Tag Archives: Divorce

News

New study finds that Christians who regularly attend church divorce less

Leave a comment

Note: This post is to contrast with Richard Dawkins’ atheist view of marriage posted earlier today.

From Citizen Link. (H/T Andrew)

Excerpt:

It’s a number that is trumpeted from the rooftops — and the pulpit: Half of marriages among Christians and non-Christians alike end in divorce.

But the reality is that Christians who attend church regularly get divorced at a much lower rate.

Professor Bradley Wright, a sociologist at the University of Connecticut, found that among people who identify as Christians but rarely attend church, 60 percent have been divorced. Of those who attend church regularly, 38 percent have been divorced.

W. Bradford Wilcox, a leading sociologist at the University of Virginia and director of the National Marriage Project, found a nearly identical spread between “active conservative Protestants” who regularly attend church and people with no religious affiliation.

Professor Scott Stanley from the University of Denver, who is working on the Oklahoma Marriage Initiative, said couples with a vibrant religious faith have more and higher levels of the qualities that marriages need to avoid divorce.

“Whether young or old, male or female, low-income or not, those who said that they were more religious reported higher average levels of commitment to their partners, higher levels of marital satisfaction, less thinking and talking about divorce and lower levels of negative interaction,” he said. “These patterns held true when controlling for such important variables as income, education and age at first marriage.”

I think this is another good example of means-end reasoning in marriage. I often criticize women for choosing the wrong men to marry because they don’t define typical marriage scenarios and then select men who have prepared for those scenarios. Going to church is an antidote for the moral relativism that ails us, and it transports us outside of our hedonism to a place where we can think about bigger and better things. Women need to choose men who have a habit of attending church. Basically, young people need to study research to find out what works (chastity, pre-marital counseling, church attendance, etc.) and then demand that prospective mates demonstrate those skills – if they expect the marriage to last.

I say this as someone who struggles enormously with the feminized church, but you can’t argue with the data. I personally think that church attendance is less important than a good knowledge of philosophical theology and apologetics, and the habit of debating about those things. (Especially science apologetics) I’ve been to my friend Andrew’s church, and if I lived near him, I would attend regularly. They have excellent apologetics events, world-reknown apologetics speakers and classes on apologetics. They have shown William Lane Craig debates, taught Greg Koukl and Lee Strobel books, and they even did “The Truth Project”, which features Stephen C. Meyer. They actually believe what they claim to believe, and they have actually studied why they ought to believe it. I would attend a church like that regularly.

Related posts

News

How do prostitutes stay in business in an era of hook-up sex?

39 Comments

WARNING: This is one of those posts that feminists and egalitarians should just not read. Stay away from this post, it will offend you. Also, if you read it, then know that when I talk about “women”, it is a shorthand way of saying “women who accept the tenets of third-wave gender feminism”. I don’t mean all women, I mean third-wave gender feminists. If you are a married woman, or if you are a chaste single woman who is prepared to care for and support her future husband, then I don’t mean you.

From Stuart Schneiderman, a reversal of expectations.

The sexual revolution pushed by feminists encouraged women to abandon traditional female goals (marriage and children) and traditional men (provider, protector, moral and spiritual leader) and to instead prefer anonymous hook-up sex fueled by binge-drinking – so that they can pursue careers.

He writes:

Here’s a question for the behavioral economists: How do prostitutes stay in business?

With the sexual revolution and the hookup culture and young women making love like porn stars, how can a hooker make a living?

If you are charging money for something that people can get for free, eventually it will impact your business.

In the old days nice girls didn’t. Without specifying what nice girls wouldn’t do, men who wanted “it” sought out prostitutes.

Nowadays, there is precious little that nice girls don’t do. Thanks to a certain social movement nice girls are liberated. They will do just about anything, and will refuse to allow a man to pay for them.

Many of them won’t even want to see him in the morning.

Free love has come to mean giving it away for free. No one knows how prevalent the practice is, but nice girls are marrying later and are avoiding encumbering alliances. If we assume that they are sexually active during their twenties, then clearly they have crowded the market in non-committal sex.

Young women who are out making their way in the world today will avoid relationships, but they will happily engage in all kinds of sexual gymnastics… They do not want to be tied down, just yet. (At least not in the metaphorical sense.) No man’s man’s emotional demands will get in the way of their career advancement.

[…]The marketplace being what it is, prostitutes have now adapted. They continue to offer something that nice girls no longer offer, but it isn’t kinky sex. It is emotional attachment: love, romance and a maybe even a relationship, with a little sex on the side.

Nowadays it’s called the girlfriend experience. It’s the ultimate in sex work, considerably more difficult and better paid than common fellatio.

Strange as it seems, if you are a young man today you often have to pay a woman to act like she’s your girlfriend.

Even the term “escort” which is commonly taken to be a euphemism for prostitute, has traditionally referred to a woman who would accompany a man to a social or cultural event. She was a stand-in girlfriend.

In the old days prostitutes used to know how to do things that nice girls had never even heard of. Today, prostitutes know how to do things that nice girls do not know how to do: that is to conduct relationships.

Young women today are proficient at being sex kittens. Many of them become expert in the art of dating. Fewer know how to conduct a relationship with a man.

I grew up with a non-Christian mother who was very distant and focused on her career, wealth and health. So, I always expected a lot more from women in terms of affection, attention and approval. I knew perfectly well that what I wanted in a woman was someone to be involved with my education, career and hobbies, and most important of all, with my Christian faith. That is what I missed growing up as a visible minority in a predominantly white city. That’s probably one of several reasons why I am chaste. Sex is not the primary thing that I am looking for from a woman. Instead, I want to be the traditional man who is needed as a provider, protector and moral/spiritual leader, and who gets affection, attention and approval for fulfilling those roles (and only those roles).

