Do Evangelicals Shoot Their Own Wounded Divorcees?
I’ll never forget sitting in church listening to my beloved pastor preach on marriage. I’d been in church since birth, and in this church for 40 years. It’s where I grew up, came to Christ, went through confirmation, was baptized, and figured I’d heard every marriage and divorce sermon ever preached.
But this one took a painful turn.
My pastor said, “If you walk away from your marriage, you’re walking away from Jesus.” I was stunned. Then he said it again. In fact, he said it five times in that sermon.
I was sitting next to a woman who had endured severe abuse for years before she finally found the courage to divorce. She turned white. She had just been told, in effect, that she was going to hell.
That moment has stayed with me ever since.
Evangelical pastors do not merely preach against divorce. In practice, many churches shoot their own wounded. They stigmatize wounded believers and drive them out.
This post shows the attendance gap, explains why it exists, and exposes one way marriage-at-any-cost groups use charts to make divorce outcomes look worse than they are.
Watch the original video here
Can We Measure the Attendance Gap?
After that sermon, I kept asking myself: How serious is this problem? Was this just one painful message from one pastor, or was it part of a larger pattern in evangelical culture? Are wounded divorcees really being pushed to the margins of the church? And if so, can we measure it?
We can.
A lot of divorced evangelicals still attend church regularly, and I’m glad for that. But the more revealing question is this: How does their attendance compare to married evangelicals in the same religious group? That is where the problem comes into view.
When we look at the attendance gap, evangelicals stand out for the wrong reason. The gap between married and divorced attendance is larger among evangelicals than among several other major Christian groups. In plain English, that means a significantly smaller share of divorced evangelicals are still in the pews compared to their married counterparts.
That should concern every pastor, elder, and Christian leader who cares about the wounded.
Why does this happen? I believe one major reason is stigma. Too many wounded believers hear sermons and sound bites that treat all divorce as rebellion, selfishness, or spiritual failure. But about half of divorces are for very serious reasons such as abuse, infidelity, addictions, and abandonment. These are what I call life-saving divorces.
For more on this, see What Is a Life-Saving Divorce?. For more on this, see chapter 1 in The Life-Saving Divorce.
Examples of Stigmatizing Statements
Let’s talk about examples of stigmatizing statements. Both of these are real.
Example 1: “If you walk away from your marriage, you’re walking away from Jesus.”
The implication is devastating. If that were true, then divorce becomes the unpardonable sin and all who divorce are going to hell. No wonder wounded believers shut down in fear. For more on this myth, see Myth 18: Divorce is the Unpardonable Sin and “God Hates Divorce”.
Example 2: “Divorce never makes anything better. It just gives you different problems.”
That sounds wise until you remember what many divorces are actually about. Many are not about boredom or selfishness. They are about getting to safety from long-term abuse, repeated infidelity, or destructive addictions. These divorcees are not looking for an “easy way out.” They are looking for relief from fear and anxiety.
If you are talking about destructive marriages, you have to include the reality of abuse. See:
- 130 Examples of Abuse: Physical, Emotional, Sexual, Spiritual, Financial and Neglect and
- But He Never Hit Me: Divorce for Neglect, Emotional, and Financial Abuse.
Messages Divorcees Hear
- You didn’t try hard enough.
- You didn’t value the sanctity of marriage.
- You didn’t obey Jesus’ teaching about forgiveness.
- Your kids will be destroyed if you divorce.
- Your marriage would be healed if you prayed more.
- It takes two to tango, so the problems must be 50/50.
These messages may fit immature or frivolous divorces, but they do not fit committed Christians who sacrificed over and over to save their marriages. Many of us prayed, fasted, forgave, returned, tried counseling, and kept hoping. Some of us stayed far too long.
For more on this, see 27 Myths about Divorce That Probably Don’t Apply to Committed Christians.
How Marriage-at-Any-Cost Groups Mislead People
There is another problem too. Some marriage-at-any-cost organizations use charts and studies in ways that make divorce outcomes look worse than they are. They often present themselves as neutral research groups, but their goal is to scare people.
One common tactic is to present real numbers on a compressed scale so the differences look enormous. For example, a chart may make it look as if children of divorce are in catastrophic danger, when the actual numbers are more like this: about 5 in 100 children from married two-parent homes versus 8 in 100 from divorced or separated-mother homes ever being suspended or expelled.
