Author: frjim123

Those Infernal Republicans…

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The Infernal Republicans

The GOP (which is short for “Grand Old Party”) emerged as a political party in the mid-19th century as the anti-slavery party. The old “Whig” party was destroyed by its own corruption, so there was a political vacuum for a political entity to embody their political principles while also advocating for the swift elimination of chattel slavery.

The election of 1860 gave America their first Republican president in Abraham Lincoln. The 1860 election was a serious battle between the Democrats (pro slavery), Constitutionalists, and the Republicans (GOP). Lincoln emerged the clear winner, but he got zero southern support.

Lincoln ran on a platform of keeping the union together, not freeing slaves. In fact, his inaugural speech made clear that keeping all the States together was his most important goal. But the Southern States were having none of it. One by one, the states below the Mason-Dixon Line began to withdraw from the Union, starting with South Carolina.

At that point, Lincoln had a choice. He could respect the independence of the several states to make their own decisions about the Union. He could enter into negotiations with the secessionists in the hope of finding a compromise to keep the states together. Or he could slap the “traitor” label on those states who left and put together an Army to force the seceding States back into Union.

He chose the last option.

Lincoln believed that the nation was first and foremost a federation of subservient states…that the very nature of the “United States” was…”United”. Anyone or anything intent on separating individual states from that could not be countenanced. Lincoln attempted to levy 75,000 men from each state of the Union to form an army to invade the south and force them back to the federation at the end of the bayonet.

The result of this was the secession of more southern states. The battle lines were drawn.

The Republican Party in 1862 then introduced a new reason for the war. It wasn’t to put down a rebellion against a proper government…but rather a holy war to free African slaves from their cruel slave masters. All this, even though Lincoln had said keeping the Union together with slavery was acceptable to him.

The end of the Civil War ushered in the end of the free states. Under the Republican Party, the United States was an ascendent federal government served by individual states. And for the next 150 years, this belief carried weight as the US Constitution became weaker and weaker.

The Republicans from 1865 to 1901 expanded the power of the federal government and the territory of the United States in the western part of North America. The Republicans were “in bed” with big business, whose thirst for power and expansion of their commercial markets at the expense of the native tribes, racially non-Europeans, and former slaves could never achieve satiety.

In 1901 the United States had the first Progressive president. Was he a Democrat like Woodrow Wilson or Franklin Delano Roosevelt? No…it was a Republican.

Theodore Roosevelt wielded the federal government far beyond the scope of the United States constitution. The Sherman Anti-Trust Act legislation used the power of the federal establishment to reign in business monopolies even though there is nothing in the Constitution about the federal government having that power. Roosevelt also expanded the power of the President by adding departments to the executive branch who often acted through the courts to expand government power.

Here is my point: The GOP has never been a party of limited federal government…it has always been about using government towards a “virtuous” end. In short, the GOP is a Progressive party.

Since the ascendency of Theodore Roosevelt, the federal establishment has tyrannized the individual states and their people. It is the federal government that steals upwards of 60% of the money earned by the most productive Americans. It is the federal government that regulates far beyond the scope of the Constitution, choking entrepreneurs and absconding with their resources while adding horrible layers of bureaucracy. And now, thanks to the federal government, Ponzi schemes like Social Security, Medicaid, and Obamacare rape families of their money and destroy their access to healthcare by inflating costs beyond the capability of working people to pay.

A few weeks ago, the American people overthrew a corrupt and incompetent President. There is hope that the second term of Donald Trump – the GOP candidate – will bring transformation of the government and unleash economic growth and prosperity.

But Trump is a Progressive in the image of Teddy Roosevelt. He is not a libertarian of the Austrian / Chicago school…he is Keynesian. He supports tariffs, which the American customers pays. He supports providing minuscule tax cuts, but plans to expand government services. With a $36 trillion debt, the thought of balancing the budget by ending government programs and reducing spending doesn’t appeal to the populist…President Donald Trump.

I do not expect any significant change to the destruction of America’s soul from Trump.

Neither should you.

A Fresh Approach to Servant Leadership

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Leadership always got my attention as a young man. I saw a lot of leaders before I turned 21. I remember my athletic coaches by name. Many of the teachers who endured me as a student left impressions on me – some good, some less so.

