And yet we hear it doesn"t make any difference. For more than a decade, it has been common to hear that the rate of divorce in the church is the same as the rate in the culture at large. And since the popular belief is that half of all marriages end in divorce, most churchgoers and pastors then think, Half of all marriages among these people here, sitting in this church, despite all this work, will end in divorce.
A friend of mine who is working through tough issues in her marriage says that thought quickly becomes personal: she looks around her church and thinks, If half of these people are getting divorced, what chance do I have?
As we listen to the depressing statistics, those initial thoughts can lead to others, some of which are so subconscious that we don"t even say them out loud: If what we hear is true, all my hard work-as a pastor, leader, counselor, or congregant-means nothing. If this is true, how can I really encourage a young couple to worship together if it makes no difference? Or even: If this is true ... if following the Bible has no impact on something as vitally important as marriage ... what does that say about the Bible?
Well, thankfully, we can stop thinking those depressing thoughts ... because they aren"t true!
The Truth Is Encouraging
A few years ago, my husband, Jeff, and I were in an elevator at a convention of ministry leaders, and we were discussing that morning"s media story on new divorce data that again gave the wrong impression about a 50 percent divorce rate.61 I said something about the first-marriage divorce rate being closer to 25 percent and that it is significantly lower in the church-and heard a gasp from the woman behind us.
We turned, and she introduced herself, sharing that she owned one of the few Christian bookstores in the area. She said, "I"m sorry ... I couldn"t help overhearing your conversation. Could you explain what you just said?"
As we walked toward the convention hall, she listened with a stunned look on her face as I gave her a brief rundown on my research. She said, "I wish you could have arrived in time to share this with the keynote speakers before they spoke yesterday. A major part of their talk was about how all these social problems are the same in the church-including the 50 percent divorce rate. I looked around at four thousand people in this giant ballroom and saw everyone"s shoulders just slump. It was so discouraging. I"m sure the speakers wanted to encourage us to work harder to help marriages in the church. But they don"t understand how disempowering that "fact" has been for those of us who already do try to help marriages. It is insidious. What a huge thing that it isn"t true!"
Thankfully, what we hear isn"t true. Not even close! Every study that has ever been done has found that the rate of divorce among those who regularly attend church is much lower than among those who don"t. I"ll explain the research shortly, but the bottom line is that weekly church attendance alone lowers the divorce rate significantly-roughly 25 to 50 percent, depending on the study and group of people being studied.62 Weekly church attendance alone lowers the divorce rate significantly-roughly 25 to 50 percent, depending on the study.
The popular belief that the rate of divorce is the same inside and outside the church is based on a deeply entrenched misunderstanding about the results of several George Barna surveys over the past decades. A misunderstanding that, Mr. Barna told me, he would love to correct in the public"s mind.
So let me briefly explain how this confusion arose and outline the true facts from several different, representative studies, including my new a.n.a.lysis of previously unpublished Barna data.
Myth Based on a Misunderstanding
For years, George Barna and the Barna Group have been at the forefront of research into beliefs and practices in faith and culture. In 2001, Barna released a widely quoted study that showed that professing Christians had the same divorce rate as non-Christians-roughly 33 to 34 percent.
The news media understandably jumped on it. The original Barna study came out not long after the resurgence of the conservative movement and the growth in evangelical churches had put family values front and center. So the finding that professing Christians had the same divorce rate as everyone else was a black eye for the church. Pastors everywhere were shocked and began talking about this sobering reality from the pulpit, exhorting followers of Jesus that they shouldn"t look like the culture at large and that those who believe marriage is a covenant before G.o.d should instead be those who take their marriage vows most seriously.
While the instruction to Christians to take marriage seriously is a great message, the desperation behind it was unfounded. Unfortunately, at this point two major misunderstandings had become entwined and taken on a life of their own: First, the idea that the current divorce rate was 50 percent, which as you now know, it isn"t. And second, the idea that the divorce rate is the same "in the church," which you"ll soon see isn"t accurate either.
A Barna specialty is digging deep into people"s beliefs and how their beliefs and actions change over time in this modern culture. But what many clergy, marriage leaders, and news reporters didn"t realize was that this particular Barna study was designed to dig out divorce trends based on faith-based beliefs and was not designed to look at faith-based practices such as going to church. Simply stated, the Barna researchers were studying those who professed to hold Christian beliefs, not those who went to church. In fact, in keeping with the adage that "Going to church doesn"t make you a Christian any more than sitting in a garage makes you a car," Barna specifically excluded church attendance from the a.n.a.lysis. They did ask whether the survey takers had been to worship services in the last week, the last month, and so on, but that factor was not included in the a.n.a.lysis.
