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v o l u m e i i i , i s s u e i i iPRINCIPLESFaith and Marriage,
Better Together?W. Bradford Wilcox
Over the next decade, count on the press, academics, and pop
culture icons to take a more negative view of religion in American
life. This opposition has been driven by a variety of factors, such
as the rise of the “new atheism” and conservative Christian
alliances with the Republican Party and with President Donald
Trump. In particular, orthodox religious opposition to today’s new
morality—on matters ranging from abortion to LGBTQ rights—has made
religion a target of scorn, skepticism, or outright hostility on
the part of many of the nation’s cultural elites. This negative
view of religion extends to religion’s influence on family
life.
Take, for instance, the media’s coverage of a recent University
of Chicago study purporting to show that children raised by
religious parents were less altruistic than children raised by
secular parents. The study’s author, psychologist Jean Decety,
claimed that his research showed “how religion negatively
About the Author
W. Bradford Wilcox, Ph.D., is professor of sociology at the
University of Virginia, director of the National Marriage Project
at the University of Virginia, visiting scholar at the American
Enterprise Institute, and senior fellow at the Institute for Family
Studies. His research has focused on marriage, fatherhood, and
cohabitation, especially on the ways that family structure, civil
society, and culture influence the quality and stability of family
life in the United States and around the globe. Wilcox is the
author of numerous books and articles. His work has been featured
in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic,
Slate, National Review Online, NPR, NBC’s The Today Show, and many
other media outlets.
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influences children’s altruism” and that it challenged “the view
that religiosity facilitates prosocial behavior,” calling into
question “whether religion is vital for moral
development—suggesting the secularization of moral discourse does
not reduce human kindness. In fact, it does just the
opposite.”1
The study had numerous methodological problems and
limitations—it was based upon a non-random and non-representative
sample of children watching cartoons and sharing stickers in a few
cities around the globe—but received glowing, credulous coverage
from numerous media outlets.2 As I noted in the Washington Post, a
Daily Beast headline proclaimed “Religious Kids are Jerks,” and the
Guardian reported “Religious Children Are Meaner than Their Secular
Counterparts,” while Slate weighed in to say that “religious
children are more selfish.”3 This was clearly a story that some in
the media were more than happy to run with.
There is only one problem with this new, negative view of
religion and family life: it misses the mark. In the United States,
at least, religion is generally a positive force in the family. My
own research, which has focused extensively on the connection
between faith and family life, indicates that religion
generally fosters more happiness, greater stability, and a
deeper sense of meaning in American family life, provided that
family members—especially spouses—share a common faith. In simple
terms, the old slogan—“the family that prays together, stays
together”—still holds in 2017.
WEDDED BLISS
Consider Roberto, 37, and Marcia Flores, 35, who immigrated to
the United States from Mexico when they were children. This
Catholic couple are representative of some of the unique challenges
and opportunities facing Latino couples. These San Diego residents
met in their early twenties, lived together for a number of years,
and had their daughter prior to getting married. In 1997, they wed
and had a son shortly thereafter. For most of the early years of
their relationship, Roberto struggled with drugs and alcohol, and
spent many a weekend focused on soccer and friends rather than his
family. “Before, I used to be in the world (‘del mundo’); I used a
lot of drugs, I drank a lot, I didn’t care for my family, not my
wife, my brothers, mother and father, I didn’t care about them,” he
said, also noting, “when the weekend came, I left my wife and I
would go play soccer with friends . . . and then go drinking, and
that was my whole weekend.”
He also says he took a “macho” approach to family life, leaving
domestic responsibilities to Marcia. “You come home and you boss
people around,” he said, describing his macho ethic. “You force
your wife and your kids to do things for you. And the woman had to
take care of all the house one way or another, the man did
nothing.” If he had kept up this approach to family
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| 3
life, an approach characterized by intoxication and machismo,
Roberto thinks his family would have fallen apart: “I’m sure my
wife would have left me. I wouldn’t have my wife or kids anymore if
I had stayed in that path.”
In 2000, Roberto took a detour. Some friends suggested that he
and Marcia attend a retreat for couples at a local Catholic church,
and, after some prodding from her, he decided to go. Much to his
surprise, Roberto was overcome at the retreat, filled with remorse
over his failings as a husband and father. What happened next was
powerful: “That’s when I met God,” he said, adding, “I cried before
God, which was something I never did. I never cry. But a lot of
things I never did before I did on that day.” Besides crying at the
retreat, Roberto felt “all the presence of God” and decided to give
up drugs and alcohol and to stop treating his family so poorly.
In the wake of the retreat, Roberto and Marcia have seen a
marked improvement in the quality of their marriage. “I started
going to church and they taught me that the family is important and
you have to care for it,” he said. “I never knew that before; I
really didn’t think I had to put family first before.” At church,
he has learned that God “has a plan for marriage,” that he must
live “unity in all aspects” of his marriage. In practice, this
meant temperance, and coming to embrace the notion that “you need a
lot of love to raise a good family.”
