DEBORAH POTTER: These family pictures bring back unpleasant memories for Jen Thompson.
(To Jen Thompson): Is it painful for you to pull these out and look at them?
JEN THOMPSON: Mmm-hmm. My father, when he came to my college graduation, that was the first time he came to see me in college after three and a half years.
POTTER: Jen's parents divorced when she was 14, and along with the sense of loss came a crisis of faith.
Ms. THOMPSON: My father was emotionally just barren -- just not available. So I came across as thinking that my father was just impossible to please. And that definitely carried over into my relationship with God -- that I felt that God was just very judgmental, God was just waiting for me to slip up and make a mistake, and that I was, in God's eyes, I was unforgivable and unlovable. POTTER: Jen's painful experience is surprisingly common. A national survey of adults who were kids when their parents split up found that divorce had a major impact on their spiritual lives. They were much less likely to go to church or to call themselves religious than adults whose parents stayed married.
ELIZABETH MARQUARDT (Author, BETWEEN TWO WORLDS): One extraordinary finding in our study was that of those grown children of divorce who were active in a church at the time of their parents' divorce, two thirds say that no one in the clergy or congregation reached out to them at that time.
POTTER: Marquart's study found that adults often feel the church abandoned them as kids, when their pastors were no better equipped than anyone else to help them.
Ms. MARQUARDT: At the time of divorce, people are reluctant to reach out to the children because they don't know what to say; they don't want to offend the parents. They're afraid they might upset the child, so they don't reach out.
POTTER: Jeff Williams was 10 when his family began to break up.
JEFF WILLIAMS (Association of Marriage and Family Ministries): We went to church, and the older ladies were complaining about the temperature of the sanctuary, and the ushers, the people who served, went on with their rituals, and nothing seemed to change there, while my life had radically changed. And I know now they didn't know what to say. But it's like you have had a leg blown off or you've had a wound and it's terrible, and nobody sees it. POTTER: Laura Petherbridge had just made her first Communion when here parents divorced.
LAURA PETHERBRIDGE (Author and Speaker): This is a special picture because it is the last time -- in my family memory -- of where my brother and I and my mom and dad were all together as a family.POTTER: Laura blamed herself for what happened.
Ms. PETHERBRIDGE: It was like, okay, I can't even make my parents happy. There's no way I'm going to be able to make the God of the universe happy. So he was a taskmaster at that point in my life who[m] I respected and revered, but I never let him love me. I would not let God love me for a long, long time into my adult life.
POTTER: Raised a Catholic, Laura found her way back to God in an evangelical Protestant church, a path followed by many children of divorce. More than 40 percent of those who are members of a faith community describe themselves as born again. Ms. MARQUARDT: I think the theology found in evangelical churches, where you have a more direct personal relationship with God as a father through the son Jesus Christ, could work for some children of divorce.
LINDA RANSON JACOBS (Executive Director, Divorce Care for Kids) (Speaking at Workshop): Divorce affects every area of a child's life. It affects them emotionally, spiritually, intellectually.
Ms. JACOBS: We wanted to put together a program to teach churches what the children are experiencing, the grief that they're going through, the stress that they're under, and bring them into the church family. You know, what better place for a child who's lost their earthly family to be than in a church family? 
Ms. MARQUARDT: Some of them become more religious after their parents' divorce, but they do it in a different kind of way. For instance, they're much more likely to agree that God became the loving father or parent [they] never had in real life. So they are turning to God and the faith for something they didn't have in their own lives. And in the midst of that healing, in the midst of finding wholeness, there's also a very poignant story of loss. 
