I'm going to miss this forum. I hope the feeling is mutual, dear readers. While research reports will continue to appear regularly in Presbyterians Today and on the Web, the unique opportunity to publish fortnightly focused pieces of interest to ministers will be gone.
It's been over a dozen years since Theo Gill, then editor of Monday Morning, approached Research Services about writing articles for Monday Morning. As a magazine dedicated to opinion, he wanted to balance the contributions of individual readers with the more systematic opinions gathered through the Presbyterian Panel. It was a marriage made in heaven, continued by three other editors and resulting in more than 200 articles on everything from the most common names of PC(USA) congregations ("First," by far) to Presbyterian beliefs about the Bible (mixed).
I'll resist a stroll down memory lane. (If you're interested, all of the articles since 1995 are available here.) Instead, I'll revisit the subject of the first article, in September 1989: divorce.
When we most recently asked about marital status in a 1999 Presbyterian Panel survey, 76% of members, 84% of elders, 89% of pastors, and 85% of specialized clergy indicated that they were currently married. For most of these individuals, their current marriage is their only marriage, but 14% of the members, 15% of the elders and pastors, and 20% of the specialized clergy have had one or more previous marriages which ended in divorce. In addition, among the subset of panelists not currently married, 31% of the members, 30% of the elders, 41% of the pastors, and 53% of the specialized clergy had been married previously and were now divorced.
Put another way, among those panelists who have been or are now married, 19% of members, 18% of elders, 18% of pastors, and 25% of specialized clergy have been divorced. As the figure shows, most of the ever-divorced have remarried. The figure also makes clear that almost all Presbyterians, laity and clergy alike, have married, and in fact, at the time of the survey, around two-thirds in every Panel sample were currently married and had never been divorced.
While the divorce rates among Presbyterians may seem high, they pale in comparison to those found in the United States overall. Among adults, 43% of the ever-married population has been divorced. Also, among Americans generally, a quarter have never married, compared to less than 10% in every Panel group.
In sum, when it comes to marital status and divorce history, Presbyterians look very different from the population at large. But those of you who have been reading this column for 13 years are not surprised, are you? If our research has found one thing consistently it is that, for good or ill, Presbyterians in general, and Monday Morning readers in particular, are a very select group.
Email the author: Jack Marcum
Research Services