A cluster of survey research now converging from the Institute for Family Studies (IFS), the Wheatley Institution, and Focus on the Family points in the same direction: couples who practise their faith together report markedly happier, more stable, and more sexually satisfying marriages than secular or nominally religious couples. The findings arrive at a moment when religious attendance across North America continues to fall, which makes the pattern harder for secular commentators to explain away as mere correlation with older, more traditional demographics.
The most detailed data comes from IFS’s report on the 2018 Global Family and Gender Survey, which sampled more than 9,000 married men and women across 11 countries, including over 2,000 American respondents. Researchers sorted couples into three groups: highly religious pairs who attend services together two to three times a month or more, less/mixed religious couples with minimal attendance, and secular couples who never attend. The report found that 67 percent of highly religious American wives reported above-average relationship quality, compared with 44 percent of wives in less-religious marriages and 53 percent of secular wives, according to the same IFS analysis reported by Christianity Today.
Sexual satisfaction followed a similar pattern. Wives in highly religious marriages were roughly 50 percent more likely to describe themselves as strongly satisfied with their sex lives than wives in secular or lukewarm-religious unions, per the same reporting. Religious wives also reported lower rates of infidelity. Separate IFS research by sociologist Brad Wilcox, published in a 2017 IFS essay on faith and marriage, found that spouses who attend church together are about nine percentage points more likely to describe themselves as very or extremely happy than spouses who do not, a pattern Wilcox said holds across white, black, and Latino couples alike.
Focus on the Family finds a similar gap
A 2025 poll commissioned by Focus on the Family and detailed in its official press release surveyed more than 3,800 Americans and found that so-called convictional Christians, defined as those who actively practise their faith, scored highest of any subgroup on 32 separate measures of marriage health, including trust, financial cooperation, and taking responsibility for mistakes. The poll found 82 percent of convictional Christian marriages were rated healthy, against a 74 percent average across all respondents, and that only 13 percent of convictional Christians reported their marriage was in crisis, compared with 25 percent of non-Christians. Focus on the Family president Jim Daly said in the release that convictional Christians are nearly twice as likely as non-Christians to avoid a marital crisis, a claim attributed directly to him in the organisation’s own statement.
Not every finding favours a simple narrative of religious protection. The IFS and Wheatley Institution report also found that couples who attend church only sporadically, described as lukewarm, do not enjoy better relationship quality than secular couples who never attend, and in some measures, such as men’s infidelity, they fare worse. The same research found no significant difference in reported domestic violence between highly religious and less religious couples in the American sample, a point the report’s authors themselves flagged as an area where church communities have work to do, according to Christianity Today’s account of the underlying report.
What the decline in attendance obscures
None of this data disputes that religious attendance in North America has fallen sharply over recent decades. What it complicates is the assumption, common in secular commentary, that this decline is a straightforward liberation from repressive institutions. The research consistently finds that it is specifically shared, active religious practice, rather than nominal identification or occasional attendance, that correlates with stronger marriages. Couples who identify as religious but rarely attend do not show the same benefits, which suggests the effect is tied to communal practice rather than belief alone.
How the outlets framed it
The Institute for Family Studies presents its own data in unambiguous terms, framing shared religious practice as an unambiguous strength for marriage and titling its coverage around the phrase that faithful couples are flourishing. Christianity Today’s account of the same underlying report leads with similar positive numbers but spends more space on the caveats, particularly the finding that lukewarm religious attendance offers no benefit and that domestic violence rates do not improve with religiosity. Focus on the Family’s press release, by contrast, foregrounds the positive marriage-health numbers with almost no caveats at all. The difference reveals how an advocacy-adjacent research outlet and a general Christian news outlet covering identical survey data will still choose to lead with different halves of the same finding, one emphasising the affirmative case for faith and marriage, the other layering in the qualifications that complicate a clean story.
Taken together, the data represents one of the more consistent empirical challenges to the secular assumption that traditional religious marriage is inherently repressive rather than protective. Institutions that treat declining church attendance as a purely neutral or positive social trend may be overlooking what these surveys suggest churches have actually been supplying: a structure that measurably correlates with happier, more stable, and more sexually satisfying marriages, at least among couples who practise their faith together rather than merely claim it.
