The Religious Attitudes Towards Divorce

Mark Roseman, Ph.D. (Supreme Court Certified Family Mediator and CFLE,

Certified Family Life Educator)

The Religious Attitudes Towards Divorce

Factors that Affect Divorce Rate:

Poverty: People with economic disadvantages are

just as likely to marry as other people, but their marriages are substantially more unstable. There is a martial quality gap between low-income and other couples but it is not as large as might be expected based on the differences in marital disruption rates.


Cohabitation: Non-US Divorce Rates: According to the

report "Profiling Canada's Families III", by The Vanier Institute of the Family, unmarried cohabiting couples are four times more likely to break up than married couples.

Cohabitation Data:There is a higher risk, 40 to 85%, of divorce between couples cohabiting before marriage than couples waiting until after marriage to share a home together.


Alcoholism: The article ALCOHOLISM EFFECTS from

Psychology Today, August 2004 issue, states that "adults who grew up with an alcoholic parent are a third more likely to end up divorced." A study was done with almost a thousand college students. The students that had parents who were heavy alcoholics saw marriage more negatively than those students whose parents were light drinkers.


Children of Divorce Getting Divorced

Children of Divorce becoming less likely to marry, divorce than in the past Marriage and Divorce Stats for Children of Divorce


Age: According to the 2000 Census, 9.7 percent

of those over the age of 15 in the United States listed themselves as divorced


Religion: Divorce Rates and Religion (Correlations

by denomination and by participation level)Interfaith Marriages lead to more divorce Baptists have highest divorce rate Mormon Temple WeddingsScientific American on divorce & geography, religion, race


Religion:Ninety-seven couples completed questionnaires about theirinvolvement in joint religious activities and perceptions regarding thesanctification of marriage, including perceived sacred qualities of marriageand beliefs about the manifestation of God in marriage. In contrast toindividual religiousness and religious homogamy (distal religiousconstructs), these proximal religious variables directly reflect anintegration of religion and marriage, and were consistently associated withgreater global marital adjustment, more perceived benefits from marriage,decreased marital conflict, more verbal collaboration, and less use ofverbal aggression and stalemate to discuss disagreements for both wives andhusbands. The proximal measures also added substantial unique variance (R2.08-.49) to specific aspects of marital functioning after controllingdemographic factors and distal religious variables in hierarchicalregression analyses.


Born-Again Christians No More Immune to Divorce Than Others

A 2001 Barna Research Poll indicated that 33 percent of born-again Christians end their marriages in divorce, roughly the same as the general population, and that 90 percent of those divorces happen AFTER the conversion to Christianity. (Most people become born-again during their high school years.)


Occupation: Military Divorce Statistics

Study linking the number of psychologists and psychiatrists with divorce ratesMarriage and Divorce when wives earn more than husbandsLaw enforcement: We are often asked for statistics on this topic. We don't have any, but there is a new article out on the subject: Nicole A. Roberts and Robert W. Levenson, "The Remains of the Workday: Impact of Job Stress and Exhaustion on Marital Interaction in Police Couples."

Divorce Rates:

Marriage and Divorce Rates by Country: 1980 to 2008

[Per 1,000 population aged 15–64 years] Marriage Rate Divorce RateU.S 1980199020002008198019902000

2008 15.9 14.9 12.5 10.6 7.9 7.2 6.2 5.2

Single Parent Households:

Single-Parent Households: 1980 to 2009[In thousands (6,061 represents 6,061,000),

except for percent. For the United Kingdom in 1981, children are defined as those under 15 and those who are 15, 16, or 17 and attended school full-time; for later years, children are defined as those under 16 and those who are 16 or 17 and attend school full-time.

U.S # 1,000 % of all households with children1980 6,061 19.51990 7,752 24.02000 9,357 27.02008 10,536 29.5

Grandparents Raising Grandchildren:

6.2 millionThe number of grandparents whose

grandchildren younger than 18 lived with them in 2007.

Grandparents as Caregivers:

2.5 millionThe number of grandparents

responsible for most of the basic needs (i.e., food, shelter, clothing) of one or more of the grandchildren who lived with them in 2007. These grandparents represented about 40 percent of all grandparents whose grandchildren lived with them. Of these caregivers, 1.6 million were grandmothers, and 932,000 were grandfathers.


1.8 millionThe number of grandparent-caregivers who

were married in 2007.1.5 millionThe number of grandparents who were in the

labor force and also responsible for most of the basic needs of their grandchildren


930,000Number of grandparents in 2007 responsible

for caring for their grandchildren for at least the past five years.

482,000Number of grandparents whose income was

below the poverty level and who were caring for their grandchildren.


