Chapter 7: Breaking Up Is Hard To Do
From People's Chosen God, by Chad Hayes
Despite the abundance of marriages, the Old Testament provides relatively little guidance about divorce. It’s clear that it was allowed, and it seems that it was straight-forward and unilateral, requiring only that the husband write a certificate of divorce and present it to his wife. If another man married the woman, her divorce was final; if her original husband married her again after she had been “defiled” by another man, it would be “detestable” to the Lord.1 There is no mention of women being able to initiate this process; they had, after all, been purchased.
Priests were barred from marrying women who had been divorced.2 And divorce was not permitted if the marriage was the result of purchasing the woman from her father after raping her (more on this later),3 or if the husband falsely accused his new bride of not being a virgin on their wedding night.4
In the New Testament, Jesus establishes more restrictive rules for divorce, just as he does for adultery. He says that the Old Testament laws allowing divorce were provided as a concession due to the “hardness of your hearts.” The accounts of his teachings about divorce in Matthew, Mark, and Luke vary in subtle ways. According to Matthew and Luke, divorce itself seems to be acceptable, so long as neither party goes on to have sex with or marry someone else. Jesus’s teachings in Matthew’s account, taken together, would seemingly allow remarriage only for men who divorce an unfaithful wife. The latter part of Mark’s account seems to imply some agency on the wife’s behalf to initiate the divorce, but with the phrase “What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate,” Jesus seems to be at least strongly discouraging divorce in any case.5
Paul provides similarly confusing guidance. Relaying a message from God, he states that a wife can’t divorce her husband. But if she does, she can’t remarry. And a husband can’t divorce his wife. And then he adds his own suggestions. If a Christian man has a wife that doesn’t share his faith and she’s ok staying in the marriage, he shouldn’t divorce her. Same when the roles are reversed (gender-neutral language would have saved some characters). But if the non-believer divorces the Christian spouse, the Christian spouse is “not bound in such circumstances.” And if a woman’s husband dies, she can remarry, but only within the church.6
The contradictions in the Bible’s teachings about divorce, coupled with the unavoidable reality that marriages frequently don’t work out, have resulted in a wide spectrum of opinions within Christianity about whether divorce is permissible, and if so, in what circumstances. But in general, because of the enormous emphasis that evangelicals place on marriage due to its usefulness in maintaining the established order, divorce is frequently viewed as a thing that one should make every effort to avoid.
Despite this, divorce rates among evangelicals are higher than the national average and higher than any other religious group in the US.7 Interestingly, Christians who attend church regularly are significantly less likely to get divorced than those who self-identify as Christian but attend church irregularly or not at all.8 Many would say that this must be because regular church attendance and increased devotion to their faith strengthens their marriages. There’s an oft-used illustration of a triangle with the wife at one corner, the husband at another, and God at the third, to illustrate that as the husband and wife each grow closer to God, they also grow closer to each other. “The family that prays together stays together.” This may be the case for some couples, but I think there are other factors at play.
Evangelicals view the divorce rate as a negative thing. I like to compare divorce rates to C-section rates in hospitals that deliver babies. These hospitals frequently make systemic changes with the goal of reducing their C-section rates. The need for many of these changes stems from past practices in which C-sections were performed for convenience of scheduling, because they are faster than vaginal deliveries, or because the OB/GYN or hospital made more money doing them. These are clearly bad justifications for an invasive surgery. But when attempting to decrease C-section rates, a major question that arises is what the ideal C-section rate is. There are several risk factors that can make a vaginal delivery riskier than a C-section. And there are times when a C-section is the only way to prevent the death of one or both parties. The real answer is that the “ideal” C-section rate depends on a number of factors including the hospital, the population of patients, the experience of the healthcare providers, and when it comes down to it, each specific situation. The ideal C-section rate is the percentage of deliveries for which the overall risks of performing a C-section are less than the risks of a vaginal delivery, with both the pregnant person and the baby in mind (which brings up the ethical issue of how you weigh the lives of each of these people). There is no simple answer.
Similarly, there is no “ideal” divorce rate. It’s certainly not 0%. Some marriages are toxic and abusive. Some people simply aren’t a good fit for each other, and may potentially even remain friends while living much happier lives with different partners. And given that many LGBTQIA+ individuals that grow up within the evangelical subculture have been forced to repress their gender identities and sexual orientations, some people find themselves in marriages that don’t align with who they really are.
While nobody enters a marriage planning to get divorced, trying to prevent divorce at all costs is extremely harmful. Overall divorce rates are higher in people who marry at younger ages,9 which evangelicals tend to do. So if divorce rates are significantly lower in evangelicals who attend church regularly, there are probably a lot of regular church-goers that would be better off divorced.
