A recent study by the Associated Press has revealed that the highest divorce rates in the country (aside from Nevada, for obvious reasons) is… you guessed it… the Bible Belt! And we're not talking just a little bit higher, but by a fifty percent margin!
Sometimes life just tosses these bits of delicious irony to us and we have to smile.
So why this seeming paradox between high divorce rates and high emphasis on marriage? Well, there are a lot of reasons. But according to some people I know from that area, it's not surprising at all. Though marriage is strongly supported, and touted as the bedrock of society, not much is really said about how to make a marriage work. What little is said tends to be utterly useless, if not right out of fantasyland.
A lot of people are under the impression that if God is part of your marriage, you're fine. So religious people, as long as they keep up the religiosity, feel they're in no danger of marital strife.
Obviously, they're sadly mistaken. Just look at Oklahoma, arguably the most conservative state in the nation, where six out of every thousand people will be divorced. (The national average being 4.2 out of every thousand.)
Another factor is that the south is predominantly Protestant, while areas such as New England (with the lowest rate of divorce) are predominantly Catholic. Catholics stigmatize divorce big time. To many, it's simply not an option, no matter how awful the marriage might become.
Some Protestants feel they, too, should similarly stigmatize divorce. This is a truly stupid response to the situation, which of course also doesn't surprise me, coming from the conservative religious faction.
Not to belittle the issue, but my personal view is that it isn't worth the time to discuss it. I'm tired of hearing how marriage is the foundation upon which our nation is built, or other such drivel. It isn't. Not even remotely.
If anything, the strict definitions we have of marriage and family in this country are doing more harm than good. We need to apply freethought principles to these institutions and see what results. I think we'd see that lifelong commitments are more fantasy than reality. People are not static creatures. We change over time, and to expect two people married to each other to change in the same or complementary ways over several decades is exceedingly optimistic.
This isn't to say that commitment is foolish. Far from it. But to expect it to last forever, or to stigmatize legal separation, is definitely not in our best interests.
