What Focus on the Family’s 2025 Marriage Report Gets Wrong About Divorce, Faith, and Abuse
An abuse-informed review of the State of the Family: Marriage Health in America report
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Focus on the Family’s newly released Marriage Health in America report is already being downloaded and shared widely. On the surface, it looks reassuring: most marriages are “healthy,” faith “helps,” and Christians who pray and attend church report less marital “crisis.”
But when you read the fine print—especially through the eyes of Christian abuse and infidelity survivors—something disturbing emerges. This report does not simply miss the realities of abuse, coercive control, deception, addiction, porn, and betrayal. It systematically erases them.
1. Abuse is not named—at all
Across 31 pages, the report never analyzes abuse as a factor in marital breakdown. They define “Crisis in marriage” relationally (loneliness, lack of intimacy, communication problems), not in terms of safety, fear, integrity, malice, or marriage-destroying sin against another person.
That matters. When harm is unnamed, responsibility quietly shifts away from the one doing harm and toward the one enduring it.
For example, a spouse who leaves because their partner was controlling, deceptive, or sexually coercive is not described as escaping harm, but as part of a marriage with “communication problems” or “lack of intimacy.” The abuser’s destructive behavior disappears from view, while the person who finally identifies it carries the weight of the failure.
This omission of abuse is especially striking given that Jim Daly, president of Focus on the Family, is also a featured speaker in the recent #GreaterThan campaign video, which similarly speaks at length about children and marriage without naming abuse or the damage destructive marriages do to children. Whether intentional or not, the consistency is telling: when abuse goes unnamed, divorce is framed as the problem rather than the response to harm.
Related: How similar “pro-child” messaging appears in the #GreaterThan campaign—and what it leaves out: Why the #GreaterThan Campaign Isn’t Actually Pro-Child
2. The Report Highlights Christian Divorce Rates—But Refuses to Ask Why
The report’s own data reveals an uncomfortable fact: self-identified born-again Christians show the highest divorce rates in the dataset.
By the report’s faith categories, those who are currently divorced include 8% Convictional Christians, 9% Non-Christians, 10% Nominal Christians—and 15% Born-Again Christians. The ever-divorced figures follow the same pattern: 20% Convictional, 22% Non-Christian, 23% Nominal, and 25% Born-Again.
Rather than investigating why this group fares worse, the report quickly reframes the issue around “conviction,” implying that increased prayer, church attendance, and Bible reading somehow insulate marriages from divorce. The implication is clear: more religious practice equals more marital protection.
But the data itself undermines that claim.
How the Report Explains the Problem Away
Faced with these numbers, the report offers a convenient caveat: faith identity is measured now, not at the time of divorce. A person may identify as born-again today, the authors note, but may have divorced earlier—possibly before becoming a practicing Christian as the study defines it.
This maneuver allows the researchers to avoid the obvious follow-up questions. Either these individuals “weren’t really Christians” when they divorced, or their divorces happened in a faith-free vacuum. In both cases, the role of churches, theology, and religious counsel is quietly erased.
What the report never does is examine whether faith communities themselves influenced marital outcomes—positively or negatively.
Notably, the report never claims that “God hates divorce” or cites Scripture, even though that language appears in most Focus on the Family articles, podcasts, and videos on marriage, abuse, and divorce.
The Questions the Report Refused to Ask
If the goal were genuine understanding rather than reputation management, the researchers would have asked questions like these:
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Did you seek help from a pastor, church leader, or Christian counselor before divorcing? What guidance were you given?
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Were you encouraged to stay despite fear, intimidation, addiction, infidelity, or ongoing harm?
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Did concerns about sin, God’s will, church discipline, or reputation delay your decision to leave?
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Were you told divorce was “not biblical” in your situation?
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Did church advice increase your safety—or reduce it?
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Did theology make it harder to name abuse or betrayal? Were you criticized for doing so?
These are not speculative or ideological questions. Survivors answer them every day.
By declining to ask them, the report does not remain neutral. It chooses not to see how spiritual pressure, misapplied theology, and church counsel can trap people in destructive marriages—often longer than they would otherwise stay.
Until research is willing to confront that reality, claims about “conviction” protecting marriage amount to little more than wishful thinking dressed up as data.
3. “Convictional Christians” who still divorced are erased entirely
Perhaps the most insulting omission in this report is what it does to people like those in my 6,000-member private online group: deeply devout Christians who already fit the report’s own definition of “Convictional.”
These are men and women who prayed daily, read Scripture daily, attended church faithfully, served in ministry, sought counseling, and took their vows seriously. Many were married to pastors, elders, worship leaders, missionaries, or respected lay leaders. Some were those leaders.
This is not anecdotal. Research from the Institute for Family Studies found that nearly 1 in 4 highly religious couples report experiencing abuse in their current relationship, undermining the claim that shared or practiced faith reliably protects against harm.
