People who regularly attend church are more likely to report happy marriages, according to a new report examining the relationship between faith and family life.
According to the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) study, they also reported a stronger commitment to marriage and greater sexual satisfaction than those who were less religiously active.
The report, titled ‘The Devout Difference: Religion, Marital Quality, and Sex Among Americans’, argues that religious practice rather than religious identity alone appears to be most closely associated with positive marital outcomes.
The 62-page study comes against a backdrop of falling church attendance and declining marriage rates in the US.
Its authors describe America as being in the midst of an “epidemic of social isolation”, pointing to declines in face-to-face socialising and community life.
Against that background, they describe faith and family as two institutions that have long served as “antidotes to isolation”.
The report analyses General Social Survey data alongside the 2026 IFS Religion and Family Survey, which was carried out by YouGov between February 9 and March 4 among 3,125 married adults aged 18 to 54. The sample comprised 1,243 Protestants and 1,080 Catholics.
The researchers found that while religious participation has declined substantially over recent decades, regular churchgoers remain more likely than less religious Americans to marry.
Frequent church attendance fell from 49% of Americans in 1972 to 32% in 2024, while the US marriage rate declined by over 60% across the same timeframe.
Despite those trends, six in 10 religious Americans aged 20 to 54 are married, compared to just over four in 10 (42%) of secular adults, according to the report.
Church attendance also appeared to matter within Christian denominations.
Among churchgoing Protestants, two thirds were married, while the figure stood at 57% for churchgoing Catholics.
Of those who attended services less than twice a month, marriage rates fell to 47% among Catholics and 41% among Protestants.
After adjusting for age, education and race, regular churchgoers had 39% higher odds of being married.
The same pattern was evident in divorce figures.
Among ever-married adults aged 35 to 54, 34% of churchgoing Protestants and 27% of churchgoing Catholics had divorced or separated, compared with 54% of nominal Protestants, 36% of nominal Catholics and 40% of those with no religion.
The differences extended to marital happiness.
Among churchgoing Protestants, 74% described their marriages as very or extremely happy, rising to 79% of churchgoing Catholics. That contrasted with two thirds of respondents with no religious affiliation.
After accounting for age, education, race and sex, regular churchgoers were 49% more likely to report being happily married.
However, merely identifying as Catholic or Protestant did not appear to produce the same pattern.
Nominal Catholics and Protestants showed no statistically significant marital happiness advantage over those with no religion, leading the authors to argue that “active church participation, not merely affiliation” was the more important factor.
Prayer was also associated with stronger marriages.
Among Protestants who prayed daily, 77% said their marriage was stable, compared with two thirds of those who prayed less often. Among Catholics, the corresponding figures were 67% and 60%.
Daily prayer was associated with 1.48 times greater probability of marital stability and 1.50 times increased likelihood of marital happiness.
One of the strongest associations in the report concerned shared values between spouses.
The researchers defined value alignment as agreement on areas including religion, work and family roles, openness to children, child-rearing and hopes for the future.
Among Protestants, 73% of value-aligned spouses reported happy marriages, compared with just 18% of those whose values were not aligned. Among Catholics, the figures were 79% and 38% respectively.
Belief in the permanence of marriage was another significant factor.
Respondents who completely agreed that marriage is a permanent bond, except in extreme circumstances such as domestic violence, had 1.85 times greater probability of reporting high marital satisfaction and 1.81 times higher odds of viewing their marriage as stable.
The report also examined sexual frequency and satisfaction at a time when married Americans overall are having sex less frequently than in previous decades.
General Social Survey figures cited by IFS show that 64% of married 20 to 54 year olds had sex at least once a week in the 1990s, compared with 54% today.
Among regular churchgoers, however, 62% currently report weekly sex, compared with 48% of non-religious married adults.
The 2026 IFS survey found a similar pattern.
Weekly sex was reported by 60% of churchgoing Protestants and 69% of churchgoing Catholics, compared with 60% of nominal Catholics, 52% of nominal Protestants and 47% of religiously unaffiliated respondents.
After controls, churchgoers were 1.49 times more likely to have sex at least once a week.
Sexual satisfaction was also higher among regular churchgoers, with 45% of churchgoing Protestants and some 55% of churchgoing Catholics rating their sex lives as excellent or very good, compared with 40% of those with no religious affiliation.
The authors conclude that the stereotype of the “sexually prudish, frustrated religious American” does not fit their findings.
The picture was not universally positive for religious couples, though.
Among churchgoing Protestants, 77% said their marriage was stable, compared with 63% of churchgoing Catholics and 71% of those with no religion. However, the report notes that although Catholics appear less likely to divorce, they are more likely to express doubts about whether their marriages will endure.
The report also highlights pornography use and pressure on larger families as challenges.
A quarter of churchgoing married men aged 20 to 54 reported viewing pornography at least monthly, compared with 35% of men who attend church infrequently or not at all.
The study also shed some light on parenting and family pressures. Among churchgoing parents, 57% of Protestants said they received at least “some help” from their church community, compared with 46% of Catholics.
Catholic families with three or more children reported lower marital satisfaction than those with fewer children.
Overall, the authors argue that the results point less to religious identity by itself than to what they call “commitment and communion”.
They wrote: “Taken together, shared beliefs, commitment, community, and regular prayer appear especially important for fostering strong marriages.
“Faith, in other words, does not just bring couples to the altar. It gives them a reason to stay, and a way to experience happiness when they do.”
The report concludes that faith and family are potential “havens in what can often feel like an increasingly heartless world”.
The authors argue that strengthening both is a question of social wellbeing.
“Strengthening faith and family is therefore not a matter of nostalgia but of necessity,” they wrote. “It could mean the difference between a society that sustains the foundations of personal and social well-being and one that leaves its people to drift alone and unhappy in an increasingly atomistic age.”
Among their recommendations, they call on churches to encourage active faith, help couples discern shared values before marriage, offer greater practical support to families, and invest in preparing young people for marriage.
