It has long been assumed that the success of Gone With The Wind, both as a book and a movie, was due to the genius of its author, Margaret Mitchell. There is no doubt that Margaret Mitchell was a talented writer, but a little known fact is that the plot of the book came straight from the lives of real people . . . most of them, very famous on their own account. She would have never come in contact with these people had not a strange, unpredictable chain of events begun over 2,000 years ago at the northern tip of Bartow County, GA in the valley below the Pine Log Mountains.
Two thousand years ago, an advanced indigenous people arrived here from the south. On a flat topped hill, they established a ceremonial enclosure and royal compound. In the valley below they built a town with several mounds. In 1817, Cherokee Chief Charles Hicks, the father of the Cherokee Renaissance, established his farm in that ceremonial enclosure. Over a century ago, nationally famous author, Corra Harris, bought that farm to be near the ghost of her husband. For the next 18 years, Harris gathered together progressive leaders of the New South for weekend retreats at that farm . . . first to promote the right of women to vote and then to promote the right of women to work in professions. A cub reporter with the Atlanta Journal, Margaret Mitchell, tagged along with her bosses to most of those retreats.
This 1951 blockbuster movie was based on the experiences of Lundy and Corra Harris, while he was a Methodist “Circuit Rider” minister in Georgia’s Nacoochee Valley. The original book was named, “A Circuit Riders Wife.” The roads are paved now, but most of the buildings in the movie still stand. Ironically, Lundy Harris committed suicide after “A Circuit Rider’s Wife” was serialized in the Saturday Evening Post in 1910.
Cast of characters in Episodes Three, Four and Five
Corra Mae Harris
Corra May White Harris: She was born in 1869 on a not-too-prosperous small plantation in Elbert County, Georgia in the hamlet of Ruckersville . . . which was primarily a mixed-blood Creek Indian community. As an escape from a miserable marriage to a mentally ill alcoholic and opiate addict, she began sending a series of controversial, but well-crafted “blogs” to a New York newspaper. One of her first blogs supported the lynching of African-American men, who raped Southern white women. This in fact, was her emotional revenge after discovering that her husband, while a professor a Emory College, had a long time affair with a rural black woman. She went on to become the first woman writer in the South to achieve national prominence.
In 1910, Corra became nationally famous when her semi-biographical novel about her experiences as a Methodist minister’s wife in the Georgia Mountains was serialized by the Saturday Evening Post. In 1911, Corra published a novel about a heroine of the Women’s Suffrage Movement, “The Co-Citizens,” which was loosely based on Rebecca Felton’s life.
Corra was the inspiration for Belle Watling, the owner of an Atlanta brothel and friend of Rhett Butler. She had a platonic relationship with Henry Ford. The weekend retreats at her Pine Log, GA home allowed people such as Martha Berry and Henry Ford to “be themselves” away from the public’s eye.
The Rev. Lundy Harris
Rev. Lundy Harris: He was born in McDonough, GA in 1858, from a long line of Methodist ministers. He graduated from Emory College (now university) in 1879. Fluent in Classical Greek and Hebrew, Harris was always known as a brilliant scholar, but a “hell and brimstone” preacher. In addition, to “serving time” as a Methodist Circuit Rider preacher in the North Georgia Piedmont and Mountains, he also was a a professor at Emory and Young Harris College, plus an official of the Southern Methodist Episcopal Church.
Harris had problems with bouts of depression, plus addiction to alcohol and laudanum, a opiate derivative. As years went by the bipolar behavior worsened into severe mental illness. He died in 1910 from a deadly overdose of alcohol and opiates at the foot of the flat topped hill in Pine Log, Georgia, where Native peoples, many centuries before, had constructed a sacred enclosure.
Margaret Mitchell’s description of an insane, alcoholic Gerald O’Hara after the Civil War is based on Corra Harris’s description of Lundy Harris during his bouts with depression and alcoholism.