732,000Number of grandparents with a disability

who were caring for their grandchildren.586,000Number of grandparents who spoke a

language other than English and who were responsible for caring for their grandchildren.


$44,469Median income for families with grandparent-

caregiver householders. If a parent of the grandchildren was not present, the median dropped to $33,453.

71%Among grandparents who cared for their

grandchildren in 2007, the percentage who lived in an owner-occupied home.

The Unique Dynamics of Religious Views on Marriage and Divorce:

Christian views on marriage typically regard it as instituted and ordained by God for the lifelong relationship between one man as husband and one woman as wife, and is to be "held in honour among all....”

Civil laws recognize marriage as having social and political status. Christian theology affirms the secular status of marriage, but additionally views it from a moral and religious perspective that transcends all social interests.

View of the Catholic Church:

While marriage is honored among Christians and throughout the Bible, it is not seen as necessary for everyone. Single people who either have chosen to remain unmarried or who have lost their spouse for some reason are neither incomplete in Christ nor personal failures. There is no suggestion that Jesus was ever married.


The Bible holds that sex is reserved for marriage. It says that sex outside of marriage is the sin of adultery (for the married person) if either sexual participant is married to another person. Voluntary sexual intercourse between persons not married to each other is considered the sin of fornication.

Ideas about roles and responsibilities of the husband and wife is the long-held male-dominant/female-submission view.


The Catholic Church teaches that God Himself is the author of the sacred institution of marriage, which is His way of showing love for those He created. Marriage is a divine institution that can never be broken, even if the husband or wife legally divorce in the civil courts; as long as they are both alive, the Church considers them bound together by God. Holy Matrimony is another name for sacramental marriage.


Marriage is intended to be a faithful, exclusive, lifelong union of a man and a woman. Committing themselves completely to each other, a Catholic husband and wife strive to sanctify each other, bring children into the world, and educate them in the Catholic way of life. Man and woman, although created differently from each other, complement each other. This complementarity draws them together in a mutually loving union


In Catholicism, marriage has two ends: the good of the spouses themselves, and the procreation and education of children. "entering marriage with the intention of never having children is a grave wrong and more than likely grounds for an annulment. . The Catholic Church may refuse to marry anyone unwilling to have children, since procreation by "the marriage act" is a fundamental part of marriage.


Divorce or dissolution of marriage is generally seen from a Christian perspective as less than the ideal, with specific opinions ranging from it being universally wrong to the notion that it sometimes is inevitable.

View of the Eastern Orthodox Church:

marriage is treated as a Sacred Mystery (sacrament), and as an ordination. It serves to unite a woman and a man in eternal union before God. , Orthodox marriage is more than just a celebration of something which already exists: it is the creation of something new, the imparting to the couple of the grace which transforms them from a 'couple' into husband and wife within the Body of Christ.


Marriage is an icon (image) of the relationship between Jesus and the Church. This is somewhat akin to the Old Testament prophets' use of marriage as an analogy to describe the relationship between God and Israel. Marriage is the simplest, most basic unity of the church: a congregation where "two or three are gathered together in Jesus' name


Divorce is discouraged. Sometimes out of economia (mercy) a marriage may be dissolved if there is no hope whatever for a marriage to fulfill even a semblance of its intended sacramental character. The standard formula for remarriage is that the Orthodox Church joyfully blesses the first marriage, merely performs the second, barely tolerates the third, and invariably forbids the fourth

View of the Protestants:

Essentially all Protestant denominations hold marriage to be ordained by God for the union between a man and a woman.

View of the Protestants:

They see the primary purpose of this union to be to glorify God by demonstrating his love to the world. Other purposes of marriage include intimate companionship, rearing children and mutual support for both husband and wife to fulfill their life callings. Protestants generally approve of birth control and consider marital sexual pleasure to be a gift of God. While condoning divorce only under limited circumstances, most Protestant churches allow for divorce and remarriage

Catholic view on Divorce:

find their basis both in biblical sources dating to the giving of the law to Moses and political developments in the Christian world long after standardization of the Bible. According to the synoptic Gospels, Jesus emphasized the permanence of marriage, but also its integrity. Paul of Tarsus concurred but added an exception, known as the Pauline privilege

Catholic view on Divorce:

The Catholic Church prohibits divorce, and permits annulment(a finding that the marriage was never valid) under a narrow set of circumstances. The Eastern Orthodox Church permits divorce and remarriage in church in certain circumstances, though its rules are generally more restrictive that the civil divorce rules of most countries. Most Protestant churches discourage divorce except as a last resort, but do not actually prohibit it through church doctrine.

