Marriage Rates By Religion
2013-01-21
I recently met another young man my age who was married (at least I am assuming the woman with him was his wife). I have now done a count of people about my age I know well and am in contact with. The results are that 8/25 = 32% who were unmarried 2 years ago are now married. There were two people I excluded because they were already married 2 years ago, and three I excluded because I do not have current data.
If I break it down by religion, I get:
| Atheists/Agnostics |
1 / 7 |
14% |
| Buddhists |
0 / 1 |
0% |
| Christians |
6 / 15 |
40% |
| Hindus |
0 / 1 |
0% |
| Muslims |
1 / 1 |
100% |
From this, I would conclude that the Christians-should-marry-young faction is doing well. This is not unexpected, as they have several good arguments. In contrast, the opposed arguments I have seen tend to be spurious or just plain wrong. Incidentally, if anyone does know of some good against arguments, please tell me.
However, if I break the marriage distribution down by strength of religious conviction (for atheists, this means conviction that there is not a god), I get:
| Strong |
7 / 14 |
50% |
| Weak |
1 / 11 |
9% |
Note: This a lot of guesswork in this one
Based on this, It seems like the religion itself is not so important. For the less populous religions (at least on my list), the Muslim (married) was a serious believer, but the Hindu and Buddhist (both unmarried) were not.
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