No-Fault Divorce, Family Court & the Crisis of Marriage – The Mansplainers

I was guest on “A Male Space” podcast with co-hosts Stephen Baskerville and Bradley Grunner. Baskerville is the author of “Taken Into Custody, The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family” and “The New Politics of Sex, The Sexual Revolution, Civil Liberties, and the Growth of Government Power.”

Watch: No-Fault Divorce, Family Court & the Crisis of Marriage – The Mansplainers

In our conversation, we issued a direct challenge to religious institutions: if you claim authority over marriage, why do you remain silent when that marriage is unjustly broken? Across denominations, the pattern is strikingly similar.

When a spouse is abandoned without clear wrongdoing, churches often retreat into passivity, offering prayers but little concrete action. This silence has consequences. It signals to the wider culture that marriage, even when described as sacred or covenantal, is ultimately optional and unenforced. Over time, this disconnect erodes both the credibility of the institution and the seriousness with which marriage itself is taken.

Our discussion emphasized that religious institutions are not powerless; they possess moral authority, internal governance structures, and the ability to apply real pressure–yet they rarely use them. When they fail to act, they unintentionally normalize the very breakdown they claim to oppose, leaving the faithful spouse isolated and the broader community confused about what marriage truly means. If churches are to remain relevant, they must move beyond symbolic support and reclaim a consistent, visible defense of their own teachings. The question is no longer theoretical. It is practical and urgent: will religious institutions stand behind the permanence of marriage when it is tested, or will they continue to step aside and allow the culture to redefine it?

For example:

Bai (24 min.:42 sec.): One of the disappointing responses that people get is the church personnel will be like, ‘Oh, we’ll just pray for you.’ There’s another problem when a Catholic woman dumps her husband. It causes scandal. Everyone else sees the woman dumping her husband and thinks, ‘Well, she’s a Catholic, so if she can do it, I guess the Catholic Church is perfectly okay with this. I guess there’s nothing wrong with this. I guess this is normal. Oh, she was bored. She was unhappy. She didn’t like him anymore. He gained too much weight. He couldn’t keep a job that she liked.’

So everyone else who’s viewing this starts to think it’s normal. So, then it becomes normalized, and everyone just stays quiet about it. You were talking about the Church. What is the Church? The Church is just quiet. They run away.

Baskerville: (27 min. :21 sec.) I’d like to go back to Bai’s point about how the bishop and the Church can intervene and put moral pressure on its parishioners—on its members—to behave themselves, to reconcile, and so forth. ” […] But you mentioned that if the Church does put pressure on its members, it can be effective. I’d add (and you’ve probably heard me say this before) that I think the priests, the pastors, the clergy, and the parishioners too, should not just put moral pressure on. Because, as you mentioned a few minutes ago, every church, including the Catholic Church, also registers the marriage with the state, and the state has an interest in it. No matter how much pressure the Catholic Church or any church puts on the spouses to reconcile or behave themselves, the state can, of course, tear up the contract in ways that leave the Church unable to do anything.

So I think the Church, especially the clergy, should do more than just apply moral pressure, more even than excommunication. I think they should go into the courtroom and stand up for the spouses, or for the wronged spouse, if there is one. If one spouse is being flagrantly wronged and the other is in the wrong, then the clergy should go into the courtroom and say, ‘We have standing in this case to be heard. We consecrated the marriage. We witnessed it. We have standing to come into this civil case and speak on behalf of justice—not just on behalf of God, yes, but on behalf of justice.’

And that is a big part of what God Himself demands in these cases. The clergy should not hesitate to go into the courtroom, point the finger at the judge, and say, ‘You are dispensing injustice in this case.’ That’s not mixing church and state. That’s standing up for your principles. And those same principles, I think, can be justified from a secular standpoint, from a Catholic, Protestant, or any standpoint.