And yet their marriages still ended—not because they lacked conviction, but because they remained faithful in marriages where the other spouse chose deception, betrayal, addiction, or abuse.
This report has no category for them.
By presenting “Convictional Christians” as uniquely protected from crisis and divorce, the study quietly implies that those who did divorce must not have practiced their faith deeply enough. That is not only false—it is spiritually cruel.
It makes survivors invisible instead of listening to them as witnesses.
When a study’s framework cannot account for faithful people who still experienced betrayal and harm, the problem is not those people. The problem is the framework.
If you are reading this and thinking, “That was me—I did all of the right things, and my marriage still imploded,” please hear this clearly: you are not invisible to God, even if you are invisible to Focus on the Family’s report. Your prayers were real. Your faith was real. Your obedience was real. What failed was not your conviction—it was a system that refused to hold sin accountable and preferred tidy narratives over costly truth. Scripture never teaches that spiritual disciplines can override another person’s free will to lie, betray, or abuse. You did not fall through a spiritual crack. You were pushed there by theology that could not name evil when it appeared inside marriage.
4. Infidelity disappears into “sexual issues/lack of sexual intimacy”
Betrayal, secret double lives, serial affairs, and porn escalation are not named, they disappear into a neutral category, as if this were about mismatched sexual desire instead of broken trust.
This framing equates the pain of being sexually denied with the trauma of being sexually betrayed. One is disappointment; the other is violation. Treating them as the same obscures responsibility and protects offenders.
5. Deception is reframed as “things I wish I had known” before marriage
One of the most troubling sections lists what divorced people “wish they had known” before marriage: addictions, infidelity, control issues, lying.
They are never asked about the final straw before the divorce, or given the option to report marriage-endangering sins, other than “Infidelity/affairs.”
By talking about these serious issues as “things individuals wished they had known,” they subtly blame the victim for “choosing poorly,” rather than naming the truth: many of these behaviors were hidden, denied, lied about, or emerged after the wedding. Abuse beginning on the honeymoon is tragically common.
Scripture is clear that deceit matters. In 1 Corinthians 5:11, Paul instructs believers not to remain bound in close fellowship with someone who claims to be a brother yet persists in sexual immorality, drunkenness, greed, or swindling. Fraud and exploitation are covenant violations—not minor flaws.
Forcing people to remain bound to someone who obtained marriage through fraud is not biblical fidelity—it’s injustice.
6. Porn and betrayal are minimized
This report misleads readers by describing a well-documented driver of marital betrayal (pornography) as a minor, temporary inconvenience—rather than naming it as a pattern of deception that often destroys trust and safety.
Pornography is minimized in a footnote and said to affect “just 2.7%” of marriages overall—despite acknowledging a “wide body of research” showing its devastating effects. Even when the number nearly triples (7.9%) in years 6–10 of marriage, it’s brushed off as a “seven-year itch.”
Porn is not an itch. It is often accompanied by secrecy, entitlement, escalation, sexual coercion, and deep betrayal. Minimizing it does not protect marriages; it protects offenders.
7. “Crisis” is never described as a pattern of sin in the marriage.
Marital crisis is framed as stress, busyness, lack of intimacy, or poor communication. There is no category for fear, intimidation, exploitation, or danger.
This makes abusive marriages statistically invisible. It also rewards silence. In many Christian communities, devout couples are less likely to label their marriage a crisis—even when it is—because naming it feels disloyal or faithless. Endurance is mistaken for health.
As explained in The Life-Saving Divorce, spiritual practices do not prevent abuse. They are often used to hide it (see https://lifesavingdivorce.com/runfromabusers/).
8. Seeking help is framed as good—even when that help may be unsafe
The report notes that “convictional” Christians are more likely to seek help through prayer, the Bible, or church leaders, and less likely to seek professional counseling. What it never asks is whether that help was safe, informed about abuse, or effective.
Many survivors were told to pray harder, submit more, forgive faster, or endure longer—guidance that didn’t stop abuse, but escalated it. Groups like Focus on the Family may say “leave” or “get to safety,” but only temporarily. Divorce is ruled out from the start, and separation is treated as a tool for reconciliation, not protection. There are no real safety protocols for determining whether reconciliation is safe now—or ever.
A system that discourages outside help, minimizes abuse, and prioritizes preserving marriage over protecting lives is not neutral. It is dangerous.
The bottom line
This report presents itself as pro-marriage. But a marriage study that cannot name abuse, deception, or exploitation is not protecting marriage. It is protecting an institution at the expense of the vulnerable.
God does not ask His children to preserve appearances by tolerating harm. He calls us to truth. And truth begins by naming what actually breaks marriages—not blaming the people who finally had the courage to leave.
For further biblical and pastoral clarity, see https://lifesavingdivorce.com/abuse-in-bible/ and https://lifesavingdivorce.com/runfromabusers/.
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