✝️ 🇺🇸 🐣 Religious Couples Avoided the Sex Recession

"No group of Americans seems to be having more sex—and more satisfying sex—than married men & women who regularly attend a place of worship. In fact, we find the only Americans who have avoided the country’s “sex recession” are husbands & wives who attend religious services at least twice a month."

"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. 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.

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.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/09/religion-sex-recession-marriage/688774/

https://archive.ph/Qf7ED

📎 Brad Wilcox