Church is funny thing. I recognize its importance in my ideal society, in my upbringing, my married life, and also its hypocrisy. Your church and its members/family are supposed to be there for you when things go bad or you need help. This help often comes in form of emotional support through the word of God. Bible verses and stories are to be used to help you push through the battle that is divorce and child custody, right? Your Pastor should be there to offer guidance and support. How realistic are these expectations and should you rely on your church family, professed Christians, to help you?

Sadly the answer is no.

Because the Church has its own problems and its members, including the Pastor, are too often weak people. They can make the Church and its activities seems so important and its environment a great place to be as long as the money is flowing and there are no significant tragedies in its membership. Individual problems are pushed aside when the parishoners are aware of the world and how religion shapes their life. Cookie cutter prayers, sermons, and interaction are the norm unfortunately. Church leadership is simply not capable of providing anything beyond superficial advice and support and no matter how many prayers you say, whether it be one on one with a Pastor or in a group prayer meeting. If you look at all the churches in your community, especially the ones who preach the loudest or have the biggest membership, you can bet atleast one, in addition to not being able to offer genuine support to its members when bad things happen, probably has a problem with its youth leadership including likely one or more instances of pastors molesting or sexually grooming youths right now, today, in 2020. The people who they help the most are those who believe that praying and talking about things in a church or religious setting solves everything or is all they need. Sadly this isn't the 1850's on a Wagon Trail in Utah or a screaming church in the South telling you that if you don't behave or fix your marital issues, the wrath of God is in your future. 

My opinion about staying away from the Church during your divorce is based on my religious upbringing, watching a pastor handle my family during a tragedy, interaction in my own church during my divorce, and cynicism that comes with life and dealing with people who claim to be Christians yet act like the devil when it comes to putting their own interests first. I was raised from a young age in the Lutheran Church, went to Sunday School, watch my mom teach Sunday School, and my father volunteer. They put a check in the offering plate every week despite money being a problem for them. I went to confirmation class and was confirmed. I was in a Boy Scout Troop sponsored by the Mormon Church my best friend and his family were Mormon. I had the best time in Scouts under this Mormon umbrella even if I was still learning the difference between Latter Day Saints and Lutherans. The Mormon Church will always be part of my life and its people are great. Maybe how they handle the problems of their members are different then my Lutheran experience has been but who knows. I don't know if I would want to be in a Mormon Church and get divorced but that is for another post. I even went to a college based in religion. I was not the guy who joined Fellowship of Christian Athletes or brought up God with everything I did however. I wasn't Tim Tebow even if I am a fan of what he does in today's world. My religion was private and important and to this day I am still a believer and a Christian even if I don't participate in my church or attend services like I did as a younger man. Reality and experience has always taken precedence in how and who I get help or advice especially during times of turmoil. My character and religious beliefs have little meaning in trying to understand why others do what they do to destroy or take from you when just recently they were your friend or professed love for you. There are things God cannot answer. 

Life experience has told me that the Church is not the place for the solutions of real problems of individuals but instead for group think where if we attend a group church service or prayer meeting, we can get answers from God. God does many wonderful things but he allows us to live our lives and learn from our mistakes giving us guidance with his words to help us understand and improve our choices in some instances but not all. God does not have individual plans for people or pick favorites from his community of believers. The pain of having to fight an ex over custody of kids is tough. Its very hard to explain in a Christian sense, or any sense, why a woman who sat next to you in church, prayed with you, stood next to you while your kid was baptized, sees you as a good Christian man and father, says you are not worthy of equal time with your kids. This is also harder to swallow when you walk into a court room and a Judge tells you how he or she is a Christian or even a pastor in their church, that you as a good Christian man should not have equal custody of your kids while berating you for speaking out against the injustice of what your ex wife is trying to do to you and your kids. People can call themselves Christians but its their behavior that determines what they actually are as people. You can say you have taken God as your savior, attend church every week, and feel good that you will now end up in heaven while still behaving deceptively as the devil wants you to on a day to day basis. Add a position of power or a black robe to the equation and you wonder why any man would think he could call his pastor and expect help in a divorce or child custody situation.

Churches do not want conflict. They know people will get sick and die. They know people will fall on hard financial times. These things can all be prayed about and solved mentally with a good bible verse to justify a persons current situation. There are even members in a church who the pastor calls on to stroke a check for church needs. Lets hope these deep pocket individuals dont need help. These people probably know to look elsewhere when they do. Most church members are not woke to the real world. They live in their bubble and their pastor is just a reflection of them providing a prayer or brief meeting when things happen in life that they cannot cope with. This does not mean they are bad people or your pastor does not care. I value the role they play and if you are a Christian you should as well. I have a pastor who I listen to online for 2 hours every week. My favorite podcasts are christian based. I know what is inside my soul. However I would never give anyone advice to rely on your pastor for help when it comes to a divorce and child custody issue. You likely aren't lucky to have such a man as a Pastor. With rare exception they cannot help you and will push you out the door if you try to talk to them. There are good ones that will give you time and real world perspective. These top level pastors are rare and very valuable. I'm still trying to find this type of church that makes me want to go on Sundays to interact with him and the people that are members of his church. Like a woman who can be a good wife and mother through the good times and bad, these pastors and your church community can be a god send to a positive life with an understanding of how religion matters for you and your kids. Finding the wife and the pastor who are what you would hope they appear to be are rare.