Jesus’ disciples were also interested in leadership. In fact, we shared a common approach. I believed that leaders were “in charge” and told people what to do. This was modeled to me over and over growing up.

Eventually, I saw that this doesn’t work. People don’t like being pushed around…*I* certainly don’t. Then I was introduced to a new idea of leadership: servant leadership.

Jesus taught and practiced this approach. He washed his disciples’ feet. When they would fuss with each other about who was the greatest, he brought in little children and said, “This is what it’s all about.”

I was enamored. No more yelling. No more berating…just serve the people you lead. It made sense. I practiced servant leadership all my life from my mid-20s going forward.  The theory worked well. Occasionally, however, someone would come along that would take advantage of me. I had a female employee who accused me of being inappropriate with her because I gave her a sympathetic ear and a should to cry on. The accusation was baseless, but not uncommon in the 1990s. Servant leadership in this case led to one of the worst professional crises of my life.

When I worked on my Ph.D in leadership, I learned many approaches. The one that got my attention early on was “existential” leadership. Essentially, it meant determining a leadership approach not on the style the leader liked but rather the needs of the employee. When trust and competency was high, a leader could be more relaxed and laissez-faire. But where trust or competency was low, the leader needed a more active and even micro-managing set of behaviors.

As I was developing a better theory of leadership during my coursework, I had a staff member that received multiple counseling statements for sub-par behavior and performance. Eventually, I made the decision to fire this member of my team because he was so substandard and showed no capacity to learn from mistakes or corrective training.

This experience taught me that a leader must never put the desires or even needs of a substandard member before the mission of the organization. Supervisors have a duty to protect their organizations by not handing off problem people down the line. A good supervisor must look after the whole team, reward appropriate performance, promote those who excel, and (sadly) eliminate problem employees when they become a detriment.

Can a servant leader be an effective manager? I believe that is a case-by-case situation. Two important qualities of the employee make servant leadership appropriate: (1) High motivation and, (2) high competency.

As a leader of a brigade team, I had very competent subordinates. As a result, I did everything I could to simply keep everyone from distracting these teammates and make it easy for them to focus on their jobs. I could be a servant leader easily in this case because I had the right kind of people.

But shortly after my tenure ended at the brigade, I had another situation emerge where I helped send an employee out of the military and into civilian life. This teammate was so racked with personal and emotional problems that there was no way anything could bring redemption. I drove this person to the airport after making sure the out-processing steps were completed by the numbers.

I believe an expansion of servant leadership is important. Yes, leaders serve their teams and help them. But the first duty of a supervisor is to insure the team performs…that the team serves the organization’s mission by providing appropriate service to its customers. Sometimes the best servant leadership is to fire an employee or issue a reprimand or put together a P.I.P. (personal improvement program).

Servant leadership is still my go-to approach to leadership. But now its based in the real world…not in the “pie-in-the-sky” world of my youthfulness.

Divorced Preachers? Where?

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The marriage of clergy is a controversial subject. Here are the current practices in the Christian tradition:

Roman Catholic: Clergy may not be married unless they are transfers from traditions that allow marriage. In such cases, the divorce or death of the wife means that the priest/deacon may not remarry without a dispensation from the local bishop. Bishops may not be married.

Eastern Orthodox: Clergy can be married IF they are married prior to their ordination to the priesthood – but married clergy are forbidden to be consecrated bishops. If a priest’s or deacon’s marriage ends from death or divorce, he may not remarry without a dispensation from the church and only for extraordinary reasons (such as a cleric family with many small children).

Anglican: These matters are handled by the diocese and/or jurisdiction where the cleric is from. In most cases, a cleric can marry, divorce, and remarry without concern once. Second remarriages are rare…and more than that are rarer still. Bishops can be married. Jurisdictions that allow same-sex marriages are in a state of technical disfellowship within the communion, thought that is not enforced.

Protestant: Wide variation. Marriages are generally allowed for Protestant clergy. In some places, when a cleric is divorced, he or she is also defrocked and disfellowshipped. In other communities, divorce has no bearing on the cleric…even to the point of permitting her or him to remain in their current ministry.

