As we close out the month of October, I want to close Spooky Month out with what evangelical leaders are saying about the end of an evangelical marriage. For many years, both evangelicals’ troubled marriages and their divorce rates have been the subjects of observation from onlookers. For years now, evangelical leaders have tried to improve their flocks’ marriages—or at least reduce the number of divorces among them. Let’s see how their advice has changed over the years, and then explore what they’re suggesting more recently.
(This post appeared on Patreon on 11/1/2024. Its audio cast is there too, and available to the public!)
During the Silent Years
The main posts in the Unequally Yoked Club series took place in the first couple of years of Roll to Disbelieve. For mixed-faith couples, those years were a whole other world. About the only thing that’s stayed the same is the hysterical screeching evangelical leaders do about mixed-faith marriages as a concept.
For the most part, evangelicals spent the years between then and 2020ish talking about how to “divorce-proof” a marriage. This Focus on the Family post from 2018 is a great representative of that advice. Their writer intoned at readers:
It’s not easy, but with God’s help, it is possible to avoid becoming yet another divorce statistic. [. . .]
God designed marriage to last a lifetime. He cares deeply about your relationship with your spouse and wants to see your marriage succeed. Commit your marriage to Him and then start to divorce-proof your marriage by making these seven strategies part of your regular conversations with your spouse.
(Egad, this sounds absolutely excruciating. I cannot even imagine the damage my Evil Ex would have done our relationship if he’d followed their “seven strategies” and held “regular conversations” on the topics suggested here. It’s like evangelicals don’t realize that their main gung-ho members are control-hungry narcissists.)
“It’s not easy,” they declare. You know why it isn’t? Because evangelicals use rules that don’t work.
Don’t miss the implication, either, that the couples who divorced just didn’t seek Yahweh’s help—and that if they divorce, they’re distinctly disappointing him. That’s all intentional. The message must always be perfect in a broken system like evangelicalism. Nobody is ever allowed to question or criticize the message, so if a couple divorces then obviously the problem is not evangelical rules about marriage. The problem is how poorly the couple obeyed those rules.
What evangelical leaders teach about divorce-proofing a marriage
Needless to say, all of the “divorce-proofing” instructions run along the same lines as we see in that 2018 Focus on the Family post. Their suggestions all center around Jesusing somehow:
- “Reaffirm your commitment.” Couples do this by being shown Bible verses and “remov[ing] the word divorce from your vocabulary.” By simply deciding not to divorce, they’re reaffirming their commitment!
- “Invest in your spouse.” Actual good advice, though its explanation of that step clearly assumes that the couples don’t know much at all about each other and never have nice, quiet conversations with each other about anything they’re doing. They must be told to do this.
- “Invest in your marriage.” Exhortations to Jesus at each other super-hard gets mixed with advice about sharing hobbies and having lots of sex.
- “Practice healthy conflict.” As if evangelicals could ever do this. Dysfunctional authoritarians do not deal well with any level of criticism, no matter how gently it’s phrased.
- “Surround yourselves with couples who have strong marriages.” But these other couples must also be very Jesusy, so good luck finding them. I only knew of a couple of strong marriages the entire time I was Pentecostal. They can all pretend successfully while at church, but once you get to know them you figure out they fight behind the scenes all the time.
- “Get help.” They also suggest couples join support groups for “instruction, encouragement, and accountability.” But they have no way of knowing if the leaders of these support groups walk the walk of their talk. All too many evangelical support groups and therapy practices are run by people who buy into the marketing hype about Jesusing as a substitute for real-world interpersonal skills. If the people seeking their advice make that same mistake, then they won’t be able to fix their relationships. (See also: As the night the day.)
- There is no #7. PSYCHE!
Almost none of that advice will work. The people who need advice most won’t understand how to pick real-world strategies out of the Jesusy-sounding rhetoric. And those who don’t need it are already following real-world strategies.
Pointless rules that don’t work but sound super-Jesusy vs real-world rules that actually do work
When the rubber of the party line hits the road of reality, the entire world sees just how ineffective evangelicalism is as a social system, relationship guide, and path to personal improvement. Their rules are like the umbrella in that old joke about hunting bears:
After marrying a young beautiful girl, a ninety year old man told his
doctor that they were expecting a child.“Let me tell you a story,” said the doctor. “There was an absent minded
fellow who went hunting one day, and instead of taking a gun, brought
his umbrella. Before he realized his error, a bear charged him. He
aimed his umbrella at the bear, shot and killed him on the spot.”“That`s impossible!”, the geezer exclaimed. “Somebody else must have
shot that bear!”“Exactly!”, replied the doctor.
