I’m a lawyer who’s more generally conservative (libertarian-flavor) and I agree with you on this point!
I wonder if the reactions on this point have more to do with the difficulties with sorting out financial and child care issues in divorce situations - actual difficulties and perceived senses of fairness or unfairness in matters involving child custody, support, division of assets, etc. Back in the bad old days of ‘fault’ divorce, it was generally more tolerable to a general public watching mostly from afar that the ‘bad’ spouse was dealt with punitively and the ‘innocent’ spouse was treated more positively.
My biggest concern with easier divorce is the effect on children, especially as easier divorce leads to multiple mixed families, step-siblings, wrenching changes in financial and other circumstances for children, who are often shuttled between parents in joint-custody situations, with both parents vying for the kids’ sympathy and loyalty.
Regardless of the legal impediments or lack thereof, married couples should think thrice (or more) about the potential effects on the children and less often about their individual ‘happiness’ in situations in which there is no overt infidelity or physical or mental abuse.
I’ve know a fair number of kids over the years - starting with friends when I was a teen and on through children of friends and of our own children - where the parents divorced at sensitive times for the children for no apparent reasons other than they had ‘grown apart’ or ‘wanted to do their own thing’ or even ‘wanted a better lover’…Very tough on these kids - unsettling to the kids into many ways, confusing about themselves and everything they’d believed about their families, etc.
I know there are situations where divorce makes sense even when children are involved, and I am certainly no enemy of relatively liberal divorce laws.
The problem becomes when those with "loud voices" are in positions of power to advance policy and law's. Those loud voices believe their view of marriage and divorce should be what everyone adheres to. And that frightens me. All we have to do is look at the overturning of Roe (even when it's own flaws) to see those loud voices become extreme ... and see real women die because of restrictive laws regarding reproductive care.
This isn’t anything that significant, but (as a lawyer who’s personally liberal and who supports no-fault divorce) I have trouble making sense of people who say they want getting a divorce to be *easier* in the years since 2010 (when New York was the 50th state to pass its no-fault divorce law). There’s already no-fault divorce in every state—how could we make it even easier than it is??? Are people really that vested in slightly lubricating family court procedure? Do we want, like, to limit domicile requirements more than we already have or something?
I just can’t believe that people actually care about taking measures like these, or that they’re even aware of what kinds of obstacles (however minor) exist to getting a divorce anymore. As a result, that kind of survey response seems incredibly vibe-y and ungrounded, unless I’m missing something (maybe they’re talking about removing *cultural* obstacles?)
Like, okay, three states still require mutual consent for no-fault. We could do away with that, that would be a substantial obstacle in those three states. Maybe more states could enact summary divorce-type laws, though those wouldn’t really make getting a divorce easier in the vast majority of cases. Otherwise… ???
Relevant here is that unmarried cohabitation (what used to be called "living in sin") has now been almost completely normalised. There is a partisan divide, but not on the morality of cohabitation. Democrats mostly belive that pre-marital cohabitation is positively desirable, Republicans not so much (but I think that they mostly practice it, at least to the extent of sleepovers)
Abortion and divorce are both indications of individual and a societal failure to understand the difference between a contract and a covenant----a failure to think of possible consequences first, then act accordingly. Apparently we "all" live in Erica Jong's "paradise" now.
ha - not sure about divorce being easier/more difficult, but let's make marriage more difficult - premarital education. Wishful thinking. Would that just lead to fewer marriages? Same if childbearing could be tied into this requirement; parenting courses...
I was inspired by this to query AI about the divorce rate in arranged marriages vs what most of us experienced. Unfortunately the comparison is complicated too much by different legal systems and cultural/legal frequency of separations as opposed to divorce.
I would think the status of divorce is largely downstream of the status of marriage. If you are someone who never really intends to marry, doesn't see the point of marriage, or for whom marriage is a distant prospect, then you're going to think about divorce very differently than someone for whom marriage is normative. And broadly speaking, marriage is in decline.
There's an idea out there that marriage is headed towards a steady state in which it's only something that religious people bother to do. But then again, it seems to me there are real differences among secular people, by country, in terms of how they view marriage. Will marriage stabilize at different levels among secular people by country, or is it generally converging towards zero?
I'm fascinated by this map of out-of-wedlock births by country:
I wish I understood European cultural differences well enough to explain it. Some differences seem readily explainable by religion (Protestant/Catholic/Orthodox) and religiosity. For example, the Baltic States differ greatly on this statistic: Estonia 54%, Latvia 40%, Lithuania 27%. But they also differ in religion and religiosity.
