There has been a lot of news recently about the very old news that red states have less divorce than blue states for a variety of likely reasons (although our classic picture of a nation evenly divided between red and blue dates to 2000 and 2004 and the reality changed a lot in the last two elections.) It looks like "Findings on Red and Blue Divorce Are Not Exactly Black and White", by Charles E. Stokes, criticizes not so much the actual findings in the study by Jennifer Glass, "Red States, Blue States, and Divorce: Understanding the Impact of Conservative Protestantism on Regional Variation in Divorce Rates", but rather, the interpretations and connections that are attempted partly in the study, and more so in the study's press release and press accounts of it, regarding actual causation between evangelical Protestantism and divorce. Looking at the press release by the Council on Contemporary Families, its speculations about causation do sound like a pretty far stretch. Mostly it has to do with how evangelicals might affect local public policy and thus keep the locals uneducated, barefoot and pregnant. I think that is increasingly outdated, and probably never was that accurate in the first place.
Although I have always thought, from my work with divorcing families, that there is something about the culture and personal attitudes of certain kinds of Christianity that spills over to people who aren't in the same churches but share the same culture and discourse, and contributes to divorce and other unrealistic, unhelpful ways of dealing with personal situations. If I could pin that on anything specific, it would be the belief in being personally sanctified by one's choice of belief, identity, and religious experiences, and not by the extremely hard work of living out God's love, integrity and peacemaking, with our fellow humans, especially those closest to us. I see this carrying over to merely nominal Christians and the population in general, both white and black. On the other hand the same churches also instill many good habits and beliefs, but those may not move through the larger culture in the same way. And it is useful to remember the numerical scales of the differences we are talking about, and not get the most excited over the smallest effects that can be observed. Apparently being unchurched has a much stronger correlation with divorce than being an evangelical.
(Via Glenn Stanton, "Divorce Among Conservative Protestants: What’s the Story?")