Divorcing Charles Stanley
When a superstar pastor’s wife leaves him, he has a problem
He was the man who knew the truth about God. On his longrunning T.V. show, “In Touch with Dr. Charles Stanley,” he let us have it.
As part of my ‘deconstruction’ of the religion of my youth, I had questions—like I’d heard Charles Stanley got a divorce. What happened there?
Typically, a divorcing pastor would be fired.
In any conservative Protestant setting, a pastor’s divorce would’ve been seen as violating not merely Jesus’ teachings on divorce, but Paul’s rules of pastoral character in 1 Timothy 3:
“He must manage his own family well…”
The “rules” were seen as applying even to Southern Baptist superstars who were megachurch pastors whose media companies brought in $35 million a year. Charles Stanley’s career as a cleric should’ve been over.
He recognized that. A 1995 news clip quotes him: “If my wife divorces me, I would resign immediately.”
Which isn’t how it went down.
Browsing through old newspapers, I realize he was nearly a divine figure to his church.
A 1981 ad for First Baptist in Atlanta reads: “We believe that our pastor is a modern day prophet in these last day times.”
His enemies, a 1988 profile notes, call him the “Baptist pope.”
To Anna Stanley, he was the husband who wasn’t there. “I have been a faithful and supportive wife to Charles,” she writes in a 1995 letter to his church. “Long ago, however, Charles, in effect, abandoned our marriage. He chose his priorities, and I have not been one of them.”
By a few accounts, he’d checked out of their marriage in the early 1970s.
One of these accounts is his own. In a 1989 book, How to Handle Adversity, he calls it a problem that got ‘handled’. He writes:
“In 1970 we moved to Atlanta, and I got too busy. I became married to the ministry and began to neglect my family. It took me several years to see how I was at fault and to put things back in order. Anna experienced a great deal of hurt and rejection during that time. There were moments when I was not sure either of us could go on.
Today I can feel the hurt of a man or woman who sits in my office and cries. I can identify with the husband who wants desperately to change but is not sure where to begin. I know firsthand the frustration of a woman who loves her husband but feels that her love is not reciprocated. And more important than being able to identify with their hurts, I know how to comfort them, not simply counsel them.”
A husband who “wants desperately to change” as his wife “loves her husband but feels that her love is not reciprocated.”
What could possibly be going on here?
He mentions Anna or ‘Annie’ in a few of his books.
There’s little sense of her personality or presence. In Is There a Man in the House? (later re-published as A Man’s Touch), Stanley’s 1975 guide to Christian manhood, he tells the story about their honeymoon, and the first meal she ever made for him: fried chicken.
He writes: “I looked around and asked, ‘Where is the gravy?’”
Anna got up, and got right to work.
Charles continues the story: “It was more like jello than gravy, but she learned in time.” He congratulates himself on his handling of the scene. “I could have sulked and wondered: ‘When is she going to learn how to fix a real meal?’ but I spoke up and she responded. I’ve enjoyed a lot of fried chicken with gravy since then!”
She announced the divorce was happening in 1995. She wrote her letter, and sent it to the church to be read at a business meeting which was convened to determine if Stanley “should resign unconditionally or be removed…because he is biblically unqualified.”
But Charles Stanley wasn’t divorced yet — and didn’t plan to get there.
The meeting to deal with the issue was scheduled for 6:30 P.M. on Sunday, August 13th, 1995.
Many thousands showed up at the church. Only 3,000 could fit in the sanctuary, as overflow rooms were set up to handle more.
By 6 P.M., though, the sanctuary filled with Stanley’s supporters, and the doors were locked.
Anna’s letter was ruled out of order, so it wasn’t read.
From the podium, Stanley reassured: “I am not divorced. Secondly, I don’t want a divorce. Thirdly, my wife doesn’t want a divorce. I’m trusting God is going to put this back together.”
The only note of protest was sounded by his son.
Andy Stanley had been pastoring at a side-service for the ‘unchurched’. He and several other church staffers resigned.
The newspaper reports: “In a letter to the congregation read Sunday, the younger Stanley expressed love for his father but said, ‘I felt my father should step down as leader of First Baptist of Atlanta.’”
In a 2012 profile by CNN, there’s a report of a chilling scene between father and son—the son he’d planned to take over the show.
“Andy,” he said, “you have joined my enemies, and I’m your father.”
Andy later writes: “His closest friends and staunchest supporters rallied behind the theory that I was using my parents’ divorce as leverage to move my dad out so I could move in.”
