Parental Alienation, Divorce, and the Christian Responsibility to Children
A custody battle involving a well-known television actor has reignited a conversation that millions of families — far from any camera or courtroom — know intimately and painfully. General Hospital star Steve Burton has reportedly filed legal action against his ex-wife, accusing her of parental alienation involving their young daughter. The claims are serious. The pattern they describe is tragically common.
We are not here to adjudicate their case. We don't know all the facts. What we do know is this: parental alienation — the deliberate or systematic effort to damage a child's relationship with one of their parents — is not merely a legal category. It is a moral wound. And the Church has something urgent and clarifying to say about it.
What Parental Alienation Actually Is
Strip away the legal language and the courtroom filings, and here is what parental alienation looks like at ground level. One parent — consciously or unconsciously — begins to position themselves as the only safe, loving, trustworthy figure in a child's life. The other parent is framed as dangerous, absent, uncaring, or unworthy. The child, caught in the middle, begins to absorb those messages. Over time, they internalize them. What began as conflict between two adults becomes a crisis of identity and attachment for a child who never asked to be a battlefield.
It can look like spoken accusations. It can look like withheld phone calls. It can look like a lifted eyebrow when a child mentions the other parent's name. It can look like scheduling activities to conflict with custody time, or coaching a child on what to say — and what not to say — to evaluators and judges. The methods vary. The damage is consistent.
Psychologists who work with families in crisis have documented this pattern for decades. Children who experience prolonged parental alienation often carry the effects into adulthood: fractured identity, difficulty with trust, and a complicated grief over a relationship that was taken from them before they had the maturity to protect it.
The Biblical Architecture of Family
Scripture does not approach the family as a sociological convenience. It approaches it as a covenant structure — designed by God, ordered for human flourishing, and sustained by obligations that run deeper than any legal agreement.
From the very beginning, God established that a child would be the fruit of two — one man, one woman — and that the generational transmission of faith, identity, and love would flow through that dual structure. The fifth commandment — "Honor your father and your mother" — is not incidental. It is structural. God commands children to honor both. Which means God intends for both to be honorable. Which means the Christian parent has a theological obligation not to undermine the honor a child might naturally extend to the other.
"Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord." — Ephesians 6:4
Paul's instruction here is pointed. The word translated "provoke" carries the weight of exasperating, embittering, or breaking the spirit of a child. Few things break a child's spirit more reliably than being turned into a weapon against their own parent. When we use our children's love for us as leverage in our adult conflicts, we are doing something the Scriptures explicitly forbid. We are provoking them — and the collateral damage is their soul.
Divorce Does Not End Parental Responsibility
Here is a truth the Church needs to speak more plainly: divorce dissolves a marriage. It does not dissolve parenthood.
The vows change. The household separates. The legal status shifts. But the child remains. And that child still carries the image of God. Still deserves to be loved well by both of the people who brought them into existence. Still has a claim — not just a legal claim, but a moral and spiritual one — on the full attention, affection, and investment of both parents.
Christian theology has always understood that rights and responsibilities are inseparable. A child's right to know and be known by both parents carries with it a parental responsibility not to obstruct that relationship — even when the marriage that created it has ended in pain. Especially then.
This is hard counsel. Divorce is almost always saturated with hurt. Betrayal. Anger that feels entirely justified. And there are, of course, situations where genuine safety concerns must take precedence — where abuse or danger makes separation from a parent necessary. Those situations are real, and they matter. But they are not the majority of custody disputes. In most cases, what we are dealing with is not danger. It is unresolved pain being enacted on a child who cannot defend themselves.
The Idol of Winning
Something spiritually sinister happens when a divorce becomes a war. The objective quietly shifts. It stops being about building the best possible life for the children given the new circumstances. It becomes about winning. About being proven right. About making the other person feel the full weight of what they did.
The children become proxies for that war. Their loyalty becomes the prize. Their love becomes the currency. And a parent who has given themselves over to this dynamic may not even see it happening. Grief and righteousness can feel identical from the inside. The father or mother who is alienating their child's other parent may genuinely believe they are protecting their child. The human capacity for self-deception in matters of the heart is staggering.
This is precisely why the Christian tradition calls us to something more rigorous than emotional self-trust. "The heart is deceitful above all things," Jeremiah tells us. We need accountability. We need the community of the Church. We need counsel from people who will tell us the truth, not just validate our anger.
What Faithful Parenting After Divorce Looks Like
It looks like speaking well of the other parent, or staying silent. It looks like facilitating phone calls, visits, and genuine connection — not as a legal obligation grudgingly fulfilled, but as an act of love toward your child. It looks like refusing to question your child about the other household. It looks like resisting the temptation to position yourself as the good parent by contrast.
It looks, frankly, like dying to self. Which is the center of the Christian life.
The Gospel does not promise that this will be emotionally painless. It promises that it is right. It promises that children who grow up knowing they were loved well — by both parents, even imperfect ones, even separated ones — are given a gift that no court can mandate and no amount of winning can purchase.
A Word to the Church
The Burton case will play out in courtrooms and tabloid headlines. Most cases of parental alienation play out in silence — in bedrooms and school pickups and therapy offices and the quiet confusion of children who sense that loving one parent has somehow become a betrayal of the other.
The Church is uniquely positioned to intervene. Not with judgment, but with truth spoken in love. With pre-divorce counseling that addresses co-parenting as a permanent vocation. With post-divorce communities that hold parents accountable to the wellbeing of their children. With pastoral courage to name parental alienation for what it is — not a savvy legal strategy, not a protective instinct — but a moral failure that leaves marks on a child's soul.
Every child is made in the image of God. They deserve to know where they came from. They deserve to be loved without conditions or loyalty tests. They deserve parents who are willing to lay down their own wounds for the sake of their flourishing.
That is not a legal standard. That is a Gospel one.