But then, why is Portugal at 58% and Spain at 48%? I didn't think they differed that much in terms of religiosity, and they're both post-Catholic countries with a lot of shared history. Meanwhile the Nordics, for example, are pretty close, but Iceland is an outlier.
I'd be very curious to see some regressions that try to evaluate how much of this map, or other marriage statistics, can be explained by religion and religiosity, and how much by other cultural factors.
Maybe a thought for future research, Ryan. I know you've run some regressions on Europe before.
This quote from the link you provided gives a clue as to one reason why this may be on the increase, the government takes the place of the provider. “The good news for many of these single-parent families is that there is help and programs, not only in the US but in outreach programs and services around the world. Many of these programs and organizations provide clothing, food, and education for these families.” What you incentivize tends to increase.
I agree, legal/welfare state differences probably explain a good amount as well. The US welfare system has long been known to have a marriage penalty, especially if you have children. Meanwhile, insofar as marriage is incentivized by the government in a particular country (which it is for SOME couples under the US tax code, but not others, depending on the exact structure of their incomes), I think some countries also extend those benefits to cohabiting couples.
So does tax/legal structure explain the rest of the difference? And to what degree does legal structure produce these cultural differences, and to what degree is the causality reversed?
What’s puzzling to me is the dip in the None’s curve from 60% in ~75 to about 35% ~O1-05 then back up to ~68% around 22.
I can understand a conservative backlash in the faith communities given their dogma but what occurred amongst the nones who aren’t really organized by what they believe rather are lumped together by their not believing.
As someone who came of age in the early 90s, no fault divorce was THE culture war issue in NYC at the time. "Kramer vs Kramer" was a famous movie about the issue.
Bestiality was still legal in eight states in 2017 when Texas finally outlawed it.
Texas outlawed bestiality on September 1, 2017. This was enacted through a bill signed into law in 2017. The law makes engaging in sexual contact with an animal, possessing or providing an animal for such conduct, or organizing, promoting, or participating in such conduct illegal.
And it remains legal in only one state, a red one, of course:
Currently, all U.S. states except for West Virginia have laws prohibiting bestiality, according to the Animal Legal Defense Fund.
Divorce in Jesus' day was allowable only by men, and that's why Jesus tried to convince people it was wrong. It didn't protect women. They didn't have a say. And that is why abortion is equally hated by right wing Christians. They don't want women having a say. And abortion was not always an issue with many conservative Christians. See Netflix movies Bad Faith or God and Country to get an idea of the history of how abortion became a trigger point---it started in racism.
The 1970s was the final decade before the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). For the great majority of their existence, Southern Baptists paid little attention to the practice of abortion; there had been no reason to discuss it as all states had legal restrictions or prohibitive laws in place since as early as 1880. (2) The 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, however, drew the SBC's attention and inevitable involvement. This judgment led to arguments and discussions involving SBC leadership, agencies, ethicists, state conventions, and rank-and-file Southern Baptists, and by end of the decade their abortion position was opposite of where it had been at its beginning. The SBC's change in stance on abortion provided an entry into the political sphere that continues to this day.
Even divorce is even being challenged by conservative Christians who believe they see into the future of marriages. Witness the return of a "covenant marriage" in Tennessee. One that is hard for either party to get out of.
The Tennessee Covenant Marriage Act, effective July 1, 2025, creates a new type of marriage with stricter requirements for divorce. Couples opting for a covenant marriage would need to undergo premarital counseling and sign a declaration of intent outlining their commitment. They would also agree to seek marital counseling before pursuing divorce. Divorce would only be granted under specific circumstances, such as adultery, abandonment, or abuse.
You mention "generational replacement" as probably the main cause. But I do have a question. If you look at the graph of the 6 religious groups "share saying divorce should be easier to obtain", the common bottom of all of the curves, including Black Protestants, is 2000-2005. They all seem to bottom out and then head upward again at the same time. That seems kind of specific a time frame, especially for all the groups. Is there any sociological event(s) you could point to? Is this more generational replacement? Polling questions?
Have you been noticing the rise in "divorce memoirs" and "divorce parties" by Gen X age women in particular? I'd be curious to see the data you shared split out by male/female. There's at least a strong online subculture of feminist women who see divorce almost as a form of self-actualization.
