Interracial Marriages in US at All-Time High, Study Shows

By Alex Murashko, CP Contributor Thursday, February 16, 2012

Interracial couples make up every 1 in 12 marriages in the U.S., marking a new record high, according to a Pew Research Center study released Thursday.

The report showed that about 15 percent of all newlyweds in 2010 were between spouses of a different race or ethnicity, more than twice the percentage in 1980.

The growing trend is being driven by Asians and Latinos, according to the statistics. Asian Americans are the most likely (27.7 percent) to enter a mixed-race marriage, followed by Hispanics at 25.7 percent, blacks at 17.1 percent and whites at 9.4 percent.

Get Our Latest News for FREE

Subscribe to get daily/weekly email with the top stories (plus special offers!) from The Christian Post. Be the first to know.

Subscribe

"The rise in interracial marriage indicates that race relations have improved over the past quarter century," said Daniel Lichter, a sociology professor at Cornell University, as reported by Fox News Latino.

"Mixed-race children have blurred America's color line. They often interact with others on either side of the racial divide and frequently serve as brokers between friends and family members of different racial backgrounds," he said. "But America still has a long way to go."

Church leaders such as Derwin L. Gray, the founding and lead pastor of Transformation Church located in Fort Mill, S.C., have also felt that churches in the U.S. need to improve race relations.

Gray told The Christian Post late last year that his conviction to see churches become more ethnically diverse comes straight from the Bible.

Transformation Church includes about a 60 percent majority of the race (Caucasian) reflected in the local population. The remaining 40 percent reflects a mixture of other ethnic groups. On average, U.S. churches have an 80-20 split between majority and minority ethnic groups.

"I'm very passionate about the Gospel, and the Lord Jesus, and one of my core convictions is that the result of [applying] the Gospel in the local church whenever possible is that it should reflect the ethnic diversity in which it finds itself," Gray said.

The Pew Research Center study also showed that 43 percent of Americans say that more interracial marriages are a benefit to society. Of those polled by the research group, more than a third say a member of their family or a relative is married to someone of a different race.

Geographic statistics from the study reveal that mixed race marriages are more common in the West. About 20 percent of the newlyweds in Western states married someone of a different race or ethnicity between 2008 and 2010, compared with 14 percent in the South and 13 percent in the Northeast.

Pew compiled data for the report from the U.S. Census Bureau's American Community Survey for 2008 to 2010 and through a telephone poll.