The various groups within Christianity that forbid remarriage do so with the belief that marriage is a sacrament (or a Biblical model) of the relationship between Christ and the Church. It is a “once-in-a-lifetime” experience. And while there are allowances for certain conditions, remarriage is an exception, not a given.

Most faith communities that do not excommunicate their divorced clergy might require some sort of divorce recovery program or individualized therapy before allowing the cleric to return to vocational ministry. In almost no settings would a member of the clergy be allowed to remarry before a healing period of 18-36 months. All of these steps are prudent.

In cases where clergy endure divorces as the “victim” of divorce (meaning she/he did not seek the divorce and wanted reconciliation), there is very little difference in remarriage. For example, some denominations would treat the “victim” of divorce the same with regards to whether or how remarriage happens. In a few denominations, a divorce-is-divorce approach means even if the spouse leaves, the cleric’s days as a vocational minister is over. If your spouse leaves you, that’s life.

There is another critical factor involved in this discussion: The leadership role of clergy. We expect clergy to be true paragons of virtue. Pastors find themselves on pedestals because, “to whom much is given, much is required.” This means that clergy must be “above reproach.” A divorced cleric, therefore, carries a stigma. Marital failure is often like the “Scarlet Letter”.

We need more discussion on this subject. Yes, I have a “horse in this race”. Let’s keep the discussion going anyway.

An Old Curriculum…Restored?

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America’s public school systems has some amazing teachers – some I know personally. But there are many teachers, administrators, and even advocates of the current system that are blind to the many failures the current system produces.

I was blessed to have some amazing people in my student years who challenged me to do better. And while I was often deaf to their voice or emotionally upset by their comments, I learned a few things…and even practiced one or two of them.

I hope that what follows can be included in any future curricula at any school in America. We need a return to this formula to truly Make America Great Again…political party differences notwithstanding.

Do you want to be the best you can be? Here are a few ideas about that noble and wonderful path:

1. Leave your ego at the door.

2. Be prepared to work harder than you’ve ever worked before. The only place where Success comes before Work is in the dictionary.

3. You must sacrifice good things that do not matter for the great things that do.

4. You must get ruthless with yourself.

5. You must forget everything you think you know about yourself. The only thing that matters is the generation of references to prove what you can do in the world of experience.

6. Mediocre people don’t like high performers. They will tell you to slow down, take a break, be realistic. You must speed up, keep going, and be “UNrealistic”.

7. You must make an ally out of two paradoxical principles: self-knowledge and faith. You need to have a clear understanding of where you stand at any given moment, but have a powerful belief in where you will be by working hard and getting better.

8. You must have a clear demarcation between what you believe and what you know. Don’t mix up the two.

9. Less than 1% of the people in this world are willing to do what it takes to push the limits and become the greatest they can be. That’s why they are the most prosperous and happy people on the planet.

10. You have no idea how jealous and petty people can become when you become great.

Exposing the Church: Time for Real Reformation

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This is a painful entry to write because it is critical of the Church. I hope the readers of my materials will understand that I take no delight in exposing the truth about the Christian community…I love the Church. But we must face our own demons if we are to heal and change the perception of the world about who we really are.

Today is known as Reformation Day…the yearly remembrance of Martin Luther nailing his 95 ideas on the door of his church building that launched a rebellion against the Roman Catholic Church. The Church in the West needed reforming. It needs reforming again…

Few people are more adept at understanding the true nature of the Church than His Beatitude, Metropolitan Jonah Paffhausen. He was the former head of the Orthodox Church in America. His story epitomizes the real sickness of Christianity that demands we move down the road of repentance, sackcloth, and ashes.

Metropolitan Jonah addressed the Anglican Church of North America in 2009 during one of their first meetings. His intent was to reach out to this new Anglican movement in the United States and hopefully create a link that would bring these Anglicans into full communion with the Orthodox Communion. The link to his address is here: https://youtu.be/sHRgCIPofc8?si=vEr4XY-kF2odlzv_

My focus is on his simple words uttered at the beginning of the address: “We are all hypocrites.” Metropolitan Jonah wanted to make clear from the outset that he was not living in an unrealistic, “pie-in-the-sky” world where the millenium had arrived. He understood that the Church was an organization filled with hypocrisy, denial, and even outright deceit. The extent of the corruption was later to make itself plain to him in great power.

