian scholars who were also literalists/inerrantists, with all the authoritarianism that hermeneutic always carries with it. What the world got instead were willfully-ignorant Christians who went all in on the dumbest possible aspects of literalism (such as Young-Earth Creationism).
As you might suspect, the fusion was also way more one-way than most normies might assume. Generally speaking, it was evangelicals fusing to fundamentalism rather than the other way around. Of course, you can still find some unfused fundamentalist churches out there. Kim Davis’ weird-ass church is one, and any snake-handling church counts as well. It’s extremely rare, though, to find unfused evangelical churches. They’re almost all willfully-ignorant literalists nowadays.
Before that fusion, my evangelical friends looked at me and my fellow fundamentalists like we were crazy for our beliefs and practices. They especially expressed alarm about complementarianism. So yes, long ago they clearly perceived the doctrine’s potential for abuse. Many evangelicals tried to reason with me about the sheer misogyny of fundamentalism, of its abuse-enabling legalism. (BTW, that last word is Christianese for rules that the judging Christian thinks are a little extreme. The word’s opposite, lukewarm, was the salvo I fired back at them.)
Ironically, perhaps, after the fusion fundamentalists softened some of their rules—while evangelicals went hog wild making new ones that were far more extreme and far-reaching than anything pre-fusion fundamentalist leaders had ever dared to impose.
(One big, recent example: The SBC’s recent outlawing of IVF. The move provoked so much criticism from their angry, mostly-aging-in-place flocks that the denomination quickly walked back most of it.)
But one doctrine above all others would prove utterly disastrous for post-fusion evangelicals.
The doctrine that was supposed to make evangelical divorce nearly nonexistent
One of the biggest changes to evangelicalism might have been their glomming onto complementarianism. This doctrine is essentially sexism-for-Jesus, forcing men and women into strict gender roles that only exist in modern TV shows and movies about the 1950s and Victorian Age. It was an early outgrowth of fundamentalist literalism, as well as the source of the concerns my pre-fusion evangelical friends had about my relationship with my Evil Ex.
Evangelical men loved complementarianism the moment they encountered it. This doctrine not only forbade women from ever becoming pastors or powerful leaders, but also ensured that husbands would always hold ultimate power over their wives, who were forced to submit to their every whim. It also imposed a strict hierarchy on both churches and families, but mostly it governed marital relationships. Here’s the main diagram of it that I saw in my own church toward the late 1980s:
That illustration was not credited correctly at the time. That’s not surprising, since fundamentalist churches often didn’t cite back then. At the time, my old tribemates were leery of ministries that didn’t completely agree with their doctrinal beliefs and stances—which mainly meant Trinitarianism, since we were Oneness. So at the time, I thought this diagram came from a person in my denomination.
Many years later, I learned that this diagram actually came from an extreme right-wing misogyny cult headed by an alleged sex abuser named Bill Gothard.
At least by the mid-1980s, pre-fusion fundamentalist churches began pushing complementarianism. Just to give you an idea of the timeframe involved here, the year after Michelle and Jim Bob Duggar tied the knot in 1984, they joined Gothard’s ministry. They did this because they thought that Gothard’s rules were the only way to raise kids who’d be obedient, safe, and Jesus-centric forever.
So by 1985 at least, the entire wretched system became a vast social experiment performed on fundamentalists who never learned that it had never been tested before. But none of them would have cared if they’d found out. After all, it sounded really Jesusy and had tons of Bible verses to back up its instructions. Fundamentalists didn’t stand a single chance of resisting its siren call. And neither did evangelicals, once they fused and adopted the literalism stance needed to successfully sell complementarianism.
As a result of their particular weaknesses and quirks, back then fundamentalists thought that complementarian rules were the only way to ensure a lifelong, happy, harmonious marriage, too. Equipped with those rules, we thought, any two fools could make a marriage work.
Oh boy.
Oh boy oh boy, were we wrong.
