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Monday, November 4, 2013

Christians are destroying traditional marriage

Sorry, but I thought this was funny:
When I was young, a slogan made its way around my church: The family that prays together stays together. Tom Ellis, former chairman of the Southern Baptist Convention's Council on the Family boldly claimed that "born-again Christian couples who marry...in the church after having received premarital counseling...and attend church regularly and pray daily together... experience only 1 divorce out of nearly 39,000 marriages.”

But then came data. According to research by the Barna Research Group over a decade ago, American divorce rates were highest among Baptists and nondenominational “Bible-believing” Christians and lower among more theologically liberal Christians like Methodists, with atheists at the bottom of the divorce pack. When the findings were made public, George Barna took some heat because Christians expected the difference to be more dramatic and to favor believers. Ellis suggested that maybe Barna had sampled badly. Perhaps some people who called themselves born again had never really devoted their lives to Christ. ...

In 2008, Barna again sampled Americans about divorce rates. The numbers fluctuated a bit, but once again atheists came out painfully good from a prays-together-stays-together perspective. Thirty percent reported ever being divorced, in contrast to 32 percent of born-again Christians. Slicing the U.S. by region, the Bible belt has the highest divorce rate, and this has been the case for over a decade, with the institution of marriage faring better in those dens of blue-state iniquity to the north and west.

There's plenty more about why this might be the case, though it's just speculation. But I thought it was funny how conservative Christians, more than atheists, are destroying traditional marriage like this - especially since I've recently been reading the Bible and enjoying all of the traditional, moral, godly marriages in that. :)

Of course, evidence will never matter to people who are faith-based. They already know what they want to believe, so they'll simply reject any evidence to the contrary. How do you think that religion has lasted this long?

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