In the popular imagination, religious faith and a thriving sex life don’t tend to go together. Movies, books, and TV shows depict religious couples as sexually inhibited or dysfunctional. For example, in Caro Claire Burke’s best-selling novel, Yesteryear—soon to be a movie starring Anne Hathaway—a Scripture-quoting tradwife puts up a good front for Instagram but is privately miserable with her husband, who not only is passive but also struggles to perform in the bedroom.
But the data tell a different story. According to our new report, published today by the Institute for Family Studies, no group of Americans seems to be having more sex—and more satisfying sex—than married men and women who regularly attend a place of worship. (This group is made up mostly of Christians, but also includes Jews and Muslims.) In fact, we find that the only Americans who have avoided the country’s “sex recession”—in which fewer and fewer men and women are having regular sex—are husbands and wives who attend religious services at least twice a month. In the 1990s, 64 percent of married people aged 20–54, both churchgoing and secular, had sex at least once a week, according to the General Social Survey. Now only 48 percent of secular couples (who never or rarely attend church) have sex weekly compared with 62 percent of their religious peers. In America today, the faithful are having more sex.
Could this just be about wives in patriarchal religious communities who feel obligated to perform for their husband, but in ways that leave them sexually unsatisfied and deeply unhappy? Again, the data suggest otherwise. Both religious husbands and wives aged 20–54 are more likely to describe their sex life as “excellent” or “very good” than their secular peers, according to the 2026 IFS Religion and Family Survey. Forty-nine percent of churchgoing wives report being sexually satisfied, compared with just 38 percent of secular wives. The survey also finds that churchgoing spouses are more likely to be “very” or “extremely” happy in their marriage. In our report, “The Devout Difference: Religion, Marital Quality, and Sex Among Americans,” written with the family scholars Richard Dell’Isola and Jane Lankes Smith, we conclude that the “cultural trope of the sexually prudish, frustrated religious American does not fit the data.”
We hypothesize that when marriage and sex are endowed with a sense of sacredness—and the family-friendly values found in faith—they are both more likely to be satisfying. That’s partly because virtues such as forgiveness and fidelity smooth out the bumps in married life and reduce the odds that your marriage will hit those bumps in the first place. It’s also because religious rituals such as prayer—especially shared prayer—do more than foster emotional intimacy: They help make the stresses of family life more manageable, which may help explain why the believers in our study who pray daily have 1.29 times higher odds of sexual satisfaction than those who do not regularly pray.
[From the September 2026 issue: The great romance slump]
The sociologist Sam Perry, an expert on religion and sex, thinks that most of these findings flow from the tie between marital quality and religious faith. As he told us over email, the sexual advantages that the religious enjoy are, in all probability, “mostly downstream of relational harmony.” Research generally finds that faith leads to happier marriages, he noted, especially for couples who share a common faith. “So religious couples who are attending together are likely more in sync religiously and consequently happier and better able to enjoy one another,” he wrote.
The religious advantage regarding sex may also have to do with the fact that religious Americans are more likely to embrace an ethic of sexual generosity. Religious couples seem more willing than secular couples to acknowledge what popular culture often denies: that men and women can have different sexual appetites, and that men typically want sex more frequently than women do. Indeed, husbands are more than three times more likely than wives to initiate sex in contemporary marriages. Rather than treating that gap as a grievance, the faithful may lean into it: Husbands honor their wife’s moments of uninterest, wives honor their husband’s desire, and both sides are willing to compromise. In the 2024 book Get Married, one of us (Brad Wilcox) found that wives in religious marriages are more likely than others to say that it is “mostly” or “definitely” true that their husband is considerate when they do not want sex, and found that husbands in such marriages are more likely to say that their wife is responsive when they initiate.
But if qualities such as generosity and forgiveness explain why religious couples are withstanding the sex recession, they don’t explain why secular couples are succumbing to it, and experiencing much less intimacy than their predecessors. We suspect that one factor is that secular women are more likely than churchgoing women to fall prey to the negative messaging about men and marriage that floods social-media algorithms. The social psychologist Jonathan Haidt has observed that young female liberals are “more anxious and depressed than other groups”—especially religious conservatives—because of their “heavier use of social media and their participation in online communities” dominated by catastrophizing thinking. Amplified by social media over the past 15 years, these currents may also have strained the lives not just of young liberals but of secular couples in their prime, all the way into the bedroom.
[Read: What a century-old sex manual got right]
Another challenge facing secular couples is that they live in what the writer Derek Thompson has called “the anti-social century,” in which neighborliness, friendships, and community life are all in shorter supply. This matters because husbands and wives with high levels of support from friends and family are “at least 23 percentage points more likely to report that they are very happy” in their marriage, according to one study.
In contrast with secular couples, religious couples are more likely to be embedded in real-world communities that lend social and normative support to marriage and family life. These include regular worship and small men’s and women’s groups that encourage them to be better spouses and parents. Engaging in real communities with real people also means that religious couples are less subject to the trends of our era that can leave people feeling lonely, unmoored, and unhappy.
Religion frequently gets a bad rap in our public conversation about sex. One recent New York Times op-ed, for instance, argued that conservative Christian women are pushed to “submit to their husbands, sexually and otherwise” in churches marked by “misogyny and hypocrisy.” Of course, some religious women are in coercive or unsatisfying marriages. But blanket commentary like this leaves the public with the impression that religion is an obstacle to a happy marriage and a good sex life. Yet in an atomized, individualistic age, faith has turned out to be one of the few institutions still nurturing one of the most powerful expressions of human intimacy.
Leave a Reply