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Percentage of weekly churchgoers, views on abortion and other "social issue" touchstones, etc., tend to correllate positively with the WORST divorce rates,

I suspect Aberta's Child would say that weekly churchgoers, etc, get married more (instead of cohabitating), and thus get divorced more.

Recently, someone posted on the "Double Income No Sex" thread that couples who pray together daily have a very low chance of breaking up. I Googled it up and found this:

Christian Divorce Statistics

They claim the rate is an astounding .1/100

They also say that those who go to church regularly, as opposed to at Christmas and Easter I suppose, have a 1 in 50 chance of divorce. This is at odds with other statistics, but they may have a far more strict definition of churchgoing.

I haven't looked into the original source or tried to validate this astonishing claim in any way (I have to confess to some skepticism), but if daily prayer is taken as an indication of commitment to your faith (rather than just church-going), maybe the truly faithful are doing OK after all.

By the way, I want to correct an ambiguity -- the percentage of weekly churchgoers who get divorced is relatively small.

The divorce rate in AREAS with high percentages of weekly churchgoing, or high poll responses against legalized abortion or other "liberal" ideas and practices is relatively high.

However, I think that event that is simply a second-level correllation, reflecting the fact that social conservativism of the public, political sort is most prevalent in areas with lower educations and incomes, with the primary correllation (and, likely, causation) for the divorce rates lying in those economic factors.

I do think that, the >private<, non-partisan practices of the affluent suburbs and chic urban districts are actually intensely socially conservative. No one is more militant about property values, about keeping the unfit or unpleasant out of their neighborhoods and their kids schools, about getting rid of crime ... and I can't believe that there's anywhere in the Bible Belt that would look more askance at unwed teenage mother in the neighborhood than would >my< very typical middle-class New Jersey suburban neighborhood.