The numbers on this graph reflect percentages of the total number of marriage licenses issued in El Paso County since 2005. Thus, you can see that marriage licenses for religious ceremonies accounted for 48 percent of the total in 2005 and only 36 percent of the total so far this year. Similarly, civil ceremonies conducted by a judge have dropped off gradually during the same time. The "self-solemnizing" variety, in which husband and wife merely fill out paperwork after showing their I.D.s, has grown steadily and pretty dramatically since 2005. So far this year in the county, almost half of the marriage licenses are the self-solemnizing kind.

This is hardly just a local phenomenon.  In  Scotland, two-thirds of all marriages are performed civilly now, and religious ceremonies are decidedly a minority of the total.What does all this mean? It's debatable. It doesn't necessarily mean we're less religioius; only that organized religions have less to do with weddings than they once did. In El Paso County, the number of self-solemnizing marriages has increased dramatically in the last two years, and that could be related to the poor economy. Fewer people can afford big ceremonies. That doesn't mean they are not religious. We must be careful about what we read into the numbers.

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.