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Sunday, January 19th, 2014

Study: Conservative Protestants More Likely to Divorce, Raise Divorce Rates for Neighbors

Author:     GEORGE CHIDI
Source:     The Raw Story
Publication Date:     Saturday, January 18, 2014 18:45 EST
 Link: Study: Conservative Protestants More Likely to Divorce, Raise Divorce Rates for Neighbors
Stephan:   The Theocratic Right is so good at manipulating the media, and the media is so uninterested in digging into the real story that very few except scholars know that this community of people are more violent, more likely to abuse their children, and their spouses, and more likely to divorce, for all the family values talk. It is all part of the great hypocrisy of this trend. Here is yet another research survey proving these points. (See At the Cost of Your Life: Social Value, Social Wellness. http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2813%2900249-8/fulltext. Also Social Values, Social Wellness: Can We Know What Works? http://www.explorejournal.com/article/S1550-8307%2811%2900346-6/fulltext.

For all the talk about the conservative family values of marriage in Bible-belt, red-state America, a new study to be published this month notes that the more religiously conservative protestant an area is, the higher the divorce rate … even for non-protestants.

Demographers Jennifer Glass at the University of Texas and Philip Levchak at the University of Iowa looked county-by-county at divorces for a study to be published later this month in the American Journal of Sociology.

Their study controlled for the effect of poverty, which is greater in the southern Bible belt and is known to contribute to higher divorce rates. Even accounting for income and the higher rate of marriage overall in southern states – an alternative to unmarried cohabitation more common in less conservative households – divorce rates in counties with higher proportions of conservative protestants remained higher.

The religiously conservative states of Alabama and Arkansas have the second and third highest divorce rates in the U.S., the authors noted. 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 per year.

The strongest correlation showed that early marriage and low income among religious […]

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