In evangelicalism, their tribe’s official marriage rules are pointless and often completely counterproductive. To get along with another human being for decades, couples need actual real-world guidelines that work, not umbrellas that don’t.
Indeed, I’ve run across a number of ex-Christian men who felt very uncomfortable with those official marriage rules and forged their own with their wives—which they followed in private, often while pretending to follow the party line in public! I can only assume that any successful marriage within evangelicalism proper is doing the same exact thing.
(See also: Yet another raw-foodist vegan turns out to be a hypocrite.)
But it wouldn’t be evangelicalism without judgementalism and fearmongering, even (especially?) about marriage
In the wake of the pandemic, I began seeing a different message coming from evangelical leaders. Instead of offering Jesus-flavored pablum and super-Jesusy-sounding rules that don’t work, they began drilling down on threats of various kinds for any evangelicals daring to end their marriages. It’s almost like the people making these threats are quite aware that none of their marriage rules work, so they might as well just hop straight across to shaking their finger at total strangers. And, of course, arguing among themselves about the acceptable reasons for seeking divorce.
Early in the pandemic, evangelicals began relitigating the circumstances under which an evangelical—and by that term they clearly mean an evangelical woman, as you’ll see—may be graciously allowed to seek divorce. As just one example of what I mean, check out a 2019 archive of this exact question vs its 2024 version. The old hall passes involved abuse, abandonment, and adultery. But quicker wits among them realized that ackshully, abuse isn’t mentioned at all as an allowable reason.
Luckily, some sharp cookie among them realized they could categorize abuse as what one site calls a “treasonous breach of covenant vows.” I know of no biblical path leading a literalist/inerrantist here. The two Bible citations offered, Malachi 2 and Exodus 21, do not mention marital abuse at all. Worse, Exodus 21 mostly offers rules for the treatment of slaves and how to handle physical fights within the community.
In 2022, onetime Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) leader Russell Moore seemed to agree overall with the idea of spousal abuse being a breach of the marriage contract. Oh, wait. I mean marriage covenant:
Along with most evangelical Protestants, I believe that there are some narrow instances in which the sin of a spouse dissolves the marriage covenant and that divorce is warranted in those cases.
In that post, Moore lumps abuse in with abandonment. Alas for him, evangelicals consider marriage a covenant and not a contract. The official party line in evangelicalism is that covenants are not two-sided mutual agreements. In other words, even if one party doesn’t do what they promised, the other is still obligated to do what their side promised.
But at least evangelicals are trying, I suppose.
Relitigating abuse as a reason for ending a marriage the Jesus-approved way
Evangelicals themselves don’t tend to remember much that they themselves say. That’s how we could end up with a 2020 post from Laura Baxter detailing her church-assisted divorce from a physically violent and abusive husband, then a 2021 post from the same woman titled “Take It from Me: Don’t Get a Divorce.” Interestingly, the 2021 post begins with her creating a narrative of legions of evangelical women seeking divorces for distinctly non-Jesus-approved reasons.
At the end of the second post, she only touches upon her own divorce to carve out a Jesus-approved reason for it:
Of course, your marriage may still be torn asunder, despite your best efforts. I had to face the sad fact that restoration of my first marriage was not possible. Nonetheless, we know God’s grace is sufficient in our weakness (2 Cor. 12:9). Even through the Valley of the Shadow of Death (an apt description of divorce), God promises to walk with us (Ps. 23:4). But for now, while your marriage still lives, there is hope (Eccl. 9:4).
If she hadn’t set a link to “my first marriage” in her post, we’d never have known about it. Nor would we have known her divorce had nothing to do with the narrative she wove at the beginning of the 2021 post.
Americans already don’t tend to enjoy thinking about how a situation can go pear-shaped. But evangelicals ramp up that avoidance to 11.
Abuse in evangelical marriage wars with the party line about Jesusing as a solution to marital problems
Worse, evangelicals rarely talk much about the forms of abuse that seem to run rampant in evangelical marriage.
Nor does Baxter advise what to do if one’s religious leaders don’t accept abuse as a Jesus-approved divorce reason. That’s certainly what one powerful SBC leader, Paige Patterson, thought! Even after losing his cushy SBC seminary leadership job, he still has plenty of (male) sympathizers. I got told that, too, after my Evil Ex Biff threatened me with physical violence. And that happens only if the church in question doesn’t simply cover up the abuse and ignore it.
Instead, Baxter insists that churches that “preach the gospel” will be good allies for women in abusive marriages. Alas, this is flat wrong. Once again, we see that fundamental mistake: Good behavior must follow proper Jesusing, as the night the day. So yes, plenty of gospel-preaching evangelical ministers cover up abuse. All too often, they counsel abuse victims not to end their marriages without trying extra-dextra hard to Jesus their way to happiness.
