The Disease

I wonder how much this study cost?

McDermott and her colleagues found that study participants were 75% more likely to become divorced if a friend is divorced and 33% more likely to end their marriage if a friend of a friend is divorced.

So divorce is contagious…and you can catch the divorce bug from your friends—even from a friend of a friend (1)?

This article goes on to say the following:

Sociologists call the phenomenon “social contagion”—the spread of information, attitudes and behaviors through friends, families and other social networks (1).

So I bet I could have helped them save a lot of money and time! You can find the following text free on-line. The following is one of the most respected resources ever published. In fact people will freely give you the book that contains the following quote:

It is reported commonly that there is fornication among you, and such fornication as is not so much as named among the Gentiles, that one should have his father's wife. And ye are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he that hath done this deed might be taken away from among you. For I verily, as absent in body, but present in spirit, have judged already, as though I were present, concerning him that hath so done this deed, In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when ye are gathered together, and my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, To deliver such an one unto Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that the spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus. Your glorying is not good. Know ye not that a little leaven leaveneth the whole lump? Purge out therefore the old leaven, that ye may be a new lump, as ye are unleavened. For even Christ our passover is sacrificed for us: Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, neither with the leaven of malice and wickedness; but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. I wrote unto you in an epistle not to company with fornicators: Yet not altogether with the fornicators of this world, or with the covetous, or extortioners, or with idolaters; for then must ye needs go out of the world (2; bold mine).

Yes, when sin becomes the norm and the "in thing", others follow suit.



(1) http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/10/21/is-divorce-contagious/
(2) 1 Corinthians 5:1-10