In this episode, Dan takes his lead from listeners who’ve written in about hearing that “God hates divorce,” that “the family that prays together, stays together,” and so forth. What does this language mean? How have theologically conservative and "traditional" Christians understood divorce? How has Christian rhetoric and messaging about divorce changed over time? Are those changes positive, or do they harbor negative dimensions as well once we decode them? Listen to the episode to find out!
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Hello and welcome to It's in the Code, a series that is part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller.
I am professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College, host of the series.
As always, I want to thank everybody who sends in the comments, the ideas, the feedback for the series.
I can be reached at danielmillerswaj, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
Please keep the ideas coming.
I started this series, I don't know how long it'll go.
It'll go until, you know, until it feels like it's not relevant or people aren't into it.
But I said I wanted this to be sort of a grassroots thing with folks getting back to me about ideas and, you know, Words that they hear, slogans they hear, signs they see, what have you, related to churches and American Christianity, and sort of, you know, we decode that, sort of crack the code on what that is.
And I want to thank everybody who continues to send ideas my way.
I want to apologize, as I always do.
It's a sort of typical thing at this point, but it remains true that I just have not had the time, don't have the time, to respond to every email I receive.
And so I'm sorry if you haven't received a response, but I do read them and value them.
And with that in mind, today I want to pick up on a theme that I think, you know, picks up on what we talked about last episode.
Last episode was on the church family, the idea of the congregation as a family.
And we also looked at a number of other sort of things that relate to that.
And we're going to see that again today, right?
Just some overlap with different things.
And so this is a topic that several people have contacted me about.
It's a topic that's brought a lot of pain to people.
And as one emailer stated it, it's the idea that, quote, God hates divorce.
And for this person, this is something that they actually heard, right?
This was the explicit messaging that came from their church, from pastors, was that God hates divorce.
Some of us, maybe from a little bit earlier generation, I don't even know how old the emailer might be, but I remember the kind of slogan that the family that prays together stays together, right?
It's that same sort of idea.
And what it reflects, and probably everybody knows this, is that historically, at least, you know, in modern times, Christian groups have viewed marriage, and let's, so first of all, let's pause here, right?
Anytime we talk about marriage in today's episode, the presumption is going to be that the traditional Christian view is that when they talk about marriage, they're talking about cis, hetero, monogamous marriage, right?
A lifetime commitment between one man and one woman.
Queer people, they're not going to support marriage.
Trans people, they're not going to support marriage.
Other kinds of relationships, say open marriages or polyamorous kinds of situations or whatever, they're not going to support that, right?
So the idea has been that a marriage is a lifelong commitment and pledge between one man and one woman, but it's also a religious institution.
It's not just a commitment of two human beings, but it's something that applies to God as well.
And that's traditionally why marriages happen in churches and why people wrote vows and so forth, because marriage is a divinely sanctioned institution.
And it's just worth pointing out in early Christian history, this wasn't the case.
Actually, marriage has not always been a Christian institution, but eventually it does become one of the sacraments within the Catholic Church.
And that's a piece that remains after the Protestant Reformation and all the way forward, the idea that marriage is a religious institution remains, which means that divorce goes against God's plan.
A divorce is a sin, and with only rare exceptions, the church can't sanction divorce on this kind of traditional view.
And if we talk about, say, the contemporary religious landscape, certainly the Christian landscape in the U.S., When we talk about that traditional view, we're primarily talking about conservative Protestants of different kinds, and we're talking about Catholics, right?
And somebody might say, well, what about the mainline Protestants or the liberal or progressive groups?
We'll get to them, OK?
But this has always been a well-known element of Catholic social teaching.
I think everybody knows that the Catholic Church doesn't sanction divorce and that if you are, in fact, divorced, you're not in proper standing with the church and so forth.
But it's also been hugely influential in conservative Protestant evangelical teaching, right?
And there have been some other kind of guiding assumptions about marriage in these circles.
Again, it typically goes without saying that we're talking about cis hetero marriage.
But typically the teaching has been based on just a few words in the Bible about ending marriage.
There's a passage of scripture where Jesus of Nazareth says that people have to stay married unless there's been infidelity, and that has become kind of the measure.
So a lot of traditionalists hold that the only valid reason for divorce, the only time a church can allow divorce, or the only time that somebody can sort of be in proper good standing with the church after being divorced, is because the divorce happened due to infidelity.
There is also, with this notion that it is a divine institution, kind of following from that, a widespread assumption that only committed Christians can have truly meaningful and lasting marriages.
And also an assumption, and this is going to be an important one for what follows here, that religious identity will lead to lower divorce rates.
In other words, that part of being a good Christian is often being married.
There's a strong impulse toward being married in traditional Christian practice.
But also that if one is a committed Christian and marriage really matters and it's a divine institution and so on and so forth, then people who are committed, theologically conservative Christians should not get divorced as often as others, right?
That's all pretty basic stuff, right?
That's some background stuff that probably everybody understands.
I want to dig deeper, right?
We want to crack the code and get to some of the decoding of this language about divorce.
So, you know, the fact that lots of Christians disapprove of divorce is well known.
The idea that divorce is, or excuse me, that marriage is a divine institution is understood.
The fact that it's a cis-heteronormative project, that's understood.
By the way, of course, that's why theologically traditional folks oppose any kind of marriage involving queer folk, is that it's not a cis-hetero marriage.
We get all of that.
So let's dig a little bit deeper here.
The first thing to say, and I'm going to sound like I'm talking out of both sides of my mouth here, so I want to be careful.
I want people to hear me right.
Divorce isn't the prominent concern for evangelicals, and I even think in practice for many Catholics, that it once was.
I'm old enough that I can remember a time when pastors and churches routinely railed against divorce in sermons.
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