Christian Divorce Rate?

This last week was one in which the reminders that the divorce rate among Christians is the same or greater than non-Christians came more frequently and from an extra number of sources. I've wondered about this many times, but only today am I moved to post about it. The divorce rate is supposed to be about 50% for both Christians and non-Christians. But I have a question. Where is this divorce rate happening among Christians?

It's not happening very often in the churches that I have attended. Here's a quick figgerin': I've been attending church for over 15 years. The sizes of my churches added together are at least a thousand people, maybe two, counting people that have come and gone. I've known four divorces. One was between a Christian and an non-Christian with the divorce as a result of the non-Christian deserting the marriage. The other three fall into a category of divorce for cause - causes that fall into the "accepted" divorce debate amongst conservative evangelicals. Not a single divorce for "we just don't get along" or "God is leading us into marrying somebody else" or things like that.

I've attended many weddings over the years, and the divorce rate is zero there. I've also known church-attending Christians in other areas of life, like work and sports activities for kids, etc. I can't think of any there, either.

Contrast this with extended family and other non-church attending people or non-Christians I've known. Divorces everywhere. So, the rates are the same? Maybe they are, but I haven't experienced it, or maybe the way I figure statistics is skewed. Just curious. Any thoughts?

Another View Of Divorce And Remarriage (1)

Perhaps no other topic, or very few anyway, garner as much heated debate, flamethrowing, false accusation and overall mistreatment of fellow believers (if they are even viewed as such) as the topic of what the bible says about divorce and remarriage. I've written on this before, here and here.

Thanks to my friend Peter, who supplied me a link to something a bit different, I read a site by Dr. David Instone-Brewer on this topic. Dr. Instone-Brewer has written two books and a number of articles on this issue. How it differs from other views I've heard is that there is an allowance under God's law for divorce in cases of adultery, abuse or abandonment, stemming from Exodus 21:10-11 and from extra biblical accounts of what the "any cause" statement really meant in Matthew 19 when the Pharisees confronted Jesus.

Quoting from his Christianity Today article:

Putting all this together gives us a clear and consistent set of rules for divorce and remarriage. Divorce is only allowed for a limited number of grounds that are found in the Old Testament and affirmed in the New Testament:

• Adultery (in Deuteronomy 24:1, affirmed by Jesus in Matthew 19)
• Emotional and physical neglect (in Exodus 21:10-11, affirmed by Paul in 1 Corinthians 7)
• Abandonment and abuse (included in neglect, as affirmed in 1 Corinthians 7)

Lots of interesting stuff on this site and plenty more in the links to his articles. There's apparently a critique from John Piper out there that I'll have to read, too. I'll be writing more about this soon.

Divorce: The Unpardonable Sin (2)

Imagine your very best friend gets engaged, and he comes to you and says, "I would be honored if you were the best man in my wedding." Now imagine this same best friend has said to you that if you ever got married, not only would he not be your best man, he would not even attend your wedding. Your ex-wife left you before you even became a Christian, and for you to ever get married again would be to commit adultery. Attending a wedding that is an adulterous act would be to give a blessing to adultery, something a Christian cannot do in good conscience. Yes, this very thing happened to me. Imagine being told that even though you're divorced, you're still a married man, and as a married man, you should avoid any close fellowship with women, and that your area of ministry will be solely to men. Imagine that women in the church are told that you are a married man and to shy away.

Now imagine attending another church that believes that there are only a few scenarios where a divorced person is allowed to remarry, but you're one of them! Not only do they believe you are free to remarry, they take "It is not good for man to be alone" to an extreme and tell you to get out there and find a wife. Imagine the confusion in being held to mutually exclusive, extreme imperatives by two groups of people (still having friends from the old group) claiming to believe the same bible.

Now imagine thinking that you've come to a place of believing that you're okay to remarry, and that you're going to a church that believes the same. You find interest in a young woman, and everything is fine until her parents, who were raised in the first line of thinking, find out your ex-wife left you once upon a time, leaving you divorced. Your relationship is immediately shunned. Actually, this one had a happy ending. No, I didn't marry the girl, but the gravity of the situation over time encouraged her family in examining and re-thinking their position. They sought out wisdom from others, studied it for themselves, and changed their minds.

I've also served as a deacon in a church. This required much agonizing before allowing the elders to lay hands on me. Our church sees situations where divorced people are able to remarry, but I had to have discussions with the pastor about potentially explosive situations caused by members who didn't believe in remarriage in my case or in allowing divorced people to serve. I know of a church that split over the discovery of a divorce in the past of one of its leaders.

Fun stuff, marriage, divorce and remarriage is.

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Divorce - The Unpardonable Sin (1)

Okay, I'm about to drop a bombshell on the blogging world. I'm divorced. Or, maybe I should say, I was divorced at one time. Yep. Now that I've lost a percentage of my readers just on this bit of information alone...

I look back and laugh at it now, but there was a time early on in my Christian life that my pre-conversion divorce was a huge blot on my character. I was a divorcee. Okay, well actually, since the people I hung around with back then claimed that there's no such thing as divorce, that I'm still married to that other woman in God's eyes, now that I'm married again, I now have two wives, and am an adulterer, and probably not a true Christian because of it.

There's a line of thinking in some strains of fundamentalist Christianity, a foul smelling doctrine of marriage, divorce and remarriage that makes anybody who has ever been divorced - even if they were the unwilling innocent (and willing reconciling) party in a marriage that was broken by the other person - an equivalent of the disease leprosy. Toss every imaginable sock of sin into the washing machine with the bleach of Jesus' blood, and out come the socks of murder, lying, theft, abuse, drug addiction, harlotry, whoredom, profanity, all pure white. Yet the socks of divorce and being divorced remain soiled. For many in the church, divorce is treated quite literally as the unpardonable sin and a dead end roadblock to any advance whatsoever in the Christian life. Divorcees, no matter how innocent, have the scarlet letter "D" tattooed branded on them, and are banned from remarriage, fellowship, even simple conversation with members of the opposite gender.


I'll take a few posts in a short series to discuss how bad theology and a misunderstanding of biblical teaching can really screw up people's lives. First hand experience, here.

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