Surviving a Spiritual Mismatch in Marriage - Part 1 of 4

This transcript has been adapted from the attached audio. It may not be in its final form and may be updated.

LAND: As I travel across the country, I run into people all the time that have a spouse that is not a believer and I have heard from them and I have seen in pastorates that I have been in and interim pastorates, how difficult and how frustrating and how painful that kind of marriage can be. Lee, Leslie, why did you write this book?

LEE: Well, we had so many people, as you have had in the ministry, who we have encountered who have had such pain and such difficulty in their lives being unequally yoked in their marriage, where usually it is the man who is the skeptic and it is the woman who is the Christian, that is, in fact, 23% of Christian women are married to non-believing men, which is a lot of folks, and a lot of them are in pain. Their marriages are very turbulent and filled with conflict and arguments and so, and that was our experience when I was the atheist and Leslie was the Christian for a period of our marriage where we found a lot of difficulty and almost ended up in divorce court as a result. So, we wanted to produce a resource that could help them to not just navigate and sort of thrive in the midst of the spiritual mismatch, but also to actively be involved with trying to communicate the gospel and reach their spouse with the message of Christ.

LAND: Well before we go further into your story, I do think prevention is always the best medicine and the Bible is very clear that believers are not to be unequally yoked with unbelievers. Now, you were already in your marriage when you became a believer, Leslie, but based on your experience, what would be your advice, what would be your counsel to a Christian who is contemplating or thinking about entering into a marriage relationship with a person who is an unbeliever?

LESLIE: Not to do it. Obviously, Scripture warns us for good reason. God is not trying to be limiting our field, but, obviously, knowing what Lee and I went through, He knows the pain that comes about when your whole world is turned upside down. For me, my relationship with Christ was vital and exciting and I was so excited about what I was learning every day and I couldn’t share it with Lee because it would always end up in an argument and why did I need this crutch and how could I waste my time, and so, you know, there is just a different plane of understanding when you become a Christian. You understand and you see the world through different glasses. The non-believer just does not get your view point and so you clash on everything from money to budgeting to how to raise the children to how to spend your weekends. Every bit of your life changes.

LEE: And I think one thing you have to be careful of in terms of the dating situation is that so often the guy in the situation, if he has fallen in love with this girl and he wants to marry her and he is not a Christian, he is going to speak the Christian language. If he believes that spirituality, God, Jesus is important to this woman, he is going to talk that language and he’s going to say a prayer from time to time and he’s going to go to church and he’s going to play the role, and then when the marriage takes place, the woman is going to find out that all of a sudden he is not interested in going to church, he is not interested in developing a relationship with God, and the reason is that he was playing a role and he wasn’t really a born-again follower of Christ. That happens a lot, so one of the things we have done in our book is we have, even though the Bible says that only God knows the human heart, we had fifteen questions we put in the book to help people diagnose whether or not the person they are dating really is a born-again Christian.

LAND: You know, in this society, you are going to marry somebody you date, and so, the best policy is just don’t date people who aren’t believers.

LEE: Even casual dating, because casual dating leads to more serious dating and if you open yourself up to the possibility of falling in love with this person, then you are forced with a choice, do I go with this person who I have come to love or do I follow Jesus. Well, you don’t want to put yourself in a position to make those kind of choices.

LAND: Well, let’s begin with your story. Neither of you were believers when you married, is that right?

LESLIE: Right.

LAND: The problem, if we can call it that, began when Leslie came to know the Lord.

LEE: It is ironic that usually introducing God into a situation is going to make things better but in our case, it was as if Jesus became a barrier between us because I was an atheist, I was a skeptic with a legal background, a journalism background, I was a legal editor of the Chicago Tribune, and Leslie had been agnostic, had been sort of in spiritual neutral. She became a Christian through a neighbor and now, all of a sudden, here we were unequally yoked. Now we find out why the Bible says in II Corinthians 6:14, “don’t become unequally yoked.” Because now we began to experience all the problems as a result.

LAND: Now in your experience, you found, both in your own experience and in your ministry, that it is most often the woman who finds the Lord first and I have certainly, for every man that I know who is married to an unbeliever, there are twenty-five women that I know who married unbelievers. I noticed that in your book you have a section titled, “What’s the Matter with Men.” Well, what is the matter with them?

LEE: Well, you know, studies show, and George Barna who has done a lot of research in this area, shows that among Americans as a whole, that men are less likely than women to read the Bible or to attend church or to contribute to a charity or to agree the Bible is true or to believe in the resurrection or to pray, and I think we live in a culture where men are brought up as youngsters and taught to suppress their emotions. They are taught to be competitive. They are taught to keep their personal needs and longings deep inside. The people they look up to, the television heroes, the Arnold Schwarzeneggers and so forth, are independent and personal kinds of people. Well, that’s a formula for a spiritually repressed person and you are growing up to be independent, to be self-reliant, and so all of these factors, I think, go into the fact that men in our culture tend to be more resistant to the gospel than women are.

LAND: Well, I think that is absolutely true. You know, we have all of the statistics that show this and, of course, when you go to church, you go to any church. Now, I will say this, the more conservative the church, the more evangelical the church, the higher percentage of men, but, even then, there will be more women than men in almost any service that you attend. When you are standing up there to preach, it is true in the choir and it is true out in the congregation that there will be a higher percentage of women than men. Leslie, once you found the Lord and you began to grow in the Lord and you began to not be a natural person any more to whom spiritual things were foolish but you had passed for being a child of darkness to being a child of light, from a child of wrath to a child of blessing, this brought you into conflict with Lee. Talk to us about that.

LESLIE: Well, what happened was when I told Lee that I had found Christ and that I wanted to get involved in church and that I would love for him to be involved with me, it created great conflict because in his viewpoint, this was a crutch that I had to lean on, that I, for some reason, suddenly out of the blue, felt the need to have this kind of mythology involved in my life and he just simply could not understand it. For me, as he has put it in the past, it was sort of a “bait and switch” because we both were of one mind when we got married. Suddenly now I’ve turned into something different, wanting different things, wanting to do different things with my life and with our lives and, so, this just ran into conflict all the time. So, it was really my desire to figure out how I can reach him. And I did it in a lot of bad ways, and I also did it in some good ways but, fortunately, the woman that lead me to the Lord was a mentor to me and she was a safe place for me to go to with my frustrations and my fears. But also, she was wise counsel to be able to tell me how to navigate through this difficult time in my life and what to do right and what not to do in my trying to reach out to Lee. I was always leaving tracks or little books underlined with things I wanted him to just happen across and, you know, that would just make him mad. It was eventually Linda’s counsel that “Leslie, just continue to grow in Christ, learn who He wants you to be and allow the Holy Spirit to transform you and allow that to just be something Lee observes,” and as time went on, that is exactly how I went about my trying to reach him, as well as just praying and having a lot of prayer support for him. Over time, in fact, I never like to use this when I am counseling women immediately because I am afraid they are going to think of it as a genie bottle kind of cure, but a verse that Linda came up with was Ezekiel 36:26 which says, “moreover I will give you a new heart and new and right desires and take your stony heart of sin and turn it into a heart of love.” I had about thirty women praying that for Lee and it wasn’t until we were praying that that Lee was even open to the idea of walking into a church. It wasn’t long after that that he started to say, “Alright, I’ll go with you.” So, I would say to most women, what is most important if you are in this situation for yourself is to have a mentor, someone that is a safe place for you to talk to, and to continue to just grow in your relationship with God so that He can transform you and allow the Holy Spirit to reach your husband.