Cause and Effect Essay - Does Christianity Cause Divorce“Bible Belt Couples Are Being 'Teared Apart' More,” proclaimed the New York Times on May 21 this year: “Divorce rates in many parts of the Bible Belt are about 50% above the national average.” So much for the idea that secularism is responsible for the decline of traditional families, among other oft-lamented social ills. Apparently, in at least some states, the divorce rate correlates with an excess of mercy, not its absence. What do we make of this funny correlation? I doubt that religiosity directly causes divorce, but in some cases it can cause marriage, condemning premarital sex and cohabitation as sinful; and marriage, of course, is the only indisputable cause of divorce. Get married quickly; divorce when you come to your senses. “I had this vision that this is just what people do; Get married, have children, and Christ returns,” an Oklahoma divorcee told the New York Times. She has remarried, but apparently many Oklahomans prefer to live in sin. (Religion may not be the cause of the marriage.) According to the Times, the number of unmarried cohabiting couples in Oklahoma has increased 97 percent in the past decade. It has increased 125 percent in Arkansas and 123 percent in Tennessee same period was 72%. Statistics like these are deeply troubling to God-fearing social conservatives like Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee, who declared a “marital emergency” in his state, and Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating , which began a multimillion-dollar campaign to strengthen marriage by sending publicly funded “marriage ambassadors” to talk shows and public schools and providing premarital education. ... half of the document ... nannies, when the Supreme Court ruled that Mormons could be prosecuted for entering into polygamous marriages. Thus, Judeo-Christian notions of marriage are incorporated into the law while historical Mormon beliefs about marriage are criminalized. As Utah polygamist Tom Green recently learned, laws against multiple spouses may still apply. Green, who boasted five wives and approximately twenty-five to thirty children, was convicted of four counts of bigamy (and one of failure to support). He was not a particularly sympathetic defendant: one of his wives was only fourteen when he married her, and she could not support all the children she had promiscuously fathered. So it's probably not fair to say that he was prosecuted because of his religious beliefs, but he was prosecuted despite them. He is not a particularly virtuous man, but he is religious after all.