Dr. William Felton
Dr./Rev./ Congressman William Harrell Felton: He was born near Lexington, GA in 1823. Felton was a Populist renaissance man, who went to the mountains of NW Georgia in 1847 to build up a 1000 acre plantation. Prior to the Civil War, he became a licensed surgeon AND an ordained Methodist minister. During the Civil War, he treated Confederate wounded laying on the ground beside the Western and Atlantic Railroad, just north of Cartersville.
During Reconstruction, he was elected to Congress as an Independent. He became nationally known both as a public speaker and proponent of economic opportunity for the “little man.” He was the first United States congressman to publicly speak for women’s right to vote. He was a brilliant, handsome man, who was inept at practical matters, such as running a plantation or business records. Felton was dependent on Rebecca Felton (Scarlett) to make business decisions for him.
Dr. Felton was the inspiration of both the characters Ashley Wilkes and Dr. Meade, who attended to the sea of wounded at the Atlanta rail depot. The astonishing thing is how closely, British actor, Lesley Howard, resembled William Felton. Was this intentional?
US Senator Rebecca Felton
Rebecca Latimer Felton: She was born in 1835 on a modest plantation southeast of Atlanta. After graduating from college in 1852, she became William Felton’s second wife in 1854. This was in an era when most Southern women had no education beyond the age of 15. As her husband’s political career blossomed, she provoked several scandals for being at his side during political campaigns, and also speaking to the public. As a young bride, she took control of her husband’s business affairs and saved their plantation from bankruptcy. Later she went on to be nationally known for her work to provide universal public education, eliminate saloons, give women the right to vote, and open up career opportunities for women.
At the same time that she was promoting civil rights for some, Rebecca used rented convict laborers to run her saw mill and iron mine, just as Scarlett O’Hara did in the novel. Also . . . just like Scarlett . . . as a young Southern Belle, Rebecca had a 16″ waist. Rebecca was the REAL Scarlett O’Hara.
The Love of Henry Ford’s life
Martha McChesney Berry: She was born in 1866 on an extremely prosperous plantation on the Oostanaula River near Rome, GA. Her father became very wealthy from owning several steamboats in Rome. She used the wealth inherited from her father to start a free school for poor mountain children. It evolved into Berry College. Berry College has the largest college campus in the world (38,000 acres) and is now rated the top small college in the Southeast. Industrialist Henry Ford paid the tab for much of Berry College’s mid-20th century development . . . but there is much more to the story than that. It is probably the reason that despite being a beautiful, intelligent Southern Belle, Martha never married.
As the “social liberal” among Corra Harris’s regular guests, this true Southern Belle, who loved people of all colors and economic backgrounds, is obviously the inspiration for Melanie Wilkes.
The bedroom, where Martha Berry and Henry Ford met, during the first third of the 20th century is upstairs.
Henry Ford
Henry James Ford: He was born in 1863 near Detroit, Michigan. Ford was a lifetime friend, benefactor, confidante and paramour of Martha Berry. Yes, that’s the same Henry Ford, who built autos. Corra Harris maintained a bedroom for them, upstairs in her rural farm house, when Henry was visiting Georgia. It is still called the Berry-Ford Bedroom. Apparently, Berry and Ford maintained this secret intimate relationship their entire lives. Publicly, they were merely friends. On several occasions, Berry was invited by Mrs. Ford to their Michigan estate. Or perhaps . . . Mrs. Ford just didn’t care.
There was another irony in Henry Ford’s secret life. Publicly, he was bitterly opposed to tobacco smoking and forbade it among his workers. However, ALL of the women, who came to Corra Harris’s farm . . . including his paramour . . . smoked.
While publicly a conservative Republican and opposed to the right of women to vote, Ford’s wealth donated secretly to Rebecca and Martha, personally funded the Women’s Suffrage Movement in the South. This is a little known fact.
Henry Ford’s personality was much of the inspiration for the character of Rhett Butler. The only difference was, of course, Rhett was a Southerner.
