If your parents are divorced there is less chance that you will be religious. That is the finding of a new poll from the Public Religion Research Institute. In other words, a high divorce rate is driving down religious belief.

The US poll (which deals with drivers of irreligion generally) finds that if your parents divorced when you were a child there is a 35pc chance you will declare yourself to be ‘non-religious’ versus 23pc if your parents did not divorce when you were a child. That is a 50pc difference.

Note that saying you have no religion is more drastic than not attending religious services. Many people who don’t attend religious services regularly, nonetheless still identity with a religion. Saying you have no religion indicates a greater degree of alienation.

Why would those whose parents divorced when they were young be more likely to be alienated from religion than those whose parents did not divorce?

One reason could be that their experience of their parents’ divorce has left them disillusioned and this sense of disillusion has spread to religion. Conversely, those whose parents did not divorce are not so disillusioned and therefore are less disillusioned about life in general, including about religion.

However, in a way there is sometime paradoxical about extending your sense of disillusionment about your parents’ divorce to religion. One of the big factors driving up marital breakdown rates is a hyper-individualism that eschews life-long commitment and self-sacrifice if these things get in the way of your own happiness.

Religion, on the other hand, strongly emphasises life-long commitments (fidelity) and self-sacrifice for the sake of others. This is one reason why divorce rates among strongly religious people tend to be lower than among the non-religious.

So if those who went through the divorce of their parents thought about it perhaps they would come to see that being religious lessens the chances of other people going through the same sad experience as they did. Unfortunately, most people don’t make this connection. The result is that divorce makes people less religious, and when there is a lot of divorce – as there is in many Western countries – religiosity starts to nose-dive. This is a true vicious circle.