You're going to be shocked reading this piece of research by the Barna Research Group. Atheists may be better at marriage than Christians. That's right. Atheist marriages last longer than a Christian one. All that holier than thou may not be so great after all.
Pictured: The Christian side-hug.The research conducted on 3,854 people living in different regions of the U.S. showed that divorce rates were highest among Baptists and nondenominational "Bible believing" Christians and lower in more theologically liberal Christians like Methodists. Atheists pulled in last place when it comes to the rate of divorce.
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. But Barna held his ground, saying, “We rarely find substantial differences” [in the moral behavior of Christians and non-Christians].
Barna
sampled again a similar cross-section of Americans about divorce rates. While the numbers changed, the atheists were still at large in the still married department.
Apparently, it is not that atheists are so good at staying together, but it was the churches that inadvertently
promote divorce via draconian ideas of marriage:
To prevent that greatest-of-all-evils, abortion, such communities teach even high school students to embrace surprise pregnancies as gifts from God. They encourage members to marry young so they won’t be tempted to fornicate. But women who give birth or marry young tend to end up less educated and less financially secure, both of which are correlated with higher divorce rates
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Salon,
Love to Know,
Barna]