Quotes about Divorce

So He told them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery against her.

And if a woman divorces her husband and marries another man, she commits adultery.”

Anyone who divorces his wife and marries another woman commits adultery, and he who marries a divorced woman commits adultery.

But if she does, she must remain unmarried or else be reconciled to her husband. And a husband must not divorce his wife.

Anger is the mother of a whole brood of evil actions. Divorce too often is the bitter fruit of anger.

C. S. Lewis shocked many people in his day when he came out in favor of allowing divorce, on the grounds that we Christians have no right to impose our morality on society at large. Although he would continue to oppose divorce on moral grounds, he maintained the distinction between morality and legality.

Jimmy Carter taught a Sunday school class throughout his presidency, winning the grudging respect of reporters who had once questioned his religious talk as a political ploy. Even so, he lost many Christians' votes to Ronald Reagan, the only U.S. president to have been divorced and who rarely attended church and gave little to charity, mainly because Reagan supported many of the favorite causes of the religious Right.

I have found consolation, for example, in C. S. Lewis's depiction in The Great Divorce of hell as a place that people choose, and continue to choose even when they end up there. As Milton's Satan put it, Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.

The divorce between Church and State ought to be absolute. It ought to be so absolute that no Church property anywhere, in any state or in the nation, should be exempt from equal taxation; for if you exempt the property of any church organization, to that extent you impose a tax upon the whole community.

Of course, bad marriages are so pervasive that they have invaded the faith community too.

Marriage is sacred. And the Bible says that God hates divorce. He hates it because he wants better for you. He never intended for you to have a broken marriage of a broken home. He loves you.

To have a simple, untroubled faith, you must keep your spiritual innocence. That requires avoiding cynicism and criticism. This is the day of the cynics, the critics, and the pickle-suckers. Criticism is the forerunner of divorce, the cultivator of rebellion, sometimes a catalyst that leads to failure. In the Church, it sows the seed of inactivity and finally apostasy.