STUDY: Churchgoers Are Winning at Marriage

Decades of sneering from Hollywood and the progressive left have convinced millions of Americans that church and religion itself are relics of a dying era. But a new report from the Institute for Family Studies (IFS) suggests that a faith-centered life may still be the key to a happy marriage.

The study finds that the shrinking share of Americans who still attend church regularly enjoy the happiest and most durable marriages in the country. Those who drifted away from their faith were more likely to report unsuccessful marriages and relationships.

Every strong marriage and every full pew pay dividends to society far beyond one household. The Trump administration grasped that early, putting faith and family back at the center of federal policy. While government acknowledgment of faith's role in strengthening marriage and families is important, America needs a whole-of-society recognition of the benefits of church attendance to make a real difference.

The question now is whether the American people are ready to confront what the data keeps showing.

IFS researchers surveyed 3,125 married Americans between the ages of 18 and 54 this past spring. Among spouses who attend church at least two or three times a month, 79 percent of Catholics and 74 percent of Protestants described their marriages as very happy.

Among spouses with no religion, 66 percent said the same. After adjusting for age, education, race, and sex, regular churchgoers had roughly 1.5 times the odds of reporting a happy marriage.

The divorce figures, drawn from the General Social Survey, are even more stark.

Among ever-married adults between 35 and 54, 27 percent of churchgoing Catholics and 34 percent of churchgoing Protestants have been divorced or separated. For the nonreligious, that figure is 40 percent. For Protestants who claim the religious label but rarely attend church, the divorce rate is 54 percent.

That last figure is a stinging rebuke to anyone who thinks a Christian label alone will hold a marriage together. Scripture set that standard long ago, urging believers in the Book of James to be “doers of the word, and not hearers only.”

Interestingly, “in-name-only” Christians fare worse than people who profess no faith at all. Catholics and Protestants who seldom attend religious services enjoyed no measurable advantage over purely secular couples in terms of marital satisfaction.

The difference appears to come from showing up week after week, and from the support that being part of a congregation provides to couples.

Couples who said they were aligned with their spouse on faith, children, and family roles—and actually attended church regularly—were more than twice as likely to be happily married as couples who were not (78 percent vs. 36 percent).

Of course, all studies like these can only show correlation, not causation. It could be true that people who are already committed and family-minded may be more likely to sit in a church pew in the first place.

But none of that erases the pattern, which holds after statistical controls and matches decades of earlier research on religion and family life.

The troubling trend is that devout churchgoers in America are a dwindling group.

Gallup reports that 31 percent of Americans attended services weekly or almost weekly in 2025, down from 46 percent in 2000, while 57 percent now seldom or never go. Fewer than half of all Americans say religion is very important in their lives. Catholic weddings alone have fallen 74 percent since 1970.

Marriage has followed faith out the chapel door. The national marriage rate has slid from 8.2 per 1,000 Americans in 2000 to 6.3 in 2024, and IFS demographers project that roughly a third of today’s young adults may never marry at all.

Another associated trend is that more babies follow weddings. The United States recorded about 3.6 million births in 2025, down another one percent, and the fertility rate has sat below replacement every year since 2007. IFS’s analysis of census data finds that about three-quarters of the fertility decline since 2007 is attributable to fewer people being married, not necessarily to married couples having fewer children.

Had the share of Americans who are married held at 2007 levels, they calculate, the country would be roughly at replacement fertility levels today. Married women are still having children at close to the rates they did a generation ago. There are simply fewer married women.

This is the backdrop for the Trump administration’s decision to say out loud what Washington usually mumbles.

President Donald Trump’s February 2025 executive order creating the White House Faith Office placed it inside the Domestic Policy Council and directed it to consult faith leaders on “strengthening marriage and family,” among other priorities. In his 2025 National Day of Prayer proclamation, Trump explained that he “established the White House Faith Office in order to strengthen our families and to protect our religious freedom.”

Other parts of the Trump administration are focused on helping marriages and families as well. Last fall, the Administration for Children and Families at Trump's Department of Health and Human Services announced more than $100 million in Healthy Marriage and Responsible Fatherhood grants to 109 organizations across 38 states, five-year awards that run through 2030. The money funds three efforts: FORGE Fatherhood for dads, HEART for marriage and relationship education among adults, and READY4Life for young people between 14 and 24. The White House said a large share of the awards went to faith-based organizations.

Strengthening families is among the hardest jobs any government can take on alone. That is why the Trump administration has partnered with churches and faith groups to strengthen families and marriages. President Trump spelled out this broader point, telling the Values Voter Summit during his first administration that “it’s the family and the church, not government officials, that know best how to create strong and loving communities.”

The prior federal track record shows why government alone has not been successful.

A study from Supporting Healthy Marriage, a yearlong course for low-income married couples, found only small but lasting gains in marital happiness and communication, though no effect on whether couples stayed together. And an earlier program for unmarried parents produced no improvement in relationship quality. Government fatherhood programs have only nudged dads toward more nurturing behavior.

Those results explain why the Trump administration now requires grantees to use evidence-based approaches. They also explain why it has turned to faith groups, which reach couples in ways no government curriculum can.

No federal grant can match what a congregation offers a young couple. Week after week, the people in church pews expect that couple to stay together, and they show up with help when the marriage hits a rough patch. The Trump administration is right to welcome faith groups as the most effective partners in strengthening marriages.

And it is past time the rest of America recognizes what regular churchgoing does for families, too.

For half a century, the loudest voices in American culture insisted that faith was optional and marriage outdated. Children, they said, could wait. Those voices got their wish, and the results have been disastrous. As church attendance fell, weddings grew rarer, and the birth rate sank right alongside them.

Meanwhile, churchgoing families have long lived by a different creed. Latter-day Saint leader David O. McKay summed it up when he warned that “no other success can compensate for failure in the home.” Families who took that lesson to heart and prioritized their marriage and family relationships tuned out the popular progressive cultural messaging, and the IFS numbers show what they gained.

Liberal or conservative, anyone serious about strengthening the American family should be loudly encouraging church attendance.

Houses of worship were building strong marriages long before government rang the alarm bells on the modern epidemic of broken marriages. The least the culture can do is give religion credit for the work it does.