But most people didn"t realize that. As the years pa.s.sed and other Barna studies continued to show the same trend, it became firmly entrenched in the churchgoing public mind that Barna finds that the rate of divorce is the same in the church as it is in the world. And at the same time, because of the myth that half of all marriages end in divorce, this translated to the inaccurate conclusion that just like in the overall population, half of all marriages in the church end in divorce.
As I have interviewed and surveyed hundreds of pastors, ministry leaders, marriage mentors, and others, it is clear that is what many leaders believe as well.
The first time I spoke about this topic publicly was at a 2012 conference for marriage and family pastors and other leaders, and I was delighted to see that George Barna was one of the other speakers. In the speaker break room ahead of time, I explained to Mr. Barna what I was going to be sharing and asked for his thoughts about how widespread this misunderstanding has become.
He said he was glad I was bringing light to this because, as he put it, "The wrong information spreads so quickly today. Someone puts a number out on the Internet and says some study found this, and everyone believes it. That happens to us all the time. Many times I"ll be driving down the street listening to someone on the radio say, "As George Barna found ..." and it will be something I"ve never even studied."
I thanked him for his encouragement, went onstage to tell these pastors what I"m telling you in this book-and realized just how many faith leaders today need this encouragement! That first talk was embarra.s.singly unpolished, with thirty minutes of solid data, not nearly enough helpful stories, and PowerPoint slides that weren"t pretty at all ... and yet I was stunned to see many of the pastors standing up to take pictures of the slides on their cell phones.
So in the interest of countering the "wrong information," as Mr. Barna put it, what is the truth?
Getting a Handle on Truth
There are many distinctive and credible studies about the impact of religiosity, and I found it easy to get confused by differences in the results. Even a small variation in the objective or hypothesis-for example, a study of "religious affiliation" versus "religious practices"-can yield quite diverse results.63 I don"t want to get lost in the technicalities, so the bottom line is this: numerous well-known sociologists, demographers, psychologists, and other researchers have found that when someone is active in their faith, it lowers their chances of divorce-usually significantly. These experts, many of whom have taken the time to personally correspond or meet with us about their research, include Brad Wilc.o.x, Annette Mahoney, Steve Beach (along with Frank Fincham), Chris Ellison, Tim Heaton, and Scott Stanley. (Since it is difficult to a.n.a.lyze the sincerity of an individual"s faith, most of these researchers studied actions such as regular worship attendance as a signal of how much the person prioritized and lived out their faith.) Although there are fewer major nationwide surveys looking at this today compared to years past, those that have (including several conducted by those named above) have found the same trend as before.
There are, in fact, so many studies it would be easy to get overwhelmed. So in this chapter, we present only the four studies we view as most significant. (Others are discussed in the FAQ section at the end of the book.)
Study 1: Barna Group64-Divorce Rate Drops 27 Percent Among Churchgoers
Barna Group has been a great partner as I have tried to understand the relationship between being a churchgoer and divorce. I commissioned them to run a tabulation on several of their most recent data sets, with one new factor included: Did the person go to church last week? In 2008 (the last year they published a study publicly) among professing Christians who had also been in church in the last seven days, the divorce rate dropped 27 percent compared to those who hadn"t.65 As you can see in the table below, an average of 33 percent of adult survey takers nationwide had ever been divorced. But among Christians who had attended church in the last seven days, the divorce rate was 27 percent. Among everyone else, it was 37 percent. Among Catholics and evangelicals, the numbers were even more positive.
The Impact of Church Attendance on Divorce Rate Ever divorced Never divorced US population (in general) 33% 67% Christians who attended church in the last 7 days 27% 73% Everyone else (non-Christian, not in church last 7 days) 37% 63% Subgroups Evangelical weekly attenders66 25% 75% Catholic weekly attenders 22% 78% Source: Barna Group, 2008 OmniPoll (special a.n.a.lysis for Shaunti Feldhahn).
As you can see, being part of a church community does make a difference. That is good news!67 It is also encouraging to know that the impact found by the Barna Group is on the low end of the scale. Other studies have found an even bigger improvement in the divorce rate among churchgoers-mostly due to the impact of church attendance itself, rather than other factors. The next study is a great example.