View of the Jewish Religion:

viewed as a contractual bond commanded by God in which a man and a woman come together to create a relationship in which God is directly involved.Though procreation is not the sole purpose, a Jewish marriage is also expected to fulfill the commandment to have children


The main focus centers around the relationship between the husband and wife. On the spiritual level, marriage is understood to mean that the husband and wife are merging together into a single soul. This is why a man is considered "incomplete" if he is not married, as his soul is only one part of a larger whole that remains to be unified


Marriage obligations and rights in Judaism are ultimately based on those apparent in the Bible, although they have been filtered and expanded on by many prominent rabbinic authorities throughout history. According to the non-traditional view, in the Bible the wife is treated as a possession owned by her husband,

but later Judaism imposed several obligations on the husband, effectively giving the wife several rights and freedoms; indeed, being a Jewish wife was often a more favourable situation than being a wife in many other cultures


The Talmud sets a minimum provision which a husband must provide to his wife:

enough bread for at least two meals a daysufficient oil for cooking and for lighting purposessufficient wood for cookingfruit and vegetableswine, if it is customary in the locality for women to

drink itthree meals consisting of fish and meat, on each

shabbata silver coin (Hebrew: ma'ah) each week, as

pocket-money


In Jewish tradition the husband was expected to provide a home for his wife, furnished in accordance to local custom, appropriate for the husband's status; the marital couple were expected to live together in this home, although if the husband's choice of work made it difficult to do so, the Talmud excuses him from the obligation


Most Jewish religious authorities held that a husband must allow his wife to eat at the same table as him, even if he gave his wife enough money to provide for herself. By contrast, if a husband mistreated his wife, or lived in a disreputable neighborhood, the Jewish religious authorities would permit the wife to move to another home elsewhere, and would compel the husband to finance her life there


The Talmud argues that a husband is responsible for the protection of his wife's body. If his wife became ill, then he would be compelled, by the Talmud, to defray any medical expense which might be incurred in relation to this; the Talmud requires him to ensure that the wife receives care


In the classical era the attitude of rabbinic scholars towards adultery was comparatively mild; although the Talmud allowed people to be convicted of adultery merely on the basis of circumstantial evidence, it forbids conviction if

the woman had been raped, rather than consenting to the crime, or

the woman had mistaken the paramour for her husband, or

the woman had not already been cautioned, by her husband, in the presence of two witnesses, before the time the crime allegedly took place, against intimately associating with the paramour in question, or

the woman had not known the intimate details of the laws against adultery, before she committed the crime


AttitudesAll branches of Orthodox Judaism refuse to accept

any validity or legitimacy of intermarriages.Conservative Judaism does not sanction

intermarriage, but encourages acceptance of the non-Jewish spouse within the family, hoping that such acceptance will lead to conversion.

Reform Judaism and Reconstructionist Judaism permit total personal autonomy in interpretation of Jewish Law, and intermarriage is not forbidden. Reform and Reconstructionist rabbis are free to take their own approach to performing marriages between a Jewish and non-Jewish partner. Many but not all seek agreement from the couple that the children will be raised as Jewish.


Halakha (Jewish law) allows for divorce. The document of divorce is termed a get. The final divorce ceremony involves the husband giving the get document into the hand of the wife or her agent, but the wife may sue in rabbinical court to initiate the divorce. In such a case, a husband may be compelled to give the get, if he has violated any of his numerous obligations; this was traditionally accomplished by beating and or monetary coercion.


The rationale was that since he was required to divorce his wife due to his (or her) violations of the contract, his good inclination really desires to divorce her, and we are only helping him to do what he wants to do anyway. In this case, the wife may or may not be entitled to a ketuba payment.

Judaism recognized the right of a wife abused physically or psychologically to a divorce at least from around the 12th century.

Reality is…. When it comes to Divorce and Religion:

Parental religion is often seen as relatively exogenous, and there is substantial evidence that religion has a significant influence on marital and childbearing behavior. Lehrer (2000) finds, for example, that even after controlling for parental SES, education, family structure and the like, children raised in fundamentalist Protestant households are significantly more likely to marry early 26 than mainstream Protestants, who in turn are more likely to marry early than Jews.

Reality is… When it comes to Divorce and Religion:

Mormons are the most likely to marry early. But while religion alters sexual behavior, these differences may not lead to differences in single parenthood. Zelnik et al. (1981) report, for example, that religion affects the odds of premarital intercourse, but not the likelihood of becoming pregnant before marriage.

Presumably those with a more tolerant view of premarital sex are also more likely to practice birth control.

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The Religious Attitudes Towards Divorce