While I am thankful for the help of some Christian resources in my dark season, I discovered most had an agenda apart from freely presenting the options.
Most Christian resources–in my experience–are focused upon “saving the marriage.” This goal is pursued at the unacknowledged cost of the faithful spouse’s well-being.
For these authors and pastors, no cost–from the faithful spouse, of course–is too high a cost to “save the marriage.”
This is why I created Divorce Minister: Taking Adultery Seriously. It is bad enough navigating adultery situations without someone weaponizing Christianity to make the faithful spouse endure more abuse.
This “divorce prevention at any cost” message is far from godly or truly Christian advice (see Jer 3:8, Mt 19:9, etc). But you would never know this from most resources provided to Christians navigating these tricky waters.
The whole point of this online community or ministry is to give voice to a perspective often unheard in our churches. I write as a pastor, chaplain, and divorced, adultery-abuse survivor.
Trust me, I encounter people who disagree with what I write here.
However, they fail to recognize that they could go pretty much anywhere else to have their “rightness” egos stroked.
This is one of the few places where infidelity survivors can come and feel free from religious condemnation for being victimized.
At least, that is my hope for how you, my readers, feel…
What also makes this place so important is how many of the good resources–like Divorce Care®, are only helpful to a point for infidelity survivors especially.
Many Christian resources fail to draw the very important spiritual distinction between an adulterous spouse and the victim spouse. Competent care–including spiritual care–is not possible if this distinction is left unrecognized.
Just as care looks different for a rape victim and her rapist, the same goes for a soul rapist–i.e. the adulterous spouse–and his victim, the faithful spouse.
This website cares for both sides, yet that care looks different for those parties. I will not excuse or shift-blame on faithful spouses for the sins of the adulterous parties. That is not godly.
A distinction remains.
…and so, too, will this online voice calling into the wilderness of victim-blaming and shaming of faithful spouses.
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*A version of this post ran previously.
I’m a Catholic and the RCC does not recognise divorce, as Marriage is a Sacrament in our Church. However, we can seek annulment if even 1 of 3 criteria were not met by both spouses at the time of getting wed and that is why I am going for an annulment.
I have an appointment with the priest on March the 4th and am praying my heart out that Almighty God will release me from the spiritual tie to my abuser, as adultery and all it entails are abusive.
Also, in my Douay-Rheims Bible, Our Lord says in the Gospel of St. Matthew that a man can’t divorce his wife except for “fornication”, which means sex outside of the Marriage of one man to one woman, so I would think that means adultery would be grounds for dissolving the Marriage Bond even in a Catholic Marriage because Our Lord Himself said it is? I will be bringing this up with the priest anyway.
The last part of the Annulment process is called “Defence of the Bond” but I regard being tied spiritually to an abuser, particularly an unrepentant adulterer, to be a soul-destroying BONDAGE, with the faithful spouse as the captive, rather than the life-giving, life enhancing , HOLY Bond that God intended Christian Marriage to be!
Please pray that God will grant me my freedom from this bondage to an unrepentant adulterer!