Tag: marriage

Sunday, 7/20/25

Divorce, penance, annulment

Roman Catholic apologists have long cited their Church’s ban on divorce and remarriage as commending it and condemning other Churches’ approaches. I have occasionally wondered if they were right.

Such doubts diminished when I began acquiring an Orthodox Christian way of thinking. I heard the somewhat penitential tone of the service for a second marriage. I gained empathy for some of those whose marriages ended, even through their own fault, because we are broken and we do break things. And God doesn’t give up on us when we do.

I also knew that Roman Catholic annulment practice could easily be cast as a (hypocritical) workaround for wealthy Catholics who cared to pursue it (like one of my very attractive law school classmates). I came to prefer the Orthodox practice; briefly:

  • some sort of penance being connected to the Church’s recognition of divorce and,
  • as mentioned earlier, the very service for a second marriage reflecting soberly that a second marriage is a concession to human weakness — “better to marry than to burn with lust”

Then a day or two ago I heard an Orthodox podcast’s treatment of the difference, and decided to dig in a bit deeper.

The Orthodox Church doesn’t give divorces; it penances divorces. Its approach is pastoral. Before remarriage, one must repent of his or her fault in the destruction of the first marriage. This helps those hurt by divorce to be healed and re-integrated into the community and set on the right path again. Since marriage is ordered to the salvation of the spouses, a second marriage is sometimes necessary (“better to marry than to burn with lust”). For a specific, albeit typical, “procedure” for Orthodox second marriages, see here.

The Roman Catholic Church officially does not permit divorce, but has a legal process for declaring, retroactively, that there was never a valid marriage in the first place. Suspecting that the Orthodox podcaster’s characterization of that process and its effects went a bit overboard, I sought out reliable Catholic sources, like here, here, and here.

You can read and judge for yourself (they’re not long), but I find that process described a legal and apologetical dodge with no repentance and spiritual healing for anyone. There’s nothing pastoral about it. In the three sources I consulted, there was only one whiff of examination of conscience about the broken marriage, and even that was in the form of “some people find that simply writing out their testimony helps them to understand what went wrong and why,” not “you really should pause, reflect and repent for your role.”

If the point is to get people into the Kingdom of Heaven, I see a clear winner as between the Orthodox approach and the Roman Catholic. And I’m ready to give as good as I get the next time a Catholic apologist tries the play the divorce card.

Biblical rules

I never hear the [college] administration admit they’re wrong about anything, even though you and I both know they’ve made some bad decisions. Rules get changed every year, but the deans never acknowledge the previous rules were arbitrary—they’re couched in all this talk of biblical principles.

Philip Yancey, Where the Light Fell (Kindle location 3371)

Yancey is very much my contemporary, and I think he was writing professionally before we were 25. Where the Light Fell is autobiographical, and I’m astonished that he retained any sort of Christian faith considering the spiritually abusive environment he grew up in.

The pretense that Christian college policies were from “biblical principles” is one that I knew well and saw through quickly. But it’s a pretext that Biblicists almost have to adopt if they’re going to (a) make rules without (b) appearing arbitrary.

It’s very much with us still. Ross Douthat this week interviews a proponent, one Allie Beth Stuckey, host of an evangelical podcast called “Relatable,” which I guess is a big deal.

For the most part, Ms. Stuckey acquits herself well (Ross is not an interviewer who goes on the attack, like a cross-examiner), but there’s one thing that bothered me. She podcasts on theology, lifestyle, politics, the leftward drift of evangelical leaders and probably other topics. She claims clear guidance from “biblical principles” on all these, and on such things as Donald Trump’s policies on immigration and deportation (which biblical principles predictably support).

And next year, when she changes her mind, it will be from “biblical principles,” too.

It’s false clarity. But the pretext of biblical principles on everything is de rigueur in the Evangelical world.

Most of the time, the earth is flat

Multiple cosmologies should be able to coexist and play different functions, some more philosophical and human and others more technical and mathematical. But in our lives most of the time, the Earth is flat. Most of the time, the Heaven is up and the Earth is down, most of the time means in those instances when I am interacting with my family, my society and my enemies. And most of all, if we wish to understand religion and its symbolism, if we wish to understand the Bible or icons or church architecture we must anchor ourselves to the world of human experience, for that is where we can love our neighbor. We must force ourselves to believe that the sun rises every morning, or that the moon waxes and wanes and honestly it should not be so difficult, because despite Galileo and Newton and Einstein I’m pretty sure I will find some Truth in tomorrow’s rosy fingered dawn.

Jonathan Pageau

Ties that still bind, at least a little

Amid the hyperpluralism of divergent truth claims, metaphysical beliefs, moral values, and life priorities, ubiquitous practices of consumerism are more than anything else the cultural glue that holds Western societies together.