Meanwhile, the wife of Tom Buck, an abusive pastor and Old Guard lackey in the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), wrote a tell-all about their marriage in 2022. She insisted that the emotional and verbal abuse she suffered weren’t grounds for a Jesus-approved divorce. In fact, her book described how she Jesused her way to marital joy at last. I just wonder how long that honeymoon period lasted.
(Weird bonus crossover with Tom Buck: Jordan Hall! At the time, he was a pastor and huge name in the right-wing Christ-o-sphere. He warned the anonymous person who exposed Buck’s abuse that he was “coming for” them. He told them they would “be exposed, humiliated, and prosecuted.” This exchange occurred just weeks before his own dramatic downfall due to drug abuse, domestic violence, lying about a trans woman, and even alleged embezzlement from his now-former church! Every accusation, etc.)
Overall, the party line wins these squabbles
While these abuse stories circulated and gained more attention, evangelical leaders and sites tried hard to push the narrative of the non-Jesus-approved divorce as a narrative. In September 2023, Joe Carter at The Gospel Coalition offered “5 Bad Reasons to Divorce.” He specifically grants hall passes to the Big 3 reasons, of course. However, his post focuses entirely on the narrative of the selfish, emotionally-driven evangelical woman who just feels unsatisfied with her marriage and ends it for an unapproved reason.
The next year, in July 2024, Jim Newheiser at the same site complained that the term “abuse” was too expansively-defined nowadays. Because of this expansiveness, he tells us:
[. . .] the pendulum has swung in our day from protecting marriage at the expense of not protecting victims of abuse to protecting alleged victims at the expense of not adequately protecting marriage. As a result, some unhappy spouses give up on their marriages too easily and divorce without biblical grounds.
Oh noes! He can’t commit overreach to the extent he wishes! Oh, won’t someone think of the control-hungry evangelical leader who wants to command other people’s lives?
Evangelical leaders ache to hold power over others’ most intimate decisions. That’s why they’re so concerned about the reasons for divorce. Every level of power within an evangelical group needs to know how far they can go with their overreach and judgementalism.
They’re right to worry. Going too far, as Paige Patterson did, may incur the wrath of the flocks even years later.
Reality-Land, where the evangelical narrative breaks down and the rules fade into meaninglessness
Of course, while all of this infighting takes place, we still see evangelicals warbling and chirping about how to have a happy, fulfilling, Jesus-flavored marriage. These days, their songs sound almost quaint. They rarely if ever recognize that all of their rules—including the ones about marriage—can be subverted and destroyed by just one bad-faith actor. Instead, they assume both partners act only in good faith. They assume partners both want the same things.
If only that were true. Because evangelicals don’t understand how bad-faith behavior mangles their entire ideology, they can’t offer any way to evaluate someone’s level of good faith. There’s no street-legal way to detect bad faith, only real-world methods that the tribe wouldn’t consider adequately Jesusy anyway.
When this problem combines with their assumptions about Jesusing as a path to good behavior, only tragedy can result. Perhaps that’s why a nearly-universal marriage teaching within evangelicalism involves how incredibly difficult it is.
Maybe it wouldn’t be so nearly-impossible if evangelical spouses were allowed to own and accept reality instead of the Jesus-frosted rules their leaders teach them instead. Maybe then, evangelicals wouldn’t see their Jesusy illusions crashing so often against the real-world bad-faith behavior of their mates.
Evangelicals will never accept that marriage shouldn’t be run along ‘biblical’ lines (Speedrun 100%, difficulty: IMPOSSIBLE)
It really says something that even when an evangelical pushes against the tribe’s marriage rules, they still insist that “none of this is biblical!” And they blame that lack of biblical-ness for the sheer impossible difficulty of marriage.
Meanwhile, the only really difficult relationships I’ve ever had were ones in which my indoctrinated illusions clashed with reality. Once I conducted my relationships using reality as my guide and lodestone, they stopped being difficult. Weird, right?
But that’s not something evangelicals can do. They aren’t even allowed to notice that the tribe’s marriage rules are at best irrelevant and at worst abuse-enabling.
That’s why the so-called “scandal of the evangelical conscience” won’t be reducing in numbers any time soon. For a number of reasons, evangelicals simply won’t change their teachings. Sure, their system fails far more often than it succeeds. But it’s like built-in job security!
NEXT UP: A new development in the FBI’s ongoing investigation into the SBC’s sex abuse crisis—and some assertions about motives that I could not resist examining. See you soon!
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