Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Discerning threats to marriage
Discerning threats to marriage
Jan 21, 2026 3:32 PM

Bill Robinson at The Huffington Post says that the real “enemies of marriage” consists of “those who treat it as modity, a temporary merger, a corporate buyout,” citing the impending fourth divorce of billionaire Ron Perelman.

In typically overblown fashion, Robinson asks, “Where are the Defense of Marriage Nazis when marriage is actually under assault? Why aren’t they boycotting Revlon? Is it possible billionaires and celebs are undermining this sacred institution more than ‘the gays’? David Hasselhoff, Babyface, and Christina Applegate, are just this week’s divorce stories. What kind of world are we living in when Eminem remarrying his ex-wife is considered the love story of the day?”

On the one hand, Robinson is right to point to divorce as the most pervasive threat to the institution of marriage. We shouldn’t forget that the biblical allowance for divorce is quite limited and was enacted only because of the reality of human sin, because our “hearts were hard,” and intended to function as a preservational check on further corruption.

But this doesn’t mean there aren’t other threats to marriage, which may just have the potential to be just as dangerous and insidious. It really isn’t an either/or question, but rather a both/and. For example, Acton senior fellow Jennifer Roback Morse highlights the move from gay “marriage” and polygamy, from “creating legal institutions to modate same sex couples and creating legal institutions to modate multiple spouses.”

In today’s column, Morse writes of the situation in Canada, which “have proven that the advocates of marriage are not being hysterical when they warn of the cultural and legal slide into polygamy.”

It’s a bit ironic to note how the world’s argument against the traditional Christian position has changed over the last few decades. When marriage and divorce laws were being relaxed in the last century, the move was hailed by feminists and others as a liberation from patriarchy and monogomous tyranny. When Christians opposed the change of such laws, they were labeled Neanderthals. But now that gay “marriage” is the issue du jour, the world asks, “Where are the Defense of Marriage Nazis when marriage is actually under assault?”

Christians need to witness to the world with humility and recognition of the realities of hypocrisy. When “born-again” Christians are “just as likely to divorce as non-Christians,” there are some huge problems. But this doesn’t mean that there aren’t other threats, or that Christians shouldn’t speak up. It just means that we should be consistent and careful in our witness. Indeed, Christian silence might end up being the greatest threat to the institution of marriage.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
Samuel Gregg: Indivisibility Of Religious Liberty, Economic Freedom
Sam Gregg, Acton’s director of research, makes the case that limiting religious liberty also infringes upon economic growth in The American Spectator. Gregg uses history to illustrate the point. Unjust restrictions on religious liberty e in the form of limiting the ability of members of particular faiths to participate fully in public life. Catholics in the England of Elizabeth I and James I, for instance, were gradually stripped of most of their civil and political rights because of their refusal...
Is Mass Incarceration the New Eugenics?
“Has the War on Drugs revived the 19th Century progressive crusade against ‘degenerates’?” asks Anthony Bradley in the second of this week’s Acton Commentary. The United States currently has over 2.3 million prisoners incarcerated in federal, state, and local jails around the country. According to an April report by the Sentencing Project, that number presents a 500 percent increase in incarcerations over the past 40 years. This increase produces “prison overcrowding and fiscal burdens on states to modate a rapidly...
Amnesty International: Release Nigerian Schoolgirls But Legalize Prostitution
Yesterday, Joe Carter wrote about Boko Haram, the terrorist group that has kidnapped hundreds of girls in Nigeria from the Christian school, and is now threatening to sell them into the sex trafficking trade. Salil Shetty, Secretary General of the human rights organization Amnesty International, is calling upon the Nigerian government to initiate a transparent investigation of the girls’ kidnapping and an immediate release of the girls. The horrific abduction shows the serious nature of violations of international humanitarian and...
G.K. Chesterton on the work of mothers
Our discussions about faith-work integration often focus on paid labor, yet there is plenty of value, meaning, and fulfillment in other areas where the market may assign little to no direct dollars and cents. I’ve written about this previously as it pertains to fatherhood, but given the ing holiday, the work of mothers is surely worthy of some pause and praise. My wife stays at home full-time with our three small children, and I can’t count the number of times...
Deirdre McCloskey on Ethics and Rhetoric in the ‘Great Enrichment’
In a marvelous speech on the origins of economic freedom (and its subsequent fruits), Deirdre McCloskey aptly crystallizes the deeper implications of her work on bourgeois virtuesand bourgeoisdignity. For example, though many doubted that those in once-socialistic India e to see markets favorably, eventually those attitudes changed, and with it came prosperity. As McCloskey explains: The leading Bollywood films changed their heroes from the 1950s to the 1980s from bureaucrats to businesspeople, and their villains from factory owners to policemen,...
Kishore Jayabalan: ‘Say “No” to Government Expansion’
Kishore Jayabalan, director of the Istituto Acton in Rome, recently wrote an article at Aleteia, titled ‘Freedom, Truth, & State Power: The Case for Religious and Economic Freedom.’ He begins his piece with a statement Gerald R. Ford made soon after ing president: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.” Jayabalan continues: Trust in our political leaders increased around the time of the September 11,...
The Dignity of Chickens and the Character of God
After a farmer in Australia had a change of heart about keeping his chickens in battery cages, he freed all 752 hens. The video below (via Rod Dreher) shows the chickens taking their first steps on soil, and feeling sunshine for the first time. What is your initial reaction on seeing the video? Did you roll your eyes at the liberal-leaning, anti-business, vegetarian-loving motive that surely inspired the clip? Did you automatically assume the “animal rights” nuts (the video was...
Tolkien, Hobbits, Hippies and War
Jay Richards and I have an Ignatius Press book on mitment to ing out soon, so we’ve been following developments in the Hobbit film trilogy more closely than we might otherwise. A recent development is director Peter Jackson announcing a subtitle change to the third film—from There and Back Again, to Battle of the Five Armies. That’s maybe a bit narrow for a novel that’s also about food, fellowship and song, but I think it’d be going too far to...
An Open Letter Regarding Greece v. Galloway
Katherine Stewart is most unhappy about the recent Supreme Court decision, Greece v. Galloway. The Court upheld the right of the town of Greece, New York, to being town hall meetings with prayer, so long as no one was coerced into participating. And that makes Ms. Stewart unhappy. In an op-ed piece for The New York Times, Ms. Stewart decries the Court’s decision as something akin to a vast, right-wing conspiracy. The first order of business is to remove objections...
Why McDonald’s Has Become a School for Remedial Work Skills
“Clean up your own mess. Your mother doesn’t work here.” That was a sign, printed on dot matrix printer paper, which hung in the breakroom of the McDonald’s where I worked. While that was nearly thirty years ago, I suspect that same sign is still there (though probably reprinted on a laser printer). But the idea behind it has changed. Your mother may not work at McDonalds, but pany—and others that hire low-skilled employees—are increasingly taking on the role of...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2026 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved