If your marriage ceremony didn’t include the Lord or his ambassadors — and instead maybe involved jumping over drum circles and then sticking banjos up your partner’s butthole before making out with a litter of dogs wearing pasties and chaps?* — you might be an atheist. And if you’re an atheist, there’s a chance your marriage might last longer than a Christian one. Take that, holier than thou sanctity of marriage people! Take that all the way to divorce court. Where you probably already are.
According to research by the Barna Research Group — conducted on 3,854 people living in different regions of the United States — American divorce rates were highest among Baptists and nondenominational “Bible-believing” Christians and lower among more theologically liberal Christians like Methodists, with atheists pulling into last place in the Divorce Olympics.
Salon has the word on the backlash to the survey’s release over a decade ago:
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].
In 2008, Barna again sampled a similar cross-section of Americans about divorce rates. The numbers changed some, but atheists were still large and in charge in the still being married department.
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