This is an interesting point. In my own little bubble I can recall several women I know being very proud of getting divorced and posting about it on social media.
I've not seen a lot of men do the same.
But it's also been my experience that women are much more likely to post anything on social media compared to men.
There was a IIRC a glut of the male equivalent stories, especially in film and literature, in the 60s/70s where guys in stagnant, joyless marriages would leave their wife (and usually kids) and soul-killing lives so they could find what could bring back his happiness. It turned out that hey, what do you know, what could bring his happiness was the nubile body of his au pair. They're very déclassé now for obvious (and honestly good) reasons, although it still happens IRL
The woman version you see going around the media now me feels like an attempt to subvert or deconstruct the trope, which is bizarre because the trope is dead letter anyway so what exactly are they reacting against?
Because the RELTRAD typology that was developed in 2000 separated Protestant Christianity into three distinct groups: evangelical, mainline, and Black Protestant.
I think that the link to the blog, the analytics tool, and the article, “The Measure of American Religion: Toward Improving the State of the Art.” All deserve further research and investigation.
I’m a lawyer who’s more generally conservative (libertarian-flavor) and I agree with you on this point!
I wonder if the reactions on this point have more to do with the difficulties with sorting out financial and child care issues in divorce situations - actual difficulties and perceived senses of fairness or unfairness in matters involving child custody, support, division of assets, etc. Back in the bad old days of ‘fault’ divorce, it was generally more tolerable to a general public watching mostly from afar that the ‘bad’ spouse was dealt with punitively and the ‘innocent’ spouse was treated more positively.
My biggest concern with easier divorce is the effect on children, especially as easier divorce leads to multiple mixed families, step-siblings, wrenching changes in financial and other circumstances for children, who are often shuttled between parents in joint-custody situations, with both parents vying for the kids’ sympathy and loyalty.
Regardless of the legal impediments or lack thereof, married couples should think thrice (or more) about the potential effects on the children and less often about their individual ‘happiness’ in situations in which there is no overt infidelity or physical or mental abuse.
I’ve know a fair number of kids over the years - starting with friends when I was a teen and on through children of friends and of our own children - where the parents divorced at sensitive times for the children for no apparent reasons other than they had ‘grown apart’ or ‘wanted to do their own thing’ or even ‘wanted a better lover’…Very tough on these kids - unsettling to the kids into many ways, confusing about themselves and everything they’d believed about their families, etc.
I know there are situations where divorce makes sense even when children are involved, and I am certainly no enemy of relatively liberal divorce laws.
The problem becomes when those with "loud voices" are in positions of power to advance policy and law's. Those loud voices believe their view of marriage and divorce should be what everyone adheres to. And that frightens me. All we have to do is look at the overturning of Roe (even when it's own flaws) to see those loud voices become extreme ... and see real women die because of restrictive laws regarding reproductive care.
This isn’t anything that significant, but (as a lawyer who’s personally liberal and who supports no-fault divorce) I have trouble making sense of people who say they want getting a divorce to be *easier* in the years since 2010 (when New York was the 50th state to pass its no-fault divorce law). There’s already no-fault divorce in every state—how could we make it even easier than it is??? Are people really that vested in slightly lubricating family court procedure? Do we want, like, to limit domicile requirements more than we already have or something?
I just can’t believe that people actually care about taking measures like these, or that they’re even aware of what kinds of obstacles (however minor) exist to getting a divorce anymore. As a result, that kind of survey response seems incredibly vibe-y and ungrounded, unless I’m missing something (maybe they’re talking about removing *cultural* obstacles?)
Like, okay, three states still require mutual consent for no-fault. We could do away with that, that would be a substantial obstacle in those three states. Maybe more states could enact summary divorce-type laws, though those wouldn’t really make getting a divorce easier in the vast majority of cases. Otherwise… ???
Relevant here is that unmarried cohabitation (what used to be called "living in sin") has now been almost completely normalised. There is a partisan divide, but not on the morality of cohabitation. Democrats mostly belive that pre-marital cohabitation is positively desirable, Republicans not so much (but I think that they mostly practice it, at least to the extent of sleepovers)
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/should-we-live-together-first-yes-say-democrats-no-say-republicans-even-young-ones/
The implied view of marriage is one of solemnizing an existing partnership rather than of an indissoluble religious commitment.
