As appeared in “The Public Square”
Richard John Neuhaus
First Things | January 2001

You have heard it said, probably more times than you can remember, that more than one-half of marriages today end up in divorce. It isn't true, as I've pointed out here before. (Why don't they listen?) It's a statistic regularly employed by those who want us to believe that marriage is a dysfunctional and outmoded institution. Now David Blankenhorn of the Institute for American Values has worked through the intimidating literature of the numbers-crunchers and explains how the statistic gained currency. The details are available in the Summer 2000 issue of Propositions, the Institute's newsletter. The gist of it is that divorce rates peaked in 1979 and have been declining ever since. For a young couple getting married today the statistical probability of their staying together for life is at least 60 percent. And it may be higher, since the statistics include all marriages and divorces, and it is established that second and third marriages are more divorce-prone than first marriages. Why does the "more than half claim continue to have currency? Blankenhorn answers, "Mostly, I suspect, because today's aging baby boomers, who divorce so frequently themselves, find it hard to accept the fact that younger people are behaving differently, and better." Also, I would add, because moralizers love doleful statistics showing that we're going the wrong way in a handbasket. In any event, Blankenhorn offers this proposition, which he admits is a mix of evidence and hope: "In a few years, we will understand a divorce rate of 'more than half not as a description of current reality, but as something that happened in the old days, when the sexual revolution was young and when today's pot-bellied commentators, editors, and divorce lawyers were wearing bellbottoms and going to discos." And, of course, young people at the altar who have their minds on statistical probabilities rather than on their love for one another sustained by the grace of God shouldn't be there.