George Barna has just released the results of a survey of American divorce rates. Christians in general have about the same rate as non-Christians — 32% to 33%. However, evangelicals have a 26% rate and Catholics have a 28% rate. (Barna defines “evangelical” very narrowly.) Non-evangelical Christians thus have a divorce rate indistinguishable from that of the world. Non-evangelical born-again Christians have a rate of 33% — exactly the same as the world’s.
By the way, Barna is speaking in terms of how many people have experienced a divorce, not how many marriages end in a divorce, which is a much higher percentage. The reason the number isn’t the same is some people have had multiple divorces, which raises the rate of divorces per marriage but not the rate of divorces per individual.
Asians and the well off (college graduate making over $75,000) do even better than evangelicals – 20% and 22%. And so the evangelical churches do better than the rest of society, but the numbers show that culture can be a bigger driver than religion — which tells us that we can do better.
One thing to remember about divorce rates, especially the cliche that "half of all marriages end in divorce" is that they don't seem to factor in who's a repeat offender, so they are somewhat artificially inflated. Half of all marriages may end in divorce, but half of those are probably second or third marriages, right?
😯 Josh, you have written a post that I agree with. I will not mess up this moment with further comment.
Mark
Statistics like these should be taken with a grain of salt. The data to support those statistics is just not available.
If two people get married today, you won't know which side of the formula to put them on until (a) they divorce, or (b) one of them dies. So we are just now reaching the point of being able to tell definitively what the divorce rate was in the 1940's. We really have no idea what percentage of the marriages that exist today will eventually end in divorce — nor what the odds are that a couple married today will eventually divorce.
Counting the number of marriages in a given year, and the number of divorces in that year, is a less than satisfactory substitute. The number is typically understood as the likelihood that a given marriage would end in divorce, which is not the same thing.
Aside from that, the numbers can be misleading for other reasons. As Josh suggested, second marriages are much more likely to end in divorce than first marriages. The sins of character and the habits that led to the first divorce are often carried into the second marriage and lead to the same result. That skews the percentages. The percentage of first marriages that end in divorce is substantially lower than the numbers often quoted.
Alan,
He is not comparing statistics. He called up folks and asked them if they'd been divorced. Obviously, some of these people may yet be divorced in the future, so the numbers seem conservative to me.
And as I pointed out, he's not counting marriages. He's counting individuals. Were he giving divorce per marriage rates, rates would be quite a bit higher for the reasons you all pointed out.
I've been astonished at the divorce rate among the parents of my children's friends. My wife and I totalled them up recently, and the numbers were close to Barna's.
There are far fewer among my own friends, as I tend to hang out with church-going folk. But my kids make friends with a wider array of people, and the divorce rate is staggering.
I talked to a middle school teacher, who said half her students had experienced divorce in their families.
It's imperative that churches periodically teach their families marriage, parenting, and financial skills. They are not getting it from their own parents, quite often. And if you're reaching out and bringing in the unchurched, the problem will be all the more severe.
Some churches do a good job with marriage training but omit the other areas. An astonishing number of our members are drowning in debt, and debt leads to marital problems.