fasano@unix.cis.pitt.edu (Cathy Fasano) (06/05/91)
In article <Jun.4.00.00.27.1991.11633@athos.rutgers.edu> jclark@sdcc6.ucsd.edu (John Clark) writes: >In article <Jun.3.01.57.35.1991.2882@athos.rutgers.edu> chappell@symcom.math.uiuc.edu (Glenn Chappell) writes: >+... It is interesting to note, however, that divorce >+is apparently nearly unknown among Christians who read the Bible daily. > >Excuse me for not giving more information on my experience... [John then goes on to relate conflicting experience in his family.] My boss, who in a previous academic life was a demographer, tells stories about a rather colorful member of his thesis committee. This guy liked to play the curmudgeonly old professor, and whenever a student would protest "most of the people I know" don't fit whatever piece of socialogical data being presented, the professor would respond dryly: "The 'sample' made up of 'people you know' is the very worst 'sample' that you can construct." The statistics which I've seen suggest that the following groups have lower divorce rate than average: couples who attend church regularly couples who pray regularly couples who pray together couples who were engaged longer than six months These statistics are often presented as the rationale for some rather stringent marriage preparation regulations that are nearly universal in the Catholic Church in the US. (Last I heard, all but one diocese in the US has a mandatory waiting period of at least 3 months, and most also require a formal "marriage preparation" program like Pre-Cana or Engaged Encounter. Of course the folks justifying the rules always conveniently leave out the statistics which say that marriage prepara- tion programs have no effect on the divorce rate.) Of course, this may not have much to do with religion at all -- almost all (>90%) Americans say that they believe in God, and almost all of them claim to be members of churches, but only about half have been inside a church lately. So, very roughly, the groupings look like this: 50% -- "committed" members of some religion 40% -- people who claim to be religious when asked, otherwise you can't tell 10% -- people who claim no religion I would say that the statistics about divorce are distinguishing between committed and non-committed members of religions, and don't really tell us *anything* about the other 10% -- they are so small a group that they get lost in the noise of the calculation. And the correlation is not so surprising -- some of the difference between committed and non-committed religionists is simply the ability to make committments -- a characteristic very important to the success of any relationship... cathy :-) -- Cathy Fasano aka: Cathy Johnston, fasano@unix.cis.pitt.edu cathy@gargoyle.uchicago.bitnet, uunet!unix.cis.pitt.edu!fasano "If there's no solution, then it isn't a problem." -- Evening Shade