Margaret Mitchell
Margaret Munnerlyn Mitchell: She was born in 1900 in Atlanta, GA to an upper class family, who could afford to send her to a private academy and Smith College. During the 1920s, she was a young reporter for the Atlanta Journal. She was usually invited along when the intelligentsia of Atlanta spent the weekends at Corra Harris’s Farm. She would sit in the background, enthralled, as Rebecca Felton, Martha Berry and Corra Harris told stories of the Old South and the Reconstruction Era.
Margaret intentionally made the O’Hara family Irish Catholics, to honor her grandparents, who emigrated from Ireland during the Great Potato Famine. It is a little known fact that the only ports open to Irish immigrants during much of the Potato Famine were Savannah and Charleston. Savannah now annually sponsors the world’s third largest St. Patrick’s Day Parade.
Prologue – The real Tara
Rear view of the Felton Plantation around 1885
Today, the site of the Felton Plantation is a nondescript sea of rental storage buildings and speculative office buildings. The home was burned by arsonists in 1998, who were angry that the home was to be a museum dedicated to women’s rights. A century ago, however, it was the home of one of the most successful leaders of the political efforts to obtain the right of women to vote and be employed in professional position.
Civic leaders in Cartersville planned to restore the Felton Plantation as a museum dedicated to the Women’s Civil Rights Movement. After all, it was William Felton, who FIRST promoted the right of women to vote.
Fortunately, just before the structures were destroyed, architectural as-built drawings were prepared in anticipation of the plantation becoming a major monument of the women’s rights movement. In 2012, these two dimensional drawings were developed into a virtual reality computer model that will enable future generations to better understand the world that Rebecca lived in.
Act One – The Civil War in Georgia
As a teenager, Rebecca was the epitome of a Southern Belle. Beautiful, high spirited, intelligent . . . her 16 inch waist line was the inspiration for Scarlett O’Hara’s 16 inch waist. Rebecca rejected all suitors when she was 18, and went off to college. The fact that she waited till age 23 to marry, would have been almost scandalous in the Ante Bellum Era.
The life of Rebecca Felton closely paralleled that of Scarlett’s O’Hara, except that William and Rebecca Felton’s marriage was a strong one. They were in as much love when he died as when they married. William and Rebecca initially opposed Secession, as did most of the people in northwest Georgia. The Felton’s were horrified when their children came home from school, wearing “Secesh” ribbons. The people in their county even raised a militia to guard the United States Mint in Dahlonega, GA from Confederate soldiers, but they quickly changed uniform colors, when President Lincoln ordered the invasion of the South.
William didn’t join the army because of his political beliefs, but he did all he could, as a doctor, to help the thousands of wounded soldiers who were deposited beside the railroad tracks near their home, after big battles to the north. That is how William Felton became the inspiration for Doctor Meade in the horrific scenes wounded Confederate soldiers during the Battle of Atlanta.
When the fighting moved into Northwest Georgia in the summer of 1864, the Felton’s fled with their entire household to Macon, GA. Rebecca heard that both her mother and sister were critically ill with the measles . . .contracted from the invading Northern troops during Sherman’s March to the Sea. She first tried to reach her family by train, but a bridge had been blown up by Union Cavalry.
Rebecca drove a mule wagon over a hundred miles through the devastation of Sherman’s March to the Sea in an attempt to reach her family. In the Old South , plantation class women would have never considered driving a wagon or traveling alone. While in the mule wagon, she was attacked by Yankee cavalry, but a troop of Southern cavalry came to her rescue and drove off the invaders. This event exactly matches the plot of “Gone with the Wind.”
By the time Rebecca reached her family, her mother and sister were dead. Again, that is exactly like the plot of “Gone With the Wind.” She then returned to Macon. All of her family and slaves fled to “a refuge” in deep Southeast Georgia. They almost starved to death. Rebecca’s firstborn son, along with many of their farm hands, died of measles. She almost died of measles, too (just like in the movie, GWTW, but eventually recovered.
