Good Luck With That

The Institute For Family Studies needs to promote marriage. So Alysse ElHage has this blog entry touting a new book that attempts to address marriage problems through churches. [This entry was bumped up.]

A few years ago, I was scrolling through Facebook to catch up with friends and family when I stumbled upon some news that made my heart sink.

As I've said, Facebook is a front row seat to a train wreck.

A married couple from the church my husband and I had attended for about 10 years had apparently split up since we moved away. Both the husband and the wife were popular leaders in our church and seemed to have a vibrant marriage that everyone admired. But now she was building a life with a new man in another state, while he raised their two children alone. As I was trying to digest this news, I discovered that at least five other married couples with kids from the same church had split up over the past few years. Two of the couples had been married for several decades; one couple less than five years. When I asked our pastor what happened, he was as brokenhearted as I was over the news, but he had no answers. He’d tried to counsel with some of the couples, but the spouse who wanted out (most often, the wife) was dead set on divorce.

Pay attention, men.

1. These were supposedly dedicated, churchgoing wives.
2. They seemed to have a vibrant marriage. You have no idea what's going on behind closed doors.
3. Decades of marriage can mean the wife gets set with alimony for life. In California (I don't know how many other states are the same), ten years of marriage sets her up for life.
4. The women are the ones leaving. YOU CAN'T STOP THEM. And, quite often, the more you try to treat them well, the more likely it is they'll walk all over you and leave.
5. The pastor claimed to have no answers. Most likely, he had answers, but doesn't want to say them.

“What’s going on at our old church that so many marriages are ending?” I wondered out loud to my husband

Women are rewarded for divorcing. Women don't want to be wives.

These questions and more are explored in Endgame: The Church’s Strategic Move to Save Faith and Family in America, a new book by John Van Epp and J.P. De Gance, who assert that “the church is the only institution that holds the potential to save the future of marriage and family in America.” However, they point out that most “churches currently allocate almost no capital or energy either to marriage ministry or to ministry for relationship health.”

More retreats and seminars aren't going to fix this. But yeah, the churches are too busy panicking women about pixels.

Overall, only 28% of Protestant churches and 24% of Catholic parishes have what the authors define as a “substantive marriage ministry” (i.e., churches that hosted at least two or more annual: date nights, marriage seminars or programs, couples’ groups, marriage mentoring training programs, and marriage retreats).

At this point I have zero interest in church-organized date nights, seminars, couples' groups, mentoring programs, or retreats in regards to my marriage. They'd be a waste of my time and money. I'd rather be doing other things.

The lack of marriage ministry in many churches is unfortunate because research shows that Americans who attend church regularly are more likely to get and stay married than those who do not.

Translation: They are more likely to he miserable but stick with the misery.

Furthermore, the 2019 World Family Map found that married couples who frequently attend worship services report higher quality relationships than those who attend religious services less or not all.

Two things:

1. The ones who aren't happy in their marriage aren't attending church together. It doesn't mean that attendance together is making them happy.

2. That is what the couples report. There are many religious people who believe saying otherwise will magically hurt their marriage. See: "Name it and claim it." Even more in number are the religious people who believe it would be a sin to say otherwise.

Except that many do [struggle], as those of us who’ve grown up in church know well—and as Communio found in a recent survey of over 20,000 active churchgoers: “regardless of denomination, 24% of married people (or 1 in 4) who are active members of a church report struggling in their marriage,” with wives more likely to report relationship problems than husbands.

The husbands suffer in quiet desperation.

Notice, this means 1 in 4 are willing to report currently struggling. All of them likely struggle. And sometimes people simply give up and they're not struggling, they're just suffering.

Instead of primarily offering support after a marriage is already in trouble or even on the brink of divorce, Van Epp and De Gance want to see churches focus on enriching relationships throughout all the seasons of family life—both the good and the bad. “The starting point of promoting relationship health is dispelling the myth that a good and healthy relationship will run itself,” they write. “Relationships are like vehicles that run of out gas if their tanks are not filled and head off course if their trajectories are not steered.”

Marriage is a lot of work. Do you need more work?

