It is high time for the church and Christians to start rethinking about divorce.

I start my conversation with Gretchen Baskerville, author of The Lifesaving Divorce: Hope for People Leaving Destructive Relationships. Today, we look at the troubling reality of the reasons behind many divorces in this country - both for Christians and non-Christians, some of the reactions of the church, and how Scripture allows spouses to get out of marriages that are abusive and harmful.

Excerpt

Reuel Sample:
Honored to be talking to Gretchen Baskerville today, author of The Life Saving Divorce. Gretchen, this book seems to go against church teaching completely. So tell us about your ministry. Tell us about your book and the reasons why you decided to be courageous and write such a book.

Gretchen Baskerville:
Oh, well, thank you for asking. Yeah, it did take some courage. I waited until I was. I was retired to write this book because I've worked in Christian organizations all my life. But the other thing I've done all my life, or at least for the last 20 to almost 25 years now, is I've been a Christian divorce recovery leader in conservative churches in the Los Angeles area since 1998. So I have learned a lot. And one of the things I've I had to face as a young divorce recovery leader right after my divorce, a couple of years after my divorce, was that to really understand that there is a big difference between frivolous divorces and life saving divorces and our churches tend and I don't, you know, I know they're well-meaning. I know the pastors out there are well-meaning, but our churches tend to make it sound like ninety five percent of divorces are frivolous and only a handful are really, really life saving. But the truth of the matter is when you look at the research studies on reasons people gave for their divorces, about half, maybe even more than half were for what I call the life saving reasons. And those are the very serious reasons. And we know as Christians that God is against sexual immorality, physical violence, chronic emotional abuse. I mean, God wants God specifically told us that our marriages are to be loving, to be caring, to be nurturing, right? So we know that these kinds of abusive conditions or where there's really serious life destroying addictions or that lead to indifference and neglect. We know those can't possibly be on the heart of God as being a good Christian marriage. I mean that God is not mocked, right? So I learned that about half of divorces in the United States are for these very, very serious things.

Reuel Sample:
So that's a that's a big claim. And I'm just going to interrupt you for a second. We hear that 50 percent of all marriages in the in the United States end in divorce, and there's no difference in that statistic inside or outside the church, which which is a problem itself. But you're saying that 50 percent at least are caused by an unhealthiness in one or both of the spouses?