[STL Today]
Police involved in the Coleman triple-murder case hit on a thorny theological question this week that goes back to the time of Jesus: Under what circumstances can Christians divorce?
It’s an important question in the case because divorce, or more specifically, an evangelical organization’s prohibition of divorce among its employees may be one reason behind the murders. That question, of course, leads to others: When, and why, do religious organizations forbid their employees to divorce?
Police have charged Christopher Coleman, a former employee of Joyce Meyer Ministries, with killing his wife and two children last month in their Columbia, Ill., home. A week after the murders, the Post-Dispatch disclosed that Coleman was having an affair. Soon after that, he resigned from his position working security with Joyce Meyer Ministries, a nonprofit evangelical organization based in Jefferson County. Coleman, 32, has pleaded not guilty.
Police disclosed Wednesday that on the day of the murders, Coleman told his girlfriend that his wife, Sheri Coleman, would be served with divorce papers. In sworn testimony Wednesday, Columbia Police Chief Joe Edwards said: “Joyce Meyer Ministry does not employ people who get divorced.” He said if the Colemans had divorced, Christopher Coleman “would end up losing his job.”
Calls to the ministry’s headquarters were not returned, and an attorney for the ministry refused to speak on the record about the ministry’s policy about divorce. Last month, however, a ministry spokesman said “a violation of moral conduct” led to Coleman’s resignation.
Three former employees of the ministry described the no-divorce policy for the Post-Dispatch, though they couldn’t say whether it was a written rule, or just an ingrained part of the Joyce Meyer Ministries culture. They said that people who have already gone through a divorce can be hired to work at the ministry, but that anyone divorced while working at the ministry is let go.
The ministry “hires people who have broken lives, who are divorced, who’ve been drug addicts,” said George Wise, who said he worked for Joyce Meyer Ministries from 2001 to 2003 as a video specialist.
The ministry uses testimonials from believers to attract others to the organization, including one from a woman whose relationship “ended in a painful divorce.”
“I started to watch Joyce Meyer every chance I got,” she writes. “God started to transform me and heal my broken heart.”
Wise said he’d been divorced twice by the time he was hired by Meyer and then married a colleague at the ministry. When that marriage didn’t work out, he said, he was fired three days after his divorce was finalized.
“Everyone I ever knew that worked there and got divorced … was fired,” Wise said.
Professor Bradford Wilcox, a sociology professor at the University of Virginia who has written about religion and marriage, said a no-divorce policy is not unusual in Christian organizations whose employment guidelines are structured according to their faith.
“Some more traditional, typically evangelical Protestant or fundamentalist Protestant institutions … have a policy relating to an employee’s personal conduct,” Wilcox said. “For some of those institutions that conduct can encompass marital infidelity or divorce, and you could be sanctioned as a consequence.”
All of which is completely legal. “There is no law in Missouri that forbids discrimination on the basis of marital status,” said Mary Anne Sedey, an employment attorney at Sedey Harper.
Eric Sowers, an employment attorney at Sowers & Wolf, said he’d never heard of anyone at a secular organization fired over marital status. He said religious organizations are exempt from the Missouri Human Rights Act. Wilcox said the First Amendment gives religious institutions wide latitude “to shape their employment policies so they’re consistent with their religious teachings.”
Read more here.
[From me]
I don’t agree with all of Joyce Meyer’s theology, but to try to blame this murder on her ministry’s stance on divorce is a stretch. This man murdered his wife and children because he was living in sin. He should have been fired. Rational people don’t kill to keep a job rather than divorce. What a strange article.
What do you think?
![[Slashdot]](http://slashdot.org/favicon.ico)
![[Digg]](http://digg.com/favicon.ico)
![[Reddit]](http://reddit.com/favicon.ico)
![[del.icio.us]](http://images.del.icio.us/static/img/delicious.small.gif)
![[Facebook]](http://www.facebook.com/favicon.ico)
![[Technorati]](http://technorati.com/favicon.ico)
![[Google]](http://www.google.com/favicon.ico)
![[StumbleUpon]](http://www.stumbleupon.com/favicon.ico)