Because purity culture encourages people to marry earlier, and because living together prior to marriage is highly frowned upon, many evangelicals find themselves in marriages that simply aren’t a good fit. Even if they were a great match at the start, people evolve over time, and there’s no guarantee that two spouses will evolve in the same direction. Several years down the road, one or both partners may find themselves with needs that aren’t met by the relationship. Often two people who never should have been married get married solely because of an extramarital pregnancy. Frequently, by the time someone mentions it, divorce is the best option.
In a subculture where marriage is both idealized and idolized, and divorce is discouraged or even prohibited altogether, people are less likely to consider it an option. This was certainly the case with me. I got married at 21 to the woman I began dating when I was 19, and I remained in this emotionally and financially abusive marriage for over 12 years before I even considered leaving it. Even though I had left religion two years earlier, I had been conditioned never to think of divorce as an option, so I continued to sacrifice more and more with the goal of keeping my marriage together until I simply couldn’t anymore—until leaving was a life-saving decision.
People who attend church regularly experience tremendous social pressure to stay married. People who are active in their church tend to have friend groups and support networks that consist primarily or entirely of people within their church, and the fear of losing those friends and that support is significant. Whether it’s due to rejection by the community because of the stigma associated with divorce, people feeling the need to pick sides and siding with their ex, or simply that it can be awkward to attend the same church as an ex, the prospect of losing this community can be a powerful deterrent to divorce.
I remember hearing the constant refrain, both growing up and as an adult, that marriage was amazing, but also a lot of work. Looking back, from the perspective of someone who is now in a marriage that has never felt like “work,” it seems to me that this idea functions as a way of conditioning people to remain in unfulfilling or even abusive marriages. By normalizing marriages being difficult, evangelical teachings make it less likely that people will recognize their own marriages or those of others as being unique in the difficulties one or both members experience, thus decreasing the likelihood of divorce. But this comes at the expense of the mental health, and sometimes the physical safety, of people that might otherwise have recognized their marriages as being tepid or toxic, not to mention the children who grow up in intact but dysfunctional households where they observe an unhealthy model for their own future relationships. There is no shortage of “broken homes” in which the parents remain married.
Purity culture also creates an environment in which abuse—particularly sexual abuse—frequently goes unrecognized. There are a variety of factors that contribute to this. Most importantly, the concept of consent, the foundation for a healthy sexual ethic, is never discussed. As I’ve mentioned previously, this is because it is irrelevant in the framework where sex outside of marriage is forbidden, and within marriage, a spouse has authority over the other spouse’s body. 1 Corinthians 7:3-4 is clear that husbands and wives mutually have authority over their spouse’s bodies. But in practice, because men are conditioned from an early age to be sexually assertive initiators and women are taught to be submissive sexual responders, this principle gets applied mainly to husbands having control over their wives’ bodies.
In The Excellent Wife, Martha Peace writes (citing the passage above) that neither spouse has the “option to refuse the other unless he or she is providentially hindered or the couple had agreed to temporarily refrain from sex because of devoting themselves to prayer.” But, predictably, she goes on to assign this responsibility to women. Women are told that they are to satisfy their husbands completely, and in every way. Peace writes that a husband should be “so satisfied with [his wife’s] love that no one else would even get a second glance from him,” employing the analogy of “eating and eating and eating until you were stuffed” to the point where, “if someone then offered you your favorite dessert, you would not even be tempted.” The only exception she makes to a wife’s responsibility to provide sex on demand is if it is “virtually impossible at that moment,” in which case “the wife should give him a rain-check for a specific time in the future. Then, when she fulfills her promise, she should make it worth his wait!”10
Men, likewise, are told that their wives are responsible for meeting all their sexual needs. I wrote in Chapter 4 about the authors of Every Man’s Battle, who compared a man’s sexual desires to bowls, all of which are intended to be filled by his wife.11 Men are forbidden from filling these bowls elsewhere—meaning not only avoiding extramarital sex, but also pornography, masturbation, or even fleeting sexual thoughts. So, in the evangelical framework, men are taught that their sex drives are irrepressible and that they have a right to their wives’ bodies, and women are taught that they are to be submissive and sexually available to their husbands at all times. Not only is the concept of bodily autonomy omitted; it’s soundly rejected.
Evangelical teachings about sex create a system in which spousal sexual abuse often goes unrecognized by both survivors and perpetrators. They result in women that have sex out of a sense of obligation, and in men that feel entitled to sex whenever they want it (and are allowed no other sexual outlets, including masturbation). Wives are made to feel responsible for meeting their husband’s sexual needs even if they have vastly different sex drives or if a wife finds sex with her husband to be painful or pleasureless. Obligatory sex is non-consensual, and non-consensual sex is sexual abuse. My intent here is not to excuse any abuser for their actions; abuse of any sort is wrong, regardless of the abuser’s belief system. Sexual exploitation of another person is unacceptable no matter what one’s marital status is, and independent of their upbringing. Rather, I am pointing out the harm perpetuated by a system that programs men to be abusers by failing to teach consent and bodily autonomy, instead telling them they have full authority over their wives’ bodies.
