Divorce messaging in the church : a qualitative analysis on how the ‘marriage and divorce’ sermon is framed from the online pulpit.

The purpose of this study was to observe and analyze messaging on the topic of marriage and divorce from the online media pulpit; this was done through a qualitative analysis of 20-25 online sermons on the topic, using framing theory to examine messaging consistencies and inconsistencies towards both women and men on divorce from a more content-objective, comparative and inferential research perspective. The practical application of the study aimed to observe how sermons were framed to analyze variations of opposing framing among churches—specifically, biblical versus cultural. The findings of this study revealed that most of the sermons were categorized into one of two framing fields (biblical and cultural), rather than that of ambiguity. With the exception of several outliers, the sermons were either largely biblically accurate, or they were largely not at all.