Abortion and divorce are both indications of individual and a societal failure to understand the difference between a contract and a covenant----a failure to think of possible consequences first, then act accordingly. Apparently we "all" live in Erica Jong's "paradise" now.
ha - not sure about divorce being easier/more difficult, but let's make marriage more difficult - premarital education. Wishful thinking. Would that just lead to fewer marriages? Same if childbearing could be tied into this requirement; parenting courses...
I used to have a really high bar for conducting ceremony for a couple. Counseling, a long history of being together before the engagement, etc.
Then I realized it some marriages just don't work and some do.
I was inspired by this to query AI about the divorce rate in arranged marriages vs what most of us experienced. Unfortunately the comparison is complicated too much by different legal systems and cultural/legal frequency of separations as opposed to divorce.
I would think the status of divorce is largely downstream of the status of marriage. If you are someone who never really intends to marry, doesn't see the point of marriage, or for whom marriage is a distant prospect, then you're going to think about divorce very differently than someone for whom marriage is normative. And broadly speaking, marriage is in decline.
There's an idea out there that marriage is headed towards a steady state in which it's only something that religious people bother to do. But then again, it seems to me there are real differences among secular people, by country, in terms of how they view marriage. Will marriage stabilize at different levels among secular people by country, or is it generally converging towards zero?
I'm fascinated by this map of out-of-wedlock births by country:
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/out-of-wedlock-births-by-country
I wish I understood European cultural differences well enough to explain it. Some differences seem readily explainable by religion (Protestant/Catholic/Orthodox) and religiosity. For example, the Baltic States differ greatly on this statistic: Estonia 54%, Latvia 40%, Lithuania 27%. But they also differ in religion and religiosity.
But then, why is Portugal at 58% and Spain at 48%? I didn't think they differed that much in terms of religiosity, and they're both post-Catholic countries with a lot of shared history. Meanwhile the Nordics, for example, are pretty close, but Iceland is an outlier.
I'd be very curious to see some regressions that try to evaluate how much of this map, or other marriage statistics, can be explained by religion and religiosity, and how much by other cultural factors.
Maybe a thought for future research, Ryan. I know you've run some regressions on Europe before.
This quote from the link you provided gives a clue as to one reason why this may be on the increase, the government takes the place of the provider. “The good news for many of these single-parent families is that there is help and programs, not only in the US but in outreach programs and services around the world. Many of these programs and organizations provide clothing, food, and education for these families.” What you incentivize tends to increase.
I agree, legal/welfare state differences probably explain a good amount as well. The US welfare system has long been known to have a marriage penalty, especially if you have children. Meanwhile, insofar as marriage is incentivized by the government in a particular country (which it is for SOME couples under the US tax code, but not others, depending on the exact structure of their incomes), I think some countries also extend those benefits to cohabiting couples.
So does tax/legal structure explain the rest of the difference? And to what degree does legal structure produce these cultural differences, and to what degree is the causality reversed?
You mention the Scopes trial. Seen this? https://www.christianitytoday.com/2025/05/scopes-trial-anniversary-science-religion-evolution-debate-history-evangelicals/
What’s puzzling to me is the dip in the None’s curve from 60% in ~75 to about 35% ~O1-05 then back up to ~68% around 22.
I can understand a conservative backlash in the faith communities given their dogma but what occurred amongst the nones who aren’t really organized by what they believe rather are lumped together by their not believing.
It will be hard for Republicans to make it harder to divorce when we have a twice divorced Republican President in office.
“There’s no problem with making divorce easier” they said. “There’s no slippery slope” they said....
As someone who came of age in the early 90s, no fault divorce was THE culture war issue in NYC at the time. "Kramer vs Kramer" was a famous movie about the issue.
I have been told that same-sex marriage was a slippery slope, as well.
But I've not seen any mainstream effort to legalize bestiality or pedophilia.
Bestiality was still legal in eight states in 2017 when Texas finally outlawed it.
Texas outlawed bestiality on September 1, 2017. This was enacted through a bill signed into law in 2017. The law makes engaging in sexual contact with an animal, possessing or providing an animal for such conduct, or organizing, promoting, or participating in such conduct illegal.
And it remains legal in only one state, a red one, of course:
Currently, all U.S. states except for West Virginia have laws prohibiting bestiality, according to the Animal Legal Defense Fund.
Divorce in Jesus' day was allowable only by men, and that's why Jesus tried to convince people it was wrong. It didn't protect women. They didn't have a say. And that is why abortion is equally hated by right wing Christians. They don't want women having a say. And abortion was not always an issue with many conservative Christians. See Netflix movies Bad Faith or God and Country to get an idea of the history of how abortion became a trigger point---it started in racism.
