Does religion help couples stay together?

Nov 21, 2016 by

from The Marriage Foundation:

I’m often asked if Christians have lower divorce rates than anyone else. Although I point out that I don’t know of any UK studies on this, evidence from the US is fairly mixed that religion – or ‘religiosity’ as it’s usually called in the academic papers – is linked to higher rates of stability.

In any case, if you were going to make a social science hypothesis based on what you read in the Bible, there’s a much better candidate than simply whether one subscribes to a certain religion or not. Jesus is reported in the gospels as saying ‘What God has joined together, let man not separate’. Therefore anyone who includes God in their marriage ought to do better.

And so it seems. US studies show very nicely that people who apply their faith into their marriage – those who see their marriage as ‘God-inspired’ or ‘sacred’ – tend to do better.

Anyway, I thought it was about time we had a look at the link between religion and stability. So I asked my long-time colleague, and world class stats expert, Professor Steve McKay at the University of Lincoln if we could do a study on this.

Using data from the Millennium Cohort study, we looked at the religious and ethnic groupings of 10,000 or so new mothers who had babies in the years 2000 or 2001, and then followed them through to when their children were 11 years old to see who was still together and who wasn’t.

You can read our full report here, published today and reported in the Daily Telegraph

Our initial finding was that Christian and Muslim mothers overall were more likely to stay together than non-religious mothers. The same was true for Christian fathers, though not Muslim fathers.

Read here

 

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