Regular Church Attendance Protects Marriages and Boosts Happiness
Source: Beverly Willett. "To Divorce-Proof Your Marriage, Go To Church Often." October 26, 2026. thefederalist.com
The Gist
The author says couples who regularly go to church are happier in their marriages and divorce less, citing a report from a family-focused think tank. She argues that shared religious values, a belief that marriage is permanent, and praying together keep couples together, and that the culture was wrong to tell people that faith and marriage hold them back.
Conclusion
Regular church attendance, especially within devout Christian communities, is the best way to protect marriages from divorce and increase marital happiness, and the cultural elites' claim that faith and marriage obstruct happiness and freedom is false.
Premises
- Regular churchgoing Christians report markedly higher marital happiness than secular or tepid religious peers (79% of Catholics and 74% of Protestants who attend regularly vs. 66% or lower), and devout Catholic Mass attendees are the least likely group to divorce.
- Spouses with shared values have about 6.86 times higher odds of perceived marital stability and 6.85 times higher odds of being happily married than non-aligned spouses.
- Christian beliefs, including that marriage is permanent and an openness to children, foster communion, friendship, and perceived fairness, so couples fight and keep score less and are more willing to sacrifice through rough patches.
- Shared prayer helps solidify marriages, consistent with the maxim that 'the family that prays together stays together.'
- Churchgoing couples have higher odds of sexual satisfaction and have sex more often than non-religious married couples.
- Marriage rates, fertility, church attendance, and American happiness have all declined since the sexual and cultural revolutions, and the revolutions' promise that freedom from marriage and faith would bring fulfillment has proved false.
Assumptions
- Correlations between church attendance and marital outcomes reflect a causal effect of religious belief and practice rather than selection effects or confounders (e.g., income, education, personality, community support).
- Self-reported happiness and satisfaction are valid measures of marital quality.
- The IFS report is an unbiased and methodologically sound source, and its findings generalize to American couples broadly.
- The shared values that matter for marital stability are specifically religious values, so people without them can't get the same benefits.
- The decline in church attendance is a cause of family breakdown and unhappiness, not merely a parallel trend.
- Marital happiness and stability are the proper measures of whether the sexual revolution and secularism have succeeded.