Part 5 (1/2)
In the study ”Spiritual Beliefs and Marriage,” coauth.o.r.ed with Peter Larson, Olson examined various religious activities (like Bible reading and prayer) to measure and evaluate how much couples agreed with each other spiritually. In all twelve dimensions of the evaluation, the more couples agreed with each other on personal spiritual beliefs and practices, the better were their scores in areas such as marital satisfaction, conflict resolution, and couple closeness. For example, those who had a high spiritual agreement scored a 71 on the couple closeness scale, almost double the score of those marriages that experienced a low spiritual agreement (they scored 39).
Study 3: Marriage Oneness a.s.sessment-Couples Who Pray Together Are Likely to Be Connected and Close in Their Marriage, Whereas Those Who Don't Are Much More Likely to Be Disconnected
As a part of an eight-week small-group FamilyLife DVD study called Marriage Oneness,83 3,850 couples took a marriage a.s.sessment called the ”Marriage Oneness Profile,” administered online by PREPARE/ENRICH. Based on the couples' answers to the a.s.sessment tool, PREPARE/ENRICH ranks couples by how close and connected the marriage is.84 This survey found a link between frequency of prayer and how connected spouses are. Fully 68 percent of highly connected couples agreed or strongly agreed that they pray together regularly. Only 19 percent of highly connected couples reported not praying together regularly. By comparison, most highly disconnected couples (73 percent) reported no regular prayer with their spouse. Among those taking this a.s.sessment, it was unusual for a couple who prays together to feel highly disconnected in their overall relations.h.i.+p. (See table.) Note that this a.s.sessment was probably offered primarily through churches and taken primarily by churchgoers, and thus these percentages are not necessarily the same as what we would see in the general population. However, the bottom line that prayer is highly a.s.sociated with connectedness is very likely to be the same.
”My Partner and I Pray Together on a Regular Basis”
Source: ”Marriage Oneness” surveys, tabulated by PREPARE/ENRICH for FamilyLife. Due to rounding, columns may not total 100%.
”Keep On Rolling”
In addition to the speaking engagements I do for corporations, community groups, and other events, I speak at thirty or forty churches a year. For the last few years, I have often asked the senior pastor and/or the marriage pastor of those churches if I can brief them on the good news I have been finding. Universally they are encouraged ... and sometimes chagrined. The pastor of one large church told me, ”I have quoted every one of those bad statistics you just mentioned.”
”I have too,” I said. ”I think most of us have.”
”I think as pastors, we sometimes feel like we have to create a crisis of awareness to draw attention to something,” he continued. ”Just a few weeks ago when we started this current marriage series, I asked people, 'Think right now of your friends having trouble in their marriage. They need this upcoming message. Look around you ... Half of us are struggling. We have to take this seriously.' ” He paused for a minute. ”We try very hard here to instill hope in every other area, but in talking about marriages, we are putting a seed of doubt into people. And that isn't something we should be doing. Hope is what you want to give as a leader. We say G.o.d is a redeemer. He takes what is broken, fallen, and seems unfixable and makes all things new.”
”What difference will it make to you, knowing the real data?” I asked him.
”Well, I can't use my old stats, that's for sure!” He laughed. ”But more than that, we own up to things here, and I think I will want to own up to this one-to tell the congregation we were wrong and didn't realize it. We would actually say, 'This may have had a negative effect on you or discouraged you, and we're sorry. Because the truth is better than fiction. Even if your marriage isn't in a happy place, realize happy doesn't mean perfect. Happy means you put the marriage in front of the issue, and the commitment overrides everything.' ”
As I have spoken with other pastors, I have often heard relief as well. One pastor who has seen marriages in his church thriving in recent years put it this way: I think to some degree pastors feel like I need to preach a special marriage sermon every three months, and if I'm not, I am not doing my job. But this data confirms what I have seen: that pastors don't have to preach ”marriage” sermons all the time. We do need to be intentional as leaders to ensure our church is supporting marriages and is bringing couples together in community. But that doesn't mean we have to cover the main marriage scriptures every week from the pulpit. Instead, we can keep emphasizing that ultimately it is about just living out these ”one anothers” of the Bible, just being a disciple. That is the best thing you can do for your marriage. The key for us is to keep on rolling, keep on showing our people how to be fully obedient followers.