This has translated into big changes in their marriage and
family life. Roberto stopped abusing drugs and alcohol, curtailed
his involvement with friends and soccer on the weekends, and took a
more engaged approach to “helping in the house.” A religious
perspective
and religious rituals became more common for Marcia and Roberto.
Now, Roberto says, “time with my family is something spiritual to
me,” and he and Marcia pray with their kids on the weekends. The
changes he has experienced in his marriage and family, in turn,
have further deepened Roberto’s faith: “That’s why I know there’s a
God.”
The Flores’ experience is suggestive of how a shared faith can
help a couple dealing with male misbehavior or other challenges.
Their Catholic faith enabled Roberto to experience powerful,
life-changing religious rituals, and to become integrated into a
religious community that embraces a positive, family-oriented
ethos. Their faith—especially Roberto’s—has given the couple a
sense of hope. It has helped them make the changes needed to
strengthen their marriage and family life. As suggested in
Elizabeth Brisco’s The Reformation of Machismo, men’s religious
faith can counter some of the misogynistic attitudes associated
with machismo in the Latino community; in this case, Roberto has
jettisoned his expectation that he could devote all his free time
to friends, soccer, and drinking, and leave Marcia with full
responsibility for the caretaking and housework that are part and
parcel of family life.
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4 | V o l u m e I I I , I s s u e I I I
Although the Flores’ particular story of faith and family life
is emblematic of many of the challenges and opportunities facing
Latino couples, my research suggests that the benefits of shared
church attendance extend to American couples across racial and
ethnic lines. Specifically, my work with Nicholas Wolfinger in Soul
Mates: Religion, Sex, Love, and Marriage Among African Americans
and Latinos indicates that couples
are substantially more likely to report being happy in their
relationship when both partners attend church regularly than when
neither partner does. This result holds equally for whites, blacks,
and Latinos, as the figure above indicates.
Clearly, white, black, and Latino spouses who attend church
together are about 9 percentage points more likely to say they are
“very happy” or “extremely happy” than husbands and wives who do
not. This may not seem like a huge boost to marital happiness, but
in practical terms it means that almost everyone in a jointly
religious marriage is at least “very
happy,” which is striking given the ups and downs of
contemporary married life.4 In other words, religious couples are
significantly more likely to enjoy wedded bliss than are their
secular peers.
THE POWER OF PRAYER AND PEERS
Why does shared religious attendance lead to happiness? Part of
the reason faith matters is that it fosters norms—such as a
commitment to marital permanence and fidelity—that strengthen
marriages. My research indicates that two other mechanisms, one
social and one devotional, also help explain the power of joint
church attendance. First, almost half of jointly attending couples
form the majority of their friendships with fellow
parishioners.
Attending religious services with friends accounts for more than
half of the association between church attendance and relationship
quality, which means that couples who have many shared friends at
their church are happier than other couples. Attending church with
one’s friends appears to provide many role models of happy, healthy
relationships. These friends can also offer support when an
intimate relationship hits the inevitable speed bump, and such
friends may encourage each other, by example or the threat of
stigma, to resist the temptation of an affair. The figure to the
right illustrates the link between shared religious friendships and
relationship happiness.
62%
64%
66%
68%
70%
72%
74%
76%
78%
80%
82%
Both Partners Attend ChurchNeither Partner Attends Church
LatinoBlackWhite
% o
f re
spon
dent
s ha
ppy
in
thei
r re
latio
nshi
p
Relationship Quality by Race and Frequent Church Attendance
70%69%
71%
79%78%
80%
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
YesNo
Does couple pray together almost every week or more?
Do friends attend religious services?
-
Second, couples in which both members attend church are more
likely to say that they often pray together, and shared prayer also
helps to account for the link between church attendance and a happy
relationship. Previous studies show that prayer helps couples deal
with stress, enables them to focus on shared beliefs and hopes for
the future, and allows them to deal constructively with challenges
and problems in their relationship, and in their lives. In fact, we
find that shared prayer is the most powerful religious predictor of
relationship quality among black, Latino, and white couples, more
powerful than denomination, religious attendance, or shared
religious friendships. In simple terms, as the figure below
also
indicates, the couple that prays together, flourishes
together.
Couples who attend religious services together are happier in
their relationships than are their peers who don’t regularly attend
church. This finding holds for whites, African Americans, and
Latinos alike. It is true that most people are happy in their
relationships irrespective of church attendance, but black, Latino,
and white couples who attend together enjoy an added boost here.
Part of the story here too may be due to selection (couples who are
happier together may also be inclined to do many things together,
including attending church). But selection probably isn’t the whole
story. Our evidence for this contention is our identification
of two of the mechanisms through which religious participation
improves relationship quality: religious friends and shared prayer.
Couples who attend church together enjoy significantly happier
relationships, in large part because they socialize with friends
who share their faith and especially because they pray with one
another. In other words, those couples who pray together are
happiest together.
| 5
Principles is the free bimonthly periodical of Christendom
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ABOUT PRINCIPLES
0%
10%
20%
30%
40%
50%
60%
70%
80%
90%
YesNo
Does couple pray together almost every week or more?