Shortly after this address, Metropolitan Jonah was confronted by bishops from his own church for his “mismanagement”. As a result, Metropolitan Jonah was forced to take a leave of absence from his duties as the senior bishop of the OCA. Not long after that, he was railroaded into submitting his permanent resignation as Primate of the OCA.

I’ve never discovered the full reasons behind his betrayal and expulsion, but I have my hunches. The bottom line, however, is that the bishops of the OCA acted because they wanted to preserve their church from Jonah’s reforming ways. Their was sin in the camp, and Jonah intended to expose it no matter where it was. The bishops would have none of that.

In 1991, I attended the Chaplain Officer Basic Course at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. One of the themes repeated to us over and over was this: “Beware of S.A.M.: Sex, Alcohol, and Money.” In the intervening years, I’ve come to believe that acronym should be S.P.A.M.; add the word “power” for that “P”. Clergy are held to a higher standard of human behavior on S.A.M., but not P. Clergy are not trained well in handling power, which explains why we do such stupid stuff so often. It is also the greatest source of the church’s corruption…because so many men and women in church authority use power to cover-up abuse of sex, alcohol, and money. It’s a predictable pattern.

In the early 1990s, the Roman Catholic Church was rocked with stories of clerics and other leaders using their power to abuse women and children. Some priests who violently raped children were sent to new parishes where their proclivity to molest children surfaced again. This cycle sometimes repeated itself 3 or more times in a diocese. The bishops involved were often hindered in their willingness to help by the confidentiality of the sacrament of reconciliation. But more often than not, they were trying to protect the church from litigation and public exposure. What’s worst some bishops actually blamed the victims of this conduct in an attempt to say that children “seduced” priests to rape them.

Of course Protestant churches often raise their heads arrogantly and say that this didn’t happen in their denominations. Truth be told, however, the Protestant churches in America had MORE miscarriages of justice and bureaucratic maneuvering to cover up sexual abuse of their leaders than their Roman Catholic counterparts. At least that was what the statistics suggested in the mid-90s when I studied this problem.

One can hardly turn on religious TV without seeing greedy clergy exploiting the poorest and most desperate for their money. No one best represents this mess than the rise and collapse of Robert Tilton. An uneducated salesman, Tilton fleeced his own flock for millions of dollars every year while also taking his “TV Ministry” nation-wide to get “$1000 vows) from people looking for a miracle to heal them of terminal disease or a way out of bitter poverty. ABC News exposed Tilton as a charlatan in 1991, and his organization finally fell apart. But there are thousands of others using the same approach to steal millions of dollars from the lowest of the low on the social-economic ladder.

But there is another serious problem. It is the wholesale abuse of the clergy by their congregations and their ecclesiastical superiors. Anyone who has been in the ministry longer than 5 years hears stories of local congregations putting their pastors out on the streets for reasons as crazy as “wearing worldly ties” to “not using the right translation of the Bible”. Truth be told, most of the people who were my contemporaries at Asbury Theological Seminary were good men and women wanting nothing more than to serve, love, and minister to their congregations. Too many of my seminary compatriots are no longer in ministry because congregations have abused their pastors, leaving broken marriages and emotionally scarred clergy in their wake. I have not addressed the abuses of bishops, district superintendents, and boards of ordained ministry involved in destroying clergy.

It’s time for more than adjustments. We need reform. Here are just a few items to consider:

1.        We need to hear more about how to prevent our clergy from getting destroyed by S.P.A.M. We need to reinforce standards, not cover up abusers. But we need compassionate answers to the all-too-human tendency to abuse our sexualities, substances, and money.

2.        Denominational officials need policies that provide pastoral care for people abused by clergy. There must also be a clear delineation in the penitent-confessor relationship where these denominational officials are concerned. Bishops Ordinary should never hear the confessions of their priests. Ever. It is a formula for covering up and abuse at every level.

3.        Denominations need to embrace that they have a duty to help their clergy, even when they fall into moral failure. Defrocking and expelling is the old answer…but it is inadequate. Even when violations of standards are severe enough for a lifelong expulsion from leadership in congregational matters, there must be means to support the sinner and his/her family for a limited time to help the former cleric’s loved ones survive through the earliest stages of healing. Pastors are human beings…and none of us are perfect. “We are all hypocrites”.

