God’s design works

For decades, cultural elites have held—and worked overtime to convince the rest of us—that marriage and serious Christian faith are both detrimental to human thriving and happiness. They have long claimed the wise person should avoid both. Sadly, too many have taken their advice as overall church attendance and marriage rates have declined over the last half century.

But a new report, The Devout Difference: Religion, Marital Quality, and Sex Among Americans, released by the excellent scholars at the Institute for Family Studies (IFS), documents how mistaken this advice is. It concludes that faithful Christians have the happiest marriages. They focus specifically on how committed faith enhances important marital qualities like life happiness as well as sexual and relational satisfaction. Their report uniquely examines Protestant and Catholic populations, contrasting regular, nominal, and non-attending individuals.

The report also tracks declines in church attendance and marriage rates. According to the General Social Survey, the gold standard in sociological data, regular church attendance—showing up to services several times a month or more—declined from 49% in 1972 to 32% in 2024. (N new data shows the decline in Christian identity has leveled off in the last few years.) Meanwhile, the U.S. marriage rates sank by more than 60% since the early 1970s.

However, the faithful are substantially more likely to be married, compared to their unbelieving peers. In the 1970s, there was a ten percentage-point gap between the number of faithfully attending married adults and their non-attending secular peers. Today, that divide has nearly doubled to where 60% of regular church-going adults are married (ages 20-54), compared to only 42% of non-believers.

Faithfully attending Protestants and Catholics are also significantly more likely to be parents than their seldom and never-attending neighbors. Surprisingly, Protestants outpace Catholics here with 74% who attend church at least twice per month or more having children, compared to 71% of Catholics. Only 49% of Nones have children. Nominally attending Catholics and Protestants are less likely than regular attenders, at 66% for Protestants and 63% for Catholics.

And divorce rates are markedly different between regularly attending Christians and their seldom- or non-attending peers. George Barna infamously reported in 2004 that divorce rates between born-agains and non-believers were “identical,” and that has unfortunately become an oft-cited truism. But updated data show that claim to be untrue. This new IFS report further proves the fiction, explaining, “Churchgoing Catholics and Protestants marry more, have more children, and divorce less than their secular peers.” Specifically, “studies suggest that regular churchgoers are between 30% and 50% less likely to divorce, compared to non-religious Americans, net of controls for socioeconomic factors.”

Let’s now look at how marriage boosts important well-being measures, starting with happiness. We are often informed by elites that marriage is confining, a ball and chain keeping people down, especially for women. But persuasive data proves this untrue. IFS’s 2025 Women’s Well-being Survey found, according The Atlantic, that “Married mothers are actually happier than unmarried women and married women without children.” The same is true for married fathers. And data shows a causal relationship, rather than selection effect of generally happier people being more marriageable.

This new IFS data reports that faithful religiosity boosts the higher happiness of marrieds.

These scholars tell us, “This churchgoing advantage is evident for both Catholics and Protestants” adding, “In fact, Catholic (79%) and Protestant (74%) churchgoers are more likely than every other group to be happily married, including religious ‘Nones’ (66%)—a pattern that holds even after accounting for education, race, age, and sex.” Nominal attendees in both denominations experience markedly less marital happiness, more on par with unbelievers.

Regular church-attending Catholics and Protestants are also more likely to indicate they see their marriage as stable. Regular prayer makes a marked difference as well. “More broadly, Americans who pray daily have 1.48 times higher odds of reporting a stable marriage and 1.50 times higher odds of reporting a happy one, compared to peers who pray infrequently or not at all.” And couples who are aligned in their faith—both husband and wife sharing the same faith belief and practice—have remarkably high levels of marital happiness and a sense of stability. Regardless of socio-economic status, IFS explains that “spouses with shared values have 6.86 times higher odds of perceived marital stability and 6.85 times higher odds of being happily married than their non-aligned peers.”

Two further findings may seem counterintuitive: First, happy secure marriages where couples often pray together have long been shown to result in greater sexual satisfaction for both husband and wife, regardless of income, education and race. A second point affirms that America, especially among younger adults, is in a sex recession. Yet the IFS scholars find that, “strikingly, this recession has largely spared churchgoing husbands and wives.”

The General Social Survey tells us that while married adults having at least weekly sex has declined substantially among rare or never attending married couples (from 64% in the 1990s to just 48% in 2024), it has remained largely stable for frequent church attendees, from 64% to 62% over the same period. Of course, frequency is related to sexual satisfaction. Regular church going husbands and wives are most likely to report sexual satisfaction, with 50% of husbands and 49% of wives reporting this, compared to 45% and 38% of their non-attending peers reporting this. By denomination, 55% of regular attending Catholics and 45% of consistently attending Protestants rate their marital sex lives as either “excellent” or “very good.” Only 40% of Nones, 45% of nominal Catholics, and 35% of nominal Protestants report high levels of sexual satisfaction.

IFS’s new report contends, “The cultural trope of the sexually prudish, frustrated religious American does not fit the data.”

So, elite wisdom gets it wrong again. Genuine Christian faith practiced seriously and consistently is related to greater levels of marriage, relational satisfaction, overall life happiness, marital sexual frequency, and satisfaction. Yes, God’s design for humanity works.