When you split up with your spouse, trying to get support from your pastor or a religious explanation will only cause you more despair. This is a time to put religion aside but still pray for strength. Your pastor wont know what to do. Too many will give a vibe telling you to get away from them and come back when you settle everything but don't forget to keep the offering coming in. This can push you away from the church. The two times I saw real tragedy in my life was with my divorce and the death of my sister., I saw what my Pastor did and how they handled me and my parents. Its get away, I cant help you, and get over it. When my sister was killed at age 16 in a car accident and I saw how my parents were shunned by our church and told to get over it, my perspective on church and its meaning changed drastically. Why would I tell my Pastor that my spouse was an addict and wrote thousands of pages of sexual fan fiction with characters named after Harry Potter characters and other characters named after my own daughters while ignoring me while I provided for my family with my hard work? He does not want to help becuase he cant. He is a good man just not an experienced one who knows how to think outside his religious training. He does not want to talk about why my sister had to die at age 16. Its lets say a prayer, put some cash in the plate, and see you next week. That is church for most people and people go to church because that is how they were raised. They don't ask for anything else other than a place to go worship with friendly, even if too often fake Christians. When there are no tragedies or difficulties, for the average person it is a great and important place. Real world issues are rarely addressed other than by individuals you know who have lived life outside the church walls or who rely on more than their church to get answers.

If you are a christian or religious based individual, as you go through these issues, take yourself away from your church. You need to surround yourself with more worldly people who have experienced life. This might be a friend who goes to your church, but its rarely your pastor. Don't go near your church for awhile. Don't get cynical about your christian beliefs however because if they matter, they should still matter after divorce. You need men, strong men, who have been through the process and can give you real world answers. 

Something to think about as you pick up the phone to call your pastor because your christian wife wants all your money and wants you to see your children 2 days a month despite you being a good husband and father. While the answers to many things come from God, things such as divorce and child custody do not so proceed accordingly.

No matter how often I may relive my own hellish experience with divorce, child custody, and the family court system, combined with the stories of men my age and younger who are getting divorced and fighting for custody of their children, with the world pretty much going to shit and change to social interaction coming faster than a simp can swipe right on a dating site, I still look for the good of the experience and remind my clients and men contemplating divorce, that things can actually be much worse.

Imagine being a 25-30 year old man with a good job or college degree(or both), a clear path to financial success, a great personality with a hop in your step that only comes with youth, and you want to get married and have a family like your parents did and what most of those around you do or atleast try. I remember being this guy 20-25 years ago, before there was social media and dating sites. It was still hard to find a woman who you not only wanted to be with in that way, but who also wanted to be with you, have a family, raise children, and hopefully feel some level of happiness and achievement. This was before we had all this information about who actually gets married and the other information that was just starting be easily obtainable on the internet. Men and women still met mostly in person and not unanimously on a dating site. Interaction with a potential mate was rare and we put the time in to get to know someone. We werent so quick to walk away because you could go home and swipe for a new woman. Despite the set up of the times, it was still hard for most men to find a wife without dating down and as we pushed toward 30 and beyond, we had to ask ourselves many things before we ended up going down a path we never planned for or thought would not apply because we had it all going for us. The women should be everywhere we look and seeing our quality while matching it with theirs.

What men did not realize at that time and many dont understand today is that it is hard for a man to get a wife and have children. While a wife may not be the dream of life, having children is for 95% of men. This desire to reproduce and be a parent causes men to continue to try and meet women no matter how much resistance we get and how much age, time, and results discourages us to keep trying. While having children does not require marriage, most men, atleast in the white community, dont interact with women so they can have kids without the wife. It happens but its not part of our makeup and still is not today despite marriage being a bad deal for men. The desire for kids is that strong. What also has not changed is the statistic that 80% of women reproduce with 20% of men in this country. Think about that. If 90% of men want kids and only 20% of men get to have kids, there are a lot of childless men out there with many of them lying to themselves about it not being a big deal while hiding their depression about it. Women face the same problems and any woman who does not get to have kids and wants them is going to be more damaged than the man who faces the same problem as she ages. A woman can get married and have kids(assuming no health issues) any time she wants. As with men, she does not want to settle and wants to be with someone she feels is worthy. However, men must date down to get a woman in most cases while women will only date up. Women wont even date an equal. It creates a huge problem for men who bare the burden of the chase, the costs that come with it, and the hypergamus nature of women who can go from wanting to marry and have kids with you to making up whatever excuses she wants to leave you or be with a higher value man.

