For reasons that include all that we can learn from this report, and for many more that we know from the Scriptures and Christian wisdom, Christians know that the marginalization of marriage can only lead to unhappiness, unhealthiness, and the unraveling of human relationships.

Evangelical Christians are gravely concerned about the family, and this is good and necessary. But our credibility on the issue of marriage is significantly discounted by our acceptance of divorce. To our shame, the culture war is not the only place that an honest confrontation with the divorce culture is missing. Divorce is now the scandal of the evangelical conscience.

We have become a culture that believes that staying together unto death is just too much to ask.

All laws are intended to have an effect, but one of the perverse rules of politics is that laws often have effects very different than those desired or expected. Beyond this, the operational reality of a law, once passed into statute and interpreted by courts, is very often different than the sponsors of the law had envisioned.

Elizabeth Gilbert is once again a married woman, and she has written a rather lengthy memoir in order to explain why. While in ordinary circumstances such an explanation would be quite unnecessary, in the case of Elizabeth Gilbert some explanation seems to be required.

Why hasn’t this been done before? That question comes immediately to mind in light of the release of “The Marriage Index,” a project undertaken by the Institute for American Values in cooperation with the National Center for African American Marriages and Parenting. The Marriage Index is an instrument that, for the first time, offers a comprehensive view of the state of marriage in the nation.

There are few national tragedies that can match the devastating effect of the Divorce Revolution. Four decades after California launched the revolution, the impact of divorce and the break-up of marriages and families is now well documented, coast to coast.

“In our parents’ generation, marriage was still the most powerful social force. In ours, it was divorce,” writes David J. Jefferson. “My 44-year-old classmates and I have watched divorce morph from something shocking, even shameful, into a routine fact of American life.”

Americans are generally aware that our Divorce Culture is a documented tragedy, but most seem to think that the availability of so-called “no fault” divorce is just a permanent reality. Few Americans seem to understand that marriage is being undermined by what can be called a “Divorce Industrial Complex” that includes lawyers, counselors, court personnel, and various others.
In other words, divorce is something of a market reality in America, and millions of persons are involved in this business. As a matter of fact, the income of these persons — and the future of the divorce “market” — depends on numerical growth in the number of divorces that occur each year.
Stephen Baskerville, Assistant Professor of Government at Patrick Henry College is the author of an excellent analysis of this problem, giving special attention to the fact that our current divorce laws — and what he calls the “divorce industry” tears apart families and discriminates against fathers.
In his new book, Taken into Custody: The War Against Fatherhood, Marriage, and the Family, Baskerville reveals the divorce industry for what it is — and for what it means to this nation and its families.
Professor Baskerville recently appeared on The Albert Mohler Program [listen here]. In that conversation he said: