Sunday, February 10, 2008
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Blue over you

Why red states have higher divorce rates

By Stephanie Ramage

Welcome to Georgia, a red state.

If you’ve recently moved here and are just heading out the door to purchase the traditional baubles one buys around Valentine’s Day, there’s something you might want to consider before making such an investment in your current relationship. Have you considered moving to Connecticut? No? Well, you’re far more likely to get married here than in chi-chi blue states like Connecticut. But that means you’re also far more likely to get divorced.

The way that works is fairly simple: In red states—politically conservative and majority-Christian states—most people believe that marriage forms the basis of a family, so they get married. But, in the United States, you’ve got about a 50-50 overall chance of divorcing, so once you’ve joined the population of married folks you’re as likely as not to join the population of divorced folks in due time.

If you were like a lot of people in the blue states—more liberal, less-religious states—you’d avoid that pitfall altogether by not getting married in the first place. You would cohabitate, or as it’s often called in the South, “shack up.” If you were an upstanding citizen of the great state of Connecticut who did actually want to get married, chances are you’d put it off long enough to finish your education and get a good handle on your career, so that once you tied the knot, it would be more likely to stay tied, thanks to having less stress regarding earning a degree or landing a good a job.

In the smallest nutshell, that’s the difference between red-state relationships and blue-state relationships. But if you worry that Georgia’s not the place for you—if you kind of like the blue state way of doing things—you don’t necessarily have to cancel dinner and call a moving company. If you’re patient, a blue state kind of family life will eventually come to you, says David Popenoe, a sociologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

Popenoe’s research suggests—and Popenoe himself believes—that the traditional American family, the one made up of a married heterosexual couple with children, is vanishing, being replaced by more casual arrangements like those in the Northeast and on the West Coast, where couples routinely live together, and that blue states are sliding inexorably toward a family lifestyle that mirrors that of Scandinavian countries. We red states are going blue, and the blue states are going Swedish.

More education=less divorce

To go Swedish, in this case, means having children with someone to whom you are not married and raising them in a parental partnership. And, when you and your partner split up and move on, your new partners can become part of your children’s lives. Popenoe believes this is very bad, first because in America we don’t have the government programs and policies that the sophisticated Swedes do, the kinds that can help kids along regardless of what kinds of parents fate has given them; and second, because eventually, the Scandinavian countries will have to pay the price for their loosey-goosey lifestyles.

“The price is a lot of unhappy, unfulfilled adults because they were children who were not given the right to grow up in a stable family,” says Popenoe. “And I believe that a child has a right to grow up in a stable family.”

Although America’s divorce rate has decreased a little in recent years, we still lead the world in divorce. And according to the U.S. Census Bureau, we don’t get married nearly as much as we used to (which is one reason why the divorce rate is down). The national marriage rate has fallen by almost 50 percent since 1970.

Popenoe, director of the National Marriage Project, the organization that produces Rutgers University’s annual State of Our Unions report, blames that on more people delaying marriage until their late 20s, as well as the rise in cohabitation, and a slight decrease in the remarriage rate of divorced people. He also blames the decline of marriage, in part, on the rise of secular individualism, something he wrote about at length in last fall’s State of Our Unions report.

“It features the gradual abandonment of religious attendance and beliefs, a strong leaning toward ‘expressive’ values that are preoccupied with personal autonomy and self-fulfillment, and a political emphasis on egalitarianism and the tolerance of diverse lifestyles,” he writes. “An established empirical generalization is that the greater the dominance of secular individualism in a culture, the more fragmented the families.”

Secular individualism dictates that an individual make the best decisions for his or her own well being, so secular individualists get along best in relationships that give them a lot of room to do what they want. Traditional families don’t allow as much for that. As Popenoe notes, traditional families are not egalitarian—not everyone has equal power. Traditional families are not democracies.

“The traditional nuclear family is a somewhat inegalitarian group (not only between husbands and wives but also parents and children),” writes Popenoe, “that requires the suppression of some individuality and also has been strongly supported by, and governed by the rules of, orthodox religions.”

To a non-religious person, suppression of individuality doesn’t sound very appealing. If your individuality is going to be suppressed in a relationship, it’s probably a good idea not to leave a paper trail when you split. No marriage, no lawyers, so to speak.

To a religious person, however, marriage is the appropriate way to start a family, hence your greater likelihood of getting hitched in the Peach State than in the Nutmeg State.

