What is the impact of divorce on children's religious lives?
Divorce
When Jesus had finished saying these things, he left Galilee and went into the region of Judea to the other side of the Jordan. Large crowds followed him, and he healed them there.
Some Pharisees came to him to test him. They asked, "Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any and every reason?"
"Haven't you read," he replied, "that at the beginning the Creator 'made them male and female,' and said, 'For this reason a man will leave his father and mother and be united to his wife, and the two will become one flesh'[b]? So they are no longer two, but one. Therefore what God has joined together, let man not separate."
"Why then," they asked, "did Moses command that a man give his wife a certificate of divorce and send her away?"
Jesus replied, "Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for marital unfaithfulness, and marries another woman commits adultery."
The Little Children and Jesus
Then little children were brought to Jesus for him to place his hands on them and pray for them. But the disciples rebuked those who brought them. Jesus said, "Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these." When he had placed his hands on them, he went on from there.
(Matthew 19:1-9,13-15, NIV)
We discovered that children of divorce are far less likely when they grow up to say they are very or even fairly religious. They're far less likely to attend a house of worship frequently. There is about a 14 percent difference in this area between children of divorce and children of intact families. They're also less likely to be a member of a house of worship or to be a leader there.
Partly this is because the children are less likely to have been involved in a community of faith as a child. Divorce itself makes it difficult logistically for parents to stay connected to any kind of community.
But there are deeper issues. For example, when children of divorce hear that God is like a father or a parent because God's always there for you, they experience a disconnect. For them, parental absence is as common an experience as parental presence.
It's remarkable to talk to the children of divorce about the parable of the prodigal son, in which the father waits for his errant son to come home. They recognize the act of leaving home, but in their experience it was the parent who left, not the child. It was the parent who left the family, or who was always leaving to go to work or out on dates. If anyone was staying home waiting for someone to return, it was the child waiting for mom and dad to come home.
The parable is about the patient love of God. This means that children of divorce see themselves in the role of God in the story. What a scary, strange feeling that is for such children—especially if no one around them in the community of faith understands how they're seeing it. These kinds of disconnects are what keep the children of divorce as they grow up more distant from church.
Yet the findings overall are somewhat complicated. Though generally the grown-up children of divorce are substantially less religious than those from intact families, a portion of them become much more religious. And I have heard anecdotally of many children of divorce who seek out the church because they're looking for the meaning and stability they find there.
......
There is an interesting historical background to this issue. When the divorce revolution took off with the advent of no-fault divorce in the 1960s, experts predicted that marriages overall would be happier because all the unhappy people would get divorced. Studies have shown, however, that as the divorce rate grew, the marital happiness rate fell. As marriage became easier to get out of, the threshold of what constituted a problematic marriage was lowered.
Excerpts from No Good Divorce -- The Children's Perspective, Christian Century, February 7, 2006.