But Charles Stanley, the godliest Christian, was ready to take on his enemies—son, church, and wife.
Church members in the overflow rooms realized their sound system had been turned off.
They couldn’t hear the proceedings. When it came time to vote, no one came to count theirs. They watched on the video monitor as Stanley assured that he wasn’t getting a divorce, got a standing ovation, and the resolution to remove him was voted down.
The church is in a “siege mentality,” says a woman interviewed about the meeting. “They may attempt to use strong measures to attempt to control even members from entering that meeting, but they can’t bar the Lord.”
One of the excluded church members wrote a letter to the editor. “It was a very unfair meeting,” he reports. He probes why Stanley had sealed all court documents: “Why were divorce proceedings instigated? After members know the truth, then we can make an educated decision concerning Stanley, and not until then.”
Anna clarifies through the newspaper that “the time for, and the possibility of, reconciliation between Charles and me has passed.”
She adds: “I have been dismayed at my husband’s refusal to accept the critical state of our marriage. Instead, he has made repeated announcements from the pulpit that progress was being made toward reconciliation, when in fact, the very opposite was true. I do not choose to contribute to this charade.”
Asked whether Charles and Anna might re-unite, a friend of hers replied: “When pigs fly.”
To follow local coverage of the divorce is to see a pastor who was different than the mask he wore in public.
A 1995 profile quotes from a 1991 speech by Stanley which had a rare bit of self-reflection. He says:
“‘I was very, very uneasy unless I was in charge,’ he says. ‘Now I know I don’t appear to be that kind of a person, and I’m not today. But I was very, very combative and very, very competitive. You see, into my ministry I brought the survival spirit. You do or die. You do whatever is necessary to win. It doesn’t make any difference what it is.’”
He says this “combative” and “competitive” spirit was in his past. It’d have served him well, perhaps, in the difficult days of becoming head pastor in Atlanta, when deacons were openly at war with him. In one meeting, he’d been punched.
He took over, always talking up his regular communications from the spirit world.
His church approved. Praising his leadership, a member says in 1988: “Moses had to keep his focus on who his boss was — God. I think Dr. Stanley has to do the same thing.”
“Some of them almost worship the man,” says a longtime member, who’d been one prior to Stanley’s arrival.
This profile calls him an “elusive figure,” as many note “it can be difficult to speak with him, even by phone.” He doesn’t really do conversations? With God, he listens. With everyone else, he talks.
Anna Stanley, in contrast, is remembered as a ‘wise’, ‘warm’, ‘Christian lady’. Andy’s wife recalls her mother-in-law in a eulogy: “Anna was never nosey, or bossy, or prone to dispensing unwelcome opinions or advice. In fact, she was such a wise and gracious lady, I would have gladly received more of her guidance, had she been well enough over the years to give it.”
To watch the divorce play out is to see Anna realizing, to get free, she has to go to war using lawyers, public announcements, and maneuvers at church. Her husband had no intention of losing his perch at the top of the Evangelical world.
He never told the story himself.
In Stanley’s 2016 memoir, Courageous Faith: My Story From a Life of Obedience, there’s almost nothing about his wife of over forty years. The reader finds a story of Charles and God—the divine voice he can summon at any time, telling everyone else what to do.
Andy Stanley is not trying to ruffle his father’s feathers in a 2012 book, Deep and Wide, that has a chapter on the divorce. He notes his parents’ long efforts at marital counseling, including three weeks with “a highly trained team of counselors and doctors.”
Charles Stanley would note that by the time she’d filed, “I’d lived with threats of divorce for many years.” It kept being stalled.
Andy writes: “By the time she filed, the marriage had been dead for years. But they were both so adamantly opposed to divorce that neither of them wanted to file. On one occasion I got so frustrated I actually asked if I could hire an attorney and file for their divorce myself!”
She first filed for divorce in 1993—then amended it to a request for “separate maintenance.”
This was a kind of legal separation and might not be read as a “divorce.” She and her husband couldn’t agree on terms, so she refiled in 1995, asking for a jury trial. That would’ve been quite a media bonanza.
Little was disclosed about whatever problems they were having. But there’s a clue in a report in World magazine of their final divorce decree in 2000. Stanley blamed “childhood difficulties” — without saying whose problems, or what they were.
But he had written about a childhood concern.