4.        Finally, it’s time for we clergy to realize that we cannot serve God and mammon. Minimalism is as much a part of our calling as learning church history and biblical theology. If we are not ready to support ourselves in ministry, we are probably exposing ourselves and our families to tremendous risk. This philosophy of minimalism applies to substance abuse as well…we need to have tools at the ready to manage our ongoing emotional and spiritual development so that using alcohol and drugs to numb our hearts instead of growing interpersonally happens less often.

Happy Days are Here Again? Not Really…

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A Reflection on an Election.

The end of the election cycle this year brought relief for many Christians. Kamala Harris was soundly defeated, Donald Trump was overwhelmingly (in the electoral college) elected, and we expect the Millenium to start the day after inauguration.

At least that’s what I’m seeing from many evangelicals and conservative Christians.

I awoke Wednesday morning about 2:00 AM local time and checked my preferred news outlets to see what was happening. It seemed clear that President Trump was well on his way to winning. In past years, this would thrill me. This year the experience was different.

I felt sad.

After I checked the local elections, I was especially concerned about the various Missouri constitutional amendments, especially Amendment 3 which would legalize infanticide in the womb (I refuse to us the language of the Left. It’s not “abortion”…it is killing at best, murder at worst.) Three of the amendments I voted against (including Amendment 3) were passed by the peopl of Missouri, overriding the legislature and governor. The other two amendments created a “public school funding” amendment to allow sports betting and a mandate that increased the minimum wage, forced employers to allow their employers time off for family and personal reasons, and other “pro-employee” requirements.

I felt nauseous that my state, an otherwise conservative bastion, would tolerate allowing our unborn children to be slaughtered in the womb. Then I discovered that the same amendment mandates that children who want to “transgender” can have access to the procedure and even receive state funding for the procedure. Finally, I discovered that young minor girls can get abortions without mandating that their parents know and give consent.

I also see through the whole sports betting nonsense. All this does is solicit organized crime to blackmail professional athletes to blow games so these manipulators can make millions of dollars. They shroud their corruption in the “money for education” nonsense…the same drivel that was used to allow the poorest among us to spend their money on the lottery, hoping that their purchases of tickets will allow them to be millionaires. Of course, we still have problems funding salaries for our teachers here…and I predict we will even with this stupid new amendment passing.

And these “pro-emp[l;oyee” requirements will only make our state poorer and our workers face an increased risk of unemployment. Employers forced to pay their workforce more money will now be looking to increase efficiency with fewer employees, sending more of the poorest on social services for the sub-par pittance they provide. In addition, businesses will now raise their prices on goods and services to make their bottom lines balance, hitting their customers with inflation. Finally, some small businesses, already fighting to stay in business, will close their doors, sending their former employees onto the social service lines. Misery, indeed!

I did an analysis of this election. 67 million Americans voted for a candidate to be our president that was supremely ill-prepared and ill-equipped to be the most important person of the greatest country of the world. She received 47% of the vote in this country. This means, in simplified terms, that we were 4% away from electing a person who would destroy America, multiply the misery of the average American, and give the nuclear launch system to a person who can’t even put together a substantive sentence.

Finally, I remain appalled at the mainstream media. I call the the “LameStreamMedia” for a simple reason: they are liars and propaganda mouthpieces for the statist minority in America. They propped up Kamala Harris and trashed Donald Trump with lies, distortions, fake news, and outright slander. In America, we have a dirth of real, objective news. It’s time we ignore ABC, NBC, CBS, the New York Times, the Washington Post, CNN, MSNBC, and yes, even Fox. We need real news and objective reporting, not the infected puss material hoisted on us regularly by the LameStreamMedia.

I pray for the President – whoever he or she is. I pray President Trump discovers ways to make America better. I believe it starts by neutering the federal establishment in Washington, DC…which he could easily do because he can only serve one more term this iteration. We need libertarian ideas, smaller government, and an America-first approach to economics that stops allowing other nation states to block access to their markets from our goods and services without cost to their own businesses. I’m hopeful.