A divorce study in 2008 provides the first inklings that something was amiss in these teachings
In 2008, an evangelical named Donald Hughes blasted into the Christ-o-sphere headlines with his book The Divorce Reality. One Christian news site at the time wrote about his work:
Born-again Christians are just as likely to get divorced as anybody else in American society, and the vast majority of those identifying themselves as divorced and born-again actually got their divorces after converting to Christianity, according to a new book called The Divorce Reality.
“In the churches, people have a superstitious view that Christianity will keep them from divorce, but they are subject to the same problems as everyone else, and they include a lack of relationship skills,” said Donald Hughes, author of The Divorce Reality and editor of the JesusJournal.com Web site. “Just being born again is not a rabbit’s foot,” he said.
Hughes says the divorce statistics referred to in his book come from a 2001 Barna Research Poll, which indicated that 33 percent of born-again Christians end their marriages in divorce, roughly the same as the general population, and that 90 percent of those divorces happen after the conversion to Christianity.
Again, due to the vagaries of Ye Olden Internet survival, I couldn’t find this book anywhere. Similarly, Hughes’ once-busy website JesusJournal only exists now on the Wayback Machine. The entire site seems to have pooped out around 2017. As for the source of Hughes’ information, it’s likely this August 2001 Barna Group survey. (Bear in mind: Barna Group isn’t what I’d call reliable or unbiased.)
But Hughes is still spot-on in his assessment. He exposed one of the best-kept secrets in fundagelicalism:
The super-important Jesus rules that fundagelicals pushed for years and tried to impose on everyone—in AND out of their group—just don’t work as advertised.
Complementarianism benefits men at the complete expense of women. It subjugates women and treats them as lesser human beings, all while their culture’s men piously insist that Jesus totally likes this system best. Women learn they must coddle, mother, clean up after, and submit sexually to their husbands no matter what. And worst of all, women never learn to be alert for red flags before marrying because their entire culture tells them that nobody who is super-duper-Jesusy can possibly be abusive!
No wonder fundagelicals divorce like mad. Of course they would. The real surprise is that the rate is as low as it is. If fundagelicals didn’t massively side-eye divorce and divorcees, their divorce rate would only skyrocket even higher.
Around this same time, the post-fusion SBC would also fail miserably at one of their biggest evangelism pushes ever—one that the denomination’s then-president said would be a sort of referendum on their entire fusion with fundamentalism during the Conservative Resurgence. So the fusion not only didn’t make fundagelical marriages happier and lifelong-lasting, but also failed to reverse the SBC’s decline. In 2024, SBC leaders would finally admit the entire Conservative Resurgence had failed to meet its proponents’ promises.
Seriously, this fusion brought nothing good to evangelicals.
Fundagelicals go on the offensive over divorce bombshell
In response to this bombshell Donald Hughes launched, fundagelical leaders could only offer mealy-mouthed—and hilariously hamfisted—retroactive gatekeeping with a standard-issue No True Scotsman attempt: See, Hughes is all wrong. The evangelicals divorcing aren’t TRUE CHRISTIANS™, which we know because they’re getting divorced! TRUE CHRISTIANS™ don’t divorce! (And they probably don’t put sugar in their porridge, either!)
As one fundagelical leader with the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), Tom Ellis, said,
[B]orn-again Christian couples who marry … in the church after having received premarital counseling … and attend church regularly and pray daily together, that the divorce rate is approximately 1 divorce out of nearly 39,000. [source]
Even at the time, I remember people mocking fundagelicals for this response. But he wasn’t the only one offering it. So did the very popular evangelical apologetics site Got Questions. A great number of fundagelical leaders went this exact same route.
In 2011, many evangelical leaders dismissed Hughes’ assertions using the No True Scotsman fallacy. Sometimes, they retroactively redefined TRUE CHRISTIANS™ as weekly-at-least church attenders. At other times, TRUE CHRISTIANS™ used one particular quirky definition of “born-again” or whatever other goalposts fundagelicals could move. The Gospel Coalition (TGC) even got in on the action by using the fallacy in 2012.
