The only thing God hates more than divorce is people having sex before marriage, or so I thought once upon a time.*
*(queer love wasn’t even on my radar for decades, unfortunately).
Last week I shared a bit about my own marriage and the shit show journey we’ve been on to reimagine our marriage outside of an evangelical context. I described how I needed to feel like divorce was an actual option before I felt like I could actually make the choice to stay.
As I was writing that story, I kept going off on tangents unpacking all the bad teaching I’d had about marriage and divorce, but it ended up being too much to put all in one, so I saved it all to share today.
15 years ago I was at the age of all my friends getting married. Now I’m at the age of all my friends getting divorced, and some I wish with all my heart to find a way out of abusive marriages.
Evangelicalism idolizes heteronormative marriage and the nuclear family.
We know this, but the tricky part is being able to identify and redirect all the ways that thinking is still running in the background of our processing and decision-making, even with deconstruction.
So, this one goes out to all of you who figuring out if your own marriage is going to make it, and to all who are already on the path to divorce and are second-guessing yourselves, and to all of us who know and love someone navigating divorce (or stuck in a marriage we wish they would leave).
Here are three of the biggest myths about divorce I didn’t realize I still believed, and some of the considerations that helped me start to deprogram from them.
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Myth #1: God hates divorce
Programming engaged: There is an authoritarian God who speaks directly through the Bible and will punish me if I pursue divorce.
Sounds like: “What God has joined together, let no man separate.”
I don’t especially revere the Bible anymore, but the religiously programmed part of my brain still does.
So every now and then, I have to engage with old verses and reevaluate them at face value in my enlightened worldview in order to retrain my thinking.
This exact phrase “God hates divorce” comes from a verse in Malachi, because all our best practical life choices come from cherry-picking translated verses in deeply contextual ancient sayings of minor Hebrew prophets. But add in teachings from Jesus and the New Testament, and we got the belief that marriage is a huge deal to God, and that divorce makes him really, really angry. End of story, no substitutions, exchanges or refunds.
Let’s just check some basic assumptions here and remind ourselves: everything we’re being told about what God thinks and feels about marriage and divorce is coming from a Bible that has been:
Written and transcribed from oral traditions by ancient men.
Curated into a book and deemed “holy” by men, (who self-selected themselves as the ones who are qualified to speak on behalf of God).
Translated by men with a specific understanding of theology.
Preached to us by men (mostly),
There is no “straight from God’s mouth to our ears” without going through centuries and centuries of communication. The odds of all the Bible’s insights on marriage getting to us in 2024 without being corrupted by patriarchy is very, very slim.
I say all that not to unnecessarily disparage the Bible altogether (because despite all that there are still some pretty great nuggets of wisdom) but to help you remove any obligation you might feel to blindly follow it’s words. Anything the bible says about marriage has to be taken with the understanding that it was not said with the full consideration of a diversity of viewpoints.
(You probably know all this, but I’m still saying it for that part of your brain that is still kind of afraid God will punish you if you get divorced.)
If you look at the context surrounding Jesus’ words about divorce, it’s clear that his admonitions didn’t have the purpose of trapping women in marriage, but instead, to protect them in a society where they didn’t have any rights or security without marriage.
Whatever God you believe in now, here’s what a loving divinity wouldn’t say:
“I hate divorce for all of time, and will never consider any exceptions to this decree, no matter how much pain and suffering this is causing people I care about. Their blind obedience matters more to me than their healing.
No.
Wisdom always requires discernment of a specific situation, intimate knowledge of the heart, compassionate care for the welfare of all the people involved, and the courage to act without absolute certainty of what the result will be.
I don’t doubt that God hates divorce when it is used to harm someone.
But I have to believe that whoever God is:
God hates despair more than God hates divorce,
God hates chronically broken hearts more than God hates divorce,
God hates people feeling obligated to die inside because of a choice they made in their youth more than God hates divorce,
God hates domestic violence more than God hates divorce,
God hates emotional gaslighting, stonewalling, and abuse more than God hates divorce
God hates religions universally condemning thoughtful, wise, good, people trying to make their most of their lives by ending unhealthy partnerships more than God hates divorce,
God hates self-righteous people shunning and judging divorced people more than God hates divorce.
Myth #2: Divorce is Selfish
Programming engaged: What you want is a result of your badness (i.e. your flesh and sinful nature) and must be denied and tamed into submission to be a good person (i.e. be a “slave to righteousness”).
Sounds like: “Marriage doesn’t exist to make you happy, it exists to make you holy.”
Divorce is a morally neutral event.
Divorce on its own is simply the legal dissolution of a legal marriage.
The surrounding words and behaviors of the divorce are what makes it selfish, wise, foolish, loving, dangerous, positive, ugly or respectful.
And the surrounding stigma can make it impossible even to consider as a possibility.
If we take what we know about psychology and that people are genuinely better citizens of the world when they practice self-compassion, divorce between two people who are bringing out the worst in each other can be a net positive event.
