There's an interesting report that the Institute for Family Studies released just the other day. Glenn Beck mentioned this on this morning’s program. I happened to overhear it while driving home this morning. With only a small memory of all this, I dug in once I got to my man cave and found this report.
The title is The Devout Difference: Religion, Marital Quality, and Sex Among Americans, published by the Institute for Family Studies with FOCUS (the Catholic campus ministry). The authors are Brad Wilcox, Grant Bailey, Richard Dell'Isola, and Jane Lankes Smith. Some of the points they make in the report:
Frequency: In the 2026 IFS Religion and Family Survey, 69% of churchgoing Catholics and 60% of churchgoing Protestants report sex at least weekly. Nominal Catholics come in at 60%, nominal Protestants at 52%, and the nonreligious ("Nones") at 47%. After controlling for education, race, and age, churchgoers have 1.49 times higher odds of weekly sex.
Satisfaction: 55% of churchgoing Catholics and 45% of churchgoing Protestants rate their sex life "excellent" or "very good," against 45% of nominal Catholics, 35% of nominal Protestants, and 40% of Nones. Controlled odds of satisfaction are 1.42 times higher for churchgoers.
The "sex recession": In the 1990s, 64% of married people ages 20-54 had sex weekly, per the General Social Survey. Now it's 48% of secular couples versus 62% of religious ones, which is the report's headline claim that the faithful have avoided the recession.
Marital happiness: Churchgoing husbands (78%) and wives (74%) are more likely to be happy in their marriages than non-churchgoing husbands (66%) and wives (63%).
Marriage rates: 60% of religious adults ages 20-54 are married, compared to 42% of secular adults.
Prayer: Believers who pray daily have 1.29 times higher odds of sexual satisfaction, and the authors suggest shared prayer helps make family stress more manageable.
Now, in the report, "churchgoing" is defined as attending services at least two to three times a month.
There are two points that need making here before the naysayers get started on me: Who published it? IFS is a pro-marriage think tank, and this report was co-produced with a Catholic ministry. That doesn't invalidate the numbers, and they line up with earlier research (a 2020 Wheatley Institution study and a Stephen Cranney paper in Review of Religious Research found similar patterns),
The predictable pushback, from the predictable sources: The Atlantic ran a piece on it, and a Substack critic (Andra Watkins) is already accusing the coverage of blending the IFS survey with General Social Survey data in a way that lets readers conflate the two. Long-time readers will know quite well what I think of The Atlantic, so I won’t bother going further on that point.
As an interesting side note, the report's own GSS numbers show that the gap is mostly the secular side falling, not the churchgoing side rising. In the 2000s, 64% of married churchgoers had weekly sex versus 61% of the non-religious. Today it's 62% versus 48%. Churchgoers are essentially flat (64% to 62%), while satisfaction among secular couples dropped 13 points.
The conclusion to draw from that seems to be that the more secular among us are increasingly less satisfied in these areas since the dawn of the sexual revolution, what, 50 years or so ago, than are those who have chosen, shall we say, the more traditional path.
All this creates a rather large problem for the “Sexual Freedom” culture that spent decades selling us sexual "liberation" as the road to satisfaction. The people who followed the old rule book of marry young, stay married, and show up on Sunday turn out to be the ones still enjoying themselves, by an increasingly wider margin.
That's an awkward result for the folks who called it “repression." Not that I have any illusion that this is going to change their minds.