That is a real difference, yes. But it is not the catastrophe the visual presentation implies. Most children in both groups were not suspended or expelled.
The way this graph is shown (on a scale of 0%-16%) makes the figures look more dramatic than they are when shown on a 0%-100% scale.
This is a graph of “Students Ever Suspended or Expelled by Family Type.” The blue line is married birth parents [two-parent birth family].
And the pink line is separated or divorced moms. So those are the single moms. If you look down at the green line, that’s birth dads only, so single dads. So single dads and single moms are about the same level.
That graph looks really scary. It looks like kids from divorced homes are a lot more likely to be suspended or expelled from school. But look at the scale on the graph!
It only goes up to 16%. [It’s a zoomed in view.] What if we saw this graph more realistically, say at 100% not at 16%.
Only a small minority of children from any family structure are ever suspended or expelled. Source: 2016 National Household Education Survey.
And now we have even more reason to be careful with scare tactics. A major 2025 working paper by Andrew C. Johnston, Maggie R. Jones, and Nolan G. Pope used linked tax and Census records for more than 5 million children to examine the long-term effects of parental divorce. The study did indeed find higher risks, but when you look at the actual numbers, the findings are far less sensational than the way some groups will present them.
For example, according to Table 1 of the study,
- less than 1 in 100 daughters of continuously married parents had a teen birth, compared with less than 2 in 100 daughters whose parents divorced during childhood.
- less than 1 in 100 children of continuously married parents were incarcerated under age 20, compared with less than 1 in 100 children whose parents divorced during childhood. And
- less than 1 in 100 children of continuously married parents died before age 25, compared with less than 2 in 100 children of divorce.
- on college residence (not college attendance), 12.9 in 100 children of continuously married parents attended college and lived in college housing, compared with 7.6 in 100 children whose parents divorced during childhood. (Note that it measured only those who could afford to be in college housing. That’s not the same as those attending college.)
Those are real differences. But they are not the kind of numbers that justify panic, exaggeration, or broad-brush condemnation of every divorce. They certainly do not prove that children are always better off if a parent stays in a destructive, abusive, or terror-filled home.
In fact, the study itself points to practical factors after divorce such as lower household income, worse neighborhood quality, and reduced parent proximity as important reasons for these outcomes. That means Christians should not use this research as a scare tactic. We should respond by supporting vulnerable families, protecting abused spouses and children, and telling the truth about what the numbers actually say.
That matters because frightened Christians are often shown charts and statistics as proof that they must stay, even in destructive marriages. But children need peace, stability, safety, and truth. In many high-distress homes, divorce brings relief and healing. A serious study should move us toward compassion and practical support, not panic and broad-brush condemnation.
For a fuller discussion, see
- New Study Shows Kids of Divorce Rarely Face Teen Pregnancy, Jail, or Early Death,
- Is it Always Best to “Stay for the Kids”? No, Not If the Home is Toxic, and
- Chapter 7 in The Life-Saving Divorce.
Why Churches Become Unsafe for the Wounded
Churches become unsafe when they broad-brush all divorce as sin, ignore the reality of abuse, and pressure victims to stay in treacherous marriages. They also become unsafe when pastors speak far more strongly against divorce than against cruelty, domination, adultery, or neglect.
The church should be the safest place on earth for the wounded. We should be the people who know how to distinguish a selfish divorce from a life-saving one. We should be the first to protect the vulnerable, not the last.
For more on the biblical grounds for divorce, see Adultery, Abuse, Abandonment are Biblical Grounds for Divorce and The Bible Teaches Us to Get Away from Abusers. For more on this, see chapter 6 in The Life-Saving Divorce.
If churches want to become safer, they also need better pastoral counsel.
See:
- Safety-First vs. Marriage-First Counseling,
- Marriage Counseling in Abusive Situations is Unethical, and
- Pastor Education: How to Respond Biblically to Abuse and Betrayal in Marriage
- 1 in 4 highly religious marriages report intimate partner violence, a report from the pro-marriage, pro-family Institute for Family Studies.
Final Thoughts
If the church wants to stop shooting its own wounded, we must stop shaming all divorcees, stop flattening every marriage into the same category, and stop using research as a scare tactic.
The wounded are listening.
And many of them have already quietly left.
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