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TechnoratiIn a recent Newsweek magazine article entitled, “Marriage Is Hard: The religious right admits it” (Oct. 19, 2009), writer Lisa Miller begins by drawing a contrast between the convictions and conduct of two professing Christians: Billy Graham and Senator John Ensign (R-NV). In describing the Reverend Billy Graham she writes:
Billy Graham had a rule. He was a powerful man, away from his wife and children more often than he was with them. Aware of the significance of his reputation and convinced of the moral value of the Gospel message, he took precautions to guard against his own human weakness. He gave his ministry colleagues explicit I nstructions: never leave me alone in a room with a woman who is not my wife.
By contrast, Senator Ensign admitted to an extramarital affair with a campaign staffer and wife of a top aide in his office this past June. Of Senator Ensign, Miller writes:
If only someone had given John Ensign similar advice. Or if someone did, that he'd heeded it. The Ensign story continues to reverberate not because of its delicious best-friend's-girl plotline (for who among us is surprised anymore that politicians sleep around?), but because he said he stood for something else. He is a "family values" Republican who voted for the impeachment of Bill Clinton and in 2004 lent his support to a constitutional amendment defining marriage, saying, "Marriage is an extremely important institution in this country, and protecting it is, in my mind, worth the extraordinary step of amending our Constitution."
It isn’t my intention to vilify Senator Ensign or pile on to man who is suffering the effects of his own sin. I am truly sad for him and his family. We all suffer from the destruction of a single family and Miller adds a painfully obvious point by saying, “Ensign has become the latest example of what so many see as the failure of the right to retain any credibility on the marriage question.”
However, as Christians our foremost concern is not the political right or left but the Christian church that is called to bear testimony to the lordship of Jesus Christ. This is why marriage both as an ideal and in reality should matter to the church, because its condition within the body of Christ either serves or opposes the gospel of the kingdom. We are simply called and empowered to live according to a higher standard-lives that should bear witness to a people who have been changed by God.
Of course the world has every right to expect this, especially when we assume the authority to speak on any moral issue. Ms. Miller echoes this expectation specific to marriage when she writes, “Of course, every person who utters ‘till death do us part’ and then separates is, in a sense, conceding defeat. But when evangelicals are leading the charge in the marriage movement (and now, the anti-gay-marriage movement) arguing that sacred unions between one man and one woman are good for society because they're good for children, one would hope that they'd have worked out the kinks a little better than the rest of us.”
Again, secular Newsweek magazine makes the ugly but all-too-apparent point, “No one denies that conservative Christians have a marriage problem, a dizzying gap between their articulated ideals and their success in achieving them.” Miller points out that “according to the Pew Forum, evangelicals are more likely to be divorced than Roman Catholics, Mormons, the Eastern Orthodox, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and atheists.” Linda Malone-Colon, Ph.D., a conservative advocate of marriage and director of the National Center on African American Marriages and Parenting gets straight to the point by saying, "It's as true with Christians as it is with other religious groups. They don't live by what they're talking about." Ouch! Continue »
