A new study revealed that religious unions are slightly less likely to end in divorce because religion encourages less cohabitation, which is a risk factor for divorce.
New research from the Institute of Family Studies (IFS) suggests that religious marriages are less likely to end in divorce compared to non-religious ones because religion does not encourage cohabitation, a risk factor for divorce, among other things.
The research analyzed data from the National Survey of Family Growth on 53,000 women ages 15 to 49 between 1995 and 2019 and found that age at the time of marriage is also a risk factor for divorce. However, depending on when a woman gets married, religion can sometimes have no impact at all on the outcome of a marriage.
"Without controls for age at marriage or an indicator for premarital cohabitation, women with a religious upbringing do have slightly lower likelihoods of divorce," researchers at IFS Lyman Stone and Brad Wilcox wrote, as reported by the Christian Post. Research showed that for religious women, the annual divorce rate was at 4.5%, compared to the 5% for non-religious women.
The difference was most evident among Catholic and Mainline Protestant women, but less evident among Evangelical Protestant women.
Researchers at IFS explained that when basic socioeconomic background and a woman's educational career trajectory are controlled, marriages of women with a religious upbringing are 10% less likely to end up in a divorce within the first 15 years of marriage compared to the marriage of women who do not have a religious upbringing.
Researchers also found that when women transition from being single to being married without cohabiting first, they tend to have lower divorce rates than women with the same religious background and age but married following cohabiting with their partner.
"This was especially true for religious women who married before age 25. For women marrying after age 30, the relationship seems to flip," researchers remarked. They added however that the estimates for women getting married after age 30 were less reliable because they only observed women until age 44 in some data, while observing women up to age 49 in others.
"Women who married past age 30 had fewer years of marriage included in the analysis. But particularly for youthful marriages before age 20 or in the early 20s, cohabiting before marriage appears to be a major risk factor for divorce," Stone and Wilcox wrote.
The study was limited in the sense that researchers could not determine how religion helped foster better, stronger marriages. But they have three theories.
First, the researchers explained that religion "might induce people to 'make lemons out of lemonade,' it might give people institutional or community support, or it might positively alter the quality of romantic pairings." They added that religious communities provide a venue for women "to access a larger and more marriage-friendly pool of potential spouses."
Secondly, religion can change the way women look for a partner given that religion looks down on cohabitation before marriage. This causes women to pursue "husband material" partners "earlier in life than other women."
Lastly, religious women seek partners whose values, beliefs, or practices are aligned with theirs because they know it is "important for union stability," which subsequently reduces the potential for conflict in the future.
According to a September 2021 report from Yahoo! Finance, divorce rates have been declining in the United States since the 1980s. It is currently at 39% in America. But the COVID pandemic impacted marriages and unions in the U.S. and all over the world. Forbes reported that before the pandemic, marriage and divorce rates were dropping, but that the trend continued on throughout the pandemic.
