Divorce Status & Religion in Britain


One of the most notoriously inaccurate statistics regarding divorce is the marital status of various religious groups.  There are few reliable large scale studies that ask both about religion and marital status.

Using the British Social Attitudes Study, Leslie Francis and colleagues compared the marital status of  adults who practice Buddhisms, Christianity, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Sikhism, or no religious affiliation over the years between 1983 and 2005. 

Although the number of adults in the samples who practice Buddhism, Hinduism Islam, Judaism and Sikhism is probably too small to be confident about the broad pattern over the years looks similar across almost all the groups with the divorce rate increasing over time.  For Christians, only 8% were divorced in the decade of 1983-1995 and 12% were divorced in the decade from 1996-2005.  Among those with no religion, 9% were divorced in the first decade and 13% were divorced in the second decade.  In the surveys conducted between 1986-1995, 7% of Muslims were divorced and in the years 1996-2005, 12% were divorced.  Hindus, Jews, and Sikhs had smaller percentages who were divorced in each decade, but their rates over the two decades indicated that the percentage of divorced adults almost doubled.