There were a lot of times when I was growing up when it would have been easy for me, having hit six figures of net worth at age 26, to focus on getting sex in the quickest way possible. All I would have had to do was to stop being an open and authentic Christian. If I had stopped talking about objective morality and exclusive theological claims, and just made no demands on any women to grow into the roles of wife and mother, it would have been easy. But that would not scratch the itch that I have. I get a lot of joy from seeing a woman learn about my plan and my goals. I enjoy providing her with books, debates and lectures to learn about the things that I care about. I enjoy protecting her from lies and labor by building up her knowledge and character and performing acts of service for her. I enjoy leading her – through study and persuasion – to grow in her understanding of moral, theological and apologetic issues. And I enjoy when a woman makes an effort to be a supportive helper and a companion. Nothing is better than seeing a woman accept your goals as her own, preparing to achieve those goals and then achieving them. I would rather be a leader – that’s what men really want.

Women today use sex as a way of pacifying men who want them to grow into the roles of wife and mother. They want to focus on their careers, on playing the field and on having a good time. Marriage is something they fall back on much later, when they are in their 30s. In order to get marriage-minded men to pay attention to them during their 20s without having to commit, women offer men sex. Men take the sex, and they stop trying to perform the traditional male roles, especially the role of being the moral and spiritual leader. And it’s a very easy thing to see. Just take a typical woman and ask her to read “The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands” and “Stupid Things Parents Do To Mess Up Their Kids“, or similar books. They won’t do it, because they have been taught by third-wave feminism to be selfish and to avoid caring about others in relationships. But you can have all the recreational sex with them that you want (especially after they get drunk, so that they don’t feel responsible) as long as you are good-looking and fun. They have been told that they must always be having a good time, and to not prepare to care for men or children. They think that they can live happily ever after by pursuing their own happiness at every moment.

Everyone complains that men are no longer interested in marriage, but the truth is that there are very few marriage-capable women left to marry. Most women today are just not ready for marriage, because they are often neither chaste nor supportive. Men and women have to be chaste, because it is a guarantee that you offer to your spouse that you can be faithful. So, marriage-minded men are being forced to choose between selfish, promiscuous feminists and prostitutes. That’s no choice at all. And that’s why men who start out with noble aims of life-long married love and self-sacrificial commitment quickly learn to settle for recreational sex from a series of temporary partners – and sometimes very temporary partners in the case of hook-ups on college campuses.  Marriage is just not there for us to achieve anymore, because most women haven’t made the right decisions that will allow them to be supportive and faithful to their husbands. They aren’t ready to step into the roles of wife and mother.

News

China takes children from their families to train as athletes

3 Comments

From the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

For during recent years its swimmers and coaches have been caught cheating so many times it is difficult to keep count – and it has modelled its draconian training system on precisely that which produced Schneider and other turbo-charged East Germans before the Iron Curtain fell.

It began in the Eighties when, determined to end the nation’s perennial humiliation at major athletics and swimming championships, China’s Communist regime decreed that a generation of future champions must be harvested and honed.

To that end, school teachers were ordered to scrutinise their pupils for signs of natural sporting ability and report any child with obvious potential to regional coaches who would install them in one of 3,000 new state training camps.

According to her mother, Qing Dingyi, as quoted by the Chinese state media, little Ye ‘expressed a wish to become a swimmer at the tender age of seven’.

In truth, she was picked out because she had an unusually masculine physique with extremely large hands and long limbs: attributes at first thought best suited to a career in track and field.

After being whisked away from her modest two-bedroom apartment, in Hangzhou, a city of 6.2 million, and installed into the Chen Jingluin sports school, however, it was decided she would be best suited to swimming, and by 11 she had won her first major junior championship.

Her mother insists she and her husband, a manual worker, had always impressed on her that ‘results are not important, but you should always enjoy the taking part’. One doubts she dares voice this opinion in the presence of her daughter’s coaches.

In swimming, as in most other Olympic sports, they enforce a regime so relentlessly harsh that it has been compared, by those few Western observers who have managed to penetrate the obsessive secrecy with which it is guarded, to that in some 19th-century prisons.

Indeed, after being shown how China’s child gymnasts are trained some years ago, in his capacity as an Olympic observer, Britain’s Olympic gold-winning oarsman Sir Matthew Pinsent – a man who knows a thing or two about pushing the human body to its limits – pronounced it a ‘pretty disturbing experience’.

Children who our own sports authorities would deem far too young even to countenance focusing seriously on one sport, let alone be taken away from their parents and billeted in these boot-camps, had been driven so hard that they wept, and one claimed to have been beaten by his coach.

The International Olympic Committee promised then to investigate his claims but seven years on there is no evidence that anything has remotely changed.

Only last January harrowing photographs were posted on the internet showing Chinese children crying in pain as they were put to work.

In case they had forgotten why they were there, a large sign on the wall reminded them. ‘GOLD’ it said simply.

What a tragedy. This is why I boycott the Olympics. To me there is nothing more important than having everything child welcomed into the world by his or her biological parents, and then having a stable loving environment to grow up in. I reject both the selfishness of adults and the fascist ideologies of socialist states. There is nothing more important to children than their parents. Children are more important than anti-family ideologies like feminism and socialism.

I recommend clicking through and reading the full article, and look at the pictures, too. This is what happens when the state takes precedence over individuals and families. We need to make sure that secularism and socialism do not dominate here, like they do in China.