What Faith Divorces Most?

He said the biggest factor in divorce is education. "The higher the level of education, the lower the divorce rate. That’s one reason atheists have one of the lowest divorce rates. Atheists tend to be well educated,” he said.

Professor Christian Smith, director of the Center for the Sociology of Religion and Society at the University of  Notre Dame, questioned the research methods used by The Barna Group to gain information for the study. “We academics have various questions about their methods, both response rates of polls and how they categorize various groups and types. They do not report all the info we’d normally like to see telling about possible non-response bases. And they seem to have biased ways of defining and categorizing at least some groups. Evangelicals tend to gobble up their findings uncritically,” he said.

Barna defended his group's research, calling the criticism " typical of criticism Barna we get all the time from the public. We use the American Association of Public Research's standards to do our research, just like everyone else in the business." "There's a lot of jealousy in research circles because one group is getting more publicity than another group. This is just a case of professional jealousy."

For Dr. Mark Regnerus, a sociology professor at the University of Texas, it's really about the topic. Divorce rates, he said, are really about geography and age. “It’s all about what we call ‘selection,’ that is — only those who get married are at risk of divorcing. And Middle America and people in the South continue to marry at rates above those in the West and Northeast.”             

Age, he said, "is the number one predictor of divorce. Couples who marry at 18 or 19 years old don’t know what they’re doing and lack the social skills we once had for making marriage work. Many who marry young have marriages that don’t make it.”


Don Moore is a veteran newspaper editor and reporter who spent more than 40 years working at newspapers around Florida. He recently retired from the Port Charlotte, Fla., Sun-Herald. He can be reached at donmoore39@gmail.com