Mormon Divorce

Posted on July 22, 2010
Filed Under Religion | 7 Comments

Interesting page at Religious Tolerance someone posted at LDS-Herm. It’s about the Mormon divorce rate. I suspect most have heard the oft quoted 6% divorce rate for temple marriages among Mormons. The page notes a problem with this statistic.

Most Mormons who have their marriage sealed in a temple ceremony and who subsequently divorce do so in a civil ceremony. This avoids the rather complex temple “cancellation of sealing” (divorce) procedures. Thus, their divorce is not counted in the above figure.

I didn’t realize the 6% figure only counted sealing cancellations which certainly would dramatically bias the rate.

The page notes that overall Mormon divorces appear close to the national average. “A 1999 study of nearly 4,000 U.S. adults showed that 24% of Mormon marriages end in divorce…” However this appears to be based on those who had divorced who self-identify as Mormon. That includes self-identified Mormons without temple marriages as well as convert Mormons who may have divorced while not a Mormon. I might be wrong on this – it wasn’t quite clear from what I read. The study is from a Barna Group study. I’ve no idea of the reputation of this group nor how well their statistical investigations are regarded.

Anyway, ignoring any potential issues of the study itself, the relevance for temple marriage isn’t clear. The more relevant statistic mentioned by the Religious Tolerance page was this one from the Salt Lake Tribune (Mar 6, 1999).

1993 study published in Demography [magazine] showed that Mormons marrying within their church are least likely of all Americans to become divorced. Only 13 percent of LDS couples have divorced after five years of marriage, compared with 20 percent for religiously homogamist unions among Catholics and Protestants and 27 percent among Jews. However, when a Mormon marries outside his or her denomination, the divorce rate soars to 40 percent — second only to mixed-faith marriages involving a Jewish spouse (42 percent).

Quite interesting. It’d be interesting to see if this has changed over time or not.

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Comments

7 Responses to “Mormon Divorce”
1 John Mansfield on July 22nd, 2010 12:56 pm

That six percent figure is for people married in the temple who then civilly divorce. It is not counting cancellation of sealings. The webpage you linked gives a link to its source for the six percent figure, a adherents.com copy of an LA Times article quoting a BYU professor Daniel K. Judd. The Times article said “While other Mormons divorce at the usual rate, only 6% of those who undergo the demanding temple marriage break up, according to Brigham Young University professor Daniel K. Judd.”

That number is from the 80′s. There’s a transcript at the URL below of some interview between Judd and Robert Millet about divorce. Page 7 of the PDF discusses numbers with the estimate that current temple divorce rate is about 20%. “Now in the early 80´s a Latter-day Saints rates of divorce among those married in the temple actually, who then had to get a civil divorce. [. . .] It was actually about 6 percent. Now, unlike the nation, that divorce rate´s been fairly stable over time. What we see in the research is that divorce rates have actually climbed since then. Nation has stayed stable, our rates have climbed. But is it higher than the national average? Heavens no! And so the best survey research we have is around a 20 percent, is about where we are.”

http://radio.lds.org/mc_files/pdf/Mormon%20Identity%20Episode%2020%20Transcript.pdf

Thanks John. Not sure how I missed that.

This FAIR article goes through Judd’s methodology although it didn’t have the later figure you mentioned.

Interesting that the 6% figure is still being quoted by so many articles though. It’d be nice to have a more formal statement on it.

3 John Mansfield on July 22nd, 2010 2:15 pm

I think that six percent figure has stuck with us because it came from a big study looking specifically at Mormons. Most of what I have seen since has been looking at the small Mormon slice of general population studies, which can’t produce a temple marriage stat. I wonder what surveys Judd takes his 20% number from. I would suppose that internally the Church membership department keeps the General Authorities supplied with timely and fairly accurate counts of civil divorces of temple-sealed marriages.

In “A Statistical Profile of Mormons”, the Authors estimate that the divorce rate of when both in the couple attend church regularly is ~30%, and say this is as close as the can get with the data the have (from 2000)

5 Glenn Thigpen on July 25th, 2010 7:36 am

It would be interesting to see what percentage of active LDS marriages end in divorce.

Glenn

“Active” LDS marriages would be an interesting figure: that is, marriages where both spouses are active, participating LDS. I suspect that more than a few LDS divorces happen after one or the other has stopped believing or living the gospel, even if they were initially sealed in the temple.

30% seems much too high based upon the other statistics I’ve seen. How did they arrive at that?

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