The archaic idea that men have control over the bodies of their wives is not limited to white American evangelicalism; like many other aspects of patriarchy, racism, anti-LGBTQIA+ discrimination, ableism, and classism, it is woven into the fabric of our society. Hearkening back to the days when women were considered property, sexual abuse against women has historically been treated differently when perpetrated by their husbands. The majority of states treated rape by a spouse differently than rape by someone else into the 1990s. And even today, in the evangelical stronghold of South Carolina, spouses are still exempted from all of the state’s laws regarding criminal sexual conduct. Instead, there is a separate law for “spousal sexual battery” which requires the “use of aggravated force, defined as the use or the threat of use of a weapon or the use or threat of use of physical force or physical violence of a high and aggravated nature” and requires that the offense be reported within 30 days, while there is no statute of limitations for acts of sexual violence by anyone else.12 But while the problem may not be isolated to white evangelicalism, it is in large part the teachings of the white evangelical church that perpetuate these ideas and stand in the way of progress, in this area and many others.
The submission expected of wives is not limited to sex, however. The doctrine of complementarianism teaches that women were created by God to be submissive to men, and this applies in the home as well as the church. As Martha Peace explains, a woman “has a different rank or POSITION, she is not an inferior PERSON” (emphasis original). Rather, “the wife submits herself to her husband so that God’s plan for the family can be carried out. She is not inferior to her husband but her role is different. The wife’s role is one of a ‘helper suitable’ to her husband.” Peace laments that “pastors often avoid the issue of submission because the subject is so volatile. Those who do address it make it more palatable with a sugar coating of some sort such as emphasizing ‘mutual submission of the husband and wife’ instead of clearly teaching the wife’s responsibility.”13
A wife’s lack of submission to her husband, according to Peace, could take the form of “angry looks, looks of disgust, [or] crossed arms.” It could manifest as interrupting her husband while he’s talking, or “bring[ing] up his shortcomings to others.”14 But too often the concept of “submission” extends to tolerating abuse. John Piper was asked in an interview in 2009, “What should a wife’s submission to her husband look like if he’s an abuser?” He chuckles and says, “Oh my,” then goes on to say that “if it’s not requiring her to sin, but simply hurting her, then I think she endures verbal abuse for a season, and she endures perhaps being smacked one night, and then she seeks help in the church.”15 And while a 2011 Focus on the Family article titled “My Husband is Physically Abusive” encourages temporary separation for the safety of the woman and any children, it doesn’t even mention divorce as an option, rather implying that biblical counseling can save every abusive marriage.16
In 2015, James Dobson republished an article on his website that had originally been published in his 1983 book, Love Must Be Tough. In it, he provides advice to a woman named Laura whose husband “has a violent temper that is absolutely terrifying.” Laura reports that when her husband gets angry, “he yells, throws things, threatens me, and makes an awful scene. If I say the wrong thing or if I say anything, he beats me with his fists…Last week he loosened three of my teeth and cut the inside of my lip. I really thought he was going to kill me!” These episodes had been increasing in frequency and severity, leading her to write to Dobson and ask, “So what can I do? I don't believe in divorce. I am trying to be gentle and cautious at all times, but inevitably I step on his toes and he explodes again. I'm so tired of being beaten and then having to stay home for days to hide my bruises.” In Dobson’s reply, he writes, “As a Christian, I agree with Laura that divorce is not the solution to this problem. Our purpose should be to change her husband's behavior, not kill the marriage.” His recommendation for Laura is “forcing the matter to a crisis” by “choos[ing] the most absurd demand her husband makes, and then refus[ing] to consent to it. Let him rage if he must rage.” In other words, his suggestion to this woman who has been severely beaten by her husband to the point that she feared for her life is to intentionally provoke him.17
There are several factors at play here. One is the deprioritization of women’s well-being in a patriarchal system of male headship and female submission. Another is that marriage is placed on a pedestal in order to maintain the integrity of the nuclear family unit at the expense of the individuals in it, a priority that dates back to the “positive eugenics” that I wrote about in Chapter 5. A third is the emphasis that is placed on forgiveness, which encourages people to see chronic abuse as a series of individual mistakes or sins that should be forgiven and forgotten. And then there is the disregard for the body that is common in evangelical churches, which have an extremely weak theology of the body. Dr. Jim Berg, a former Dean of Students at Bob Jones University that I will discuss further in a later chapter, referred to the bodies of sexual abuse survivors as “the throwaway part,” comparing them to a styrofoam cup, which contains “the most important part,” but itself lacks any significant value.18
There are other more subtle aspects of evangelical and fundamentalist Christianity, common in other patriarchal religious subcultures as well, that keep abuse from being recognized or reported. The complementarian family model often keeps women at home caring for children, while the husband is the primary income earner and often solely responsible for managing the family’s finances. Because of this, a woman that desires to leave her husband may lack the financial resources to move out and hire an attorney, or even to pay for basic necessities. Sometimes men are even encouraged to make their wives stop working so that they will remain financially dependent on their husbands. Additionally, men often accompany their wives to medical visits, making it less likely that abuse will be reported, and the requirement for women to wear modest clothing effectively covers many signs of physical abuse.
