This blog post is my joyful, heartfelt, deeply freeing, warm-hearted  goodbye to both a dogma and the people who will contemn me for rejecting it.

(To “contemn” is to treat with contempt; to despise. It is what people often mean when they say “condemn” or even “judge.” I suspect some of you will be happy to find out there is such a word. I learned it from the 1890s scholars who translated the 10-volume Ante-Nicene Fathers series.)

I wrote an email to a friend in England today. He asked what I thought about people I call “the anti-divorce-and-remarriage crowd.” Most of the people in that crowd that I am familiar with are what I call “half-Mennonites.” I clarify these terms in the email.

My friend asked about people who hold to these two doctrines:

1. Remarriage after divorce is always sinful in every instance, is not truly a remarriage (since the first marriage still stands), and constitutes ongoing adultery for those involved.
2. Furthermore, they would say that anyone in a second marriage must separate in order to repent and avoid damnation.

What follows is my email response, though I have edited it and added headings.

My Experience with the Anti-Divorce-and-Remarriage Crowd

My visceral response is to say that I would rather go to hell than spend eternity in a heaven filled with the anti-divorce-and-marriage people.

I was introduced to the half-Mennonites, as I call them, by David Bercot. A sour former Mennonite told me he called them Pretendonites. David did not introduce them to me on purpose; instead, they and the actual Mennonites and Amish were the ones buying his book. The home-school movement in the 1970s introduced evangelicals to Rod and Staff Ministries, a Mennonite publishing house that produces home school (and Amish and Mennonite school) material.

Note: Despite what this post may seem to imply, I highly recommend Bercot’s book Will the Real Heretics Please Stand Up, especially if you can get your hands on the original 1989 version. It very likely inspired much of the modern interest among evangelicals in the early church fathers.

I’ll refer to the Mennonites, Amish, German Baptist Brethren, Hutterites and other “plain people,” communities with strict standards of clothing and against luxury, as Anabaptists for the rest of this email. (They call themselves “plain people.”)

Nowadays the Anabaptists major on 3 doctrines: modesty in dress and appearance, women wearing head coverings, and opposition to divorce and remarriage. These are the big dogmas, and the ones they emphasize in opposing evangelicalism, that separate them from mainstream Christianity. Anabaptist communities in America have been separated from mainstream culture for so long that these differences are more cultural than religious.

For the half-Mennonites, though, the evangelicals who have picked up the Anabaptists’ big three dogmas, the difference is doctrinal and is fought for like Baptists fight for eternal security.

My introduction to anti-divorce-and-remarriage practice was a family that visited us in Tyler, Texas. This is a true story. I am not making this up. This family showed up at David Bercot’s house in a school bus that had been renovated into an RV. This is not uncommon among half-Mennonites. I once renovated a bus for my family to live in as well. I even built a tiny redwood porch onto the back with a ladder up to a bigger deck on top.

Anyway, this family had 10 children. They had just come from Charity Christian Fellowship, a half-Mennonite church–one of the first ever, I would guess. The wife had run off to Las Vegas as a teenager, married her boyfriend, then divorced him a week later. Her husband knew about it, but not her children … that is, until they visited Charity Christian. They asked if Charity–what an inappropriate church name–would consider an exception because of the unusual circumstances. They refused. Not only did they refuse, but word slipped out about the mom’s first marriage, and the family’s children heard about it from other children at Charity Christian.

Tyler Early Christian Fellowship was tiny at the time. I’m pretty sure we were no more than 4 families then, but we assured the family that they were welcome with us. Not long after, they found out they were also welcome at a large community in Montana, so they went there.

My experience with the half-Mennonite movement is that they are harsh and judgmental. Lorie and I were sucked into it for a while after David Bercot kicked me out of the Tyler fellowship for opposing his desire to join a church with apostolic succession. David was already involved with half-Mennonites and the Anabaptists because they were the first groups of people to buy Will the Real Heretics Please Stand Up. Lorie and I did not stay in the movement long. I realized quickly that we were adopting dogmas–no, attitudes–that would have forced us separate from our six-months-in-the-past selves. It looked like there would be no end to finding new standards that would lead us to reject more people. That seemed ridiculous to me.

I would include among the half-Mennonite movement Anabaptists who left their original communities. They’re not as fiercely condemning in my experience.

There was a community in Cookeville, TN, for  example, that Lorie and I visited one weekend per month while we were living in Knoxville, Tn (in 1995). They had one ex-evangelical on their land and nearly 20 families who had left Anabaptist communities. Despite their anti-divorce-and-remarriage policy, I loved those people. I would love to be in the kingdom of God here or in eternity with them. While their community required suspenders and no belt and banned tapered haircuts, they were not convinced that outsiders were going to hell. Instead, they were afraid that if the loosening standards was a slippery slope that would end with allowing homosexual pastors. The leader of the community, a former and well-known Amish bishop, and I hit it off well. He loved inviting my family to his house. He died suddenly at age 47, about a decade later, and his sons greeted me with fondness at the funeral.

I asked him once if he would take communion with a clearly Christian man who wore a belt, and he told me no. I told him that was enough for me never to join the community, something I would have loved to do at the time. I even asked about buying land near their community and simply visiting regularly, and he said that would not work.

Many other half-Mennonites who were formerly part of Anabaptist communities and churches landed in Perry County, Tennessee, about an hour’s drive from Rose Creek Village (a community in which my family lived from 1996 to 2011). These were more like the judgmental formerly evangelical half-Mennonites. In fact, I heard from a man, whose family I got to know quite well, that most of them were churches to themselves, officially in fellowship with only their own family, though the human desire for friendship did connect some of them.