Do friends attend religious services?
Adjusted Percentage of Individuals Very or Extremely Happy in
Their Relationship, by
Congregational Friendships and Frequent Prayer
% v
ery/
extre
mel
y ha
ppy 78%
61%
76%
65%
-
6 | V o l u m e I I I , I s s u e I I I
TOGETHER FOREVER
But do higher-quality marriages founded on faith necessarily
mean more stable marriages? Certainly, in the broader culture, many
people think that Christians divorce just as much as their
unaffiliated fellow Americans. Some would even argue that
Christianity is actually bad for marital stability. Writing in The
Nation, for instance, Michelle Goldberg asked: “Is Conservative
Christianity Bad for Marriage?” Her affirmative answer was based on
a study of red-state Protestant cultures where disapproval of
premarital sex has led to earlier, less financially stable
marriages.5 It is true that marital happiness is not perfectly
correlated with freedom from divorce. Enjoying a happy marriage
doesn’t eliminate your odds of divorce later on; it just reduces
them. So does faith serve as a stabilizing force in American
marriages?
New research from Harvard professor Tyler VanderWeele indicates
the answer to that question is yes. In tracking a sample of
thousands of middle-aged women across the United States, he found
that women who regularly attended church were 47 percent less
likely to divorce
than women who did not regularly attend church. He also noted
that other research has come to a similar conclusion, generally
finding that regular church attendance is associated with a
reduction in divorce of more than 30 percent.6
So what accounts for the stabilizing power of religion when it
comes to American marriages? VanderWeele offered four theories to
explain how faith is linked to less divorce:
1. Religious teachings often indicate that marriage is something
sacred—that an important bond is created in the exchange of
marriage vows. Attending religious services reinforces that
message.
2. Religious teachings also discourage or censure divorce to
varying degrees across religious traditions, which may lead to
lower rates of divorce; moreover, religious traditions also often
have strong teachings against adultery, which is one of the
strongest predictors of divorce.
3. Religious teachings often place a strong emphasis on
love and on putting the needs of others above one’s own. This may
also improve the quality of married life and lower the likelihood
of divorce.
4. Religious institutions often provide various types of family
support, including a place for families to get to know one another
and build relationships, programs for children, marital and
pre-marital counseling, and retreats and workshops focused on
building a good marriage. Religious communities can provide
-50%
-45%
-40%
-35%
-30%
-25%
-20%
-15%
-10%
-5%
0%
Depression Mortality Divorce
Percentage Reductions in Depression, Mortality, and Divorce From
Regular
Religious Service Attendance
-33%-28%
-47%
-
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healthy marriage. 7
Regardless of how precisely religion fosters more stable
marriages, however, this new research from Harvard suggests that
the couple that attends together, stays together.
So the next time you come across an academic study or media
story contending that faith plays a pernicious role in family life,
be skeptical. So long as family life, and marriage in particular,
are based on a common commitment to religious faith, it looks like
religious faith lifts the fortunes of American families. And that’s
good news in a nation where the fortunes of the family too often
seem to be flagging.
This essay is adapted, in part, from Soul Mates: Religion, Sex,
Love, and Marriage Among African Americans and Latinos, co-authored
with Nicholas Wolfinger. Follow Brad Wilcox on Twitter:
@WilcoxNMP.
Endnotes
1. See Susie Allen, “Religious upbringing associated with less
altruism, study finds,” UChicago News, November 5, 2015,
http://news.uchicago.edu/article/2015/11/05/religious-upbringing-associated-less-altruism-study-finds.
2. For a critique of the study’s methods, see Robert D.
Woodberry, “Are Non-Religious Children Really More Altruistic?,”
Institute for Family Studies Blog, November 23, 2015,
http://family-studies.org/are-non-religious-children-really-more-altruistic/.
3. Bobby Azarian, “Study: Religious Kids Are Jerks,” The Daily
Beast, November 6, 2015,
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/11/06/study-religious-kids-are-jerks.html;
Harriet Sherwood, “Religious children are meaner than their secular
counterparts, study finds,” The Guardian, November 6, 2015,
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/nov/06/religious-children-less-altruistic-secular-kids-study;
Rachel E. Gross, “Are Religious Children More Selfish?,” Slate,
November 6, 2015,
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2015/11/religious_children_are_more_selfish_in_a_sticker_study.html.
4. When only the wife attends, relationship quality is not
higher for spouses than when neither attends. When only the husband
attends, relationship quality is a bit higher than when neither
attends but still not as high as when both attend.
5. Michelle Goldberg, “Is Conservative Christianity Bad for
Marriage?,” The Nation, January 22, 2014,
https://www.thenation.com/article/conservative-christianity-bad-marriage/.
6. Tyler J. VanderWeele, “Religious Service Attendance,
Marriage, and Health,” Institute for Family Studies Blog, November
29, 2016;
http://family-studies.org/religious-service-attendance-marriage-and-health/.
7. Ibid.
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