But we better be ready, because the statists are coming to derail all that…and they are good at that. When it comes to the next two years, I hope the GOP has a “take no prisoner” approach and stop trying to compromise with people who never extend that courtesy when they are in power. Politics is war…and elections have consequences.

We have work to do. So let’s roll up our sleeves and get busy.

A Time for Peace, and a Time for War…

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Recently a friend of mine posited the argument that with the end of the elections, it was time for the people of the United States to come together and unify. In fact, he argued that this was the biblical and Christian position to take.

But something about that didn’t ring true with me.

I responded that there are opportunities for unity, but that this is not one of them. To illustrate, one need only remember the elections in Germany of the late 1920s and early 1930s. In 1933, with Adolf Hitler as chancellor of Germany, elections were held for the Reichstag, the German parliament. The Nazis took control of the Reichstag in that election, opening the door wide for all sorts of evil done by the hands of Germany’s government apparatus. Now imagine a genuinely German Christian suggesting that an orthodox believer in Jesus Christ should “unify” with the anti-Semitic Nazis.

For the last four years, the Democrat Party has been in control of the presidency and the Senate. In 2022, the GOP took control of the House of Representatives, which meant that the Democrats could not wield unlimited legislative power. But look at what the Democrats did during that period:

1.        The Democrat Party committed massive cheating to give Joe Biden the White House. The cheating in Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia, and Pennsylvania was shocking.

2.        The Democrat Party falsely claimed that the January 6th event was a “coup” that Donald Trump incited. They then rounded up people they could identify with MAGA and put them in prison…many of them are STILL locked up awaiting parole or the completion of their sentences.

3.        The Democrat Party used the justice department and courts in Democratically held areas to indict Donald Trump on ridiculous charges from violating election laws to rape. None of these charges were serious…and the presidential election of Trump is evidence that the American people didn’t buy what the Democrats and their sycophants in the media were selling.

4.        The Democrat Party advanced an agenda of permitting children to determine their own gender and allowed Naziesque doctors to chop off breast and genitalia. The militant trans-gender movement has no greater ally than the Democrats and their allies in the press.

5.        America’s new racism moved deeper inside America’s heart as the Democrat Party helped Black Lives Matter become mainstream, looking away at their extremism. In addition, the Democrat-controlled education establishment perpetrated racial hatred by promulgating the 1619 Project and Critical Theory, despite the Marxist origins and outright lies within them.

6.        The Democrats turned the US military into a Woke organization…permitting cross-dressers into base libraries to read to children.

7.        Democrats like Bill Clinton, Tom Hanks, and Bill Gates (among many others) are connected to pedophile rings. Instead of exposing these infestations, the media and Democrats are in full cover-up mode to protect these people from justified scrutiny.

8.        The Democrats opened our borders and allowed millions and millions of illegal aliens into the United States. Among these masses are criminals who kill our children and market addictive drugs like fentanyl.

9.        Finally, the Democrats and RINOs in Congress have spent us into a debt hole we can never payback. The United States is $35 trillion in debt…with most of that coming in the form of our federal government spending trillions of dollars more than we bring in via taxation. We now have no other choice but to declare national bankruptcy in the near future.

I could go on talking about how Obamacare has destroyed our healthcare system, our police now view the American people as the enemy and violate our rights repeatedly and with the blessing of Democrat judges, and the militarizing of government agencies like the Post Office (of all groups!)

No, I have no interest in unifying with Democrats. In fact, I am interested in only one activity regarding Democrats:

Defeating them at the ballot box and annihilating them politically.

Hegel and Bowen…a Humble Attempt at a New Ontology of Truth

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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a philosopher who spent much of his career trying to decipher how history and time worked. I could never do justice to his deep thinking, but I want to discuss one of his famous ideas.

Hegel believed that a simple process works its way throughout history. An idea is suggested…a thesis. As this idea is pondered, others attack it and offer a counter-idea…an antithesis. Eventually, the two ideas find a way towards a resolution…a synthesis. This is called the Hegelian dialectic.

While I think the Hegelian dialectic is not as ubiquitous in history as he believed, I believe there is a simple truth here: balance.