Brad Gregory, The Unintended Reformation

Quotable

I am a slow unlearner. But I love my unteachers.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World, via Phil Yancey

Religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set afloat in the world, are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some woefully coarse, feeble, or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.

George Elliot, Janet’s Repentance, via Alan Jacobs

[N]one of the things that I care about most have ever proven susceptible to systematic exposition.

Alan Jacobs, Breaking Bread With the Dead

You can read most of my more impromptu stuff here and here (both of them cathartic venting, especially political) and here (the only social medium I frequent, because people there are quirky, pleasant and real). All should work in your RSS aggregator, like Feedly or Reeder, should you want to make a habit of it.

Lizard brains

At its most fundamental level, same-sex marriage is not about what we think about homosexuality. It is about what we think about marriage.

(Maggie Gallagher)

I listened Friday evening to Jonathan Rausch’s and David Blankenhorn’s discussion on The Future of Marriage, facilitated by Krista Tippett, on On Being‘s “Civil Conversations Project.” The participants are two of the brightest, most thoughtful and civil, contestants in the struggles we’ve been undergoing over what we think about marriage, and they’ve “achieved disagreement” in large part because they share many counter-cultural convictions about marriage.

Rausch, a gay man who lectures straights about how they’ve screwed up marriage (and what they need to do to fix it), summarizes part of his view:

When I talk to young people on college campuses, they all think marriage is, you know, it’s a thing two people do and, if they need a piece of paper from the state, that’s just a convenience. I tell them, no, no, no, no. Maybe you have to be gay to see this, what it’s like to be excluded from a community and all the tools that go with this, but this is an institution.

This is a commitment that two people make not just with either other, but with their community. And that commitment is to have and to hold from this day forward, for better or for worse, for richer or for poorer, in sickness to health, till death do we part. That’s a promise you as a couple are giving to care for each other and your children forever to your whole community and the community has a stake in it. And that’s what we gay people want. We want to be married in the eyes of community in that web of family.

Blankenhorn, formerly an opponent of same-sex marriage (arising from his  conviction, before same-sex marriage was a hot issue, that children need their fathers), announced a change of tactic, if not of heart, this summer, for reasons he explained in a New York Times Op-Ed.

The whole point of the On Being series is civility in disagreement, of course, but I was surprised when Blankenhorn recounted “losing it” the first time he engaged with Rausch publicly:

Mr. Blankenhorn: … I was a fatherhood nut and then I was a marriage nut and we weren’t giving a single thought to gay anything. This was just what we were doing, trying to strengthen this institution that protected children. So when the gay marriage issue came along, I first tried to avoid it. I spent years not trying to talk about it because I knew it was divisive and I didn’t want to — it seemed like a side issue. I didn’t take it that seriously. Eventually, in the early 2000s, I got drawn into it a bit, got all tangled up when I met Jonathan because he invited me to come talk when his book came out in 2005…

Mr. Rauch: 2004.

Mr. Blankenhorn: 2004. He invited me to come give a talk. We didn’t know each other, you know. I had met him. I read the book and I thought I was going to give a rational calm presentation, but I found myself just being overcome with emotion and I said many ugly things about him and the book and accused him of bad faith and cited all these radical gay writers and said that this is what his real agenda was. It was an un — uh, it was not by best day.

[laughter]

Mr. Blankenhorn: But, I…

Ms.Tippett: Why do you think it works that emotion in you?

Mr. Blankenhorn: I don’t know. I still don’t know.

Ms.Tippett: I haven’t read anything about that.

Mr. Blankenhorn: It just kind of poured out. I called him the next day. I said I was sorry. I said I really regret having acted this way. He was like, oh, OK.

Far too much of our “debate” over this issue consists of “being overcome with emotion and I said many ugly things” about the other side.

I won’t try to rehash the bad, hateful arguments, or summarize the good, thoughtful ones – that’s why I’ve provided some links (though they’re skewed toward the pro-SSM side, which is not my own; Tippett and her staff perhaps had trouble finding good arguments on the anti-SSM side now that Blankenhorn has left it) – nor will I declare which side I think more prone to saying ugly things.

Rausch and Blankenhorn both acknowledge that SSM is a profound change:

It took me a long time to get my mind around the notion that in the straight world this is not, you know, an obvious thing. This is a huge shift in the way they’re thinking about marriage for 3,000 years and I think we need to respect that. I think societies have to ingest change at a rate they can sustain. That was something I had to learn.

(Rausch) As Tippett quipped in a different podcast recently, “as human beings, one of the things we’re learning from science, change is stressful and it sends us back to our lizard brains, right?”

But there’s good change and there’s bad change. Just as paranoiac can have real enemies, so a stressful change can be truly bad, not just lizard-brain-stressful bad. A huge shift in the way we think about marriage after 3,000 years is an eminently debatable subject. That something should go from unthinkable to almost axiomatic in 50 years ought to give us pause, and I intend to continue saying and writing things to incite pauses.