Fast forward and today, it is almost the cool thing to say you are MGTOW or redpilled before you are even 25 years old. How is that good for the success of any culture and society. Men are taught the nature of women and witness it right in front of their face through dating sites and social media. Its hard to argue with men who advocate this for other men because marriage is not a great bargain. That being said, men still want kids and families and the men lecturing us on being MGTOW or redpilled have kids and that experience. Even if their experience leads to good advice, its hard to listen to someone talk about it while also mentionng their kid. We are stuck and the difficulties of getting this experience in life is not as guaranteed for young men today. This might be the price we pay for information because we are shown how women behave and men are more open to sharing their experiences. Men are literally walking away from any attempt to live the life we always assumed was normal. Families dont exist any longer. Divorce is up as are the number of bastard children in the white community. The lack of families used to be a joke laughed about against the black community. This problem is moving to the white culture where our birth rate is continuously going down. Western Europe and Japan do not make enough children to continue their culture. The muslims and africans dont have this problem and will own Europe in 50 years. Japan will die off. The USA will be South Africa at some point depending on how long it takes the black race to kill of the whites faster than it kills its own while scaring the whites that remain to bow down to them out of guilt. If you dont understand what I am talking about turn on your television and go on You Tube. White people are checking out of society and that makes it tough for a young man who did everything right to be in the top 20% to find a wife and have a family. In a society where women use dating sites and social media to get more attention than even the most insecure starved ones can handle, their only need for marriage is to use it as a contract to make themselves rich the moment they choose to end it. If you cant put her in that position, she wont marry you. The end result is a man must date down and take what he can get if he wants a family and kids.

So why do I mention all of this? Ill tell you why....

I continue to meet men who are 40-50 are faced with divorce and a fight over their children, some of them often very young. Most of them dont want the divorce. 80% of them are filed by the women and for the remaining 20%, the woman behaved so bad that the man had no choice but to leave. She stayed not to look like the bad guy or because it was in her financial interests to stick around. I left my wife. I didnt want to be divorced. However I had self respect. She would have stayed for as long as necessary to improve her payout. I left to minimize the damage. The men that do leave their wife voluntarily when the wife does nothing to deserve him leaving or who does not want to leave is less than 5%. There is nothing good about it. Marriage is for women in every aspect except when it comes to a man wanting to be a father.

As bad as that is, I ask these men would they rather be going through this hell and fighting over their kids or having to go back to being 30 but living in todays world trying to find a wife and have kids. None of them would would chose todays option. They are lucky to have their kids. They got married just before things went from bad to worse in terms of how people meet and treat each other. It is the rare person who had a worse divorce than I did but I got married and had two kids. The money might be gone and the parental alienation is ongoing, but I still have them and I have a relationship with them. As hard as it was to get divorced, I am still on the side of being glad I got married and had kids. I know how hard it was for me in to find a family opportunity 20-30 years ago and the reason I married the person I did really does not matter. I still got to do it.  I got in just under the finish line of time and the advent of the change from in person dating to where online meeting has devalued people, marriage and family. This is the case for most of the men I meet now and I remind them of how they are a dying breed. They all hate their wives, but they to a person would not want to be 25-30 and trying to create a family.

As marriages reduce and there are less children being born, combined with the information out there telling men not marry, the future of society is going to go from lawyers like me trying to help men save their assets and get access to their children in a family court owned by liberals and man hating judges, to a society where men are 40-50 years old and have no family or kids. The top level men will always have access to women and have kids if they choose, but the men who are above average but not top 15-20% are going to face a real dilemma. They know it because it is shoved in their face as soon as they start looking for misery because a girl they dated in college had no desire to marry them. The marijuana use and porn addiction starts young and has taken men who would make good husbands 50 years ago and men who would still try 20 years ago, to men who become sloths and live in their parents basement or under the thumb of a single mom.

Men are going to go from dealing with divorce issues to the issues of loneliness and addictions as they hit middle age and they no longer live in the USA they saw and remembered, if only briefly as kids. These men who say they are free, have plenty of money, pump and dump women, all because they are single and never married or have kids like they have some good life are lying to themselves. There is no doubt in todays society that marriage is not a game you want to play, but if you learn how to navigate it, it can benefit you with children before you are destroyed financially. Men who are able to marry will be taught how to control the narrative of it but that is for another discussion and maybe a review of prior posts on this blog.

When I explain all this indepth to men who are now facing a shock divorce and all the issues that destroy your psyche, I try to put some positivity  on it. Be glad you got to do it and have some kids. Value the relationships with your children. Dont speak to a horrible wife just because she is their mother. Better yourself and appreciate what you have. There are many young men today will never get to have children and the odds that were already stacked against them are only going to get worse. In 10-20 years they wont be talking to professionals about divorce, they will be taking to professionals to help them with depression over a life wasted and unfulfilled.  For as bad as women behave in relationships, I d rather take my chances and be glad that I got to have certain experiences over what most young men are now facing.