But some types of abuse leave no bruises, only lasting scars. The tactics of people who emotionally, psychologically, and financially abuse their spouses in many ways reflect the evangelical church’s own treatment of its members. To the extent that I ever had a “personal relationship with Jesus,” it was one in which I was frequently told how much he loved me, while being constantly reminded of how much he had sacrificed for me and how worthless I was without him. The church controlled my appearance, the entertainment I enjoyed, the language I used, the places I went, and the people I associated with. I was told how to think and not allowed to question my relationship with the church. I was required to give financially even when I didn’t know how I was going to pay my bills. All of these things were also true of the abusive marriage I was in for over a decade. And I was threatened with hell if I ever walked away from either of these relationships—literally in one instance and far worse in the other.
When abuse is recognized, or in marriages that are struggling for other reasons, evangelicals frequently seek counseling from a pastor, church leader, or Christian counselor. This counselor may genuinely try to help a couple explore their individual needs and desires, resolve their conflicts, and improve their communication, but they are frequently heavily biased, often prioritizing preserving the marriage above the needs and desires of one or both individuals.
Unlike mental health professionals that go through years of training and specialize in marriage counseling, pastors and church leaders frequently lack the training and experience to recognize subtle, or even overt, signs of abuse. These church leaders and counselors, who are not subject to the same licensing and oversight as mental health professionals, often make harmful recommendations. Relationship issues are frequently blamed on the woman not giving her husband enough sex, including many instances in which the husband’s sexual abuse (whether recognized or not) is causing the relationship problems. And when a man has an affair, his wife is frequently blamed—by herself and others—for not providing the sexual fulfillment he needed, resulting in him seeking another means by which to “fill his bowls.” His actions aren’t necessarily condoned, but they’re frequently viewed as understandable.
In general, divorce is usually seen as acceptable in cases of infidelity (including the type that involves only a single internet connection), and many evangelicals would also allow an exception for cases of overt physical or sexual abuse. But too often, marriage is viewed as something to be preserved at any cost. This can result in couples staying together for decades when both parties would have been happier and more fulfilled if they had parted ways. And it can keep people trapped inside toxic and abusive marriages without any hope of improvement.
A 2013 article by Michal Gilad in the Rutgers Journal of Law & Public Policy is not specific to evangelicals, but it does represent them when it states that “abuse victims in religious communities are less likely to leave the abusive relationship, more likely to believe the abuser’s promise to change his violent ways, more reluctant to seek community-based resources or shelters, and more commonly express guilt that they have failed their families and God in not being able to make the marriage work or to stop the abuse.”19
This system, which has been designed to keep women in their place within the patriarchal power structure, while also protecting the purity of the white evangelical church body, is toxic. It fosters abuse, prevents it from being recognized for what it is, and frequently blames those that are being hurt. It binds together dysfunctional marriages until they either collapse or explode, causing significant harm to one or both of the spouses, and almost always to their children. I don’t think that divorce should be taken lightly, and I certainly think that many relationship problems should be worked through instead of bailing on the marriage at any hint of conflict. But a marriage that ends in divorce is a marriage that ended, not necessarily one that failed, and there are many failed marriages in which the spouses remain married.
[Turn the page to Chapter 8: Spare the Rod]
[Link to go back to the beginning and start with Chapter 1: Original Sin]
Deuteronomy 24:1-4
Leviticus 21:7
Deuteronomy 22:29
Deuteronomy 22:19
Matthew 5:32, Matthew 19:9, Mark 10:2-12, Luke 16:18
1 Corinthians 7
Peace, Martha. The Excellent Wife: A Biblical Perspective, Expanded Edition. United States, Focus Publishing, Inc., 1995, pp. 121-122.
Stoeker, Fred, and Arterburn, Stephen. Every Man's Battle: Winning the War on Sexual Temptation One Victory at a Time. United States, Crown Publishing Group, 2004, pp. 137-140.
Peace, Martha. The Excellent Wife: A Biblical Perspective, Expanded Edition. United States, Focus Publishing, Inc., 1995, pp. 138-139.
Peace, Martha. The Excellent Wife: A Biblical Perspective, Expanded Edition. United States, Focus Publishing, Inc., 1995, pp. 116-117.
GRACE Report, p. 88.