Fundie Divorce and Other Dramas

What god has put together let no man put asunder, goes the line. And since judges are men, and laws are written by men that means that divorce, if you’re a Biblical literalist, seems? Bad? I mean a Biblical literalist might look at all the times that people in the Bible married multiple women and also had concubines as well, and there were laws about doing a divorce but Jesus said it was only because of sin and then Paul said it’d be better if you never got married in the first place but this is only useful for spherical christians in a vacuum.

How do you think fundamentalist churches handle divorces? Setting aside the way that, as human beings in a social setting may actually handle something like this sensible, the fundie environment is one with a lot of its own special traditions and rules. Rules like how to absolutely mishandle a complex topic like a divorce.

And just to be clear on this one by the way, I am 100% pro-divorce. I think divorces are good. They suck to experience, I don’t think anyone goes into a divorce going ‘eff yeah, time to be divorced!’ but I think if a relationship is collapsing or failing nobody should be trying to stick around and force it into working when it doesn’t. Which is why an environment that makes this hard decision worse uh, sucks. And it sucks because of techniques liiike…

Judeeing

First of all there’s the option that works within a fundamentalist church’s greatest and most well-used tool, which is endless denial of reality. Judeeing is when you continue to associate with the divorced people, continue to talk to them and just pointedly never bring any of it up. This can create a really weird alienated feeling where you watch two people having a completely normal conversation where you’ll watch voids form. You know, like person A, the divorced one, says hi, how are you, how’s your partner? and the other will say oh, he’s fine, dead pause where a response question would be.

The important thing for this isn’t to do anything that acknowledges the experience of the person undergoing the divorce. Sometimes you’ll have someone gracious who is willing to shift topics and make things a little gracious, but vitally, you never ever ever offer support or help based on what they’re going through. You don’t do anything that implies their free time has changed or their financial situation is difficult.

This technique is really interesting because it’s clearly really difficult to do. It’s actively hard, you have to maintain a conversation that’s entirely emotionally brittle but also never do anything that might direct attention to the most important thing happening right now. In this regard it underscores the way that we WASPs will expend enormous effort in doing something for someone else as long as it’s not the much easier, much more sensible and emotionally honest option. Accepting imperfection or failure in people is hard and it’s emotionally challenging and so, uh, just… just don’t? Don’t do that. Don’t need to.

Fundies will literally construct an entire alternate reality rather than recognise that some people need therapy. Probably starting with themselves.

Unpersoning

Hey, that sounds like a lot of work though. What if instead you could just pretend that one of the people involved wasn’t a thing? What if, when presented with two people who gave you a difficult kind of experience to reconcile with, within your faith, and you don’t have the skills to confront anyone about that or recognise that sometimes people are bad for one another, what if instead, like, just…

One of them wasn’t there?

This is really specific, really direct kind of complete freezeout. The church collectively picks one of the people in the former couple and just ignores the other. Wholesale. I’ve seen this happen a few times but every time it’s been the unpersoning of the woman in the couple, which, you know, maybe that’s because in every example the church collectively agreed that the woman did the bad thing or maybe it’s just that we were pre-built and prepared to hate women a lot? Maybe.

The thing is this Unpersoning is an example of treating the experience as something that you need to punish, but not something that you have the emotional

Anyway, Unpersoning is easy but it runs into risks if say, the Unperson is the one with the kids and the other kids play with those kids. It can be harder to isolate the kids and you know, the parents and adults don’t want to tell the kids ‘don’t talk to them, they did a divorce,’ so instead it’s just social pressure, a sort of low-key pushing away from shared events with that kid or those kids. This is obviously, a tough one. The good news is that kids just have enough suffering and struggles to go through because it’s not like they’re people with agency and emotional needs.

Heck, just tell the kids that one of the parents died, and call the parent that’s still around a widow and let the kids think that. Even if the other parent is in the church and the kid just doesn’t recognise them! What’s wrong with a bit of gaslighting? They’re kids, they won’t remember and be messed up by this!

The Whole Church Divorces

Then there’s another option which is… weird to see in action but I’ve absolutely seen it. In the case of a Church Divorce, basically, everyone in the church picks one side of the conversation, and then only interact with that side of it. I’ve noticed this only happened in the churches which were small enough that only one couple could have a divorce at a time – larger churches, this strategy tends to create weird shattering spaces where people have to organise a kind of chart to work out whether or not the person they were talking to could recognise the existence of another person or not.

This technique is pretty solid in those smaller groups though. Because suddenly you’re not feeling like you did something bad or excluded a person, you’re not Abandoning Fellowship, or Punishing a Person. It’s actually much more like half the church gets social anxiety, and it can be as simple as ‘hey, did I talk to that person more recently than the other? well, I don’t want to talk about the d word, so… soo I guess I’ll just never talk to that other person, ever again!’

Remember, one of the things that God gives you is strength and courage, which you should never use to do anything modestly socially uncomfortable.