October 8, 2009
Marriage is Hard; The Religious Right admits it.
by Lisa Miller
Newsweek
Billy Graham had a rule. He was a powerful man, away from his wife and children more often than he was with them. Aware of the significance of his reputation and convinced of the moral value of the Gospel message, he took precautions to guard against his own human weakness. He gave his ministry colleagues explicit instructions: never leave me alone in a room with a woman who is not my wife.
If only someone had given John Ensign similar advice. Or if someone did, that he'd heeded it. The Ensign story continues to reverberate not because of its delicious best-friend's-girl plotline (for who among us is surprised anymore that politicians sleep around?), but because he said he stood for something else. He is a "family values" Republican who voted for the impeachment of Bill Clinton and in 2004 lent his support to a constitutional amendment defining marriage, saying, "Marriage is an extremely important institution in this country, and protecting it is, in my mind, worth the extraordinary step of amending our Constitution." To which the obvious retort is: but not the ordinary step of protecting your wife and children from public humiliation? Ensign has become the latest example of what so many see as the failure of the right to retain any credibility on the marriage question.
No one denies that conservative Christians have a marriage problem, a dizzying gap between their articulated ideals and their success in achieving them. According to the Pew Forum, evangelicals are more likely to be divorced than Roman Catholics, Mormons, the Eastern Orthodox, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and atheists. Of course, every person who utters "till death do us part" and then separates is, in a sense, conceding defeat. But when evangelicals are leading the charge in the marriage movement (and now, the anti-gay-marriage movement) arguing that sacred unions between one man and one woman are good for society because they're good for children, one would hope that they'd have worked out the kinks a little better than the rest of us.
A new generation of leaders is trying to reclaim the high ground by asserting publicly what everyone who has ever been married knows: marriage is hard. It wasn't so long ago that the failure of a Christian marriage was regarded as shameful. Divorced women, in particular, were ostracized or shunned. As a result, marriage vows were carried like a Christian duty; problems were kept hidden. Christian men of the Greatest Generation were "more regimented" when it came to marriage, says Jim Daly, the president since 2005 of Focus on the Family. "You do this out of duty. You respect authority and institutions."
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