Study 2: Brad Wilc.o.x and the "Cultural Contradictions" Study68-Divorce Rate Drops by 50 Percent Among Churchgoers, and Most of That Is Due to Church Attendance, Not Other Factors
The landmark National Survey of Families and Households (NSFH) is one of the largest, most detailed, and precise surveys to address the topics of religion and divorce69 and has been used by many social scientists. Based at the University of Wisconsin Center of Demography and Ecology and led by Dr. Larry b.u.mpa.s.s and Dr. James Sweet, the survey conducted three separate waves of interviews with thirteen thousand people between 1987 and 1994.70 A major study on this data by Dr. Brad Wilc.o.x found that regular attendance (several times a month) had a major impact on reducing divorce rates. In "The Cultural Contradictions of Mainline Family Ideology and Practice," Wilc.o.x doc.u.ments that those who attend worship services regularly have an average drop of roughly 50 percent in their divorce rates compared to those who do not.71 Further, Dr. Wilc.o.x found that most of the reduction in divorce among churchgoers can be conclusively tied to the impact of church attendance itself and not some of the other factors that come along with it. For example, churchgoers tend to be more educated and well off, but since those factors also lower the risk of divorce, Dr. Wilc.o.x wanted to find whether it was church attendance or those socioeconomic factors that were more important.
He discovered that even after controlling for many other factors, such as income, age, gender, race, ethnicity, education, and geographic region, the matter of church attendance trumped them all. Church attendance alone decreases the divorce rate substantially. Among mainline Protestants, for example, church attendance alone dropped the divorce rate 35 percent even after other factors are eliminated.72 See the table below.
Reduction in Divorce for Active Churchgoers*
Actual Reduction in Divorce Rate Reduction in Divorce Rate Attributed to Church Attendance Alone**
Overall Average73 50% 35% Active Mainline Protestant 54% 35% Active Conservative Protestant74 44% 35% Active Catholic 50% 31% *As compared to those who do not regularly attend church. "Active" is defined as attending several times per month.
**After controlling for socioeconomic factors.
Study 3: Religious Influences and Divorce75-a Couple Who Shares the Same Faith and Attends Services Together Regularly Is 35 to 50 Percent Less Likely to Divorce Than Anyone Else
This study looked at divorce rates in a slightly different way yet yielded similar results. "Religious Influences on the Risk of Marital Dissolution" examined several religious aspects from a sample of almost three thousand couples married for the first time. Three leading sociologists looked closely at whether and how frequently partners attended religious services (church, synagogue, and so on), and whether they remained married or broke up during the five-year period between wave 1 and wave 2 of the NSFH (the very detailed survey mentioned earlier). An e-mail from lead author Dr. Christopher Ellison summarizes the results of the study: Same-faith unions in which both partners attend services regularly are much less likely to dissolve over our five-year study period than virtually every other type of union. Specifically, they have 35 to 50 percent lower odds of dissolution than same-faith unions with less frequent attendance, or mixed-faith unions regardless of attendance pattern. (This latter category includes unions that involve non-religious partners.) These apparent religious differences withstand statistical controls for socio-demographic factors, marital duration, and multiple measures of baseline marital quality-in other words, these are "net" religious differences among couples who are generally similar on this broad array of other characteristics.76 Simply stated, couples who go to church or other religious services together on a regular basis have the lowest divorce rate of any group studied, regardless of other factors such as how long they"ve been married. For example, they have better odds than two professing Christians who do not attend church regularly or a couple where one spouse attends regularly and one does not.
Study 4: FamilyLife Family Needs Survey, 2012201377-Among More Than Fifty Churches Surveyed, Total Divorce Rate (Including Second and Third Marriages) Was Only 22 Percent
Over the course of multiple years, the large ministry FamilyLife has been surveying those in congregations so pastors and staff can get valuable feedback on what is working and what areas of family ministry may need the most attention.
In the 20122013 survey among 6,171 ever-married persons in more than fifty churches, only 22.4 percent have ever been divorced. (And that divorce rate is almost certainly overstated because the survey captured baby boomers at much higher rates-and the baby boomer generation has by far the highest rates of divorce. A church survey that included a more representative sample of younger age groups would almost certainly find an average churchgoer divorce rate of under 20 percent.)78 You can find a summary of this survey at www.familylife.com/FNS.
The Power of Prayer and Other Religious Activities
Several other studies provide a window into the impact of religious actions beyond church attendance-factors such as praying or reading the Bible.
Before I get to what we do know so far, let me mention what we don"t. I have heard several marriage counselors, pastors, or other leaders say things like "Those who pray together have only a 5 percent divorce rate" or "Those who regularly meet together with others outside of church have a 1 percent divorce rate." I have seen that type of statistic printed in quite a few articles and books. However, Tally and I have been unable to substantiate those ultra-low divorce numbers, and they appear to be based more on myth than reality.
