Posted on 10/04/2010 12:49:37 PM PDT by Mrs. Don-o
“When a marriage is messed up, there’s no closing that book and opening a new one.”
Why not?
You can not tell if someone is a Christian according to how often they go to church. There are many reasons why someone goes to church other than that they are a saved Christian. From my own experience, my ex-wife attended church with me every week. We were not Christians when we married. I began to follow Christ and to attend church with plans to raise our children in the church. My ex-wife attended with us and to the world we would appear as a Christian family. Obviously, my ex-wife knew otherwise and took steps to end the marriage.
My point is that our divorce would appear as a divorce of Christians, even a divorce of evangelicals of which I am one. All of the stats reported would include ours as a Christian divorce. The facts are otherwise. Very few people actually know the true facts about our divorce. Likewise, the true state of anyone’s apparent Christianity or the truth about the apparent Christianness of any couple’s marriage is purely speculative.
Fortunately for me, in time I became remarried a truly Christian woman. We have been enjoying a Christian marriage for 20 years. We expect to stay married for life and are seriously committed to our marriage. We have raised our children as Christians from their first day. My sense is that the rate of divorce for equally yoked Christian evangelicals is significantly lower than the rate of divorce for others including those who regularly attend church.
Tough issue. A church I go threatened to remove church membership of a couple that was getting divorced because of unhappiness (no cheating or physical abuse). The couple refused, left the church, patched things up ultimately and returned to the church. Very hard feelings for a while there though.
....This occurred even though, as Smith writes, divorce, which is clearly and strongly condemned in the Bible, was prevalent among conservative Christians. His findings show that 43 percent of evangelical Protestants divorce, higher than almost any other religious group and above the national average of 38 percent. (Other surveys show the divorce rate is highest in Red States and actually lowest in Blue States.)
Here's another set of results re divorce statistics that I found many years ago, interesting mainly because it breaks with statistics given in this article. The whole series makes for interesting reading, but here's the summary...
In the past several posts, I have presented data from various surveys regarding divorce rates among Christians compared to others. Here I would like to summarize these findings plus offer some qualifications about how much they tell us.1) Active Christians vs. non-active Christians. In each of the studies, those Christians, whether Protestant or Catholic, who attended church about once a week or more had substantially lower divorce rates than those Christians who did attended church less frequently.
2) Christians vs. members of other faiths. It's not clear that there are meaningful differences in divorce rates between Christians and members of other religions. Of all the issues analyzed here, this is the most ambiguous because of the inconsistent nature of the "other religion" data. The composition of "other religions" varied a lot across sample, and a clearer statement on this comparison would need to examine other religions individually.
3) Christians vs. people of no faith. Christians as a group, but especially those who were active, had substantially lower divorce rates than individuals professing no religious belief (e.g., atheism, agnosticism). Sometimes as much as half the rate.
4) Black versus white Christians. Black Protestants, or, in the case of the GSS data, individuals attending predominately black denominations, have much higher divorce rates than white Protestants or members of other religions. It's unclear if this is a simple race effect (i.e., blacks vs. whites regardless of religion) or a race by religion effect (the effect of religion varies by race).
5) Protestants versus Catholics. In some data sets active Catholics had somewhat lower divorce rates than protestants, in other data sets they had comparable rates. No consistent difference emerged across data sets.
6) Frequency of attendance. Divorce rates for Christians drop considerably when going from period attendance to weekly attendance. I.e., the functional form does not appear to be linear, rather it's a threshold effect at about one week.
****it looks like there will be very few couples who end up growing old together****
I think you are correct. What is even more depressing; I know of many parents and grandparents who have buried young adult family members from drugs, suicide and auto accidents. I just don’t ever remember so many children dying before their parents, except for serious illnesses.
I saw Al Mohler and Robert Godfrey at a conference last month and Robert Godfrey (from California) said he was asked his opinion about Proposition 8 on gay marriage. His response was, “where were all these concerned people when the divorce laws where being liberalized?” Clearly, he didn’t see divorce as something the church should have taken lightly.
LOL it doesnt matter that you were raised to believe divorce is not an option if your partner wants a divorce. I too was raised that way yet had a wife that left me for another guy. I refused a divorce for a year then relented when I realized I was making it harder on the kids to string it out.
Wow, come to think of it, we’ve had the same experience.
