Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Well shut my mouth, Conservative Christians divorce more, study says

This should send them hollerin like stuck pigs:

Divorce is more common among conservative Christians and young people, according to a recent study.

University of Iowa sociology professor Jennifer Glass presented her study on skyrocketing divorce rates in regions highly populated with conservative Christians to an overflowing crowd in Burdine Hall on Friday.

“Politically and religiously conservative states, especially in the Deep South, exhibit higher divorce rates than politically and religiously liberal states in the Northeast and Midwest,” Glass wrote in her study.

But in two shakes of a sheep's tail these same sanctimonious hypocrites will argue it's all the fault of those evil gays.




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2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Plenty of conservative Christians are sanctimonious hypocrites, to be sure, but either the author of the study or the journalist who wrote The Daily Texan story plays really loose with statistics.

Distinguish two claims: (A) People in politically and religiously conservative states divorce at higher rates than people in politically and religiously liberal states and (B) conservative religious people divorce at higher rates than liberal people.

(A) is true. (B) is false, especially if by "conservative religious people" we mean people who attend religious services regularly (it turns out that people who identify with conservative beliefs but do not regularly attend religious services are at opposite ends of the spectrum from those who attend regularly on a wide range of behaviours). I take it that the study found support for (A), which seems less than newsworthy since I thought that had been common knowledge for a long time.

Seething Mom said...

Thank you for the input. I am not above letting my own jagged cynicism get the best of me. And I confess to being a little too gleeful when a study comes along that seems to back my own preconceived notions (some of them backed by personal but anecdotal experience).