(Part of a series. See parts one, two, three, and four.)

One issue that inevitably comes up in discussing divorce — especially if, like me, you’ve never been married, let alone divorced — is how fit other people are to judge someone’s decision to get one. Especially in the Think Christian discussion, a common refrain was: “You weren’t in my shoes, you can’t possibly know what it was like!”

This is true, which is why in this whole discussion I haven’t pointed fingers at anyone’s specific divorce. And as Christians we are generally admonished not to judge each other. But I think that, in modern urban churches at least, there’s probably too much complacency about our own ignorance. Are marriages each so unique that we really can’t know what they are like, or is it that we don’t want to know?

I was raised with a very strong ethic of noninterference in people’s love lives. I realized how much my attitude had drifted during a recent discussion with my mother. One reason I’ve been so interested in the whole subject of marriage and divorce lately is that I’ve been dating a man from PMC the last seven months, who has occasionally commented here under the name John Paul. (No, he wasn’t named after the Pope; it’s a family thing.) When my mother was out here last month we all went camping together. Later we were talking on the phone, and she asked me if it was OK if she talked to other members of the family about him, since they were bound to be curious.

The question struck me as odd. There was nothing scandalous about him; why shouldn’t she tell other people about him? But it reminded me that a month or two earlier John had asked me what he should tell his friends about the state of our relationship, since they were also curious. When I mentioned this to my mother her first reaction was, “How do they know you’re dating?”

“Well, it’s pretty obvious,” I said. “We always sit together in church. And in a community of 130 people you don’t expect this sort of thing to be a secret.”

She seemed to understand that, but the conversation said a lot about how powerful the presumption of privacy is in urban liberal America. Yet people’s curiosity is still there — it’s just not respected. So people’s natural interest in each other’s lives seems to have been subverted into a kind of seamy underground, where people dig into the details of celebrities’ infidelities and divorces but know little about those of their neighbors.

Yet I think there are good reasons, as well as prurient ones, to know about your neighbor’s marriage. As I said in the last post, people are great at rationalizing, and so if your spouse is the only person to provide an outside perspective on your behavior, and you’re having a dispute with your spouse, your own self-delusions can wind up being your highest authority. More to the point, if you leave marital disputes entirely to a contest between two people, it seems inevitable that the stronger one will win. How does it resolve the abuse-of-power problem in the last post to draw a veil of secrecy around marital disputes, and accept whatever outcome emerges?

Now, I realize that involving the neighbors doesn’t always help things. Sometimes the community has warped values. Sometimes the stronger party can smooth-talk people to his or her side and gain even more advantage. Priests and pastors are not necessarily experts on marriage (especially if they’re celibate). But I do get frustrated hearing everybody explain why there may be too much divorce out there, but their own divorce was unavoidable. Given the sheer number of divorces out there, surely they can’t all be right.

Overcoming the current assumptions of privacy can be hard. Nathan the Perth Anabaptist wrote last month about trying to get his church to help decide whether he should get married:

What I think we’re hoping to do is drag the marriage process out of the closet. To not just wait until there’s an announcement of engagement to tell the people in the church. But since we are a body of people whose lives affect each other, instead to seek counsel and advice from everyone.

But of course, some thought we were announcing an engagement. An engagement is a bit late to be seeking people’s advice. I want advice before I get engaged, and so does Nicole.

I remember a church I used to go to, it was small too but I witnessed two engagements that shouldn’t have happened unexpectedly pounced on everyone. It was only three years ago, but one of them’s over already. I don’t think the church should make the decision for you, but it should at least ask you questions and relate the experiences of other members. Otherwise we’ll repeat the mistakes of others and not have any accountability.

I think this was a good move on Nathan’s part (and a brave one). Another thing that might be helpful, and that might formalize the process, is to get “old marrieds” to mentor younger ones. I remember Telford told me that before he was married he spent time in a singles group at Lake Avenue Church, a big evangelical church in Pasadena. The experience was mostly hideous (this was apparently his first encounter with the common evangelical attitude that singlehood is a curable disease), but the one meeting he did like was when some folks who’d been married 40 years or more came in to tell their war stories. When I think about it, I myself have heard very few detailed stories (in church or out) of marriages that have survived crises, which reinforces the feeling that divorce is natural and inevitable.

Although Lee recently mocked evangelicals for acting like chastity is such a big achievement, I do think it is harder in our society than it was for a lot of Christians in the past, at least after the Roman era. Your average medieval peasant wasn’t surrounded by media always trying to titillate and arouse him, or a near-cult of romantic love, or people sleeping around and seeming to suffer no consequences for it. I wouldn’t say it’s as hard as being shot full of arrows, certainly, but I do see the need for communal as well as individual action on this sort of thing.

Does anyone else have other ideas for how churches can help?

(Part of a series. See parts one, two, and three.)

There’s another theory about Jesus’ sayings against divorce that is especially popular with left-leaning Christians, including the ones at my church. It’s that Jesus was speaking to men in a patriarchal society about abusing people who were dependent on them. Women, in those days, were financially dependent on their husbands and could not initiate a divorce, so the institution itself was a product of male entitlement.

I expect that is basically true, since like I said, Jesus generally defended women against male abuse. What worries me about it isn’t so much the basic idea, as the assumption that therefore it doesn’t really apply to us if we have a modern egalitarian marriage or if we are the weaker party in the marriage. (Lynn gives a Quaker example of that line of thinking here.) I think that assumption is hazardous on two fronts.

