Looking for happiness?

The main selling point of living for yourself has always been that it will make you happy. This is the promise of the secular, hedonistic lifestyle: Throw off commitment and restraint and pursue maximum freedom and pleasure.

Decades of pop songs, TV shows, and movies have preached this message. Social media now mainlines it into the veins of millions of young people via their smartphones, where “influencers” seem perpetually to be on vacation, toning already flawless bodies, unencumbered by family or faith, cooing maxims about self-actualization. Many of them specifically denounce marriage and Christian sexual ethics as a losing bet, encouraging men to gauge their worth by zeros in their paycheck and notches on their bedposts, while women are urged to place their careers and individual dreams above permanent attachments, patriarchal religions, or (the horrors!) children.

Millions have taken the bait. A quarter of Americans over age 40—the highest percentage ever recorded—have never married, according to Pew Research. As Generation Z ages, the share of unmarried Americans could climb to as high as a third of the population. We’re also becoming less religious as a people. Zoomers are the least likely to identify as “Christian” of any cohort in American history and tend to value “time for themselves” over having children. The majority say they’re at least “willing to consider” nonmonogamy.

By now, we ought to be some of the happiest, freest, most self-actualized people in history, right? It turns out we’re quite the opposite. A Gallup poll last year found that only 41 percent of those between age 18 and 26 describe themselves as “thriving” compared with 60 percent of millennials at the same age, with 1 in 3 reporting symptoms of depression or anxiety. And contrary to the blandishments of everything from Playboy and Sex and the City to Andrew Tate and hookup apps, liberated young Americans are not even managing to have much sex. A UCLA Center for Health and Policy Research study found that 20-somethings today are more likely to report being celibate over the past year than their parents were at the same age.

There’s a counterintuitive and underappreciated truth, here: Pursuing pleasure and self-gratification above all else is truly one of the surest roads to a general lack of pleasure or gratification.

Contrast these empty promises of secular hedonism with emerging research on the lives of devotedly religious people who marry. University of Virginia sociologist Brad Wilcox highlights one finding from the 2022 “State of Our Unions” survey that flips cultural common knowledge on its head: Married, religious people have more and better sex. A clear majority (more than 65 percent) of churchgoing married couples have sex at least once a week, compared with less than 45 percent of nonreligious married couples. And unmarried people have even less sex on average. Contrary to generations of jokes on sitcoms and in standup routines, God-centered marriage isn’t where intimacy goes to die.

Lest someone suggest that churchgoing married couples are just acting out of obligation, these husbands and wives told social scientists otherwise. In his recent book, Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization, Wilcox reports that 73 percent of wives who regularly attend worship services with their husbands are “very happy” with their sex lives, compared with 43 percent of nonreligious wives. And fully 80 percent of women who regularly go to church with their husbands are “very happy” with their marriages, compared with 66 percent who never attend.

Traditional sexual morals also boost long-term happiness and stability in marriage. Writing for the Institute for Family Studies, Jason Carroll and Brian Willoughby survey past and present data on the relationship between “sexual experience” and marital success, and they report a consistent pattern: The fewer sexual partners you have before your wedding, the happier and less divorce-prone your marriage is likely to be. It’ll also probably be more fulfilling. Those who have only had sex with their spouse report the highest overall levels of relationship and sexual satisfaction.

Taken together, these findings paint a picture that’s precisely the opposite of what secular pleasure-seekers in the media and cultural heights would have us believe. The good life is not the result of throwing off moral restraint, commitment, or belief, but it is the very thing that results when we voluntarily submit ourselves to these ideals. Happiness comes not to those who single-mindedly chase their appetites but to those who master their appetites in the service of higher allegiances. And even pleasure turns out to be a flower that blooms most reliably not in the wilds of heedless lust or self-worship but in the cultivated gardens of tradition and religion.

Christianity is often criticized as a killjoy religion for demanding people sacrifice personal happiness in pursuit of holiness. In reality, its rules and constraints aimed at holiness are one of the surest ways to achieve earthly happiness as a side benefit.

And I do mean side benefit. You shouldn’t go to church or get married simply because statistics say it will make you happy. But surveying the data on marriage and faith, it’s clear that those who pursue intrinsically valuable goals often find deep fulfillment along the way, while those who shrug off those goals to pursue self-indulgence typically find neither. Give your soul, get nothing in return. It’s a devilish formula. Little wonder, considering who invented it.