Marriage, Divorce and the Church: Where Did the Church Go Wrong - Coursework Example

Marriage, Divorce and the Church: Where Did the Church Go Wrong?

Introduction

Between 1970 and 2008, divorce rates increased inall the countries of the world except for Latvia and Estonia.According to the Centre for Disease Control (CDC), divorce rates in the United States have declined from 4.0 for every 1000 people in 2000 to 3.4 in every 1000 people in 2012. By contrast, while 8.2 in every 1000 Americans were married in 2000, that proportion had reduced to 6.8 in 2012. While this trend indicates a decline in the divorce rate, the United States still has one of the world's highest divorce rates(Vail, Scott;, 2012). Whereas the CDC statistics are not broken down to give a picture of how Christian marriages fare compared to non-Christian marriages, a 2007 survey of American Catholics does indicate that the rate at which Christian couples are divorcing could as high as that of their non-Christian counterparts. The survey indicated that contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church on divorce, the majority of the surveyed Catholics were receptive of divorce .To reverse the trend, the church should require that prior to being united in marriage, a couple undergoes premarital program.

The Role of the Church in (Christian) Marriage

The traditional role of the church

The traditional role of the church in Christian marriage has been to prepare couples for marriage through premarital programs. The clergy has an important part to play in these programs. For most couples, it is through preparation for marriage that they first encounter their priest or pastor in a personal way. Many couples also arrive largely un-evangelized and lacking the understanding of the great importance of the Christian marriage to the church and the society. Couples are often unaware of the general and denomination-specific teachings about marriage and what the church expects of them. Besides playing the role of the teacher, marriage preparation enables the clergy to get couples to play an active part in their Christian community. The induction is particularly successful if there exists, within the Christian community, an in-house team of experienced couples that have been trained to mentor new couples.

Overview of the history of premarital education

Premarital education is not new. In the United States, it dates to as far as the 1930s. Merrill-Palmer Institute developed the first premarital program in 1932. Nine years later, in 1941, the Philadelphia Marriage Council developed a standardized premarital program whose purpose was two-fold: to help couples gain an understanding of what the married life entails and, in so doing, avoid the potential causes of difficulty in marriage. After the Philadelphia program, premarital programs in the United Sates remained rare until the 1970s, although clergy would often meet with couples prior to uniting them in marriage. Since the 1970s, there has been a shift in the focus of premarital programs from educating couples to preparing them for marriage. In the last three or so decades, the clergy has also sought to formalize and improve the quality of educational programs. An example is Norman Wright’s 1977 program Before You Say I Do. Today, educational programs take a variety of forms – retreats, group sessions, personalized couple counseling, workshops, self-directed curricula, college classes and books among others.

Benefits of premarital programs

Premarital programs are supposed to confer several benefits to couples. Premarital programs impart in couples essential life skills they need for a successful marriage . The skills include communication, conflict resolution, parenting, sexuality, financial management and relations with members of the extended family. Communication is considered the most important of all the skills . A study was conducted among college-age premarital couples to assess the effect of using the Premarital Communication Inventory (PCI). The study found that the use of PCI led to freer and more open discussions. The study emphasized the importance of teaching communication skills to premarital couples in the hope that it would lead to more open discussions of the challenges of marriage. In a separate study, people attending an advanced family studies course at a university in Southwestern were asked to name three interventions they considered useful to their relationship and another three they deemed detrimental. The most mentioned desired skills included communication, problem-solving and the identification and modification of behavior. These three are consistent with what other researchers have identified as being essential to a premarital program. These observations have led some marriage therapists to conclude that marriages are destroyed by “slow leaks”, not blowouts. By “slow leak” is meant the slow yet steady breakdown in communication between a couple.

Premarital programs help couples better understand each other. This is achieved through the use of premarital assessment questionnaires (PAQs). The primary purpose of PAQs is to make couples more aware of the views of their partners in addition to clarifying their own. They have also been used by educators and counselors to design their programs to better meet the unique needs of couples. A valuable attribute of PAQs is their ability to ability to produce individualized feedback to couples regarding the functioning of their relationship. There are three types of PAQs: the Premarital Preparation and relationship (PREPARE) questionnaire; the Facilitating Open Communication, Understanding and Study (FOCCUS) questionnaire and the RELATionship Evaluation (RELATE) questionnaire.

