A new report from the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) finds that regular church attendance is strongly tied to happier, more stable marriages, even as marriage rates and church attendance have both collapsed across the country.
The report calls family and faith among “America’s most reliable antidotes” to social isolation, and argues they remain the best available remedy for a wave of family breakdown driven by no-fault divorce, record-low marriage rates, and fertility rates far below the level needed to sustain the population.
Church attendance has fallen sharply over the past five decades. Regular attendance dropped from 49 percent in 1972 to 32 percent in 2014. Catholic mass attendance fell by more than half over the same period, down to 18 percent today. Among married parents, church attendance dropped from 82 percent to 61 percent, with the steepest decline coming after 2010.
The IFS report traces much of this shift to the sexual and cultural revolutions of the 1960s and 1970s, which it says “loosened the grip of religion and marriage on American life” as elites argued that marriage and faith stood in the way of freedom and happiness.
The Numbers on Marriage and Faith
The data tells a different story. Being married substantially raises the odds of reporting being very happy, and being “happily married” raises those odds by 545 percent, according to the report.
Christian couples who attend church regularly report the highest marital happiness of any group measured: 79 percent of regularly attending Catholics and 74 percent of regularly attending Protestants describe their marriages as happy, compared to 66 percent or lower among secular couples and less devout religious couples.
Churchgoing Christians also divorce less often, with devout Catholic mass attendees showing the lowest divorce rate of any group in the survey.
What Explains the Difference
The report identifies four factors behind the pattern: shared values, belief in the permanence of marriage, prayer, and a perceived sense of fairness between spouses.
A Pew Research Center poll found that only 38 percent of adults consider shared moral and religious values very important when choosing a partner. But the IFS study finds that this alignment is one of the strongest predictors of a strong marriage. Spouses who share values have 6.86 times higher odds of reporting marital stability and 6.85 times higher odds of being happily married than couples who don’t share those values.
The Christian belief that marriage cannot be dissolved also appears to act as a buffer against breakdown. The report states: “And when conflict arises — as it does in every marriage — the belief in marriage as permanent becomes a kind of ballast.” Couples who hold that belief are more willing to sacrifice and push through difficult periods rather than walk away.
Prayer plays a role too. The old saying popularized by Hollywood minister Patrick Peyton — “The family that prays together, stays together” — is now backed by the data in the report.
The study also found that churchgoing married couples report higher sexual satisfaction and more frequent sex than non-religious married couples, countering decades of cultural messaging that sexual fulfillment required stepping outside marriage.
The report’s conclusion is blunt: the promises of the sexual revolution and feminism that freedom from marriage would bring greater personal and sexual fulfillment have not held up. Hook-up culture, the report notes, has instead produced less dating, more social isolation, and a widening mental health crisis.