As a humorous aside, I once spent an afternoon at the house of a Dunkard Brethren family in California. The Dunkard Brethren are the most liberal branch of German Baptist Brethren branches. An Old Brethren (less liberal than the Dunkards and more liberal than the German Baptists) couple was there along with a Holdeman Mennonite couple. The Holdemans believe they are the only truly saved church. Yes, this sounds like a comedy, but this is also a true story.

These couples were good friends, often spending Sunday afternoons together, but they could not take communion with one another. In fact, the Holdeman couple, if they really held to Holdeman doctrine, had to believe the other two couples were going to hell. I asked them about this, which produced a round of nervous murmuring with some occasional sentences. I dropped the subject, and we all went back to pleasant Christian fellowship.

Wow!

We found the people who would become Rose Creek Village in October of 1995 and joined them almost immediately. We moved to the other end, the west end, of Tennessee to be with them in November, 1995, and you know most of my story from there.

There are others besides the half-Mennonites who hold to the doctrines you described. Other ones I have read about are extreme Calvinists with unusual views on many things. If it is possible to be harsher that the half-Mennonites, they are. I know the anti-divorce-and-remarriage doctrines have crept into more mainstream evangelicalism as well.

I have told you my experiences because I have very strong feelings against the half-Mennonite movement (though not necessarily its individuals, people vary). It’s impossible that those feelings don’t bias my Scripture interpretations, but here they are.

My Doctrinal Position on Divorce and Remarriage

It is obvious that evangelicals don’t pay enough, or even any, attention to Jesus’ teachings on divorce and remarriage. If Lorie had ever divorced me, I would not have remarried during her lifetime … even if she remarried. (Of course, I can only say what my beliefs are and were; I can’t know for certain that I would have lived up to them.) It appears to me that while divorce is opposed by evangelical churches, remarriage is not. I am speaking practically, not doctrinally. A LOT of evangelicals are remarried, and I haven’t heard a sermon on divorce in decades.

The top issue for me, and it is a central, critical issue on every doctrine, is maintaining the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace (Eph. 4:3). If God fellowships with a person, or a couple, then I must fellowship with them as well. If a couple is pursuing God, and they are, as far as I can tell, walking in the Spirit and following Jesus, then who am I to tell them they must separate? My judgment, based on the fruit Jesus told us to judge by, is that God is neither separating them nor giving them any reason to believe he opposes their remarriage.

Otherwise, except for believing that the past, including divorces and remarriages, is erased by baptism, I agree with the half-Mennonites on divorce and remarriage. I am, however, convinced that Jesus despises their treatment of those who disagree with them every bit as much as he despised the behavior of the Pharisees, scribes, and lawyers of his day.

Here’s an important addition I left out of the email. If the anti-divorce-and-remarriage crowd were willing to be honest with the Scriptures, they would not allow the determination of who is married or not be made by a human government. They would be sending people back to the first person they had sex with, not to the first person the US government agreed they were married to.

It is hard for me to believe that a person who is not troubled by breaking up families with children could be a Christian. Can a person have the Spirit of God and mercilessly deprive children of united parents? The statistics on children raised in a family without a father are frightening. I haven’t seen any on children raised without a mother, but I expect those statistics to be even worse.

Concluding Thoughts

There you have it. I suspect I feel the same way you do. I suspect as well that you would want to obey Jesus’ teachings on divorce and remarriage without appointing yourself judge of those who have not followed those teachings. Personally, I feel free to tell a divorced person that they should not remarry while their spouse lives, but I’m not going to tell anyone to divorce their spouse because they are remarried. I am “guilty” of advising one man, with four children, one from his former spouse, NOT to divorce his second wife. He was plagued with guilt about his remarriage, and I made every effort to get him out of that guilt … to face forward, to the future, instead of backwards to his past. His guilt was plaguing his new marriage.

I also once told a man that his decision to divorce his second wife (no children with the second wife) and remarry his first wife was a mistake. Their remarriage was rocky, and he was trying to be the lord of his wife, not just her leader. In my defense, I also told him that if he and his buddies didn’t learn to love their wives rather than trying to dominate them, there was nothing I could teach them.

I used to be nervous about expressing these thoughts on remarriage because of taunting of the repercussion of vocal half-Mennonites. No more. I cannot apologize for being horrified by people who would dissect a loving a family by splitting the parents no matter how scriptural a case they can make for it. It is apparent to everyone except the people who do these things that God and Jesus would never do that.

It does not matter if you can produce the example of splitting up families by Ezra the priest. To do what the half-Mennonites are doing is wicked. That’s not true in every case, but it is true in most cases I have seen.

I must also mention the other side of this problem, those that cannot legally divorce but do so in practice. It occurs often enough that I have heard it called a “Mennonite divorce.” The husband and wife live at opposite ends of the house, mostly avoid one another, and raise their children in that environment.

I started to add my thoughts on this, but that was a rabbit hole. Suffice it to say that I believe that hypocrisy, by which I mean pretending, is bad, that staying together for the sake of children is good, and that surrender to Jesus by both a husband and wife can produce not only reconciliation but real respect and love.

In the multitude of words, sin is not lacking. Hopefully, I have sinned minimally in all these words, and maybe there is benefit in some of them. I am going to eliminate names that I put in this email to you, and I am going to make a blog post out of them. Doctrinal purity without love is evil; it is neither good nor beneficial to anyone. In fact, teaching, especially teaching dogma, without love cannot be pure.

God grant you power, peace, and continued joy in your marriage.