William and Rebecca together drove the mule wagon 250 miles northward to Cartersville, to see if anything was left standing on their farm. All of Bartow County was a visage of hell. Sherman had ordered most buildings burned a full four months after there were any Confederate regiments in the area. These pure acts of terrorism, and Sherman openly admitted it.
As Rebecca and her family crested the hill on the road leading to the house, Rebecca stood up to see that their farm was wrecked, but the house was standing. She the uttered those famous words, “I swear by God that I will NEVER be poor again!” Of course, Scarlett said the same words in the novel and movie.
Rebecca Felton created a national scandal by speaking for her husband at rallies next to the newly completed Bartow County Courthouse.
Act Two – The South after the Civil War
During the extreme poverty of Reconstruction, William and Rebecca started a school, since the Yankees had burned all of the public and private school buildings around Cartersville . . . except one that had a Masonic emblem on it. William ran for Congress in outrage when the “Old South Democrats” immediately took control of Georgia after Reconstruction ended. He called these Plantation Democrats . . . the Bourbons.
Rebecca began buying up all of the land around their farm: eventually another 2500 acres. She used rented convict labor to run a saw mill and iron mine Does that sound like “Gone With the Wind?” Rebecca became very wealthy from her business activities, while William became nationally known as a progressive congressman and public speaker. There is a section in “Gone With the Wind” when Scarlett is assaulted in a Shanty town. Both Corra Harris and Rebecca were terrified of being assaulted by black men, although there is no record of either of them being harmed in any way by any black person. It is believed that Corra may have fabricated the story of being assaulted by a black man, which Margaret Mitchell dutifully recorded in her novel.
William Felton’s political career and health waned in the 1890s. He died in 1909 from Parkinson’s Disease. By then, however, the couple had become extremely wealthy from her businesses. She was an astute businesswoman like Scarlett O’Hara . . . but also, like Scarlett, her wealth was created on the backs of rented convict laborers, who were treated far worse than any African-American slave before the Civil War.
Rebecca devoted much of her time to two political causes, the Temperance Movement and the Women’s Suffrage Movement. She considered the two causes interrelated because widespread alcoholism in the Southeast after the Civil War had kept the region in a dungeon of poverty and despair, while archaic laws kept women in political chains that prevented them from applying their talents to solving America’s problems. Ironically, although much of Felton’s early wealth came from leasing convict laborers, she led the effort to have the practice outlawed in Georgia in 1908. For 20 years Felton also wrote a popular syndicated “advice” column for newspapers, called “The Country Home,”
Shortly, after the ratification of the 19th Amendment to the Constitution, giving women the write to vote, At the age of 87, Felton was appointed to fill in the term of a Georgia senator, who had died, until a special election could be held. Although the Senate was in session only the last 24 hours of her term, she was sworn in as the first female to serve in the U.S. Senate and was invited to make a significant speech to Congress. Rebecca Latimer Felton died in 1930 at the age of 95. “Gone with the Wind” was published six years later.
“Fiddle-dee-dee . . . tomorrow is another day! “
Richard Thornton is a professional architect, city planner, author and museum exhibit designer-builder. He is today considered one of the nation’s leading experts on the Southeastern Indians. However, that was not always the case. While at Georgia Tech Richard was the first winner of the Barrett Fellowship, which enabled him to study Mesoamerican architecture and culture in Mexico under the auspices of the Institutio Nacional de Antropoligia e Historia. Dr. Roman Piňa-Chan, the famous archaeologist and director of the Museo Nacional de Antropologia, was his fellowship coordinator. For decades afterward, he lectured at universities and professional societies around the Southeast on Mesoamerican architecture, while knowing very little about his own Creek heritage. Then he was hired to carry out projects for the Muscogee-Creek Nation in Oklahoma. The rest is history.Richard is the Tribal Historic Preservation Officer for the KVWETV (Coweta) Creek Tribe and a member of the Perdido Bay Creek Tribe. In 2009 he was the architect for Oklahoma’s Trail of Tears Memorial at Council Oak Park in Tulsa. He is the president of the Apalache Foundation, which is sponsoring research into the advanced indigenous societies of the Lower Southeast.
