In recent years, demographers have observed an alarming trend: American women are giving up on marriage.
According to Pew Research Center data, only about a third of single women are looking for romance — well below that of single men. Meanwhile, a growing cultural consensus treats romantic partnership as optional at best and embarrassing at worst, as fears of divorce loom and the number of Americans who want to remain childless has more than doubled.
Are marriage and family not only declining in the data but also in aspiration and prestige?
What almost no one connects to this story is a second decline running directly alongside it. Over the same decades that marriage and birth rates have dropped, religious participation has fallen, too, and at a strikingly similar pace. We tend to treat these as separate problems — handled by separate experts — but they are two sides of the same coin.
A connection between marriage and religion
Mary Eberstadt made this case in “How the West Really Lost God.” She claims that people first lose their faith and then, untethered, lose a desire for marriage and children. Eberstadt argues that this runs both ways. Faith and family are the “invisible double helix of society … whose strength and momentum depend on one another.”
Faith communities give people reasons and support to marry and raise children. Marriages and children, in turn, pull people into religious communities and keep them there. When one weakens, so does the other. A recent Max Planck working paper describes a “self-reinforcing negative effect” in which secularization lowers fertility and falling fertility further erodes religious life.
This is why much of the current conversation about marriage and birth rates often misses the point. We treat family formation as a stand-alone problem to be solved with the right incentive, while ignoring the institution most responsible for producing it. Daniel Cox at the American Enterprise Institute calls the broader pattern a romantic recession, though new research shows the desire for family is still there.
A Wheatley Institute and Institute for Family Studies survey of 5,275 unmarried young adults found that only about 1 in 3 is actively dating, even though 86% say they want to marry someday. Faith communities serve a critical role in encouraging and helping marriage feel attainable. Accordingly, a weakening of faith communities has a detrimental impact on marriage and birth rates.
Professor and Harvard-trained economist Catherine Pakaluk spent years interviewing highly educated women with five or more children and concluded in her book, “Hannah’s Children,” that a deep religious commitment may be the only pronatalist family policy that actually works. The reason is structural, not sentimental. You cannot incentivize someone into repeated sacrificial love, and you cannot reproduce in a government office the things only a “caravan of care” or faith community can offer: weekly gatherings, bonds across generations and people who notice when you are struggling (or thriving).
Strong families fill churches, and full pews produce the next generation of strong families.
As Pakaluk explains, many people of faith will give up their comforts and plans for their “love of God,” but not for a check from the state. The fertility gap bears this out. Women who attend services weekly have a fertility rate at or near replacement, while the rate among the nonreligious is far below that.
A new report from the Wheatley Institute provides rigorous footing for this connection. “The Religion and Social Health Connection” is the third report in a series built on the “Handbook of Religion and Health,” compiled by Harold Koenig of Duke and Tyler VanderWeele and John Peteet of Harvard. The authors screened for the strongest available research, favoring large samples and careful controls.
In our analysis of 528 high-quality studies on religion and social health, 489 of them, or 93%, found that religious involvement tracks with better social outcomes, against only 15 that found the reverse. On marriage and family specifically, 76 of 86 rigorous studies linked higher religiosity to stronger marriages, lower divorce and less domestic violence. A national study of roughly 6,800 people by sociologist Chris Ellison found that men who attended services more than weekly were 72% less likely to abuse their partners than similar men who did not attend. And considering the single women who refuse to date due to bad behavior of partners, the research suggests that investing in a faith community could result in a more committed, stable partner.
Church programs can help strengthen marriages
Those who end up married are among the most likely people to attend services and to enroll children in religious education. Strong families fill churches, and full pews produce the next generation of strong families. Indeed, most countries still at replacement-level fertility are religious. A global study of 30,000 adults across 24 countries found that frequent religious attendance went hand in hand with seeing children as a source of joy rather than a burden. American fertility rate now sits at 1.6 births per woman, the lowest the country has ever recorded, and it has fallen alongside religious attendance.
We all recognize that stable families, committed marriages and well-cared-for children strengthen society.
Faith communities demonstrate that they can help strengthen marriage formation and improve stability. Churches and civic groups in Florida, for example, joined forces through a privately funded effort now called Communio, where roughly 90 churches offered marriage and relationship education within existing faith communities. This resulted in the divorce rate in the surrounding county falling by more than a quarter in three years, at a fraction of the cost of government healthy-marriage programs preceding it. The model worked well enough that all 12 Catholic dioceses in California have now adopted it statewide.
When public and private institutions team up to treat family stability as a core measure of flourishing and to pursue voluntary, opt-in partnerships with the faith communities already doing this work, the results can be measurable. And the responsibility extends beyond government: employers, schools, the media and responsible social media shape how a generation views marriage and whether parenthood looks worth it.
As in Florida and California, partnerships can be forged between civic groups, policymakers and willing faith communities that share the goal of strengthening families.
We all recognize that stable families, committed marriages and well-cared-for children strengthen society. Religious communities cultivate the qualities strong families need: fidelity, sacrifice, responsibility and love. If we want stronger couples and healthier communities, we should consider the places that help create them.
And if dating, marriage and children no longer carry much cachet in mainstream culture, maybe people need communities where those choices are still encouraged and feel possible: at church.