Conservative Protestants are not only failing to live up to their own pro-family standards, now they are making it harder for everyone else to stay married, too. At least that’s the story likely to be reported based on findings in a new article, “Red States, Blue States, and Divorce: Understanding the Impact of Conservative Protestantism on Regional Variation in Divorce Rates,” published this week in the American Journal of Sociology.
Authors Jennifer Glass and Philip Levchak are more nuanced in their own telling of the story, but their findings are provocative. The authors conclude, “The results here show that communities with large concentrations of conservative Protestants actually produce higher divorce rates than others, both because conservative Protestants themselves exhibit higher divorce risk and because individuals in communities dominated by conservative Protestants face higher divorce risks.”
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