In a 1986 book, How to Keep Your Kids on Your Team, he writes:
“Several years ago the Lord was working me over about some insecurities that I had been dragging around since childhood. As is often the case, these insecurities greatly influenced my ability to accept and love my family. As the Lord continued to give me insight into why I acted the way I did, I felt led to share these with my wife and kids. A family vacation afforded me the uninterrupted time to share all that was on my heart.”
Though not dated, his children were teenagers in the mid-1970s, so I’d imagine it was happening then.
News coverage of the divorce mentioned a later scene when the childhood drama was back—with a bite.
In a 1995 article he was reported to have taken “a three-month leave, which included hospitalization, in 1977.”
This seems to have been a nervous breakdown. He refers to it in a 1985 book, How to Listen to God.
“One Sunday I became very ill and had to go to the hospital. All I could do was sleep for the first two days. On the third day, my wife came to visit, and we began talking, because God had impressed on my heart the need to go back to the very beginning of my life and review it up to the present point. I felt He had something to show me, and I needed my wife to help me see it.
Every afternoon we talked. We talked the rest of that week, all of the next week, and all of the next week. For three weeks she wrote and she listened. Toward the end of the third week, my wife looked over a mountain of paper where she had recorded the conversations and said, ‘I believe God has shown me what the problem is.’ When she told me, the problem in my life became clear for the first time.”
He doesn’t relay the insight that his wife had.
Stanley would speak of a childhood framed by the death of his father when he was a baby.
His mother went to work. There wasn’t welfare or day care in the Great Depression, and only intermittent help from relatives. Young Charles grew up largely alone—in empty rooms.
Thinking her son needed a father, when he was nine, his mother re-married. In his memoir Stanley describes his stepfather as “very negative, self-centered and bitter,” given to “fits of rage.”
A 1995 profile in the Atlanta Constitution notes: “At one time, young Charles said he drew a knife on his stepfather to keep him from injuring his mother.” The memoir skips that scene, though it notes that, at age 15, his stepfather had slapped him, and he’d punched back.
The obvious career path for him was an Evangelical pastor.
He got ‘saved’ at age 12 and the next year decided to become a pastor. He needed a wife fit for the job. In his oft-told story, a deacon at church had walked up to him and said, “Charles, I want you to meet the girl you’re going to marry.”
Charles wasn’t so sure. “She was a very nice young lady, of course, but she wasn’t necessarily the type I usually went for.” He doesn’t clarify what that means. Anna was a bit different. In college, she’d majored in art.
She was, he writes, “pretty, very bright, artistic, and best of all, she had a deep passion for God.” When he told her he loved her, she replies: “Thank you.” He writes: “Well, I wasn’t expecting that! Gratefully, it wasn’t too long before she reciprocated and told me she loved me, too.”
They married in 1955.
In a later profile, he notes: “Like most preacher’s wives, she went out and worked while I finished at the seminary.”
Position by position, he crept up the ladder of Evangelical power. His luxury tastes were often noticed. Charles Stanley would be provocative in his high salary and driving a Mercedes. He kept up a side job as a motivational speaker for Amway, and put Anna to work as a distributor.
Their second child, Becky, writes a brief memoir of her mother, referring to Anna’s “gracious hospitality — her instinct to include people others might overlook, and her unapologetic enthusiasm to share Christ with anyone who would listen.”
Her mother threw dinner parties, heavy with conversation about “forbidden” subjects, politics and religion. “Mom’s knowledge of the Bible rivaled Dad’s, and her memory was equally phenomenal. She could produce the most remote Bible verse to support any of her arguments.”
Anna had a special ministry to young women.
Becky writes: “I admit to getting irritated at some of her lengthy phone calls with brokenhearted girls who had gotten themselves in trouble.”
Anna was always ready to deliver the ‘good advice’. Becky adds:
“She told them what it had to say about purity, the importance of waiting on God’s timing, and the assurance of God’s love and forgiveness.”
But then, Becky has talk of some kind of inner distress: “Mom fought an unseen enemy that none of us ever fully understood.”
Anna put on the required performances, then disappeared into her bedroom. Becky writes: “The blank spaces in my childhood, the ones left empty while Mom lay in bed with the blinds closed, used to haunt me.”
It was a family of shadows and secrets—all committed to the show they were putting on.
Except Anna—who drifted away from the church. Andy notes in his memoir: “My mom had not attended church for years.”
It would seem bizarre for a pastor’s wife to not attend church. Andy adds in the CNN profile: “People got used to it, and they quit asking about it.”
