When Pentecostal power couple Randy and Paula White recently announced they were headed to divorce court, the most remarkable part of the reaction was that there wasn’t much reaction at all.
For increasing numbers of clergy, a divorce no longer generates the kind of career-killing hue and cry of decades ago, in part because plenty of people in the pews have experienced divorce themselves. The shifting views on divorced clergy reflect a growing concession among rank-and-file conservative Christians that a failed marriage is no longer an unforgivable sin.
For many evangelical Christians, the line seems to have shifted from a single acceptable reason for divorce — adultery — to a wider range of reasons that some say can be biblically justified.
“I am probably one of those evangelicals who would say it would be three A’s for me,” said Chris Bounds, a theologian at Indiana Wesleyan University in Marion. “Abuse, abandonment and adultery.”
With the Whites’ breakup, Randy White now leads the Without Walls International Church in Tampa, Fla., and Paula White remains prominent in Christian broadcasting. Not long after they announced their divorce, Atlanta evangelist Juanita Bynum filed for divorce from her husband, Bishop Thomas Weeks III, after he allegedly assaulted her in a hotel parking lot.
‘Lingering discomfort’
Beyond the church, polls by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press indicate the divorce records of GOP presidential candidates Rudy Giuliani, Fred Thompson and John McCain have not hindered their popularity among white evangelical voters.
Christianity Today, a magazine that often serves as a barometer of evangelical culture, published an October cover story called “When to Separate What God Has Joined,” in which David Instone-Brewer, a senior research fellow at Tyndale House in Cambridge, England, concluded that adultery, physical and emotional neglect, abuse and abandonment are all biblically justified reasons for divorce.
Mark Galli, the magazine’s managing editor, said there is a simultaneous rejection of divorce in principle but acceptance in practice. But the reaction to Instone-Brewer’s article reflected a lingering discomfort with divorce; Galli estimated that 60 percent of responding readers had a negative reaction.
Statistics bear out that divorce affects conservative Christians just as much as anyone else. A study this year by The Barna Group, a California research firm, showed that 27 percent of “born-again” Christians have been divorced, compared to 25 percent of nonborn-again Americans. In 2005, Phoenix-based Ellison Research found that 14 percent of clergy has been divorced; the vast majority has remarried. (RNS)
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