One, I think it is tempting for people to compare their own marriages to a patriarchal stereotype — husband as autocrat, wife as helpless victim — that was probably not the norm even in Jesus’ day. I wrote here and here about James Ault’s analysis of how the actual interaction between genders in a traditional society can be more complicated than the official patriarchy, and it seems likely that similar dynamics were at work in ancient Judea. And in fact, there are lots of idiosyncratic factors that affect the balance of power in any given relationship: the personalities involved, their intelligence, their social influence, who is more in love, etc. I have trouble believing Jesus was too unsophisticated to notice this.

Conversely, I think some caution is called for in believing our own official account of our marriages, that they are voluntary unions of two equal parties. For the same reasons I mentioned above, the actual balance of power can be quite lopsided even in a relationship of legal equality. In fact, who has the power in a relationship may be extremely unclear. It seems like almost an axiom of relational conflict, that people see themselves as victims and the other person as the oppressor. It may be because it’s true, but it may be because people are great at rationalizing.

In fact, it seems to me that one reason hierarchies are so popular is that they automatically settle such disputes. If one party gets the ultimate say in things, and everyone else has to go along, then unity is maintained. But if you have a situation like modern marriages, with parties of equal number and equal claims to power, then it’s not surprising that conflicts often seem unresolvable.

But if you don’t want to go in for the conservative “male headship” models — and I don’t — then who breaks the impasses? That will be the subject of my next post.

(Part of a series. See parts one and two.)

Lee pointed me to a fascinating article by John Howard Yoder on divorce. There are a lot of points in it that I may cover at another time, but right now I want to focus on Yoder’s answer to the question: what makes a marriage? To Catholics, it’s the sacrament enacted by the Church. To the secular world, it’s a legal marriage license. To Yoder, it’s sex.

Yoder takes 1 Corinthians 6:15 quite literally: any time you have sex, you become “one flesh” with that person, which in the Bible is an image of marriage. He argues that this was the ancient Hebrew view, and so that was the view that Jesus would have assumed. This then, creates an even more stringent version of the remarriage ban than Catholicism has, since Catholicism only recognizes marriages as valid if they were formed with a certain intent. Yet Yoder also recognizes that second marriages are real, since the spouses also became “one flesh.” Therefore he thinks churches should accept second marriages that have already happened, but not be in the business of performing them.

But what of sex performed under very adverse conditions — like incest, or rape? Here Yoder makes an odd comparision between a marriage and a fetus. A fetus is a human being (this being an uncontested fact in his circles, I suppose) but may not be viable; likewise a sex act may make a marriage, but they marriage is not viable. This is how Yoder interprets Paul’s words about sex with prostitutes.

There are some things I like about Yoder’s argument. I like the way he grounds the idea of marriage in bodily reality; it is neither the technical legal definition that has little to do with people’s behavior, nor the sacramental vision that seems too rarified for sinful mortals to set foot in. It also punctures the modern confidence in the supremacy of conscious intent; it asserts that when we have sex, our bodies are fulfilling their own agendas. I’m reminded of the line from the movie Vanilla Sky that came up in a previous discussion: “Don’t you know that when you sleep with someone, your body makes a promise even if you don’t?”

But reading the essay, I felt like Yoder was going a bit too far with the sex = marriage thing. A few years ago Telford responded to a student query on this very subject and said that while there are some passages in the Bible that support sex = marriage, others do not. He pointed to Exodus 22:16-17, and more importantly to Jesus’ line to the woman at the well: “You have had five husbands, and the one you now have is not your husband.”

The difference may be more semantic than substantive, however. Yoder admits that sex doesn’t exactly create a full-blown marriage, but is more of a beginning point:

In very few societies is becoming married instantaneous. There is normally a sequence of stages no one of which is uniquely decisive. That means that there is always in every culture some point at which a “minimal marriage” exists in the absence of some of the important other things that marriage must properly mean. It must always be said that each stage calls for the others, that whole marriage is preferable to minimal marriage, and especially that “true love” will call for such wholeness of expression. Therefore what is questionable about “pre-marital sex” is not that it is sex, nor that it is “pre-marital” (which, by definition, it is not), but that the avoidance of legality and publicity, the postponement of common residence and finances, and the withholding of the public pledge, constitute both a handicap for the marriage’s success and prima facie reason for doubt as to whether the “love” is “true.”

I think that what both Yoder and Telford are getting at here is that in ancient Jewish society — as in most premodern societies — sex created a social expectation and obligation to marry, which was real and irrevocable but not quite the same as marriage itself. As the Exodus passage indicates, it was possible to avoid marriage but not without damage to both parties. This makes sex somewhat less than marriage, but somewhat more consequential than our current society generally takes it to be.

The more radical implication of Yoder’s theory is that a person could therefore be “married” to more than one person at a time. The conclusion this leads him to, when he discusses pragmatic dealings with marriages and divorces, is that de facto polygamy is a better way to deal with human weakness than serial monogamy. Describing the amicable parting and remarriage of someone he knows, Yoder writes, “So now ontologically or ‘in God’s eyes’ James has two wives. With the second one he lives. With the first he shares the parenting of a daughter who loves both parents, and is not torn between them. He loves both wives, in different ways.”

This is actually a highly respectable position, seeing as about 90% of human societies have agreed with it, including most of the ones in the Bible. In fact, the only biblical society I can think of that preferred serial monogamy was Rome, which is hardly held up as a moral paragon. The difficulty, though, is in not allowing polygamy to turn normative, as it has in so many cultures. In a way, the American divorce rate is a testimony to our belief in monogamy — we don’t take a “sophisticated” European attitude of “men screw around, what can you do?” But it is a worthwhile challenge to Western notions that because we practice monogamy, we’re better — a monogamy that may be more imagined than real.