Heretofore Unverified Statistics Have Mislead the American People

The following is an interview of a best-selling author Shaunti Feldhahn who provides genuine statistics on the divorce rate in the United States through her new book,  The Good News About Marriage; the shocking outcome of these statistics reveals that  problems with marriage and the divorce rate are substantially less than is constantly reported by the major media which seems interested only in discouraging the American people by reporting myths concerning the foundation of American society − the American Family.  Fortunately we have a dedicated woman who is not afraid to research one of the most oft falsely reported and critical issues of our time.

Author Debunks Myths About Divorce Rates, Including of Churchgoers

BY ALEX MURASHKO, CHRISTIAN POST REPORTER

May 16, 2014|9:05 am

Many of the most demoralizing beliefs about marriage, especially when it comes to discouraging statistics commonly passed around, are just not true, says social researcher and best-selling author Shaunti Feldhahn.

"A subconscious sense of futility about marriage is everywhere, as everything we hear says marriage is 'in trouble,'" states Feldhahn. "And while some of the bad news is accurate (for example, 41% of children are born out of wedlock), many of the most demoralizing beliefs just aren't true. For example, the notion that half of all marriages end in divorce or that the divorce rate is the same in the church… neither are anywhere close to true."

The Christian Post recently conducted an interview with Feldhahn, whose recently released, The Good News About Marriage, is the result of an 8-year investigative study that she believes reveals the truth about the state of marriage and divorce in today's culture and churches. Below is the interview.

CP: What compelled you to do this study?

Feldhahn: I started learning just how much of our discouraging conventional wisdom about marriage and divorce was wrong – and how much it was killing marriages. In all my own research with individuals and couples for my books like For Women Only I kept seeing that whether or not a couple "made it through" a tough time was directly tied to whether they had a sense of hope or a sense of futility. If someone thought, "We're going to make it," it was a completely different situation than once they started to think, "This is never going to get better." 

So the sense of futility was killing marriages – and yet, I noticed, we have a culture-wide feeling of futility about marriage.   Everyone thinks of marriage as being "in trouble."  Everyone just knows that "fifty percent of marriages have ended in divorce." Everyone just knows that "the rate of divorce is the same in the church as it is outside the church."   Everyone who has ever been divorced just knows that "60 percent of second marriages don't make it."

And yet I started coming across all this data that seemed to completely contradict this conventional wisdom. Like that according to 2009 Census Bureau numbers, 72% of people are still married to their first spouse – and the 28% who aren't, includes people who were married for years until a spouse died!

When I would share some of those numbers with people, the reactions were sometimes dramatic. Standing in front of me, I saw the difference between being defeated and feeling hopeful. People were grasping the good news like a life-preserver! I felt like this study had to be done.

It started pretty casually, but it became a drive for me and Tally Whitehead, my senior researcher, to understand and dig out any good news that was there. And to get enough clarity to publish The Good News About Marriage, it ended up taking eight years!

CP: What was some of the most important good news that you learned?

Feldhahn: The most important big-picture truth: contrary to popular opinion, most marriages are strong and happy for a lifetime. That doesn't mean most marriages are perfect; there are still plenty of legitimate concerns out there. But for our culture as a whole, the marriages that are unhappy, the ones that don't make it, are the exception rather than the rule.

To prove that, we debunk five different discouraging pieces of conventional wisdom about marriage in the book. Let me just mention two here.

First, is the idea that, half of all marriages are ending in divorce. While some high risks groups (like those married as teenagers) may have a 50% divorce rate, we've never come close as an overall average. After looking at dozens of studies, I believe one of the most meaningful statistics is the one I mentioned earlier: 72% of people are still married to their first spouse.

Now, that is only an overall average at one point in time, and the real question is what the numbers are for people who have had many years of chances to get divorced. And that is where I was really astonished. The highest-risk age group today is baby boomers, and many of that group have had thirty years of chances to get divorced.  And among those who have only been married once, even seven in ten baby boomers are still married to their first spouse!  Among those on their second and third marriages, the divorce numbers in that group are higher, but still: overall, this is good news!

Another very important finding was that the rate of divorce is not the same in the church. That is a misunderstanding of Barna Group data – because Barna was not trying to study divorce "in the church." They were studying beliefs, so those who said they held Christian beliefs had the same divorce rate as those who said they didn't. But since Barna wasn't studying actions, the researchers didn't include worship attendance in the analysis.

So I partnered with Barna and we re-ran the numbers: and if the person was in church the prior week, their divorce rate dropped 27% compared to those who weren't! Many studies have found that church attendance drops the divorce rate 25-50% compared to those who don't attend. It also increases happiness in marriage and has several other dramatic life and marriage outcomes that we cover in the book.

CP: When couples and pastors discover the "true state of marriage and divorce" how do they first react and how do they move forward with this information?

Feldhahn: Let me describe the responses of the pastors first since they are on the front lines and are the leaders who most need the hope before they can share it with others. I've privately briefed probably 40 or 50 leading pastors, therapists and ministry leaders over the past year, and after I give them about a 15-minute overview of what I've been finding, there's usually a long pause, and then they say something like this (actual quotes): "I'm staggered;" "This is pretty astounding stuff;" "If this is true, the implications are enormous."