As a young seminarian, I became exposed to systems theory as it relates to social science. The greatest advocate of family systems theory is Dr. Murray Bowen, a psychiatrist trained in the thinking and practice of Sigmund Freud. But Bowen began to see that individual therapy did not take sufficient account of the fact that human persons are a part of a family…and the functioning of the individual in that web of relationships was insufficiently examined. Murray postulated several important ideas that help family therapists diagnose their clients.

One of those principles is the power of homeostasis. This means that every family has its own comfort zone or sense of balance. That balance looks different in each family, but whatever feels “normal” to the members of the family….that is the comfort zone. And the system will restore that comfort zone when something changes it.

Hegel and Bowen help us see the way truth works…and how the system of understanding truth – and the way we discover it – brings balance by challenging the comfort zone.

Divorce, Culture, and Vocational Ministry

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The United States suffers from two massive frauds: Federal government tyranny and the ease in which couples divorce and destroy their families. I’m rather infamous for bloviating about the first, but not nearly enough to lambast the latter.

Before diving in, there’s a few things to clear up from the beginning. I’m a twice divorced person, though in both cases, my wives sought the divorce over my strenuous objections. In addition, the vocational pursuit of my life has been Christian ministry. My current denomination (The International Communion of the Charismatic Episcopal Church) has a very specific rule about divorced clergy that I’m vowed to support. Finally, I am a student of the Bible…not just the texts themselves, but also the cultural backgrounds of those sacred writings that help us understand the intentions of the authors.

Divorce in the ancient world was a reflection of the patriarchy. Women had no power over who they married – their parents arranged that. As a result, divorce was a rare occurrence. Generally, the man was the only person empowered to divorce his wife, though there were exceptions to this rule, especially in European empires like the Greeks and Romans.

Divorce laws in Western civilization changed as marriages became the choice of the partners and family influence over these unions waned. By the mid-1800’s, women could freely divorce their husbands, but only under certain conditions like repeated adultery, physical abuse, or abandonment. This was further changed in the 1900’s when “no fault” divorce laws allowed either party to divorce for any reason at all.

The divorce rate in the United States in 1900 was around 8% according to a Valerie Schweitzer, a researcher from Bowling Green State University. When the “no fault” divorce laws began to affect couples, the divorce rate was at 9%. Within 40 years, that rate spiked to 52%. The current rates (according to the study from 2018) are around 45% in rough numbers.

The historic church developed rules about the clergy over the centuries from the time of the Apostles based on several factors: Judaism’s practices, the teachings of the Old and New Testaments, the current laws of the geographical areas, and the practices of the church in the business of marriage and family life. In the early church, there was nothing specific mentioned about leadership’s familial status, but the Apostle Paul made several important rules that exist in his letters to this day.

The general practice of the church in the Medieval centuries was for a member of the clergy to be male (yes, there were female clergy but that’s for another time…) and have one wife. Tradition has suggested that this meant a man could only have one wife in his lifetime. So if a deacon’s wife died or he divorced her, he must remain single or lay down his orders. This was true for bishops and presbyters as well.

This practice continues today in the Eastern Orthodox tradition and Roman Catholic in those extremely rare conditions where their priests are married and their deacons (who are allowed to be married as a matter of canon law).

But is this tradition the correct or the best reading of those texts concerning, “the husband of one wife”? I say no for two important reasons: The texts are rather clear in how they are written that the issue is not one wife throughout the life of the man, but rather he cannot more than one wife at a time. Second, the sacred tradition of the Church was dealing with a whole different set of circumstances than we have in current society. For example, a divorced presbyter at the time (unless he was married to a Roman citizen for a wife) must have been the divorcing party…and that was an arranged marriage, which meant their were political ramifications behind the divorce.

There is a pastoral concern that the current practice does not address. Divorce.com says that women initiate divorce in 70% of divorces. That number rises to over 90% when the wife has a college degree. To a large degree, women are now the initiators of divorce, which may explain why the divorce rate is so high in Western Society.

The fathers of the Church created a system that worked for centuries in a world where the conditions were different. Do we really think that our forebears wanted a system where a cleric’s wife could divorce him for any reason, which necessarily ended that cleric’s ministry?

In my next blog entry, I will discuss the remarriage of divorced or widowed clergy…and why forcing clergy to be single can be very dangerous.