Children of Divorce More Likely to Abandon Religion, Study Finds

Adults whose parents divorced when they were children are less likely to practice any religion, a new study finds. 

The same study also found that children whose parents practice different religions are also more likely to abandon religion altogether.

In the last 40 years, as divorce rates rose, the percentage of Americans who identify with no religion went from 5 to 25 percent. And there’s a connection: according to a new study from the Public Religion Research Institute, 35% of children of divorced families identify with no religion, compared with 23% of children of parents who were married when they were children.

Divorce has an effect even if the child’s parents are religious: only 31% of children of divorced but religious parents attend religious services weekly, compared to 43% of children of married and religious parents.

The study from the Public Religion Research Institute says yes. The children of divorced parents have grown up to be adults of no religion.

People whose parents divorced when they were children are significantly more likely to grow up not to be religious as adults, the study found. Thirty-five percent of the children of divorced parents told pollsters they are now nonreligious, compared with 23 percent of people whose parents were married when they were children.

Other studies on the rise of the “nones” — those who say they have no religion — have focused on millennials’ changing preferences. This study 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. 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, said Daniel Cox, one of the researchers on the new study.

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 said his team found that even children of divorced parents who are religious are less religious than their peers. Thirty-one percent of them go to services every week, compared with 43 percent of religious people whose parents were married when they were growing up.

The study, which asked many questions about nonreligious Americans’ beliefs about faith, touched on other consequences of parents’ marriages as well. It showed, as other research has demonstrated, that children raised by parents who have two different religions, grow up more likely to have no religion at all.