So, what exactly does such a robust marriage ministry involve?

Lots of meddling, probably.

1. Preach regularly on marriage and relationship health.

Likely to be: "Husbands, you're the leader of your home and so the problems are your fault." Husbands are assigned far more responsibility and far less power.

2. De-stigmatize relationship enrichment.

Unless the enrichment is going to be cooking classes and sex tips, forget about it.

3. Stress that every marriage has seasons.

This is a way of saying every marriage sucks. If the real estate agent told you that much of the time, the house you were considering buying was going to be hell to live in, would you buy it? Especially when you could happily live the rest of your life wherever you were already living?

4. Publicly recognize relationship milestones and new marriages.

This would be to pressure the men into proposing, and to pressure the married people to stay in a miserable marriage.

In Jacksonville, Florida, De Gance led an extensive three-year marriage campaign working with area Protestant and Catholic churches and non-profits. A study of that campaign found that divorce in the Jacksonville area dropped by over 20% during that-year period—significantly more than the rest of Florida and similar counties across the nation.

I'd be interested in seeing what has happened to those marriages since. And not divorcing doesn't mean the marriages are in good shape. Some people decide to murder and/or commit suicide rather than divorce. Wouldn't divorce be preferable to that?

Sorry, more "retreats," admitting that marriages have awful times, and giving yet more attention to engagements, weddings, and anniversaries isn't going to to do the trick.

Life has changed and it isn't going back. We don't live in isolated, rural farming villages anymore, with land and businesses handed down from father to son. More people realize that they can have a great life without ever marrying, or without remarrying. Women used to stay in their marriage because they'd be shamed and destitute if they didn't. That's not the case anymore. A man is unlikely to lose his job or be denied a promotion now because he's divorced. Nobody really wants to take the steps to get our culture back to the place in which people married and stayed married. They say they want more marriages and fewer divorces, but they don't want the realities it would take to get there.

Most women, including women in churches, don't want to be wives. Oh, they might SAY they want to be wives, but that wears off for most of them. They see husbands as a burden. They might be willing to endure that burden if he earns enough money or has enough wealth. In their mind, he's there to be her source of sperm, source of money, babysitter, bodyguard, driver, errand boy, butler, handyman, gardener, mechanic, masseuse, emotional/verbal punching bag, and sycophant. They might want to show him off to the other women at church or parties. He's not there to be respected or loved.

What are you going to do about that?

If churches really want help marriage, the should do something like this:

1. Discourage the default state marriage contract. Ideally, this would be from refusing to register their marriage with the state. Other than that, having extensive customized prenups or cohabitation agreements.

2. In place of the awful state contract, the church would maintain a database, networked with other churches and religious organizations and anyone else who wants to participate, that would essentially be its own marriage database.

3. Require nine months of intense, professional, non-misandrist premarital counseling, which would include explaining the expectations of both spouses, of the husband, and of the wife. Included would be risks, obligations, etc. Although they won't really know until they're in it. the aspiring spouses should be thoroughly warned about the realities of marriage.

4. If someone is being a bad spouse/wife/husband, the church should have a process for addressing that.

5. As far as the church database is concerned, divorce is only to be granted if there is cause. A practical example of how this would work is that if someone leaves their marriage without justification, they will not be getting a church wedding ceremony with someone else and their new relationship will not be recognized as marriage.

 

6. What each spouse gets in the church divorce should involve fault, so that someone can't be a terrible spouse and then walk away financially rewarded for it.

This won't happen, though. Too many people would leave the church/system rather than continue to submit to this, unlike hundreds of years ago in isolated villages and towns, they can leave and still have a great life.

Marriage takes two dedicated people. If one or both of them don't want to be married to the other anymore, to the point that they want to leave, there really is no stopping them. The alternative is forcing people to be miserable and hostages. The biggest problem with these messes is what they do to minor children. This is exactly why the church should stop encouraging people to marry, if the concern really is broken homes. Rather, make it difficult to marry. Make sure people really should be getting married to each other and really want to be, before helping them to marry. This would mean going with less wedding revenue.