And meanwhile, fundagelical married couples continued to divorce. One funny headline from 2013 reveals that a major Republican initiative to lower divorce rates in Oklahoma had failed miserably. Not only had this fundagleical-dominated state not slowed down their divorce rate, but in the 12 years the program had run the percentage of married-couple households shrank while the percentage of couples cohabiting or raising children alone grew.
By 2022, according to that Census site (relink), the situation had only deteriorated further. That year, Oklahoma placed 5th in a state-by-state ranking of divorce rates—worsening from 8th in the nation in 2012.
Meanwhile, other fundagelical leaders admitted the truth about their divorce rate
However, some fundagelical leaders were on board. Barna Group, of course, stood by their 2001 survey results. And a surprising supporter of Hughes’ claims came from the SBC: Al Mohler, the leader of one of the denomination’s seminaries. In 2010, he observed on his personal site:
The real scandal [“of the evangelical conscience”] is the fact that evangelical Protestants divorce at rates at least as high as the rest of the public. Needless to say, this creates a significant credibility crisis when evangelicals then rise to speak in defense of marriage.
As well, in 2010 the SBC passed a formal resolution speaking out about evangelicals’ high divorce rate. The resolution also asked SBC-lings in unhappy marriages “to seek godly assistance” to prevent divorce —and asking the flocks to try to be nicer to all the divorcees in their midst.
These fundagelicals were vindicated in 2014, when a new report came out from Baylor University (a fundagelical university) that confirmed Hughes’ findings. At the time, America’s overall divorce rate was 14.2 per thousand:
But white Conservative Protestants and Black Protestants are more likely than the average American to be divorced, with 17.2 percent and 15.7 percent of their populations being currently divorced, respectively.
Indeed, Evangelical Protestants are more likely to be divorced than Americans who claim no religion.
Thus the common conservative argument that strong religion leads to strong families does not hold up.
Also in 2014, Religion News Service ran an article about evangelicals’ high divorce rates, calling the findings “complicated.” It really wasn’t, though. Pentecostal communities had always had a high number of troubled marriages in the mix. Post-fusion evangelicals simply inherited that tendency toward drama.
Indeed, some of that article’s sources note fundagelicals’ increased risk of too-early marriage and encouragement to start having kids right away, which—combined with fundagelical men’s decreasing ability to support an entire family by themselves—certainly put more tension into fundagelical marriages. Pentecostals faced almost all of those same concerns and as far as I can tell always had. All that changed after fusion was the emphasis on single-earner families, which wasn’t really a thing when I was Pentecostal.
And then, suddenly, around 2016 fundagelicals just stopped comparing their divorce rates to those of other religious groups. This near-total silence lasted for some years, until the pandemic at least. At that point, the fundagelical world would explode with headlines about high-profile fundagelical divorces and spousal abuse.
Perhaps the deepest cut of all: Atheists’ marriage and divorce rates
I strongly suspect that one major reason fundagelical leaders largely stopped talking about their high divorce rates was that any such discussion inevitably turned toward the remarkably low divorce rates among atheists.
Obviously, atheists were generally not following evangelical rules about marriage. Their church attendance was obviously also quite low. And it was vanishingly unlikely that they’d ever Jesus at each other on a regular basis. So atheists blew fundagelicals’ No True Scotsman fallacy out of the water!
Fundagelicals weren’t in the least curious about their secret, though. To a great extent, their dishonest No True Scotsman excuse, as pathetic as it truly was, had worked on the flocks.
Over the next week or so, I’ll bring us up to the modern day regarding fundagelicals’ divorce rates and their generally unhappy marriages. To start, though, I felt it necessary to talk about where all of this dysfunction began:
With evangelicals adopting the parts of fundamentalism that served their interests and gave them permission to subjugate women—and more importantly, the ability to strong-arm evangelical women into accepting the valuation that had already brought misery to countless fundamentalist marriages.
NEXT UP: A dysfunctional authoritarian pastor tries to shut the mouth of a woman reporting his abuse. Hilarity ensues. No, I’m not being hyperbolic—it really does! Wait till you find out what this absolute shitheel tried to do. It’s amazing. And we’ll discover it together next time—and then we’ll figure out why he went this route! See you soon!
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