One number in particular spread widely due to a Dr. Phil book, Relationship Rescue, which quotes a Christian discipleship series by David McLaughlin that supposedly says the divorce rate among married spouses that pray together is one in ten thousand. However, we listened to every one of the long audios of that series and did not hear McLaughlin say that statistic anywhere.79 Because we have not been able to trace McLaughlin himself, and because Dr. Phil"s representatives have not been able to provide any information, we are forced to conclude, for now, anyway, that that particular number is more myth than fact.
We have also seen a misunderstanding of the conclusions cited in the book Faithful Attraction by iconic and sometimes controversial Catholic sociologist Andrew Greeley. Greeley calculated a 1 percent "possibility of divorce" when couples prayed together and had a highly satisfying s.e.xual relationship with their spouse. He describes this finding as based on two surveys run by Gallup Poll, originally for Psychology Today, back in 198990, along with his own a.n.a.lysis of the General Social Survey (one of the surveys referenced in chapter 2). Gallup has not been able to provide us this particular Gallup Poll from the pre-digital age so we cannot examine the study or confirm the book"s data calculations. And even a.s.suming the poll exists, what Greeley means by "possibility of divorce" is whether the couple thinks they might divorce, which is a very different thing from their actual divorce rate.
In both these cases, since we have eight years of experience in seeing that we have to eyeball the actual study in order to find out whether it truly says such and such or not, we simply have no way of knowing if those ultra-low divorce numbers actually exist. And for now it appears that they do not. (But if you are aware of concrete research we have missed, please contact us through our website.) Although we haven"t yet seen actual studies linking the impact of prayer (or other actions of faith) to much lower divorce rates, it wouldn"t surprise me if a more direct correlation between prayer and low divorce rates is found by researchers in the future. What we do know about prayer so far is that couples who pray have much healthier and more connected marriages than those who don"t, which should, theoretically, improve the chance of the marriage lasting for a lifetime.
I"m including three relevant studies below. (We reference several others in the FAQ section.)
Study 1: My Surprising Secrets of Highly Happy Marriages Study / Wilc.o.x Data80-Those Who Are Active in Their Faith Are the Happiest in Their Marriages
Faith-related actions (like worship attendance and being in a supportive community) appear to have a dramatic impact on the strength and happiness of a marriage. While the majority of both religious and non-religious couples are happy, those who are active in their faith are far more likely to be very happy.
Several times we have mentioned Dr. Brad Wilc.o.x, director of the National Marriage Project. Each year, he and the Center for Marriage and Families produce a report on marriage ent.i.tled The State of Our Unions, and he ran a special a.n.a.lysis on the 2011 report data for my book The Surprising Secrets of Highly Happy Marriages. We found that couples in which both partners agree that "G.o.d is at the center of our marriage" are twice as likely to be at the highest level of happiness in marriage compared with those who do not share that type of faith commitment.
In fact, when both spouses said "G.o.d is at the center," fully 53 percent of those couples were at the highest possible level of marital happiness. That"s huge! (See graph.) Think about the implications: in a vibrant church with couples who are trying to put G.o.d first, more than half of them are not just "happy," they are at the highest level of marital happiness and enjoyment.
In a vibrant church with couples who are trying to put G.o.d first, more than half of them are not just "happy," they are at the highest level of marital happiness and enjoyment.
As a different example, the Oklahoma survey mentioned in the happiness results in chapter 3 specifically examined the impact of church attendance on happiness. The total of those who said they were very happy was 72 percent among those who regularly attended worship services, twenty percentage points higher than those who never attended!81 An active faith and being a part of a supportive faith community tend to lead people into much higher levels of marital satisfaction.
In other words, if all this is true, not only are most marriages happy but most marriages of people in the average local church are very happy. What an encouraging finding for the average pastor or church counselor who is wondering if his or her work even makes a difference!
Happiness Levels Among Couples Where Both Spouses Agree "G.o.d Is at the Center of Our Marriage"
Note: to be categorized as "Very Happy" both the husband and wife had to independently declare that they were at the highest level of happiness in their marriage.
Source: The Surprising Secrets of Highly Happy Marriages study, Shaunti Feldhahn, 2013.
Study 2: PREPARE/ENRICH Study by Dr. David Olson82-the Better the Couples" Agreement on Actions Such as Bible Reading and Prayer, the Closer and Happier the Couple Was
Dr. David Olson, professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota and founder of the highly respected a.s.sessment organization PREPARE/ENRICH, has surveyed over fifty thousand couples through the organization"s relationship inventory a.s.sessment. The number of studies, articles, and books borne out of this research remains unparalleled in the marriage arena, including on how spiritual beliefs impact marriages, and Dr. Olson himself has been very helpful to us as we have done our research.