Have you ever heard the statement, “The teacher learns more than his students”? For over 30 years, I have been teaching high school boys at my church. And I’ve been surprised by how much I have learned just in my preparation time, and how much I’ve retained–long after the lesson is taught. And the same holds true for business: more engagement means more learning.
As I write blog posts, like this one, I continue to be amazed by how much I learn by just writing it. The process of writing forces me to identify and explain why our business was so successful at producing extraordinary profits.
Training our people was an important part of our business, and we monitored its effectiveness. In fact, our chief operating officer would often say, “Training has not occurred until behaviors have changed.”
“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.”
–Ben Franklin
I love the way that old Ben could distill truth down to a simple statement.
It is interesting how well we learn from the things that happen to us – our experiences. Our knowledge and our abilities are largely determined not by our IQ or some other fixed measure of intelligence, but by the effectiveness of our learning process – in the experiences of participative learning.
What if we could lead by leveraging the fundamental truth of “involve me and I learn”? Well, I’ve got good news for you! I’m about to share one of the best ways for your organization to learn, and it involves a participative leadership style that I call Engage2Lead. Specifically, we’ll look at how to employ the 1-2-3 leadership tool.
What is 1-2-3?
1-2-3 is a unique approach to the decision-making and goal-setting process defined as:
At the very beginning of the decision-making process— AND before making a decision – the empowering leader seeks input from his or her employees. Such a leader asks:
1. Who can help me make a better decision?
2. Who will have to carry it out?
3. Who will be impacted by it?
The 1-2-3 approach reminds leaders to involve their people as appropriate when making important decisions and setting goals.
By doing so, every leader can develop a more effective and efficient TEAM by asking these three simple questions that bring consistently better results while maintaining and enhancing relationships.
How should 1-2-3 be used?
1-2-3 is not a process that you pull off the shelf and dust off for use every once in a while.
Rather it should be part of your organization’s culture and used often and in a variety of situations.
When a change, idea, opportunity or problem facing you is “big”, it is best to engage your TEAM over a period of time through a series of meetings.
A good 4-step approach is to:
1. Start with a meeting to expose your TEAM to the change, idea, opportunity or problem and then give them some time to let the information “incubate”.
2. Pull them together again and ask for and record their input about things to consider and what suggested decision to make.
3. Frame a decision and meet with your TEAM to review, help “tweak” and “buy in” to the decision.
4. Have the TEAM review the “final” decision to see if there are any more ideas for improving it.
And don’t forget to include customers and suppliers in the 1-2-3 process when it makes sense.
Many times their input/feedback is important as you consider adding new services or goods to your product mix, make changes in your operating schedules, or change how your organization provides services, etc.
Remember: This is not decision-making by a committee. You, as the leader, must still decide to make the final decision.
“Give me a fish and I eat for a day. Teach me to fish and I eat for a lifetime.”
–Chinese Proverb
Ben Franklin was right, everyone learns when you involve your TEAM in the decision-making process.
How have you best learned? Would you agree that more engagement means more learning? Are you ready to use the 1-2-3 tool? Please leave a comment <here> and share this blog post with family, a friend, or co-worker.
As early as preschool, I would insist on wearing only business attire to class everyday. And by business attire, I mean I’d put on one of my father’s button-down shirts and tuck it in with a ridiculously oversized pair of slacks that my brother had worn.
When I got older this interest began to manifest itself in ways that caused conflict in class.
The Young Entrepreneur
In 4th grade, I made a little business out of reselling Livestrong wristbands after class. I made about $150 with this side business before the school told me I needed to stop. My classmates were disappointed because I was the only reliable source when it came to getting bands. Plus, I had recently started purchasing Freedom Bands, which were available in far more colors than the Livestrong yellow. Needless to say, my customers were always satisfied.