The 1970s was the final decade before the fundamentalist takeover of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). For the great majority of their existence, Southern Baptists paid little attention to the practice of abortion; there had been no reason to discuss it as all states had legal restrictions or prohibitive laws in place since as early as 1880. (2) The 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision Roe v. Wade, however, drew the SBC's attention and inevitable involvement. This judgment led to arguments and discussions involving SBC leadership, agencies, ethicists, state conventions, and rank-and-file Southern Baptists, and by end of the decade their abortion position was opposite of where it had been at its beginning. The SBC's change in stance on abortion provided an entry into the political sphere that continues to this day.
https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA644228494&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=00055719&p=AONE&sw=w&userGroupName=anon%7E4043325c&aty=open-web-entry#:~:text=Most%20Southern%20Baptists%20believed%20that,many%20Southern%20Baptists%20to%20action.
Even divorce is even being challenged by conservative Christians who believe they see into the future of marriages. Witness the return of a "covenant marriage" in Tennessee. One that is hard for either party to get out of.
The Tennessee Covenant Marriage Act, effective July 1, 2025, creates a new type of marriage with stricter requirements for divorce. Couples opting for a covenant marriage would need to undergo premarital counseling and sign a declaration of intent outlining their commitment. They would also agree to seek marital counseling before pursuing divorce. Divorce would only be granted under specific circumstances, such as adultery, abandonment, or abuse.
https://wapp.capitol.tn.gov/apps/Billinfo/default.aspx?BillNumber=HB0315&ga=114#:~:text=Beginning%20July%201%2C%202025%2C%20this%20bill%20creates,agree%20that%20marriage%20is%20a%20lifelong%20relationship.
Statistics can be wonderful, but without the history of how they came to be they remain opaque.
You mention "generational replacement" as probably the main cause. But I do have a question. If you look at the graph of the 6 religious groups "share saying divorce should be easier to obtain", the common bottom of all of the curves, including Black Protestants, is 2000-2005. They all seem to bottom out and then head upward again at the same time. That seems kind of specific a time frame, especially for all the groups. Is there any sociological event(s) you could point to? Is this more generational replacement? Polling questions?
Have you been noticing the rise in "divorce memoirs" and "divorce parties" by Gen X age women in particular? I'd be curious to see the data you shared split out by male/female. There's at least a strong online subculture of feminist women who see divorce almost as a form of self-actualization.
This is an interesting point. In my own little bubble I can recall several women I know being very proud of getting divorced and posting about it on social media.
I've not seen a lot of men do the same.
But it's also been my experience that women are much more likely to post anything on social media compared to men.
There was a IIRC a glut of the male equivalent stories, especially in film and literature, in the 60s/70s where guys in stagnant, joyless marriages would leave their wife (and usually kids) and soul-killing lives so they could find what could bring back his happiness. It turned out that hey, what do you know, what could bring his happiness was the nubile body of his au pair. They're very déclassé now for obvious (and honestly good) reasons, although it still happens IRL
The woman version you see going around the media now me feels like an attempt to subvert or deconstruct the trope, which is bizarre because the trope is dead letter anyway so what exactly are they reacting against?
I wonder how this data relates to domestic abuse data (another famously difficult thing to measure).
Yeah, it's basically impossible to measure something like that. For a myriad of reasons.
In an article that seemed to be about religion and divorce, why did you choose to make a distinction between black and white Christians?
Because the RELTRAD typology that was developed in 2000 separated Protestant Christianity into three distinct groups: evangelical, mainline, and Black Protestant.
More here: https://religioninpublic.blog/2019/06/24/what-is-a-black-protestant-why-are-they-their-own-category/
From what I can tell about RELTRAD it’s coding to support analyzing survey data. https://reltrad.com/welcome/dataset-directory/gss-reltrad/gss-reltrad-stata/
Now im interested in knowing who created the survey questions, the answers to which this analytics tool was applied.
Furthermore, the link to the team of sociologists that are cited as having created this tool is actually a link to an Oxford journal article: https://academic.oup.com/sf/article-abstract/79/1/291/2233984?redirectedFrom=fulltext&login=false.
I think that the link to the blog, the analytics tool, and the article, “The Measure of American Religion: Toward Improving the State of the Art.” All deserve further research and investigation.