Divorce. Given the emphasis the LDS Church places on marriage, a significant and often-asked question is, What is the civil divorce rate among Latter-day Saints, especially for those with a temple marriage? Unfortunately, the information necessary to provide an exact answer to this question is not available. However, researchers have done their best to produce some type of estimate. For example, in the late 1970s, Albrecht, Bahr, and Goodman (1983) conducted a divorce study of individuals of various religious affiliations who lived in the Intermountain West. These researchers compared divorce rates by varying types of marriage settings (e.g., civil marriage, church marriage, temple marriage, other). Given the high rate of Mormons living in Utah, they included “temple marriage” as a category and assumed that only Mormons would select this response. In the end, they found that 7% of LDS members who had originally had a temple marriage were either now divorced or divorced and remarried. Thirty-five percent of the sample (includes all religious affiliations) who had originally married civilly were either currently divorced or remarried. Among those who were originally married in a church or synagogue, 15% were either divorced or remarried, and for those whose original marriage was classified in the “other” category, 21% had divorced.

Given the differences in these rates, divorce rates of temple marriages were about five times lower than civil marriages, two times lower than church- or synagogue-type marriages, and three times lower than divorce rates of those who married in other settings.

In the 1980s, a study conducted by Heaton and Goodman (1985) compared divorce rates between Latter-day Saints and members of other religious denominations who were white and age 30 and older. They found that Latter-day Saints had the lowest rate of divorce compared to other religious denominations including Catholics, liberal and conservative Protestants, and those with no religious preference. They reported that around 14% of LDS men and 19% of LDS women had been divorced at the time of the study. Twenty percent of Catholic men had divorced, as had 23% of Catholic women. Other religions reported higher percentages than the Catholics, with the highest percentage of divorce found to be among those who claimed no religious preference. Nearly 40% of the men and 45% of the women from this category had divorced.

Heaton and Goodman also looked at the relationship between Church attendance and divorce. They found about 10% of active LDS men were divorced, while 22% of the LDS men who attended church less frequently were divorced. Fifteen percent of active LDS women were divorced as compared to 26% for those who did not go to church as often. Thus, LDS men and women who attended church regularly were about half as likely to be divorced as those who went to church only occasionally and about four times less than men and women nationally.

Finally, Heaton and Goodman showed the proportion of members who had divorced from a temple marriage as compared to a nontemple marriage. Of those who had originally married in the temple, about 5% of the men and 7% of the women had been divorced. Around 28% of non-temple-married men and 33% of non-temple-married women were divorced. Thus, temple marriages were about 5 times less likely to end in divorce than nontemple marriages.

Follow-up research by Heaton, Bahr, and Jacobson (2005) assessed data from the 1990s and suggested that the divorce rate gap between Latter-day Saints and their national peers is narrowing. Specifically, they estimated that the lifetime divorce rate for Latter-day Saints married in the temple may be two-thirds of the national average of divorce, around 30%.

We recently did our own assessment of divorce among Latter-day Saints from data collected between 1999 and 2001. Table 4 shows the marital status by about age 40 among ever- married LDS men and women and national men and women. Returned-missionary men rank lowest in divorce, at 9%. This is in comparison to 29% of non-returned-missionary men and 38% of men nationally. This shows that returned-missionary men are around three times less likely to divorce than non-returned-missionary men and a little over four times less likely than men nationally. Non-returned-missionary LDS men are about three-fourths as likely to divorce as men nationally. As for women, returned missionaries have a divorce rate of 15%, while non-returned missionaries are higher, at 21%, and U.S. women are the highest compared to all other categories, with 48% (45%—whites only) who have been divorced. Thus, returned-missionary women are about three-fourths less likely to divorce than non-returned-missionary women and slightly over three times less likely than women nationally. Marriages for LDS non-returned-missionary women are just over half as likely to end in divorce as their national peers of the same age.

If the above rates represent divorce by age 40, is it possible to calculate a lifetime divorce rate? Many scholars believe that the current lifetime divorce rate in the United States is now around 50%. We recognize that there continues to be an ongoing debate among scholars concerning the accuracy of reported divorce rates. Part of the problem is that there are a number of ways to calculate the rate, and each has its own strengths and weaknesses (Stark, 2004). We use the 50% estimate as a matter of convenience in comparing LDS to national rates. Assuming that the proportion of divorce between LDS members and their non-LDS U.S. peers is similar across the life span, we estimate that the current lifetime divorce rate for returned-missionary men is around 12% and 16% for women. The lifetime rate for non-returned-missionary men is around 38% and around 22% for non-returned-missionary women. These figures include both civil and temple marriages combined.

What, then, would be the divorce rate of temple marriages only? We, like previous researchers, must also estimate this figure. First of all, we know that returned missionaries represent a relatively active subgroup in the Church and, because almost all of them eventually attain a temple marriage (see Table 3), we believe that their lifetime divorce rate, which we reported earlier as 12% for the men and 16% for the women, would represent the lifetime divorce rate for temple marriages among typically active Latter-day Saints. Thus, our estimation of the lifetime divorce rate for those with temple marriages is somewhere in the teens and probably no higher than 20%.