A bishop nullifies a marriage—from a 12th-century rendering of Byzantine emperor Justinian’s 6th-century legal digest, the Pandectae. Illustration: © Roger-Viollet / The Image Works

Over the past 40 years in the United States, divorce has become almost as commonplace as marriage, and religious communities have tried to adjust to this social reality that touches millions of congregants. But how much has really changed in the way organized religion handles divorce among believers? This was the general question posed at a two-day conference in late March titled “Protestant, Catholic, Jew . . . Divorcing,” sponsored by Boston College’s Center for Christian-Jewish Learning.

On Sunday, March 22, the conference looked closely at each of these three traditions, one by one, through the lens of divorce as well as remarriage. The discussion, held in the Heights Room, began with Judaism, going “in order of the age of the tradition,” quipped Mark Oppenheimer in opening remarks. The author of the “Beliefs” column for the New York Times, Oppenheimer organized the conference as holder of the 2014–15 Corcoran Visiting Chair in Christian-Jewish Relations at Boston College.

The first session, moderated by Oppenheimer, featured four specialists—variously, academics, rabbis, and activists—on Judaism and divorce. Apart from some historical background, the panel focused entirely on present-day Orthodox Judaism. That branch has recently spawned highly publicized clashes between estranged spouses or former spouses, over the granting of religious divorces (as distinct from civil divorces, which many also obtain).

Sketching the history, Lois Dubin of Smith College began with the definitive biblical text, Deuteronomy 24:1, which allows a husband to divorce his wife by handing her a written decree to that effect and sending her “out of his house.” Dubin pointed out that in keeping with this religious law, “Only a man can initiate a divorce, not a woman.” But she added that in various times and places over the past millennium, rabbinic authorities have “mitigated the unilateral nature” of Jewish religious divorce—for example, by pressuring men to grant their wives a divorce after the couple has separated. (And some Jews have bypassed religious authorities altogether, seeking civil divorces as far back as the late 18th century, in Europe.)

Today, non-Orthodox branches of Judaism have, to varying degrees, loosened their strictures against women initiating a religious divorce, or have abolished them altogether, in the case of Reform Judaism. But the large and growing Orthodox communities continue to hew closely to Deuteronomy, according to the panelists.

To be released from a religious marriage, an Orthodox Jewish woman must receive from her husband the divorce document known in Hebrew as a get, said Susan Aranoff, an economics professor at Kingsborough Community College in Brooklyn. Aranoff is also codirector of Agunah International, an organization advocating on behalf of Orthodox women whose husbands withhold the get. Agunah is Hebrew for “chained woman,” and Aranoff said that without the get, a woman “cannot go on with her life.” She cannot remarry in the Orthodox community, and if she marries otherwise, her future children are branded as illegitimate, explained Aranoff, who estimated broadly that there are thousands of agunot (the plural) in the United States. Sometimes the man is able to remarry in a religious ceremony, using a loophole in rabbinic law, but his first wife remains chained for years, she added.

Rabbi Yona Reiss, chief judge of the Chicago Rabbinical Court, told of how he and some other Orthodox rabbis are considering use of prenuptial agreements to level the field. Under such a stipulation, the man would agree to let a rabbinic court decide whether the get should be granted at the woman’s request, in the event that the marriage, for all practical purposes, ends. Following Reiss on the panel, Rabbi Jeremy Stern, executive director of the Organization for the Resolution of Agunot, described a confrontational tactic he has employed: holding rallies outside homes and workplaces to shame Orthodox men into giving the get. Stern called get refusal “a form of domestic abuse,” and often a way of gaining leverage in divorce settlements. For her part, Aranoff said in an interview that she is simply urging Orthodox women to forgo Orthodox weddings, which, she acknowledged, could alienate them from that faith community.

The second panel, moderated by Mark Massa, SJ, dean of the School of Theology and Ministry at Boston College, was dedicated to divorce, Roman Catholic-style.