In 6th grade, I loaned a friend money for a cookie but insisted of there being a 25 cent interest fee tacked onto each day he failed to repay. It took him two weeks and he paid the amount he owed, plus interest, without complaint.
The school found out and my parents received a call home.
What I always found interesting was that there was never any sort of explanation offered as to why my behavior was “bad.” It was just simply against the rules.
My classmates loved my attempts at offering services, but there was always the ever-present, and often unseen, force of teachers and school administrators hovering nearby waiting to stop our transactions.
High School Antics
As the associated student body president, I was required to work in the student store. I developed a practice of accepting tips in the form of the spare change students didn’t want to carry around.
I had a jar on the counter, like any food establishment might, and I would casually suggest students leave their change after a purchase. This was an innocent, voluntary donation in which I’d make a little bit of money every day.
But of course, my teacher found out and her response was a swift write-up. Again, I was not told why my actions were wrong.
It's Only Fair If Everyone Profits
One day, the administration decided to host a club fundraising festival where each club was allowed to sell one item purchased from a grocery store at lunch in order to raise funds for its club—the only time they ever broke the cafeteria monopoly.
I left campus to purchase 150 burgers from Wendy’s for $1 each. I then sold them for $5 per burger on campus, and gave away a free Arizona Iced tea with the burger, which undercut the two other vendors selling Arizona Iced tea.
We eclipsed the rest of the fundraising group that day by over 200 percent and the school accused us of cheating and being greedy.
They confiscated most of the funds and distributed it among the other students to make it more "fair."
At last the truth had come out in full. It had taken almost eighteen years but I had the answer they had never given me before: my teachers hated the free market.
The administrators regarded commerce as dirty. They didn’t see the value I created for students who wanted something better than cafeteria food for lunch. They saw value that had been acquired at the expense of others.
As I look back now with more knowledge and experience, I’ve come to the conclusion that this experience was both beautiful and saddening.
As children, we are born capitalists. We have no deep philosophies or moralities but we organize ourselves naturally around mutual exchange because we recognize quickly that life gets better if we do.
We trade cards, toys, our lunches, and other things we value for the things our friends value and rarely do we have trouble working out disputes. We don’t do it because we care consciously about free markets — we don’t even know the concept. Nor do we need to. Markets don’t require everyone to know their importance consciously. They just require people to be left alone.
It takes a lot of schooling to kill these natural inclinations towards freedom. Teachers and administrators stop these interactions on the playground, and in the classroom they teach material that distorts and obfuscates the truth. The process of schooling is the process of taking our innate tendencies towards liberty and destroying them.
As my friend Isaac Morehouse wrote in a comment when I shared this story on Facebook:
“Is it any wonder why Ayn Rand is making such a resurgence among high school students?”
Dear Church: It’s Time to Stop Enabling Abusive Men
The church is helping abusive men keep their wives trapped in hurtful marriages, but it has to stop. Because there are some things God hates MORE than divorce.
“If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters—yes, even their own life—such a person cannot be my disciple.” Luke 14:26
What does it mean to “hate” someone we are elsewhere called to sacrificially love? We are told to love even our enemies, yet Jesus here tells us to hate some of our closest family members. What could that mean?
Hatred here is Semitic hyperbole. In essence, it means “love less than.” There are times when our love and allegiance to God may be at odds with human loyalties; in those cases, love for God, His light and the way of truth must always prevail.
It’s OK (actually, commendable) for me to love the Seattle Seahawks. But if my wife needs me to take her to the hospital in the middle of a game or needs me to pay her some attention, I have to act like I hate the Seahawks and not even consider my love for them in service to my wife.
Let’s apply this principle in regards to how the church views marriage and divorce.
