That’s probably because more Christians get married in the first place.
“Lying with statistics”
Unfortunately, this is not a surprise at all.
Maybe they are just more likely to be honest and not like living a lie?
Hmmm. So how many agnostics and atheists actually marry compared to hopeful “christians”? How was the defintion of “christian” developed? Maybe the rub lies there somewhere?
I know many people who clain to be so and such, but when the chips are down, they ain’t.
Even so, a bad testimony.
My wife and I, born again believers in the Lord Jesus, celebrated our 28th anniversary yesterday. We married at 18 and 21; “Till death do we part” means just that.
Best;
Barna doesn’t release how they conduct their studies — how they select the sample, etc. Don’t trust Barna — their findings cannot be verified.
The Bible tells us that in the last days there will be a falling away from the faith, and “the love of many will wax cold”. Many Christians have become secularized and are followers of the world’s ways instead of following God’s Word. When there’s trouble in a marriage, they just give up and move on-—no need to try to salvage or get counseling or love each other enough to work things out.
Interesting. Next he should look into why Muslims stone their women to death.
My guess is that people that eat Arugula 3 or more times per year have better health, and live longer than people that do not eat it.
I looked into this mysterious “Barna Group” and they’re deep in bed with the idea of conservative Christianity dying.
Listening to them or any study they put out is listening to the propaganda of the enemy.
Self-identified atheists and agnostics (not a big group to begin with) have much more education and (I’d guess) higher incomes and older average marriage ages. These factors have a very strong negative correlation to divorce. If you controlled for them I’d be surprised to find atheists or agnostics divorcing less frequently.
Maybe because Christian kids get married before they’re ready so they can have sex, because they are taught that they shouldn’t have sex before marriage.
This is not surprising at all. The Christian church has generally been tolerant of divorce and re-marriage for several decades now. However, few churches have accepted the practice of unmarried cohabitation. Practicing Christians therefore have strong social motivation to get married and average penalties for divorce. Non-Christians have much weaker incentives to get married in the first place and no less penalty for divorce.
I went to a Christian college where a lot of students end up marrying each other, young. The divorce rate for those marriages is pretty high, which frankly is not that surprising. A lot of the students I knew were under a great deal of pressure, both from families and peers, to marry early and start a family. While it’s good that Christians uphold marriage as an ideal, I’ve seen it foisted too many times on people who are not ready for it.
The numerator and denominator in the “Christian” ratio are exaggerated for multitudes offered comfort by pastors of many mainline churches, of “Seeker Friendly” churches and those in the “Emerging Church Movement”. Their successful (?) churches promote a gospel of Christian traditions developed from the spiritual source of Jesus Christ. By focusing on” treasures of the Christian tradition” and not the treasure of Christian faith, they promote relationship with people based on them finding areas of compatibility with the missions of organizations they value, such as Rotary, Peace Corp, Sierra Club, Toastmasters, Masons, etc. Within the congregation relationships achieve a steady state where ‘treasures of the Christian tradition” merge with treasures of other religious and philosophical traditions, and amalgam the results into achievement of their desired ambitions.
The object of church growth becomes adding the church website to a person’s list of favorites on Internet Explorer, along with Oprah, Dr. Phil and PBS. Attending church to establish linkages to secular actions and concepts allows people to further sanctify themselves by including Christianity within their lives.
This church leadership must at no point allow disruption of those linkages, which occur when congregation members undergo the stress of encountering the Lord God in all His Majesty as Job and Moses did in the Old Testament, or as Paul, John and Peter did in The New Testament.
Those who persist in seeking relationship with the Lord Jesus Christ are less likely to have failed marriages.
They read crappy blogs like this and it drives them nuts.
In truth, the rate of divorce is typically correlated with education moreso than belief in Jesus, Mohammed, or Zoroaster. Those with graduate degrees are far less likely to divorce than those with merely a high school diploma.
2008 study by Barna: Evangelical Christians have lower divorce rates. He allows people to define themselves as “born-again,” It is always the so-called “born-agains” that mimic the society as a whole. He has his own methodology that leads to provocative headlines. Perhaps the question is better, “Which Christians are serious about their faith?”
Divorce Among Adults Who Have Been Married
(Base: 3792 adults)
Population Segment Have Been Divorced No. of Interviews
All adults 33% 3792
Evangelical Christians 26% 339
Non-evangelical born again Christians 33% 1373
Notional Christians 33% 1488
Associated with non Christian faith 38% 197
Atheist or agnostic 30% 269
All born again Christians 32% 1712
All non born again Christians 33% 2080
Protestant 34% 1997
Catholic 28% 875
Upscale 22% 450
Downscale 39% 367
White 32% 2641
African-American 36% 464
Hispanic 31% 458
Asian 20% 128
Conservative 28% 1343
Moderate 33% 1720
Liberal 37% 474
(Source: The Barna Group, Ventura, CA)