Another pastor summed the sense of relief up well, saying, I have long wanted to tell people, ”Bring your friends to church; you'll get support for your marriage here.” But I kept stopping myself because if we have the same divorce rate as everyone else, how can I make that claim? Hearing this is freedom. Freedom to say that not only can you believe in marriage, but you can believe in Christian marriage. It is freedom to say that the Bible does work, that what G.o.d says does make a difference. It is freedom to say what most of us have felt but second-guessed before: married people need a supportive community, and the church is the best place to get it.
Summary * The notion that ”the divorce rate is the same in the church as in the general public” is not true. That is a fundamental misunderstanding of Barna Group data.
* In the study that is misquoted, Barna was researching the divorce trends based on faith-based beliefs, not faith-based practices like wors.h.i.+p attendance, and in fact actually excluded consideration of whether the person went to religious services.
* New tabulations of the Barna data that include church attendance, as well as the findings of several other studies, show that when a person attends church, it lowers their chances of divorce by roughly 25 to 50 percent compared to those who do not attend.
* A special run of Brad Wilc.o.x / National Marriage Project survey data for The Surprising Secrets of Highly Happy Marriages book found that among couples where both the husband and the wife agreed that ”G.o.d is at the center of our marriage,” fully 53 percent were at the highest possible level of marital happiness!
* A FamilyLife survey of more than fifty churches found an average overall divorce rate in those churches of 22.4 percent, and because this survey had a higher-than-normal sample of high-risk baby boomers, the actual average divorce rate for churchgoers is likely to be lower.
* A FamilyLife and PREPARE/ENRICH a.s.sessment of 7,700 married people found that 68 percent of highly connected couples said they prayed together regularly and that 73 percent of highly disconnected couples said they didn't.
Good News #3 The rate of divorce in the church is 25 to 50 percent lower than among those who don't attend wors.h.i.+p services, and those who prioritize their faith and/or pray together are dramatically happier and more connected.
5.
Why Remarriages Are Much More Successful Than You Thought
In my interviews for The Surprising Secrets of Highly Happy Marriages, when I spoke to those in a second marriage, I often heard comments like this woman's: ”I know we've got an uphill battle. Sixty percent of second marriages fail, and we are both determined we're not going to be in that group.”
Or these comments, from a couple explaining their very difficult first few years in what was a second marriage for both of them: Her: We are very excited that we've defied the odds. One of the reasons is that we intentionally chose not to have children together because we learned that having a child together would have brought a harder dynamic. We wanted to feel that all three of the children were our children.
Him: Also, we went into the relations.h.i.+p with the right expectations, knowing that it was going to be a struggle. We understood that it would be hard, so we were resolved to do whatever it took to make it as easy as possible on each other.
Her: There were times we thought we weren't going to make it and were going to be one of the statistics. But we had promised our commitment before G.o.d, and we are both stubborn and don't like to quit. There were plenty of times where if we'd lacked determination, it would have been so easy to throw in the towel. But believing that G.o.d can redeem anything, we had a vision of what it could be like if we chose to press on. And that gave us hope, although sometimes it was literally the last thread we were holding on to.
As I spoke to those who were in highly happy second marriages, it was wonderful to see this type of commitment and determination. But I was struck by how commonly I heard these couples talk about ”the incredibly high failure rate of second and third marriages,” which is popularly believed to be at least 60 percent and 73 percent, respectively.
I couldn't help being concerned, especially since I suspected that (as with all the other divorce numbers) those ratios might not be the full story. After all, if the feeling of futility adds pressure in first marriages, which are believed to have a ”flip a coin” 50 percent failure rate, it must be smothering for those in second and third marriages to feel they are so unlikely to succeed! For every couple that was motivated and determined by the statistics (such as the ones I was interviewing), how many were discouraged?
Although eight in ten marriages that exist today are first marriages (among women), it is still painful to think about the others, about those in a second or third marriage who believe that they have a better chance of winning at roulette than of keeping their marriage intact.
What Percent of Marriages Are Remarriages?*
First marriage 80.5% Second marriage 15.8% Third marriage (or more) 3.8% *Among women. (Remarriage is more common among women, in part because women tend to live longer than men.) Source: US Census Bureau, SIPP table 10, 2009.
Fueling the Legend