I recently spoke at a long-standing North American woman’s conference and was overwhelmed by the quantity and horrific nature of things wives are having to put up with in their marriages. Between sessions, I was bombarded by heartfelt inquiries: “What does a wife do when her husband does this? Or that? Or keeps doing this?” It broke my heart. I felt like I needed to take a dozen showers that weekend.
This may sound like a rant, but please hang with me, as I think this conference was a divine appointment. I can’t get this out of my mind.
One wife began our conversation with, “God hates divorce, right?”
“Yes,” I said. “I believe He does.”
“So I’ve just got to accept what’s happening in my marriage, right?”
When she told me what was happening, I quickly corrected her. “If the cost of saving a marriage is destroying a woman, the cost is too high. God loves people more than he loves institutions.”
Her husband is a persistent porn addict. He has neglected her sexually except to fulfill his own increasingly bent desires. He keeps dangling divorce over her head, which makes her feel like a failure as a Christian. He presented her with a list of five things he wanted to do that he saw done in porn, and if she wasn’t willing, he was through with the marriage. She agreed to four of them, but just couldn’t do the fifth. And she feels guilty.
God hates divorce, right?
This is monstrous and vile. This woman needs to be protected from such grotesque abuse, and if divorce is the only weapon to protect her, then the church should thank God such a weapon exists.
A young wife, barely in her 20s, held a baby in a blanket and looked at me with tears. Her husband has a huge temper problem. He’s made her get out of the car on a highway with her baby, twice. “But both times he came back for us,” she said in his defense when I looked absolutely appalled. They were separated and she was living with her parents. She wanted to know if she should take him back because his psychiatrist supposedly said there wasn’t anything really wrong with him. Her husband doesn’t think he has a problem, that, in fact, the problem is with her “lack of forgiveness.”
They had been married only three years and she had already lived through more torment (I’m not telling the full story) than a woman should face in a lifetime. My thoughts weren’t at all about how to “save” the marriage, but to ease her conscience and help her prepare for a new life—without him.
Church, God hates it when a woman is sexually degraded and forced to do things that disgust her. It should also make us want to vomit.
When a young man is so immature he puts his wife’s and baby’s life in danger on a highway (amongst other things), the thought that we’re worried about the “appropriateness” of divorce shows that our loyalties are with human institutions, not the divine will.
As Kevin DeYoung so ably puts it, “Every divorce is the result of sin, but not every divorce is sinful.”
Another woman told me about putting up with her husband’s appalling behavior for over 40 years. I was invited to look in her face, see the struggle, see the heroic perseverance, but also be reminded that counsel has consequences. So when I talk to a young woman in her third year of marriage and it’s clear she’s married to a monster, and someone wants to “save” the marriage, I want them to realize they are likely sentencing her to four decades of abuse, perhaps because of a choice she made as a teenager. When these men aren’t confronted, and aren’t repentant, they don’t change.
Jesus said what he said about divorce to protect women, not to imprison them. Divorce was a weapon foisted against women in the first century, not one they could use, and it almost always left them destitute if their family of origin couldn’t or wouldn’t step up.
How does it honor the concept of “Christian marriage” to enforce the continuance of an abusive, destructive relationship that is slowly squeezing all life and joy out of a woman’s soul? Our focus has to be on urging men to love their wives like Christ loves the church, not on telling women to put up with husbands mistreating their wives like Satan mistreats us. We should confront andstop the work of Satan, not enable it.
Look, I hate divorce as much as anyone. I have been married for 31 years and cannot fathom leaving my wife. I have prayed with couples, counseled with couples, written blog posts and articles and books, and have traveled to 49 of the 50 states and nine different countries to strengthen marriages in the church. By all accounts, I believe I’ve been an ambassador for improving and growing marriages.
