Husbands and wives who attend church regularly, pray often and embrace their faith’s classic teachings, including the belief that marriage is a life commitment, have more and better sex than their secular peers, a new report from The Institute for Family Studies has found.
In its report, The Devout Difference: Religion, Marital Quality, and Sex Among Americans, IFS researchers found that while secular couples are showing symptoms of a documented global trend characterized by a significant decline in the frequency of sexual activity among adults over the last few decades known as the "sex recession," churchgoing Christian couples have largely been resilient against it.
“America is now in the grip of a ‘sex recession,’ in which only a minority of adult men and women have sex at least once a week, down from a clear majority in 2000. Strikingly, this recession has largely spared churchgoing husbands and wives,” IFS researchers noted. Citing data from the General Social Survey, researchers noted that in the 1990s, 64% of married Americans ages 20 to 54 had sex at least weekly. Only 54% do today.
When those numbers are broken down by religiosity, the data show regular churchgoers have largely avoided that dip. In the 2000s, some 64% of regular churchgoers who were married had sex at least weekly compared to 61% of non-religious husbands and wives. Today, 62% of regular churchgoing couples in the same age group still have sex at least weekly, while less than half (48%) of secular couples report the same.
Data from an IFS Religion and Family Survey of 3,125 married respondents aged 18 to 54, conducted from Feb. 9 to March 4, also had similar findings. The report defines churchgoers as those who attend services at least two to three times per month, while "nominal" Catholics and Protestants