Perhaps the most straightforward measure of engagement is attendance rates for religious services. Two people can be affiliated with the same religion but have very different levels of engagement. In looking at religious differences so far, I have focused on religious affiliation, but there are other aspects of being religious as well. As people of different religious groups are influenced by the broader society’s view of divorce, they become more tolerant of divorce and between-religion differences lessen. The increasing similarity between religious groups could result from our nation’s culture having an increasingly large impact on people’s moral beliefs. Now, it’s 37 percent (for Catholics) to 56 percent (for black Protestants). In the 1970s, the observed range was from 12 percent (for Jews) to 40 percent (for black Protestants). However, the religious groups are more tightly packed now than before. The rank order of the groups has stayed mostly the same, with black Protestants and the “nones” being highest in each decade and Catholics and Jews being lowest. This is a remarkable amount of change in a short period of time, and it’s significant given the many social, emotional, and financial costs of divorce.įigure 3 replicates this analysis for the seven different religious groups. Over this 53-year span, the percentage of Americans who had ever divorced just about doubled, from 24 percent to 45 percent. To make this line smoother, I calculated the average divorce rate for each group separately in each decade and then connected the decade data-points with a line.Īs you can see, the percentage of respondents who had ever been divorced has climbed since the 1970s, with the greatest increase being in the 1970s and 1980s and a smaller increase in the past 15 years. Figure 2 presents the divorce rates for all GSS respondents since 1972. There’s no reason to stop here with the data, for the Common Sociological Era (CSE) started in 1972, when the General Social Survey collected its first wave of data. But higher than all other Americans? Not at all. The data in Figure 1 show that it is now the case, as it was nine years ago, that evangelical Christians do not have dramatically high divorce rates. In the middle are evangelical Christians and members of other religions like Islam, Buddhism, and Scientology. The lowest rates were among Jews, Catholics, and mainline Protestants. The highest rates are among attendees of historically black Protestant churches and people who have no religious affiliation (i.e., the “nones”). As shown in Figure 1, there are substantial differences in divorce rates by self-reported religious affiliation. It divides GSS respondents into seven broad religious affiliations based on the type of religious group they are involved with (e.g., which religious denomination). Then I separated the respondents into seven religious groups, using the RELTRAD classification system developed by Steensland et al. The answer for the whole sample was 45 percent-quite close to the “half of all marriages end in divorce” statistic that is widely passed along. Among them, I selected the respondents who had ever been married, and calculated how many had ever been divorced (or were currently separated). Using data from the GSS, I took all the respondents who participated in the 2010, 2012, and 2014 surveys (dropping several oversamples). So let’s revisit the relationship between religion and divorce rates and see where they are at now. And the General Social Survey (GSS) collected several more waves of data. Americans marry less often and more children are raised without both parents in the home. We got our first African-American president and gas prices went back to below $3 a gallon. Since then I have gotten about nine years older and the world has changed in various ways. JOIN TOGETHER STRONG SERIESIn answering this question in 2006, I ended up writing a protracted blog series on divorce rates in America, which spawned a published article and a book. Well, which is it? Both sources can’t be right. In the sociological research literature, however, the message is different. In church, Christians, especially evangelical Christians, are often told that they get divorced as much as, if not more often than, non-Christians.
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