Are you more likely to be divorced if you live in the Bible Belt than in the hotbed of gay marriage? According to the statistics, the answer is a resounding “yes.”  

William V. D’Antonio, a professor emeritus from the University of Connecticut currently stationed at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., as a visiting research professor, reports in The Boston Globe:

The Associated Press, using data supplied by the US Census Bureau, found that the highest divorce rates are to be found in the Bible Belt. The AP report stated that “the divorce rates in these conservative states are roughly 50 percent above the national average of 4.2 per thousand people.” The 10 Southern states with some of the highest divorce rates were Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, and Texas. By comparison nine states in the Northeast were among those with the lowest divorce rates: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont.

As Mr. D’Antonio acknowledges, it is not merely ideological hypocrisy that contributes to the high divorce rate in the states that tout their “family values;” concrete factors, such as poverty, early marriage, and the comparatively low number of Catholics, all encourage higher divorce rates.

Mr. D’Antonio concludes: “For all the Bible Belt talk about family values, it is the people from Kerry’s home state, along with their neighbors in the Northeast corridor, who live these values.”  

It is, however, problematic to aggressively state, as Mr. D’Antonio does, that the Bible Belt is rife with moral hypocrisy. It is true that the inhabitants of the Bible Belt have social practices that are inconsistent with their alleged family values, but it seems unproductive to demand that people fit into a neat dichotomy of red and blue, liberal and conservative. Since it is a fact that individuals vote in ways that contradict their social behavior, then we may benefit from taking a more nuanced and more honest view of political alliances. An approach that would better accommodate what may be different shades of red and shades of blue would more accurately measure the political pulse of America.  

At the very least, America would benefit from interrogating what, indeed, is meant by the term “family values.” Do the values include stability of relationships with long-term couples and family units? And, if so, isn’t it time we refashioned our image of what appears to be a now bankrupt term?  

Mimi Hanaoka