Here is yet another reason why anti-gay wingnuts, the most vocal of whom are conservative Evangelicals, really shouldn’t be focusing on taking away marriage equality for LGBT people. Their own house needs cleaning. A new study has shown that they divorce at higher rates than the general population, even when controlled for factors like poverty:
The study, slated to be published in the American Journal of Sociology, tackles the “puzzling paradox” of why divorce is more common in religiously conservative “red” states. If religious conservatives believe firmly in the value of marriage, why is divorce especially high in places like Alabama and Arkansas?
To figure that out, researchers from the University of Texas and the University of Iowa analyzed county divorce statistics against information from an earlier study of religious congregations. They categorized Protestant denominations that believe the Bible is literally true as “conservative Protestants.”
Researchers discovered that higher divorce rates among conservative Protestants were tied to earlier marriages and childbearing – factors known to ramp up divorce. Starting families earlier tends to stop young adults from pursuing more education and depresses their wages, putting more strain on marriages, University of Texas at Austin professor Jennifer Glass said.
But the study went a step further: Glass and another researcher also discovered that people living in areas with lots of conservative Protestants were at higher risk of getting divorced, even if they weren’t conservative Protestants themselves.
County by county, for every 1% increase in the share of conservative Protestants compared with mainline Protestants, the divorce rate increased 0.02%, the study found. Glass argued that community institutions in such areas might encourage early marriage, affecting divorce rates for everyone who lives there.
I’ve always found it interesting that conservative evangelicals believe so strongly that their lifestyle is superior to everyone else’s, when in so many ways, it’s not only clearly not, but is demonstrably less desirable. Of course, they will dismiss this out of hand, because they don’t engage in much self-reflection and their worldview views science suspiciously at best. But it’s interesting information for the rest of us.