There's an explosive sense of interest and hope. Many of these pastors say something like, "I knew that what we were hearing about the Barna data couldn't be the whole story, because it didn't match what I saw in our network of churches," or "I thought that more people were probably happy in their marriages."

These pastors would describe feeling like they had been, as one put it, "held hostage to bad data I couldn't contradict," and a sense of being liberated to say with confidence what they had always felt had to be true: that doing what the Bible says does matter to your life. That getting yourself in a church community does matter to your marriage.

The responses of couples have been similarly hopeful and explosive, but even more personal. Among the ones that are struggling, there's a sense of life and hope that comes back into their faces. It is like the difference between feeling, "Man, we're struggling, and half of all people can't make it through this," and feeling, "Yeah, we're struggling, but most people get through it so surely we can too."

But even among those who have fine marriages, there's excitement about this. Let me explain a really cool thing I've seen with a lot of congregations.

My favorite speaking format is doing pastoral interviews on Sunday morning at the sermon time, usually when a pastor is doing a sermon series on men, women, sex or relationships and wants me to share things like what women need to know about men, or what makes relationships work best, from the research for For Women Only or The Surprising Secrets of Highly Happy Marriages.

But since I've been telling the pastors about my Good News research the last few years, often the pastor will say "You know, lets end our time together with having you share this as the conclusion." And every single time when I share these encouraging facts, this buzz sweeps the congregation as people start whispering to their neighbor "What did she say?" and the pastor and I can see their faces just light up. Half the time, people start clapping.

It is so tremendous for me to see that reaction among the people there – but even better to see the encouragement it injects into the pastor. These pastors are on the front lines and they need this encouragement.

CP: How can the church learn from this study/book?

Feldhahn: We wrote The Good News About Marriage to be a small, easy read – the first half is the key points, and the second half is the more technical stuff for those who like that sort of thing – so that anyone who cares about marriage can quickly come up to speed on the essentials.

We hope every pastor will learn the five main points – especially the truth about the difference church attendance makes. Then we hope pastors will equip their people to lead the way in bringing this truth and life and encouragement into the places that they live, work and play.

We hope every person in the congregation will be aware enough of these key truths that when Sarah and Abby are having coffee, and Abby cynically asks "why shouldn't I just live with him, when half of marriages are miserable and end in divorce anyway?", Sarah can say, "Well, actually, believe it or not, that is a myth. Most marriages last a lifetime."

The church can lead the way in changing the paradigm about marriage in our culture, from one of discouragement and futility to one of hope! From the current conventional wisdom that says marriage is in trouble, to the conventional wisdom that says that this institution God created… it still works!

On the Web: www.goodnewsmarriage.com 

Interview appears in The Christian Post:   http://www.christianpost.com/news/author-debunks-myths-about-divorce-rates-including-of-churchgoers-119843/

EMP revisited

In 2001 the EMP Commission, established by Congress, reported details of the devastation that can be produced by an EMP attack and made recommendations for protecting our electricity grids to avoid a catastrophy.  To date our Congress has not taken steps to follow these recommendations even though the cost of protecting our infrastructure would be nothing compared to the cost of repairing the damage caused by an EMP (Electromagnetic Pulse), if repair would even be at all possible.

Mr. Frank Gaffney, founder and President of Center of Security policy in Washington D.C., a non profit, non partisan corporation involved in elucidating policy that will protect nations from terrorist attack, explains in the following video the nature of an EMP Attack and the consequent devastation of a country without sufficient protection against such an attack:

Offering to Help

After meeting the new executive director of a Care and Counseling Center in Hawaii whose mission is to help women with their problems of pregnancy, I wrote a letter giving her my background and offering my help and experience:

It was a joy and honor to meet you at the Pregnancy Counseling Banquet Saturday evening. I commend you for your belief that to fight the present culture of legalized murder of an unwanted unborn child, requires not just focusing energies on saving the child; it is vital to focus equally on the problems of women with problem pregnancies that may result in abortion. 

The Supreme Court decision Roe vs Wade in 1973 focused mostly on inventing the right of women in all the 50 states to abort their unwanted child; restrictions on abortion based on the gestation age of the child and reasons of the woman wanting an abortion were made of no use by the passage of a companion decision Doe v Bolton which allowed a woman to have an abortion for any reason of the woman’s health that would be exacerbated by not aborting the child.  Thus abortion for any reason of damage to health became abortion on demand in all 50 states.

Subsequent legislation has tended to only strengthen the abortion right.  Such legislation has focused on the woman and not the child.  However, were all this legislation to be suddenly struck down, our society would be back at square one before Roe vs Wade with the real problems of women unaddressed.

The problem is that the legislation of Roe vs Wade and following legislation did not at all address the real need of women to properly address problems before and after sexual intercourse resulting in pregnancy.  Failures in the home, in the church, in the school, in the various informational facets of society have left many women in a void, bereft of nurturing, love, care, and vital information about life and knowledge of a caring God.

