I understand about Nevada, although your original email did not describe
this, nor disclaim it. But please explain New Mexico to us, if not Wyoming,
Indiana, Idaho, or Florida, which is still 40% above the national average.

Now, I also wonder about two factors: among the presumably less pious, I
assume that there might be less of an impetus to even bother with marriage,
especially is one is not convinced that they have found their soulmate. One
has to weigh the potential tax and insurance advantages against the
financial liabilities (or as someone suggested, when contemplating marriage,
first ask, "am I willing to let this person ruin me financially?").

Second, one of the ministers mentioned the role of premarital counseling.
Not that long ago, I recommended premarital counseling to adult who was
marrying her high school sweetheart, with whom she had lived for a few
years. What was left to address, that they did not already know about each
other? I was able to ask her a question about raising children, to which she
admitted that she had no answer. And I'm far from qualified to be a
counselor of any stripe. I wonder about the frequency of "hit 'em hard"
premarital counseling among the devout. I am aware of some ministers who
require it as a condition of performing the ceremony, but I suspect that
this is not the prevalent attitude, the proverbs about "safety in a
multitude of counselors" notwithstanding.

Finally, the state at the top of the list was the Commonwealth. Good,
liberal state, that prides itself on its Italian and Irish immigrants,
predominantly Roman Catholic. Perhaps that influence is one of many factors
influencing our relatively low divorce rate.

But I suspect that people still get married and divorced for any of several
reasons, for which there is probably no simple root cause.

I wrote:
> The bottom ten are, in reverse order form lowest to higher: Nevada,
> Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Wyoming, Indiana, Alabama, Idaho, New
Mexico,
> and Florida. I recognize Arkansas, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Alabama as
being
> in the South or Southwest, part of the "Bible Belt". Perhaps Wirt will
> address New Mexico's rating for us. But I'm not sure how Nevada, Wyoming,
> Indiana, Idaho, and Florida regard themselves.

And Wirt replied:
> In the list of states with the highest divorce rates, Nevada
> is known in
> scientific circles as an "idiosyncratic outlier", meaning
<snip>
> "The Associated Press computed divorce statistics from data
> supplied by the
> U.S. Census Bureau and the National Center for Health. They
> found that Nevada
> had the highest divorce rate, at 8.5 divorces per 1,000
> people in 1998.
> Nevada has had a reputation as a quickie divorce location for
> decades. They
> showed that the highest divorce rates were found in the Bible Belt.
> "Tennessee, Arkansas, Alabama and Oklahoma round out the Top Five in
> frequency of divorce...the divorce rates in these
> conservative states are
> roughly 50 percent above the national average" of 4.2/1000 people.

Greg Stigers
http://www.cgiusa.com

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