The experience of my parents singles' group illustrates this. They met in a liberal Protestant group in Berkeley, California. Once you married you had to leave the group, so the married couples formed their own group that still meets today. Of the thirty plus couples which were involved in the second group for an extended length of time none divorced. Collectively they are now working on their second millennium of successful marriage. Pretty good for a bunch of liberal Protestants from Berkeley, California in the second half of the 20th Century.

My former landlord met his wife in a Catholic singles' group in San Francisco and he reports that they had much the same experience, but since the couples only meet once a decade, rather than once a month, this is much less certain.

Nevertheless, it is not really my point that couples who meet in religious singles' groups never divorce, the point is that even if their record is not perfect it is many times better than the rest of society, and if most people meet their marriage partner in a religious singles group the divorce rate and therefore the poverty rate would be greatly reduced, along with a host of other problems.

I do not want to in any way denigrate the efforts that churches make to help the poor through charitable gifts, but let us not neglect the wonderful grace of the religious singles group because it is so often leads to the wonderful grace of a solid marriage.

I have several other web pages on church singles' groups. That is the index page.

You can leave a message in my Guest book.

Geocities will e-mail me to inform me of your message, only I will be able to read it, so this is like e-mail.