Can We Blame The Nones For America’s Marriage Crisis?
(ANALYSIS) A couple of months ago, the Heritage Foundation released a report entitled, “Saving America by Saving the Family: A Foundation for the Next 250 Years.”
You can probably guess the contents of said report from just the title, but to summarize: People aren’t walking down the aisle that much anymore, and that’s pretty much bad for everyone.
They start by going on a philosophical discussion of how almost all the Founders were married and Aristotle’s discourse about how societal order begins in the household. If you’ve ever read any Heritage stuff, you know this is pretty standard fare.
They do point to some tangible policies that they believe would drive the marriage rate back up. For instance, a couple that decides to marry before age 30 would get a $2,500 deposit in an investment account. They also suggest a tax credit for married parents with newborn children. But their most controversial proposals revolve around restricting no-fault divorces and moving toward a default 50-50 custody arrangement for children after divorce.
One of the most prominent throughlines in that Heritage document is the role of religion in the decline of marriage rates in the United States. In fact, when I did a CTRL+F search of the document, the word “religion” showed up forty times.
They point to studies which find that church-going couples have a divorce rate that is 50% lower than those who don’t go to a house of worship on a regular basis. Reading through that document got my wheels spinning, of course.
I think we can all admit that there’s some kind of relationship between the decline of religion and the decline of marriage in the United States. Every major religion in the United States encourages parishioners to find a partner, get married, and have children. But how much of the marriage rate decline in the United States can be laid at the feet of the rise of the nones? I think I can actually come up with a fairly robust answer to that question using a couple of different data sources.
To start out with, though, I thought I would just visualize how marriage rates have plummeted in the United States using data from the General Social Survey. It’s been asking, “Are you currently married, widowed, divorced, separated, or have you never been married?” since the very early days (1972), so we can track this with a ton of specificity over five decades. This is just the share of people who say that they have never been married.
You can read the rest of this post on Substack.
Ryan Burge is an assistant professor of political science at Eastern Illinois University, a pastor in the American Baptist Church and the co-founder and frequent contributor to Religion in Public, a forum for scholars of religion and politics to make their work accessible to a more general audience. His research focuses on the intersection of religiosity and political behavior, especially in the U.S. Follow him on X at @ryanburge.