Lisa Sowle Cahill, the University’s J. Donald Monan, SJ, Professor of Theology, pointed to Matthew 19, which renders Jesus as saying, “Therefore what God has joined together, let no one separate.” The verse appears to ban divorce, except in cases of “unchastity.” Then Cahill cited Corinthians, in which St. Paul adds another exception to the rule, declaring that if an unbelieving spouse of a Christian wants to end a marriage, “let it be so,” because “it is to peace that God has called you.” Noting the shift within the New Testament, she commented: “Just as [Church teaching] developed to this point, it could develop in the future.”

Fr. Mark O’Connell, judicial vicar of the Archdiocese of Boston and head of the archdiocese’s marriage tribunal, summarized the status quo. “Marriage is an act of God. That’s why we say it’s indissoluble,” said O’Connell, alluding to the sacrament of matrimony. Furthermore, a divorced Catholic who civilly remarries is viewed by the Church as still married to the first spouse, and is officially barred from receiving Holy Communion. That is, unless he or she had received an annulment. The priest said a marriage can be annulled when the tribunal finds that the man and woman did not fully exchange their consent prior to taking vows. He did not offer an example of what he termed “defects in the consent,” but petitioners for annulment often allege that a partner never intended to be faithful, or that an impairment such as substance abuse or mental illness made consent to lifelong marriage impossible.

Melissa Wilde, associate professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, related that until the 1970s annulments were rarely granted, but that the numbers swelled as divorce became widespread. More recently, annulment rates have fallen considerably, partly because fewer Catholics have been choosing Church weddings in the first place, and because Catholics also have fewer compunctions about remarrying without an annulment, said Wilde. Many go on receiving Communion, despite the formal ban, with no pushback from pastors and fellow parishioners.

In an exchange among the panelists, Cahill said almost anyone who has been married for more than 40 years, as she and her husband have, would be able to identify imperfections in the marriage going back to the beginning. Her comment was apparently directed at Fr. O’Connell’s remarks on “defects in the consent.” The priest turned to her and said, “You’d have a hard time with my tribunal,” explaining that if it took 40 years for a spouse to discover a supposed defect, it probably isn’t a terrible one.

During a Q&A, Rabbi Reiss stood up and asked with a smile if King Henry VIII would find the Catholic Church more amenable to his annulment request, were he petitioning today. O’Connell let the question pass. Wilde said Henry would need to prove that his wife, Catherine of Aragon, never intended to bear children (or a male heir, in this instance). In the end, she said, “He still would have had to create his own church,” that of England.

Unlike Catholics and Orthodox Jews, Protestants have no system of religious divorce or annulment. They rely entirely on civil divorce, and have made their peace with it, according to a selection of their scholars. The three panelists focused on evangelical Protestantism, whose ministers at one time would have been loath to perform a marriage ceremony for a divorcée. “All that changed dramatically around 1980,” noted Randall Balmer, an Episcopal priest and chair of Dartmouth College’s religion department. The impetus was politics: Newly galvanized, conservative evangelicals threw their weight behind a divorced-and-remarried presidential aspirant, Ronald Reagan. “That changed utterly the landscape of opposition by evangelicals to divorce in the late 20th century,” according to Balmer.

Since then, divorce rates have shot up among evangelical Christians, said the panelists. David Gushee, professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University, an evangelical institution in Georgia, related that it is “fairly typical” for parents of his students to have been married and divorced three or four times. Gushee believes the pendulum has swung too far toward permissiveness in the evangelical fold. “Not every divorce is morally neutral,” he said, citing the proverbial case of a married man running off with his younger secretary. “It can be a profound act of injustice, morally disorienting for children.”

Heather White, research scholar and adjunct professor of religion at New College of Florida, described how politics has continued to reshape evangelical thinking about key biblical passages on divorce.

She drilled down into Matthew 19, in which Jesus also says “male and female . . . become one flesh” when joined by God in marriage. Understood for two millennia as addressing divorce, the passage is now widely cast as prohibiting gay marriage: White related that evangelical interpreters today often zoom in on the man and woman, to reveal the “heterosexual nature of one flesh.” She said the Southern Baptist Convention has passed 10 resolutions in recent years citing Matthew 19—”almost all in reference to same-sex marriage.”