Charles Stanley kept up the image of an ideal Christian husband. As he writes in A Man’s Touch, “the Bible says the man is responsible for what happens in his home (1 Cor. 11:3). The husband is the head, or leader, of the wife.”
He kept slinging out the advice. At a pastor’s meeting in 1986, the Atlanta Constitution reported, Charles Stanley was asked how to balance home and work concerns. “Brother, you’ve asked the heart of the question,” he replied. “Because if a pastor doesn’t make it in his family, I don’t care what else he has to say, he doesn’t say much.”
All along, his wife seems to have felt abandoned, and in some deep sadness, which they both concealed. Then, she made a move.
Stanley kept saying the divorce wasn’t happening.
The legal process went on, and on, with few details given the public. Anna had no income, and her husband was rich, so delays might not seem too mysterious. But it caused confusion—and a lot of talk.
A church member recalls: “The private reason I often heard was that Mrs. Stanley had serious mental health issues and routinely accused Dr. Stanley of many unsubstantiated things due to his long work hours and time commitments with First Baptist Church.”
There was other talk. A man on Twitter, I saw, posted that he was a student at Southwestern Theological Seminary in the early 1990s when Charles Stanley came to visit. He claims Stanley asked him out for drinks, in a way that felt very flirty.
The man recalled that the gay grapevine was full of discussion of the Stanley divorce. He tells me: “I have no concrete proof but several gay friends from seminary said she left because he had a guy on the side.”
In 1996, Anna dropped the divorce proceedings.
Were they back together? Charles Stanley was interviewed. “Naturally, I’m pleased and grateful to God for answered prayer. I’m grateful for all the people who’ve been praying for us these almost three years. Especially, I’m grateful to my church for their patience and support and unwavering love for me through this difficult time.”
Not too thankful for his wife?
Andy piped up in the press. “I’m thrilled it happened,” he says. “I think it’s an authentic move toward reconciliation.”
In his book, Andy tells a different story. “My sister, Becky, and I knew better. Four months later, my mom refiled. And the whole thing started up again.”
Andy went on to start his own church.
In his book he writes: “For the next two years, my dad and I met together with a counselor every week. Sometimes twice a week. In spite of that, he continued to be suspicious.”
For a time, family visits all but ceased. Andy recalls inviting his father over once. “By the time the night was over, we were standing in my driveway yelling at each other like a couple of middle-school girls.”
In 2000, the divorce was announced. In his memoir, Charles Stanley says it was “devastating,” and that he mulled whether to resign. He says: “And God simply said, ‘You just keep doing what I called you to do until I tell you differently.’”
Some prominent Evangelical leaders, reported World magazine, communicated that he should take a year or two off “to get his life together.”
Since God didn’t say that, Charles Stanley didn’t need to listen.
His church loved him, and that’s what mattered.
At the announcement at the church that he’d remain as pastor, a report notes: “The congregation stood and applauded.”
Asked about the divorce in a 2000 interview, Stanley says he’s “barred by the court” from giving details. But he assured that it’s making him a better pastor. He says:
“I’ve had lots of people who said, ‘You know, I couldn’t listen to you because you couldn’t understand. Now you understand.’”
But a large section of the church’s membership had left over the issue, and the episode lingered with an acrid aftertaste. One church member recalled: “It was the first time I saw naked power on display and changed how I viewed the world.”
In later years, Charles and Anna “rarely” spoke.
What the problems were between them remain hazily unstated. The 2012 CNN profile makes slight progress in getting Andy or Becky to speak.
“Only he and his sister, Becky, know the truth, he says. (Becky declined to talk after initially agreeing.)
‘I love my mom. In her prime, she was an incredible woman,’ Andy says. ‘Something just caught up with her, and my dad took all the grief for her.’”
Charles Stanley reported that he had no thoughts of re-marriage.
“God said you keep doing what I called you to until I tell you to do something else,” he told CNN. “I got that straight from the Lord.”
Anna was sick with some unspecified condition.
An obituary reports: “She remained involved in multiple areas of church life until illness restricted her participation.”
In Stanley’s memoir, he wraps it up real nice: “I loved Anna Margaret Johnson Stanley with all my heart, and regardless of what transpired between us, I never quit loving her to the day she died.”
In 2014, she “passed away peacefully,” the obituary says, “surrounded by her loved ones.” It doesn’t appear he was among them. 🔶
