Claim about Atheists having lower divorce rates than Christians continued

Claim:

"In the United States, atheists have lower divorce rates than any of the christian sects."

Answer:

I read another article called "Reciprocal Effects of Religiosity, Cohabitation, and Marriage" which points to the fact religious people are more likely to marry. The article is written by Thornton, Axinn and Hill. They write:

"Low levels of religious importance and participation are related to high rates of cohabitation and low rates of marriage in that less religious young people are much more likely than their religious peers to cohabit than to marry. People without religious affiliations are also opt more for cohabitation and less for marriage than do people who identify with a religious group."

In this light it would not be surprising if the religious would divorce more in the sense that:

number of divorces of religious people/number of religious people > number of divorces of non-religious people/number of non-religious people.

But this is wrong way of looking at this question. The real question is whether the unions of religious people are more stable than the unions of non-religious people. In other words, out of those, religious and non-religious, WHO MARRY, how many divorce. So, the meaningful comparison would between:

number of divorces of religious people/number of religious people WHO MARRY

AND

number of divorces of non-religious people/number of non-religious people WHO MARRY