The danger of what I’m saying is clear and even a little scary to me, because no marriage is easy. Every marriage must overcome hurt, pain and sin. No husband is a saint, in the sense that every husband will need to be forgiven and will be troublesome and even hurtful at times to live with. I’m not talking about the common struggles of living with a common sinner, or every man and woman could pursue divorce. (There are many men who live with abuse and could “biblically” pursue a divorce as well.) Charging someone with “abuse” when it doesn’t truly apply is almost as evil as committing abuse, so we need to be careful we don’t bear “false witness” against a spouse to convince ourselves and others that we can legitimately pursue divorce to get out of a difficult marriage.
That’s why I love how some churches will meet with a couple and hear them out to give them some objective feedback, helping them to distinguish between normal marital friction and abusive behavior. Some women need to hear, “No, this isn’t normal. It’s abuse. You don’t have to put up with that.” Others need to hear, “We think what you’re facing are the normal difficulties of marriage and with counseling they can be overcome.” There’s no way a blog post (or even a book) can adequately anticipate all such questions.
I love marriage—even the struggles of marriage, which God can truly use to grow us and shape us—but I hate it when God’s daughters are abused. And I will never defend a marriage over a woman’s emotional, spiritual and physical health.
I went back to my hotel room after that woman’s conference and almost felt like I had to vomit. I don’t know how God stands it, having to witness such horrific behavior leveled at his daughters.
Enough is enough!
Jesus says there are “levels” of love, and times when one loyalty must rise over another. Our loyalty to marriage is good and noble and true. But when loyalty to a relational structure allows evil to continue, it is a false loyalty, even an evil loyalty.
Christian leaders and friends, we have to see that some evil men are using their wives’ Christian guilt and our teaching about the sanctity of marriage as a weapon to keep harming them. I can’t help feeling that if more women started saying, “This is over,” and were backed up by a church that enabled them to escape instead of enabling the abuse to continue, other men in the church, tempted toward the same behavior, might finally wake up and change their ways.
Christians are more likely to have one-income families, making some Christian wives feel even more vulnerable. We have got to clean up our own house. We have got to say “Enough is enough.” We have got to put the fear of God in some terrible husbands’ hearts, because they sure don’t fear their wives, and their lack of respect is leading to ongoing deplorable behavior.
I want a man who was abusive to have to explain to a potential second wife why his saintly first wife left him. Let men realize that behavior has consequences, and that wives are supposed to be cherished, not used, not abused and never treated as sexual playthings. If a man wants the benefit and companionship of a good woman, let him earn it, and re-earn it, and let him know it can be lost.
Enough is enough.
I know I’m ranting. But I don’t think it was an accident that I was constantly stopped at that woman’s conference and forced to hear despicable story after despicable story (“forced” isn’t the right word. I could, of course, have walked away). I think God wanted me to see the breadth and depth of what is going on, and in this case, perhaps to be His voice.
Message received! We are called to love marriage, but when marriage enables evil, we should hate it (love it less) in comparison to a woman’s welfare.
Check out Cherish, Gary’s latest book on marriage, here.
As you know, my husband, Ken Takeshi Tada is sansei, that is, third generation Japanese born here in America. Even though Ken is as American as they come – a real man’s man who loves football and fly fishing – his heart is rooted in the Japanese culture. He loves talking about his family history, and the other day he was telling me about something called Kintsugi. It’s a Japanese method for repairing broken pottery, and it is quite an art form. The Japanese will repair a shattered piece of pottery with a special lacquer mixed with gold, silver, or platinum. The potter doesn’t disguise the injury to ceramic piece; he actually showcases it. The lines of what once were cracks – the broken places – now reflect the beautiful bonding agent. The result is stunning.
I’m sure you’ve picked up on the obvious lesson here. Because God does 'kintsugi' on his people all the time. When our lives are shattered by terrible trial, He’s going to put us back together in a way that is far more beautiful, more spectacular than before the trial. Rather than conceal the damage, he accentuates his grace through the broken pieces of our life. It’s one way, perhaps the best way, that He performs Romans 8:28 in us – fitting the broken pieces together for our good and His glory.