Given their flexibility today, premarital programs offer both couples and trainers convenience. A research evaluated the helpfulness of four formats of premarital education: class, self-directed, counseling and community workshop. On the perceived helpfulness, each format was rated on a scale ranging from helpful to very helpful. The participants considered class and self-directed formats more helpful than counseling and community and church workshops. The researchers found it difficult to recommend one form of education to the other as each produced positive results. However, they did observe that the perceived usefulness was directly related to the length of the given intervention. Thus, workshops were the shortest and least helpful.

The new role of the church(?)

Recently, the Catholic Church in Botswana issued a statement requiring premarital couples to undergo mandatory HIV tests and obtain certificates for the same before they can be united in Holy Matrimony. In so doing, the church in Botswana appears to have set a precedent that Ghana is fast embracing. In Ghana, as in other developing countries, the institution of marriage I s important, not just to the couple but also their relatives. Traditionally, it was parents who initiated marriage, but the practice is fast changing due to modernity. Instead, for Christians, the church is increasingly playing the role of initiating marriage. Given its importance, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus (HIV) that leads to AIDS and eventual death, is a major threat to the institution of matrimony. Consequently, the church in Ghana, following in the footsteps of its counterpart in Botswana is taking upon itself the responsibility of protecting holy matrimony against the threat of HIV. Interestingly, 63% of Ghanaian youth involved in a study approved of the church’s demand for HIV test certificates before marrying couples in the church .

Where the Church Went Wrong

Prior to Christianity, the question of whether or not to divorce a spouse was a question of personal choice, but regulated by the state. With the emergence and rise of Christianity, however, the church gained control over marriage and divorce. The church forbade divorce, quoting Jesus in Luke 16:18. In this verse, Jesus ruled out the possibility of divorce, adding that only death could separate a married couple. Indeed, this has been the consistent teaching of the Catholic Church on divorce, for instance. However, before Christ, in the Roman world, divorce was common. Thus, Jesus’ words were not only revolutionary, but also created conflict between the state and the church. The Roman Empire appeared to be on the losing end of the conflict; it responded by banning marriage between Christians and non-Christians, but the intervention failed. Thus, the church remained in firm control of marriage and divorce.

The church's monopoly over marriage and divorce lasted until early in the sixteenth-century when Henry VIII, King of England, formed his church, the Church of England, so as to divorce his wife. In 1527, the King had announced his desire to divorce his wife, Catherine of Aragon so he could marry his mistress, Anne Boleyn, one of the women who attended to Catherine. Henry had proceeded to seek Pope's permission to divorce his wife, but the Pope declined to grant his wish. Henry responded by breaking ranks with the papacy. Then, in 1532, he seized control of the English clergy and compelled them to recognize him as the leader of the Church of England. Meanwhile, the Roman Catholic Church continued to prohibit divorce. Henry's Church and other Protestant churches permitted it in rare cases. Effectively, a crack in the name of divorce had developed within the walls of holy matrimony.

In recent years, despite the many benefits of premarital education, its uptake has been slow: less than one-fifth of American married couples have undergone premarital education , a situation that has contributed to high divorce rates. The low uptake of premarital education is due to some misconceptions about such education. The first misconception relates to the long-term effectiveness of premarital education in ensuring stability in marriage. The misconception has led to debate among researchers, counselors and educators. The debate persists even though research has demonstrated that, overall, premarital education is effective in generating significant immediate gains in communication skills, conflict resolution and overall relationship quality, and that these gains are seen to last for at least six months to three years. Researchers claim that these gains are obvious when one compares couples that have undergone a premarital program and those that have not. While these claims may be true, there remains a general lack of follow-up studies that would have made it possible to substantiate any statistically significant conclusions about the gains of premarital education beyond three ears.