Addressing the problems of women in a way that will essentially eradicate the crime of abortion is clearly a massive undertaking.  Solving the problem of abortion cannot be solved purely legislatively.

This massive undertaking came to my mind only a few years ago at the end of my involvement with Hawaii Right to Life starting in 1984.  Hawaii Right to Life was founded in 1974 with an educational arm and a legislative arm.  In the many following years we found that we had success in preventing the Legislature from passing some very dangerous anti-life bills  At the same time we had no success in passing any of our pro-life bills.  Nor did we have much success in getting pro-life information into the schools.  

Looking back, I believe we put too much emphasis and energy in the legislative area but who knows what would now be, had we not.  Today, legislatively, things are really a mess with the government in control of a single party, the Democrat Party, the Party of abortion.  But I hope, with the rise of many good pro life organizations, along with Aloha Pregnancy Care & Counseling, much can be done to help both women and the unborn.

What is of interest to me right now is to get the members of the churches, not just the pastors or priests, directly involved in fostering concerns for women needing information, love and care.  I don’t know exactly what might be needed but getting good information to church members could go a long way to helping women in need.

I am tired of getting blank stares from priests I have approached to concern them about the unborn.  Maybe I need to approach them about concern for women in need or maybe just give information to individual members.

I am willing to do whatever I can but at 79 my energy level is not what it was even during my 60’s.  I have come to the conclusion that I may not be able to do all I want but I wish to use my time in doing what my Good Lord wants me to do.  If you would like me to meet with you at your office at some time I would be most happy to do so.

Sincerely,

HUMAN NATURE AND WARS

Like it or not, war is an important part of human nature as the primary resolution of fundamental disagreements between nations of men. It is important to consider the history of human beings through all the centuries for thousands of years; never has there been a single century without multiple wars between collections of men who see no other way to accomplish their goals, good or  bad.

During the previous or 20^th century there were major wars that involved essentially two major theaters – the European theater and the Oriental or Asian. World War I involved only the European theater with America’s entry into that war, while at a late date, was nonetheless instrumental in affecting the ultimate outcome. 

World War II involved both the European theater and the Asian theater. The war in the European theater was a direct result of treating the major protagonist, Germany, with hatred and unjust punishments in the treaty at the end of world war I.

Adolf Hitler rose up as the tyrannical leader of the German people whose aim was to seek revenge on those countries who had perpetrated hostility and hatred against the German people in the treaty that ended World War I. The United States made a late entry into the European theater only because of the attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese December 7, 1941. Up to this point England had been the only country trying to contain Hitler in his rampage in the continent of Europe and the Mediterranean area, principally in North Africa.

In the European theater the key leaders were Winston Churchill of England, Franklin Roosevelt of the United States and Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union. In the Asian theater there was essentially one leader of note, Gen. Douglas MacArthur. More Americans understand the workings of the events in the European theater compared to the events of real importance that transpired in the Asian theater. The young people of today in America, as elsewhere, have little knowledge or interest in these and other wars that took place in the latter part of the 20^th century: The Korean War and the Vietnam war.

It is, though, of extreme importance to understand the outcomes of these wars in terms of their impacts after the wars. One of the results of the 2^nd world war is the encroachment by the Soviet Union on the countries of Eastern Europe such as Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Romania, as 1well as the Baltic states Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia. This spread of communism by the Soviet Union resulted in what is called the “Cold War” between America and Europe on the one hand and the Soviet Union on the other. The Cold War involved the threat of ultimate extinction by one side or the other through the use of nuclear weapons. With the demise of the Soviet Union around 1990 many of these subjugated countries found their freedom.

One of the results of World War II was the loss of colonies of the European powers in Asia, India and Africa. Many of these former colonies fell under the sway of communism.  The fight against world communism involved the struggle against North Korea and the Communist Chinese in the Korean War in the early 1950s. and In the long struggle against communism in Vietnam; Americans fought and died in the Vietnam War from about the early 1960s until 1975.

The present century has seen wars in a new theater, that is, the Mediterranean theater where the chief protagonist has been a group of followers of Mohamed who have twisted the writings of the Koran to suit their terroristic aims; we have already seen their capability and determination to conquer the western nations, especially America, in the attack on the twin towers in New York on September 11, 2001, the first year of the 21^st Century. The resulting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have constituted the new theater of war in the Middle East. The names of the leaders on both sides are numerous.

Currently the American government is playing a dangerous game by weakening our potential for fighting wars that will surely come from determined terrorists in the Middle East.  Hopefully future leaders of America will endeavor to educate, in particular, the young to take an interest in the history of the wars of the 20^th and the wars of the 21^st century and their impacts on all our lives and the lives of all men and women the world over. Our future and the future of the world depends upon this.

SARAH DOING SEUSS

SEUSS AT CPAC

SARAH'S BACK AND MAKIN' FUN;
BUT WILL SHE RUN?
RUN, SARAH, RUN!