But while religion may help ensure you get married, it won’t save your marriage from divorce. According to Popenoe, who used Census Bureau and National Vital Statistics data to come to his conclusions, the highest divorce rates are found in the more religiously based red states, like ours. The national divorce rate was 16 divorces per 1,000 married women in 2005. By comparison, Arkansas, the home state of evangelical presidential candidate Mike Huckabee, boasts, along with Oklahoma, the highest divorce rate in the nation. Both have 25 divorces per 1,000 marriages. West Virginia, which gave Huckabee his first victory in the Super Tuesday primaries, occupies the second-highest divorce slot, with 23 divorces per 1000 marriages. Secular blue states such as Pennsylvania and Massachusetts have well-below-average divorce rates (11 per 1,000 marriages).

Stephanie Coontz, a social historian and director of research and public education for the Council on Contemporary Families, has also looked at religion and marriage.

“People in religious states have the highest incident of divorce. Pentecostals have an even higher rate,” she says, referring to the Christian denomination that believes in the most literal interpretation of the Bible and in what adherents call acts of the spirit, like “speaking in tongues.”

Before you curse God—as Job so famously refused to do—and die single, keep in mind that while religion may be the thing that prompts people to marry, it’s not the thing that’s wrecking their marriages. Level of educational achievement is the single factor that probably best explains the geographic—and religious—distribution of divorce. The lower the educational level and the associated income level, the higher the divorce rate. And educational levels are substantially lower in the red states, which tend to be more religious, than in the blue states.

“We’ve seen that better-educated women are less likely to get divorced,” says Coontz.
Steve Martin, a sociologist at the University of Maryland, points out that factors like education and income have a tremendous impact on the longevity of a marriage. And although a shared faith can help foster marital stability, it might not counterbalance educational level and income, which would explain the higher divorce rates in red states.

“You can’t just tell them to go to church and get married and think that will solve the problem,” he says.

Popenoe is in complete agreement, and refers to an ever-widening national marriage-and-divorce gap he wrote about in his report last fall: “People who have completed college (around a quarter of the population) tend to have significantly higher marriage and lower divorce rates compared to those with less education.”

Among those married in the early ’90s, for example, Popenoe noted that only 16.5 percent of college-educated women were divorced within 10 years, compared to 46 percent for high school dropouts. Indeed, most of the recent divorce-rate decline has been among the college educated; for those with less than a high school education, the divorce rate actually has been rising. The weakening of marriage and the resultant growth of family diversity thus is found much more prominently among those with less education and associated lower incomes.

The underlying reason for this may be as simple as the fact that the personality and social characteristics enabling one to complete college are similar to those that foster today’s long-term marriages. Or perhaps the delayed entry into the adult world of work and childbearing, and the increase in income and knowledge that college typically fosters, better allows mature values and financial security to undergird the choice of partner and family life.

Whatever the reasons, this marriage and divorce gap has been a major contributor to the growing economic inequality in America. Because children tend to mimic their parents’ unions, there is some expectation that the marriage and divorce gap will grow.

The 8-year itch

If you’re still reading this paper, then it’s unlikely that you’ve high-tailed it to I-95 and set a course northward. Either you’ve resigned yourself to your fate of marrying and divorcing in the South and are paralyzed by despair, or you know that even divorce isn’t the end of the world. Not for you, and surprisingly, not for your kids. For a lot of adults, and even for some children, it’s a much-needed social safety valve.

While children of married parents do tend to experience better social adjustment and better academic performance, that depends on what their parents’ marriage is like. Some children are happier after their parents get divorced—particularly if there was abuse, coldness or contempt between the parents, says Coontz, who steers clear of sweeping pronouncements about marriage in general. She cautions, however. that children who go through one divorce tend to be substantially better adjusted than children who go through multiple divorces.

Coontz places less emphasis on marriage than does her colleague, Popenoe. Though she admits married couples’ unions break up less than cohabitating couples in America, the important thing is for parents—married or not—to stay together if they can, and treat each other and their children well. One of the best ways to ensure family stability, she says, as shown by studies compiled by the Family Research Council, is for fathers to pitch in with the housework and child-rearing. Simple as that may seem compared to instituting new public policies, it has profound effects. Boys whose fathers spend substantial time with them grow up to have more empathy for others; girls whose fathers spend substantial time with them grow up with more math and science abilities. And that’s true even in families where the parents aren’t married.

“What’s wrong with Sweden?” she asks. “Several long-term studies have shown that children in the Nordic societies, whose parents aren’t married, actually get to spend more time with their parents than do American children because of the long hours that American parents usually work. Also, in those countries, cohabitation lasts as long as most American marriages.”

How long is that?

“About eight years,” she says. For red states and blue states. SP

Editor's Note: The print version of this story incorrectly attributed the Feb. 5 GOP convention win to Mitt Romney. The state's convention instead chose Mike Huckabee. It was his first victory of the night.