Study Shows Children of Divorce More Likely to Drop Faith

A new study finds that children raised by divorced parents are more likely to be unaffiliated with religion than those raised by married parents.

The survey was conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute between July 27 and August 9.  

It found that 35 percent of Americans raised by divorced parents say they are "religiously unaffiliated," as opposed to only 23 percent who were raised by married parents.

"Our faith is built on this idea of family and the consistency and the faithfulness of relationships that are resilient through life and this unshakable structure, " said Dr. Jim Sells, Assistant Dean of Academics at Regent University's School of Psychology and Counseling.

"When it becomes shook and when it breaks it has a resounding affect on how we think," said Sells.

The study also found that 29 percent of adults who were raised religious and left their faith say they left because of their religion's negative teachings about gay and lesbian people.  

Sells explained, "I believe in some ways this is a righting of a correction of some bad theology in which sexual sin is very serious before God but it is not of a greater seriousness than every other type of sin that we encounter."

Nineteen percent say they left because of clergy sexual-abuse scandals. Sixty percent say they simply do not believe what the religion teaches.

"A lot of the narrative around the rise of the nones, or the rise of the non-affiliated, has focused on how there's changing cultural preferences, that people are choosing to move away from religion," researcher Daniel Cox told The Washington Post. 

"I think there's also a structural part of the story that has not gotten as much attention. We wanted to focus on the way Millennials were raised, which is different from any previous generation. And part of that is they're more likely to have grown up with parents who are divorced."

Cox also notes the link between family structure and religious identity.

"There is no single reason the unaffiliated are growing so dramatically, but this survey finds new evidence that the structure of the family life is part of the story," he says.

"Americans raised by divorced parents or by parents in interfaith marriages are less likely than those brought up in two-parent or sing-faith households to be religiously active as adults."