Also the number of families with no grandchildren, primarily because the children only shacked up or never married.
Sociologically, we often focus on the nuclear family. But the extended family is in trouble, too.
I have no respect for anything that Barna publishes, and his USE of his divorce statistics are at the top of my no-respect list. He has really created the stir he wants in order to sell books.
If you can muddle through his data, you find that in reality the divorce rate among committed evangelicals is very much lower than the population in general. But you’d never know it from his palaver.
That doesn't make him a coward or a hypocrite.
A coward fears repercussions; a hypocrite pretends to a virtue he does not practice and does not intend to practice. There's no reason to think Mohler is being a coward or a hypocrite here.
Having known several people who were, or are Christians who have gone thru divorce I can with 100% certainty and absolute truth tell you all this:
The cause of the divorce was a spouse losing their faith, and subsequently taking their anger and hostility out on the spouse who remained a Bible believing Christian.
Agree 100%. I talked to a woman recently that said she told her husband that if they weren’t meant to be together that God would give her someone else. I told her, you are married and THAT means you are meant to be together.
Placemark for pingout!!!
Oh please...
Bemoaning divorce rates without exploring who is doing the lion's share of the divorcing is as disingenuous as condemning terrorism without mentioning islam.
Divorce, like terrorism, is a tactic: not a goal in, and of, itself. The question one must answer, unless the goal is nothing more than moral preening, is why does one particular group so disproportionately use this tactic?
I contend that puling about the problem apart from a serious investigation of "why," starting with "who," fulfills your definition of hypocrisy; at the same time, "why" the "who" is being ignored satisfies your requirements for cowardice.
You say you don’t want churches to remarry folks who get a “no-fault” divorce. But when my wife had an affair and moved out, my lawyer told me it made no difference in a settlement how I filed. As long as that doesn’t change, most divorces for cause will probably be labeled as no-fault.
And my own 2 cents on the matter is that everyone is just way too accepting of divorce. People go around breaking their vows, behave as cruel as possible to their soon to be ex-spouse and mess up their kid’s lives big time. And what consequence do they pay? Hey its all cool is what I found out. I just wanna be happy....we grew apart....I’m not in love with you anymore.....I didn’t mean to fall in love with another man/woman....its better for the kids to have their parents happy and divorced than fighting and married....these are just some of the common sayings that go with divorce. A large portion of our population will support ppl with the above reasons. As for the counter; I don’t see it. Causing your marriage to break up doesn’t seem to have much consequence anymore.
You still have no business accusing Mohler of hypocrisy and cowardice, which are serious judgments of moral lapse unsupported by evidence. You don't know whether Mohler dealt with just this male/female thing in the article before this one, the article after this one. Nor do you know whether his purpose was to compreehensively explore ggender differences, or just to lay the problem at the doorstep of the Christian churches (which seems to me the more likely case.)
I can certainly agree with you that wives more often initiate divorce proceedings than husbands do: that's verifiable. And sometimes it's all to do with the wife's restlessness, or selfishness, or ambition to ditch Husband #1 so she can extract all the economic assets available and move on to Husband #2. I've seen that happen, and it's pretty ugly.
On the other hand, the person who initiates and pursues the divorce is not always the person principally at fault. I've also seen it happen, that a husband who has emotionally abandoned his marriage (hardly knows his kids, has had a series of honeys on the side) nevertheless would have been perfectly content to remain "married" til death: in fact, the wife keeps his household livable, rescues his outward respectability, and keeps his current girlfriend off his back ("I'd marry you, Gloria honey, but you know, my wife...")
Meanwhile, his wife finds out about Gloria and decides that since the kids are now grown, it's time to stop doing the laundry and the dishes for this creep, and put an end to the farce: therefore she's "at fault" because she initiated the divorce?
But let's not continue with hypothetical "he said/she said" scenarios. Mohler didn't say all that could have possibly be said. Don't fault him for that. Feel free to start a thread and point the discussion in the direction you think it ought to go.
So a guy comes home with lipstick on his shirt, and empty condom wrappers in his briefcase and the wife says: I want a divorce.
Does that go into your 80% figure of women seeking divorce?
Of the 80% of women seeking divorce, what is the percentage of women seeking divorce ‘cuz I just don’t want to be married to you anymore’ versus those seeking divorce for a reason.
This sounds like a wise person — with a lot of facts. I was astounded by some of them.
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