Mailvox: Erroneous!

Daniel raises a mild objection:

That having been said, the statistics you quote on divorce are too incomplete to draw good references from. They don’t seem to address people who remarry. Comparing 26.4 percent of divorced atheists to 15.7 of Baptists, is all well and good if you marry once and either stay married or divorce and stay divorced forever, but, given Baptists marry more often, it seems reasonable to also presume they remarry more often.

A larger percentage of divorced baptists who remarried would mean that you were missing more divorces that you should have counted in the Baptist group than in the Atheist.

Barna informs us that 18 percent of all those who have ever divorced have been divorced multiple times. So, the impact of remarriage on the divorce rate here is limited to 2.8 percent of Baptists and 4.8 percent of atheists. Even if we eliminate the maximum number of potential multiple divorces from the divorce percentage, that still leaves a divorce rate of 21.6 percent for atheists and 12.9 percent for Baptists, reducing the divorce delta between atheists and Baptists from 68.2 percent to 67.4 percent, a massive reduction of 4/5ths of one percent.

Nor is there any evidence to suggest that Baptists are actually under more pressure than atheists to remarry, especially considering the Baptist teaching that remarriage after divorce is tantamount to adultery. One could also point to the example of leading atheists such as Bertrand Russell (4 wives) and Richard Dawkins (3 wives).

Therefore, the conclusion stands.