Found: A False Stereotype About Fundamentalists

I constructed a dummy variable indicating whether a person is now, or ever was, divorced.

So not the percentage of people who get married who later divorce, then? Surely people who never marry don't divorce. Couldn't that be a problem. Are fundamentalists as likely to get married as the rest of the population?

You also don't control for age of marriage or length of courtship. I suspect that fundamentalists are more likely to marry younger and more likely to marry after short courtships and without living to together. It's possible that fundamentalists marry at haste at greater rates, and then get divorced, whereas non-fundamentalists in the same relationship would have broken up without ever getting married in the first place.

Indeed, checking on it myself, I see that 23.4% of those with "Liberal" religious views have never been married, whereas only 18.9% of "Moderate" and 16.0% of "Fundamentalists" have never been married.

Fundamentalists clearly marry at a higher rate, which explains a tremendous amount of their divorcing at a higher rate. More marriages to divorce, obviously.

Also, Fundamentalists do indeed have a considerably lower age when first married.

I do not have a source on this, but I did read somewhere that fundamentalist Protestant women reported having higher rates of orgasms than any other group of women. So, maybe their sexiness is offsetting their religious morality, all inflamed while feeling sinful and cheating?

Barkley:

That's this article from Slate. Which, come to think of it, could be an example of fundamentalists being different from stereotypes. After all, I suspect that many people stereotype fundamentalists as hating sex and fundamentalist women not having orgasms.

http://www.slate.com/id/56724/

Does this take into account whether they were fundamentalists at the time of their divorce? I suspect that a non-zero number of people (particularly women) who divorce find Jesus in their sorrow. That would tend to skew the numbers.

What John said, too; Blue States have lower divorce rates than Red States, but that appears to be mostly because high risk people in Blue States never get married in the first place.

Fundamentalists get married younger, for obvious reasons such as their opposition to premarital sex. That gives them more time and incentive to get divorced while they are still good looking enough to attract somebody else.

The divorce rate is kind of a red herring. What really counts is the "years married" rate, a statistic I invented after the 2004 election, modeled upon the Total Fertility Rate. Bush carried the 25 states in which white women can expect to be married the most between ages 18-44. In Utah, where he got 71%, white women average 17 years of marriage versus only 7 years in DC, where Bush got 9%. The correlation coefficient between years married for white women and Bush's 2004 share of the vote in the state is an astonishing 0.91, one of the highest in the history of the social sciences.

http://www.vdare.com/sailer/041212_secret.htm

I was going to mention what Jane Galt said. I know more than a few people who became more religious after their divorces. If nothing else, it can give you a ready-made social life.

That's one thing about Americans - we are probably more apt than others to try out a lot of different religions and beliefs. I remember one woman at my RCIA class who had already gone through New Age stuff, Judaism, and Buddhism, before she decided to become Catholic. I wonder if she's still Catholic. I had friends in high school who thought it cute to try out paganism, but then one became a born again Christian, and another became a militant atheist. It's hard to predict where people are going to end up.

I review Ron Sider's book, The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, which examines many of the cultural cases in which the behavior of evangelical Christians is indistinguishable from the broader culture, here.

These results are actually not unexpected at all. For the United States as a whole, there are three main religious groups: a)Religious catholics, b)Religious Protestants c) Atheists and non-religious. a) The Catholic Church has a very strong position on divorce - they consider it absolutely forbidden. Therefore, we should expect that religious Catholics have the lowest divorce rate. b) Religious fundamentalists have an intermediate position - they consider it a very bad thing. But even though divorce is completely disapproved of, it is not forbidden, and not even necessarily a sin. c) Atheists and non-religious don't have much of a religious opinion, divorce might be a personal tragedy - but it's not really bad.

Given these religious and cultural beliefs, we should expect that Catholics have the lowest divorce rate, Fundamentalists are in the middle and atheists & non-religious have the highest. I think this is what surveys actually find.

Rachel Soloveichik is wrong. Atheists and agnostics have the lowest divorce rate in the United States.

Other studies (most prominently, the Barna study in 1999) showed that fundamentalists and born-again Christians have higher divorce rates than average.

This is no surprise to me: I have a born-again Christian brother who divorced and married a born-again Christian divorcee. Both pretend that their first marriages never happened. And, yes, both were born-again Christians before their first marriages.

Atheists and agnostics have the lowest divorce rate in the United States.

Not surprising. They also, by far, have the lowest marriage rate in the United States and the far highest percentage of people who never marry. Unless you're talking about a study which adjusted for that.

As a fundamentalist for about 40 years, I'm not at all surprised by these results. Non-fundamentalists tend to view church as a museum of perfected people. We fundamentalists have always known that our churches are spiritual hospitals. We attract broken people. You should also find that we have an unusually high number of former acoholics, homosexuals, drug users, prostitutes, thieves and possibly even murderers. Thank God.

I define divorce as the termination of any heterosexual sexual relationship. Divorce defined that way should return the world to its proper balance.

Fundamentalists take the Bible literally, thus they believe that they are offered an absolute forgiveness of sins. This is compounded by the current incarnation of Christian teachings moving away from the Fire and Brimstone and towards Christ's Forgiveness and Love. Further as divorce has become much more common and accepted in society the opportunity cost of divorce has proportionally declined. Choosing divorce is much simpler than twenty, thirty years ago when you would have been the only person in your church or perhaps your community to be divorced.

I'll second Kent. I see marriage as instrumental strategy rather than a terminal one; that's terminal, not fatal. Easy with the jokes fellas. To the extent it facilitates the individual's terminal strategy for reproduction (# of children x genetic diversity x likelihood of survival to reproductive age) it persists. So, as was stated, if you believe you must get married to have sex, to have kids, to have your family embrace and support those children, then you do it. And if you think you can do better with somebody else afterward, you do that too. In that context, the dissolution of any heterosexual relationship is the variable of interest. Marriage is a cultural construct that imprecisely approximates that variable.

As several commenters mentioned the last time you brought it up, the biblical literalism question on the GSS is poorly worded, and the people you are trying to measure are exactly those people to whom it would matter that is poorly worded.

Another way to look at this might be to do a similar regression on hospitals and illnesses. You would find a high correlation between hospitals and sick people. Does that mean that hospitals cause people to become sick, or that hospitals don't help people become well? Without domain knowledge, it's easy to construct regression models that don't make sense.

Bryan may be assuming that all fundamentalists are fundamentalists because they grew up in fundamentalist families. It's probably true that most fundamentalists grew up in fundamentalist families, but a high percentage of fundamentalists are converts. In addition, many fundamentalist children leave the church and lifestyle during their 20's and return after some devastating event, such as divorce, causes them to seek spiritual help. So the converts and the prodigals will contaminate the data set.