By R.L. Stollar, HA Community Coordinator
The following passage is from the 2010 “25th Anniversary Edition” of Mary Pride’s seminal book The Way Home: Beyond Feminism Back to Reality, originally published in 1985. The emphases are in original:
The reason the church is getting lax about divorce is that we no longer understand marriage. If a spouse has problems, such as drunkenness or fits of temper, the other one concludes it is not a “good” marriage and moves on. Those who take this perspective end up allowing divorce “for any and every reason,” just as the Pharisees were doing in Jesus’ day. Jesus answered the Pharisees that destruction of any God-ordained marriage is always wrong… Only adultery, which breaks the partnership by pouring its resources into a spiritually fruitless extramarital union, as well as (in the case of an adulterous wife) jeopardizing the children’s legitimacy, and desertion, which nullifies the partnership, are biblical grounds for divorce… Christians may never, never, never divorce Christians. (21-22)
Image from page 21’s excerpt of the book:
You can read more about Mary Pride and her book The Child Abuse Industry here.
Homeschoolers Anonymous 
You know, it’s like Pride WANTS women and children to be miserable. How could anything good come out of staying in a toxic relationship?
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Because Pride (appropriate name, that) can then Count Coup that she’s less miserable than they are.
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I wish my self-hating-little-Christian-girl-wife-mother had divorced my self-worshipping bible-loving scum-bag father. I always knew I would never marry a Christian man and tell my daughters not to marry the creeps either.
In Christianity it is very important that the husband/father is happy, and pleasured, if the wife and kids want to set them selves on fire, so what? It is the wife and kids job to feel bad to make the Christian man feel good.
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I distinctly remember this EXACT BOOK on our shelves, around the time my mother started homeschooling us. Though it disappeared shortly before I would have been old enough to start reading it.
I once asked my mother if Pride had influenced her decision to homeschool us at all, but she couldn’t give me a straight answer.
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And now that I think about it, the drunk raging husband and the woman who couldn’t stand up to him, were actually her parents.
Maybe this book helped her whitewash some of that. (“It’s not abuse, it’s glorious martyrdom!”)
And some of what she did to us. (“This is just how family life IS.”)
I wish she could just admit that her dad hurt her, and she passed that hurt on down to us. But she can’t do it. We can’t go there. I don’t think she understands what a real apology even is.
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Well, Mary, if my mother had not fled our small town on the back streets and back rural roads, my ‘drunken raging’ father would have killed us. He had a revolver, and he had bragged as such at the bar. And you know what she did? After a year, we all left her parents’ house and went back to living together as before. It soon escalated back to a drunken “coma” every single night, which included some traffic accidents which ended up in the hospital. Finally his liver and other organs gave out and he died at 52. End of the immediate nightmare, just the beginning of the rest of our lives of living with the flashbacks. I am 71, and I have no patience with certain issues.
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I am horrified that in this day and age (of so much information available) that people think like that. I wrote to Dobson and sent my paper (which I presented at my State’s Counseling Association), Society’s Hidden Pandemic, Verbal Abuse, Precursor to Physical Violence and a Form of Biochemical Assault….if anyone is interested, you can e-mail me: carleton@oakland.edu
I got a divorce after 31 years of verbal and physical abuse……My church put me thru an 18 month nightmare, but I was determined to educate them….sadly, that didn’t ha[ppen. I was called to a meeting of deacons, not allowed to have a woman with me (I asked) and they asked me, ‘Are you still having sex with your ex?” X wasn’t called to a meeting. In the end, on my birthday, my name was put up on a screen, followed by the words, “Conduct Unbecoming a Child of God.” This was because I let the x live with me for awhile after the divorce. Sadly, churches give sad, sick counsel and women stay in abusive situations, and sometimes are murdered. So much blood on their hands.
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This is one of the most heart breaking, disgusting things I have heard in a long time.. (and that says something). However, in spite of that I congratulate you on surviving and trying to educate. Your strength is admirable.
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I don’t yet know a lot about Mary Pride, but she seems to have a meanness about her. people who can’t face their own childhood horrors often develop a hard, thick shell of denial and impose their amnesiac ways on others.
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