Posted on 01/30/2014 5:17:18 AM PST by xzins
Divorce rate is higher among religiously conservative Protestants, and even among those living around them, finds a new study that examined all counties in the United States where divorces occurred and looked at what the characteristics of those counties were.
Demographers Jennifer Glass at the University of Texas and Philip Levchak at the University of Iowa looked at the entire map of the United States, and found that a key factor predicting divorce rates is the concentration of conservative Protestants in a county.
To be published in the American Journal of Sociology next month, the study notes that religiously conservative states Alabama and Arkansas have the second and third highest divorce rates in the U.S., at 13 per 1000 people per year while New Jersey and Massachusetts, more liberal states, are two of the lowest at 6 and 7 per 1000 people annually.
The researchers attribute it to the earlier ages at first marriage and first birth, and the lower educational attainment and lower incomes among conservative Protestant youth.
"Restricting sexual activity to marriage and encouraging large families seem to make young people start families earlier in life, even though that may not be best for the long-term survival of those marriages," the non-profit Council on Contemporary Families, where Glass is a senior scholar, quotes the researcher as saying.
In their study titled, "Red States, Blue States, and Divorce: Understanding Regional Variation in Divorce Rates," Glass and Levchak also say that people who simply live in counties with high proportions of religious conservatives are also more likely to divorce than their counterparts elsewhere.
The researchers say this is due to a cultural climate where most people expect to marry young and there is little support from schools or community institutions for young people to get more education and postpone marriage and children.
"Pharmacies might not give out emergency contraception. Schools might only teach abstinence education," Los Angeles Times quotes Glass as saying. "If you live in a marriage market where everybody marries young, you postpone marriage at your own risk. The best catches … are going to go first."
W. Bradford Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia is surprised. "In some contexts in America today, religion is a buffer against divorce. But in the conservative Protestant context, this paper is showing us that it's not," he tells the Times, adding that the study also showed that more "secularism" was also linked to higher rates of divorce.
... and those areas usually tend to be ...
Grammar error. Hopefully the grammar police will be forgiving.
Good point.
That depends on who the non-marrieds are doing it with...
We live in the same general area, and I know exactly what you’re talking about, however, Baby mamas and boyfriends don’t explain how more marriages end in divorce. These folks aren’t married in the first place.
Not a grammar error in my book. It was a “typing while thinking” error. I do it all the time. Then I say, “why didn’t I preview that before I hit the post button?” Lol.
Religion is less a proximate cause for divorce than is the simple fact that western nations need a social system that they currently do not have.
A way for mixed gender children to interact in a safe, chaperoned way, without being distracted by complex tasks to perform.
If you raise a dog in isolation from other dogs, when it is physically mature it will still want to mate; but it will see other dogs as alien to its “human family pack”. Other dogs are by default, “the enemy”.
Children are much the same way. If just put into a room with each other, they will naturally gender segregate; so this social system would have to insure they are gender mixed. Then they have to do things with each other that are neither too intellectual nor too physical.
And this has to happen a lot, while they are growing up.
There is something to be said about delaying marriage. It’s great for men, but not so great for women as the difficulty of having children increases dramatically after your mid-30s. It’s a tough call. Having a secure career and enough resources certainly helps as you plan a family. For me, getting married at age 33 was the right decision. My wife was 31. Ten years and 3 kids later we’re going strong. I don’t know if I could have married at age 21. I needed to get a lot of things out of my system...
Interesting. I’ll read the thread later.
Exactly! :-)
I love agenda driven research...
Yes Kennedy did get a divorce in 1982, and was remarried. But he had a civil wedding, not a Catholic wedding in a church.
>>Glass and Levchak also say that people who simply live in counties with high proportions of religious conservatives are also more likely to divorce than their counterparts elsewhere. <<
This observation may be the key to understanding what garbage this whole study is. It’s saying in effect that where divorce rates are high, they are high among religious conservatives and among the general population.
Big whoop.
Perhaps their public funding dollars ran out and they didn’t have an extra ten minutes to normalize their data before publishing.
Evangelical Christians say they absolutely don’t believe in divorce. That’s the issue, whether in a county that has non-Christians divorcing or not.
That may be the issue to you but it is not the point of the report. Nor was it the point of my comment.
My point is simply that you have to normalize data to be sure you aren’t comparing apples and oranges. I suspect this wasn’t done well and maybe not at all.
If, for example, in AL, an area of religious concentration, the divorce rates among the population (religious and non religious) are higher than the divorce rates among those same groups in (presumably less religious) CT , how does that prove that religious concentration is the cause?
Unless you normalize for income levels, education level, age at time of marriage, age at time of divorce, etc. you ain’t got nothing but another colossal waste of research dollars.
Sure it is. Read the title of the article again.
That's pretty obvious, I'd think.
, and (2) why do people who say they reject divorce go ahead and divorce anyway
It takes two to tango. Regardless of how faithful and committed one person is, if the other is persistently not faithful or committed the divorce will likely happen.
Unequally yoked is bad enough, it can be tough but still the marriage can survive. When one is pulling the other way, however, dissolution is almost inevitable.
All Protestants are not yankee liberal Lutherans and DOC or Congregationalists
Down here I don’t know any who do not believe in the devil
Catholics here....some..
Not all...not even a majority..... live to berate Protestants whom they lump in one group.....belying their profound ignorance
But if you fight back you are an anti catholic bigot
I never saw such hateful Catholics as some here..in my life till this forum.....just downright beligerant
You can see why the Reformation was such a bloody affair
I guess mormon hunting is out of fashion. Here
Newsflash
Protestants are very very divergent
And somewhat defined by where they are...
Exactly. If one never marries in the first place, how can he or she get divorced?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.