But I intend to say them civilly –as by and large I think I’ve done so far.

Before I had gay friends who were comfortable enough to be “out” to me, I tried empathically to enter into what it might feel like to have come to terms with one’s same-sex attraction in a society where, it appears, you and those like you have the political and social momentum. Blankenhorn describes the process I went through:

There’s the intellectual, you know, you think, you read, you know, you sit in your study and you try to think about the correct view … But, I — you know, you build up a kind of a barriers of belief in theory and it keeps the other people out, and so you talk about them. You have theories about them. You can explain their lives to them, but you never really talk to them and see it from their point of view.

Since then, I’ve had more chance to “see it from their point of view,” and I don’t think my prior empathic effort to enter into their world led me far astray.

Three good aspirations in the debate would be:

  1. to stay away consciously from the lizard brain;
  2. to consciously lower barriers and try find thoughtful opponents to share their point of view (someone who shares your religious faith and trusts you enough to come out would be especially good; I’m not likely to learn much from someone who thinks sex has no more meaning than a handshake or hug); and
  3. so to debate this and other issues that if “the little light goes on” some day so that you change your mind, you won’t have to apologize for having been abusive or arguing in bad faith.

Stay off the Roof

Rachel Held Evans committed the kind of painfully protracted performance art that happens when Evangelicalism has utterly lost its sense – of decorum and of how to read scripture – and its publishing houses have become a commercial racket:

Intrigued by the traditionalist resurgence that led many of her friends to abandon their careers to assume traditional gender roles in the home, Evans decides to try it for herself, vowing to take all of the Bible’s instructions for women as literally as possible for a year. Pursuing a different virtue each month, Evans learns the hard way that her quest for biblical womanhood requires more than a “gentle and quiet spirit” (1 Peter 3:4).​
It means growing out her hair, making her own clothes, covering her head, obeying her husband, rising before dawn, abstaining from gossip, remaining silent in church, and even camping out in the front yard during her period.

Evans’ schtick incited Deborah Cruz at The Stir, reportedly secular herself, to indict her for making a mockery of the Bible:

Here’s my issue — isn’t it better to just be honest about your beliefs in the first place? I may not be living biblically, but I am living honestly. I’m not so sure the same can be said for Evans. She appears to be poking fun with her book, though she vehemently denies that she is. But you don’t make a spectacle, write a book, and make videos in a “poking fun” manner if you are taking a challenge seriously.

But Cruz, while right about Evans making a mockery of the Bible, may have inadvertently become a bedfellow (if that term isn’t too evocative) with Evans, says Strange Herring:

Interesting that that’s how the book is being read by some, although Cruz is making the same mistake Evans is. Which is to say, by trying to follow Old Testament precepts only to show them up as unrealistic in 2012, Evans has succeeded in proving absolutely nothing. Like the people who demand that Christians endorse “X” because we no longer stone adulterers or forbid the eating of shellfish — and those things are in the Bible! So it’s all relative!
As if the “New” in “New Testament” really meant “Same Old.”
…
If you have to “assume” roles — whether you believe them to be biblically based or culturally normative for a 21st century couple — you sure as hell aren’t being you, something is being buried or ignored, and your marriage is doomed, I don’t care what you call it.
…
Say the Creed, say your prayers, go to work, feed your face, and try and actually enjoy your life together.
Flip the bird to the rest of it.
And stay off the roof.

Is Evans really crazy enough to think that her mocking (or is it merely “playful”?) treatment – of the Bible, of marriage, of sex roles – builds up marriage, which as a married, albeit “feminist” Christian, she presumably supports?

Maybe I should add Judaizing to my list of blows by the 98% to traditional marriage.

(For the record, I’d have seen none of these trendy young websites were I not following the Tweets of MZHemingway.)

* * * * *

Some succinct standing advice on recurring themes.

Church as “public accommodation”?

I knew the logic, so I figured it was coming. I even started writing this blog some months ago.

But I was surprised to see it arrive so soon.

On Wednesday, two Christian churches filed a lawsuit in Hawaii federal district court claiming that individuals who are planning civil union ceremonies have already filed complaints with the Hawaii Civil Rights Commission against churches that refuse to rent their facilities for same-sex civil union and marriage ceremonies. The complaint (full text) in Emmanuel Temple, The House of Praise v. Abercrombie, (D HI, filed 12/28/2011) claims that investigations launched by the Civil Rights Commission have a chilling effect on plaintiffs’ free exercise of religion. HRS Sec. 489-3 prohibits discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation in places of public accommodation.

(Religion Clause, emphasis added.) Continue reading “Church as “public accommodation”?” →