Christians are, in theory, supposed to have a stronger commitment to marriage -- and a greater opposition to divorce -- than the surrounding culture.

Yet one of the things which has always puzzled me is why this doesn't seem to translate into any real, measurable difference. Even if we just forget questions of what's true or not, it should seem that people who are told not to do something should be at least slightly less likely to do it, just based on simple behavioral principles.

Yet, critics often allege the contrary:

The Christian faith also puts a very, very large stigma on divorce.... Adultery is a major problem in the Christian faith... Clearly, the Christian divorce rate should be zero....

[Yet a]ccording to this article, "'While it may be alarming to discover that born-again Christians are more likely than others to experience a divorce, that pattern has been in place for quite some time,' said George Barna, president of Barna Research Group." There are a millions ways to crunch the data, but no matter how you slice it, it is easy to see that Christians divorce just as often as non-Christians.

The reason for the high divorce rate among Christians is easy to see: God is imaginary.

There are more fallacies above than you can shake a stick at: for example, the author assumes that humans (including Christians) should reasonably be expected to be 100% perfect in living up to their professed beliefs. (Conversely, I should argue that the prayer rate among professed atheists should also be zero percent, but I doubt we'd find that either.)

But even so, what of the question of divorce?

It turns out that the missing nuance involves the term "born again" -- these are people who said they've had a "born again" experience, whether or not they express their alleged convictions in any visible way. When you look at the subset of those whose actions actually reflect their convictions, a startlingly different picture emerges , according to a sweeping study of love and commitment conducted by sociologists at the University of Virginia (underlining added):

Based on my earlier research, evangelical women tend to be happier in their marriages than other women, particularly when both the wife and the husband attend church on a regular basis. This idea that Christians are just as likely to divorce as secular folks is not correct if we factor church attendance into our thinking. Churchgoing evangelical Protestants, churchgoing Catholics, and churchgoing mainline Protestants are all significantly less likely to divorce.

How much less likely?

I estimate between 35 and 50 percent less likely than Americans who attend church just nominally, just once or twice a year, or who don't attend church at all. It is true that people who say they've had a born-again experience are about as likely to divorce as people who are completely secular. But if you look at this through the lens of church attendance, you see a very different story.

So what I'd been told all along -- that there's no difference in the "Christian" divorce rate -- turns out to be wrong, if we look at behavior and participation, not just stated worldview.

And, of course, if we accept logic like that quoted above, a significant difference in divorce rate must also prove a significantly greater chance that God exists.

Of course, it doesn't: such thinking is fallacious, no matter which way you apply it. But I don't expect any commitment to logic from atheist polemicists like the one I cite above. It's another case of confessing one ideal with your mouth, and demonstrating quite another in practice -- a defect hardly confined the religious.