Divorce is costly, complicated, and an incredibly difficult transition. Anyone who chooses to enter into it with thoughtfulness most likely isn’t acting selfishly on a whim… it’s often literally the only feasible solution to an unsolvable problem.
Divorce might be selfish, if people act selfishly.
Divorce might be ugly, when people act in ugly ways.
Divorce might also be kind and respectful.
Divorce might be the most loving gift two people ever give each other and their children.
Divorce is not necessarily a tragedy; though it is often the result of a tragic match of two people not designed or equipped to partner together well.
The hard thing is that if someone doesn’t believe God cares about their happiness, there’s almost nothing you can do to convince them that what they want actually does matter. That what lights them up, what drains them, what makes them despair of the future, doesn’t matter as much as the words they said on their wedding day.
Divorce isn’t selfish, but it does require us to know ourselves. For some, that is too high a price to pay.
Myth #3: Divorce destroys a family
Programming engaged: Marriage is a covenant, and the nuclear family is the ideal way to raise children (i.e. “God’s plan”). Any other family setup is second-rate and not as good.
Sounds like: “I could never do that to my kids.”
Thanks to Focus On the Family, evangelicals in the 80s and 90s were positively swimming in “biblical” family values, and I have a hunch we’re still detoxing all these years later.
Egalitarian Christian Historian Beth Allison Barr can do a much better job than me at explaining the evolution of complementarianism through history, but it’s all tied together: in order to make women feel like staying at home and raising the family was their high and God-given calling, the patriarchy had to elevate the institutions of marriage and motherhood to an eternal, cosmic level. We heard some version of preaching like God thinks so highly of women that he designed them to be the caretakers of his most precious ideas… marriage, home life, and families.
And out of that, we see the origin even in secular culture of our obsession with dating and romantic love, of over-the-top weddings and pregnancy announcements, of crushing mom guilt, and the prioritizing of the nuclear family above all else.
Any single person in the church can tell you unequivocally that evangelicals are obsessed with hetero, nuclear families: a woman and man who marry and have biological children (my friend MaryB. Safrit has a great podcast on being Christian “outsiders”).
Many of us who married and started families didn’t realize we were participating in the worship and elevation of this particular lifestyle until we got inside and realized it’s not as heavenly as we were led to believe. And when reality didn’t match the ideal we were sold, we assumed it was our fault.
I should just be willing to forgive. I need to die to my self more. I need to believe God can still do a miracle here and reconcile this marriage. If I divorce my kids will go off the deep end. I’m so miserable in this marriage I can barely function as a person, but it would still be wrong to prioritize my well-being above living in the same house as my coparent.
What would it look like to take marriage off it’s high horse and look at it as simply one of the ways a family can look?
Just like many of us have come to appreciate how the LGBTQIA+ community so beautiful brings diversity into the world, we can grow our appreciation for the diversity of family formation and all the different ways people share love and raise kids.
Good families can look like single parents, co-parents, grandparents, foster parents and any number of caring, thoughtful adults willing to love and engage with children on their levels.
Healthy kids are nurtured by healthy adults, and sometimes getting healthy means getting divorced.
I think so often of the quote by Glennon Doyle in Untamed when she was brushing her daughter’s hair, wondering if she should leave her husband and pursue love with Abby Wambach. She thought first, “no. I couldn’t do this to my daughter. I will stay married for my daughter.” But then her next thought was, “but would I want this marriage for my daughter?” And in that moment, she knew that her greater gift to her daughter was to show her that sometimes you have to do really hard things—and that your family can’t be okay if you’re not okay.
I also love how Matthew Paul Turner and his ex-wife have navigated loving divorce after he came out as gay, though not everyone has two parties as willing to be emotionally present as they are.
Divorce can destroy a family.
Or divorce might be the only way to save a family from the destruction of a miserable marriage.
Please know, I’m not unilaterally team divorce. I love love and am a romantic at heart, and am working hard to not get one, because that’s the right thing for me.
But I’m really mad at how much nonsensical, gaslighting, patriarchal programming has been piled onto us through the years, and how trapped so many people feel when we live in a time and space where divorce offers the freedom so many of our foremothers longed for but couldn’t achieve.
Divorce may be the right path for you, or it might not be. Only you can decide… but just know it can be a valid choice, and God won’t hate you if you choose it.
All the love,
Joy
“Only you can decide…” Yes!
Thank you for this. I feel this message is so badly needed. I was in a very abusive marriage for 20 years b/c I believed all myths you stated. I finally did divorce and felt I could not longer have a relationship with God b/c he was angry with me and I refused to go back. I look back now and see it was the beginning of my deconstruction but it was hell getting here. I felt so alone and rejected by God. It breaks my heart for those in the same place. I hope that someone reads this and they can know that God is not angry with them and only wants the best for them, even if that means divorce, because his love is truly unconditional.