Oy, I'll be happy when these server problems are over.

And divorce equals immorality? That's news to me.

And what does it matter what someone believes if they're a good person. If someone is a good person because they think it will make Elvis come back and give us all wicked sideburns, they're still a good person.

your answer is in the sample size. Look at the various differences between the groups in number of interviewees. It's almost as if they kept interviewing people of a certain group (or stopped interviewing people of another group) once they had the stats they wanted to get.

the strongest predictors for staying married seem to be that someone is 1)asian 2)upscale 3) conservative.

But, overall what this table is saying seems to be that the much bandied 50% American divorce rate drops significantly when instead of comparing number of marriage licenses to number of divorce certificates, you ask individuals if they have ever been divorced. That deals with the obvious possibility that some (many?) people divorce more than once.

Once you noticed that "Communities which tolerate Divorce have more divorces than communities which do not" ... you're still left with the task of establishing what proportion of those who do not are in a state of "constructive desertion" ... of those, what portion are adulterous ... and it probably makes sense to factor in variation based on State and Region --  and compare THAT to Northern and Southern European statistics. The opportunities to   generate complex tables charts and graphs is endless.  But to what practical purpose ?

Having seen the marriage issue discussed statistically for nearly 50 years -- I'm not sure that "the numbers" are good for much except capturing an audience's interest before trying to persuade them of something.

Communities and polities may want to consider the question "Which is worse social policy: enabling divorces or preserving toxic marriages ?"

But for individuals, isn't the issue is "how to have a healthy marriage?"

Still: we've got reason to think  the average American divorce rate is 33% rather than the previously believed 50%.  Is the glass 2/3 full or 1/3 empty?  And what to do about it ?

What about people who were divorced before they changed their religion? That would skew the results.

Scandal of the evangelical community?  I think that was the title of the book from about 4-5 years ago.

Or is it a more current survey?

I actually prefer the state by state reporting, where Bible Belt states had about twice the divorce rates of Massachusetts.  Got a good laugh out of that one.

"Love is like butter- it goes well with bread" - Yiddish proverb, quoted elsewhere on SP

The one statistic that jumps out of this study is that 39% of all poor people are divorced. The inference I draw from this statistic is that poverty isn't good for marriage, and I also draw a further inference that  in order to lower the divorce race, we need to end poverty.

OH. How anti American can you get?

Let's set aside the clear sample-size bias and assume that these stats reflect reality. Contradicting Dan's "So what?" 'tude is the rank hypocrisy of "born again" Christians squealing about the "sanctity" of marriage WRT same-sex unions, when their own marriages are sooooo sacred that a full THIRD of them end in divorce!

Wankers ...

a Southern Baptist preacher, divorced my mom in the late 70s after preaching about the evils of divorce for years.

He never pastored another church after that. At least the Baptists weren't as hypocritical as they are now, allowing divorced pastors and even confessed adulterers to continue to hold their pulpits (mainly because they bring in the cash ... but that's another story).

The  only time I hear "urban  contemporary" pop music is when I'm downtown in the crummy retail stores. I notice that:

1. Every song is  about getting laid.

2. The female singers express unrealistic hopes for love &  fidelity.

3. The male singers express no  such hopes.

4. Nobody sings  about marriage.

5.  "Baby" never refers to a pooping,  crying infant.

occurs because many women who are middle class become poor upon divorce.

Of course, it's not exclusively women. Three of the five guys I've had living here as roommates over the last thirteen years were here because they had got divorced and once child support was set, were not making enough to afford their own place. (Well, they were, until you factored in the child support.)

I seem to recall that a study of prisoner declared
religious afiliation, or none, showed Atheists at less than one percent.

Does this suggest anything re moral behavior?

It may be of statistical use to note that atheists skew strongly white and to a lesser extent Asian, and upscale.  The most miserable place in the country to start an atheist group, I would imagine, would be Anacostia, DC, which is 95% black and profoundly downscale.

from the data table provided by Barna.  You'd have to buy the survey to see the correlations between multiple variables and divorce rates to be able to conclude anything.  (That's actually the purpose of the table -- to sell the full survey results to interested parties.)

For example, the only really strong differences between divorced and non-divorced people within the categories provided are upscale vs. downscale and liberals vs. conservatives.  However, divorce has the effect of both incurring legal expenses as well as dividing household incomes in two, so divorce will necessarily bias results to lower income and wealth levels.  There are also good reasons to believe that wealthier married households are correlated with both being conservative (the low-taxes coalition) and having an incentive to stay married.  The parties of wealthier married household may enjoy financial securities in lieu of marital bliss that parties in lower income households don't enjoy, so we should expect the wealthy have fewer incentives to divorce than the poor, all else held constant.  

There's just no way to conclude anything about divorce and religious affiliation without the kind of multi-variable analysis that you have to pay for.