Many churches provide premarital counseling in the name of premarital programs. While the two have some similarities between them, they are different. Churches need to invest in developing comprehensive premarital programs. As already noted, the clergy plays an important role in premarital programs. Besides being present at the programs, they also initiate and guide various ministries in which premarital and newly-wed couples can serve and be active in their Christian communities. Even though there is a general lack of research on the subject of clergy training in premarital education, it appears that few clergy are investing their time and money to receive training in one of the several available comprehensive premarital programs. Many still prefer to meet with couples and “teach” them based on their general understanding of the married life. An alternative to clergy training is to have a well-trained in-house team of marriage mentors. Better still, the clergy and marriage mentors can complement each other, but only after they have received training.

The duration of a premarital program has an effect on the effectiveness of premarital education. As seen already, most couples get up in planning grand weddings at the expense of their marriages. Under such circumstances, premarital education often comes as an afterthought. Yet research has demonstrated that the longer a couple participates in a premarital program, the more they gain in terms of the essential skills they will need to deal with the many challenges that will come their way. This statement is especially true when one assumes that for a longer program, the quality of the program would be improved.

The Way Forward

The largest ever study supporting the effectiveness of premarital education was conducted by Amato and Stanley in 2001. The study involved 3, 344 adults across four states of the United States. Among other things, the study concluded that couples who received premarital education were 31% less likely to divorce than those who did not. There are three things the church can do to ensure the success premarital education, thereby reducing divorce rates among Christian marriages. First, the church must seek to increase participation in premarital programs by stressing their value to couples. Several studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of premarital education. For instance, in the aforementioned Amato et al. 2001 study, the mean duration of marriage of the participants was twenty-one years. Churches could draw from such studies to demonstrate to skeptical couples what premarital education can do for them and their marriages, not just in the short run, but also in the long run.

Secondly, churches should seek to make premarital experiences relevant. This can be achieved by ensuring that the program addresses the specific needs of a couple. While there are several good comprehensive premarital programs available to choose from, a good counselor should be able to modify any of those programs to meet the specific needs of the concerned couple or couples. The modification may entail adding or removing some tools. Premarital education can also be made relevant by inviting experienced, successfully married couples to share their experiences with premarital couples. Better still, there should be an in-house team of trained mentors. Finally, educators and counselors should make premarital sessions interactive by use reflective questions, for instance.

Third, the church should adopt the “carrot and stick” approach to premarital education. The approach entails the use of incentives and sanctions simultaneously (Vail, Scott;, 2012). One of the incentives has been explained already: the Church should stress to members the value of premarital education. Other incentives could include preferential treatment, on their wedding day, couples that would have undergone a church-supported premarital program. For instance, such couples could be allowed to use church facilities are reduced or no costs. The stick aspect would entail churches requiring that for couples to be wedded in the church, they must have attended the church's premarital program. Churches could further require that couples enroll to those programs six to twelve months prior to their wedding to avoid rushed, last minute training. However, these sanctions must be accompanied by continuous efforts to improve the quality of the programs being offered.

Conclusion

Between 1970 and 2008, divorce rates increased in all the countries of the world except for Latvia and Estonia. Among the Christian community, the increases in divorce rates are attributable to the weakening of the role of the church in marriage. Traditionally, the role of the church has been to prepare premarital couples for marriage, although in recently, the church in other parts of the world has attempted to insure the institution of marriage against the HIV/AIDS pandemic by demanding that premarital couples produce HIV test certificates as a precondition to being wedded in the church . In recent decades, such preparation has been effected through premarital education, also called premarital programs. There exists significant empirical evidence of the effectiveness of premarital education in promoting premarital stability both in the short term and in the longer-term. Despite the evidence, however, the uptake of premarital education remains low. In the United States, for example, only one in every five marriages is preceded by premarital education. The low uptake is attributable to certain weaknesses in the church that include lack of training on the part of the clergy. However, there are some things that churches can do to increase participation in premarital education, thereby reducing the high divorce rates . These include educating members on the benefits of premarital education, tailoring the education to meet their needs and making it a pre-condition to being wedded in the church.