Why Churchgoers Escaped the ‘Sex Recession’

A new report from the Institute for Family Studies found that religious married couples—those who attend church at least twice a month—have sex at significantly higher rates than secular married couples and enjoy it more.

Sixty-two percent of religious couples are intimate weekly, compared with just 48 percent of nonreligious couples. This situation is new. In the 2000s, married couples were having sex at similar rates, whether they were religious or not. In the last 20 years, a major gap in sexual activity has opened between religious and secular marriages.

And it’s not just quantity for religious couples but quality. Married men and women with traditional beliefs about God and sex are more likely than their secular peers to say they’re happy with their marriages and are 1.42 times more likely to say they’re sexually satisfied.

When you consider that religious Americans are significantly more likely to get married in the first place, and that married people have more sex than unmarried people, the advantage enjoyed by the devout minority becomes clearer.

A majority of Americans between ages 20 and 54 now say they aren’t having weekly sex, and an unprecedented number are simply celibate. Many aren’t even trying. Over two-thirds of young adults either haven’t dated at all or have gone on only a few dates in the last year, and it’s likely that one in four young adults will remain single for life.

While the sexual revolution was always sold as liberation for people repressed by religious and traditional rules, the society that revolution produced is one in which people are less sexually active than their parents were at the same age.

The counterintuitive fact in 2026: An America that long ago embraced sexual freedom is in the grip of what the Institute calls a “sex recession,” and religious people—precisely those once denounced as fuddy-duddies—are largely exempt.

From Revolution to Recession

It’s difficult to overstate how ironic this turn is in light of previous decades. Consider the long reign of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy magazine, the sexualization of pop music and movie starlets, the glamorizing of casual sex on sitcoms like Seinfeld and Friends, the epidemic of teen pregnancy, mass sexual assault at music festivals, the defense of internet pornography as free speech, and the shrugging off of Oval Office scandals.

This was the heyday of Harvey Weinstein, Bill Cosby, and Kevin Spacey, and of a well-attested attitude of winking at their predation. The 1990s to 2000s were a time of dizzying sexual license and experimentation, and the backlash was inevitable.

The society that the sexual revolution produced is one in which people are less sexually active than their parents were at the same age.

During the last 10 years or so, secular culture has remoralized sex. From the #MeToo movement’s revelations of abuse and insistence that we “believe all women,” to controversies around advertising that objectifies women, to discussions of power differentials and how they affect consent, “free love” feels like an ill-advised slogan of the past.

Even self-proclaimed liberals have reverse engineered a kind of secular puritanism deeply concerned with how bodies are portrayed in media, how drugs and alcohol influence sexual encounters, and what happens in the legal gray area between enthusiastic consent and assault.

Meghan Murphy at The Daily Wire explores how this trend is at work in the stomach-turning “Cornell seven” case, in which a young woman alleges male members of a fraternity gang-raped her while she was intoxicated. The task of the university, and now the courts, has been to decide whether what happened in that dorm room was nonconsensual and therefore illegal. Murphy argues that the case exposes how inadequate “consent” is as a standalone sex ethic.

She echoes feminist writer Louise Perry, who argued in her 2022 book, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, that the era of sexual permissiveness was mostly good for predatory men and terrible for women. A palpable burnout is spreading in the secular mating market. People are tired and wary, the sexes increasingly distrust and resent each other, and many have just stopped trying to find love or intimacy. There’s an exhaustion with sex itself, or rather the game of mutual exploitation that has defined casual sex and dating for a generation. People know and feel that they’re being used and using others, and that the sexual revolution didn’t deliver the liberation it promised.

Though she did a marvelous job of documenting this burnout, Perry stopped short of calling for a reinstitution of Christian chastity and keeping sex within monogamous, natural marriage—which is particularly disappointing in light of how effective observant faith seems to be at encouraging healthy sex.

Nevertheless, she put her finger on one of the roots of our current sex recession: a pseudo-religious idolizing of sexual freedom that failed to deliver the flourishing it promised. This helps explain why religious people are exempt from the sex recession: They worship and love something other than sex and are therefore freer to enjoy it.

Aim at Heaven, Get Earth Thrown In

C. S. Lewis wrote in Mere Christianity that if you “aim at Heaven . . . you will get earth ‘thrown in’: aim at earth and you will get neither.” Pursuing secondary goods as if they’re primary goods will always destroy your pleasure in those goods and likely deprive you of them altogether.

This is another way of stating Augustine’s famous ordo amoris (order of loves), about rightly prioritizing our desires and placing God first. The idea goes back to the first commandment (Ex. 20:3).

Nothing, no matter how glorious, should ever take God’s place in our hearts. Loving, glorifying, and enjoying him forever is our “chief end.” If we try to substitute an earthly joy like sex for this ultimate, heavenly joy, we’ll pervert and lose both. This may be the reason for the uncanny link between the pew and the bedroom: Only by satisfying ourselves in God and his commandments first can we rejoice in the good things he gives on earth.

Sex, like all pleasures in this life, must be received as a gift, not worshiped as a god.

What this looks like practically is a willingness to pursue things we want (like sex) on God’s terms, not just because we love him and want to obey but also because we know he’s the kind of God who delights in giving us good things (Ps. 16:11) and made them especially for us.

Fire That Burns and Fire That Warms

I’ve heard sex compared to a fire, and the Christian ethic of exclusive monogamy likened to a fireplace. Nothing is better or more homelike than a fire safely confined to a hearth—and nothing worse than a fire that escapes a hearth! Christianity’s much-maligned rules order sexuality toward its intended, life-warming ends of love, union, and childbearing, and prevent us from exploiting one another.

The sexual revolution claimed fire is desirable and good in almost any context, isolated from any purpose, free from any restraint. The sexual burnout and recession we see today are the result of decades of this way of thinking, allowed to blaze unchecked through homes, dorm rooms, modems, movies, and dating apps.

Sex, like all pleasures in this life, must be received as a gift, not worshiped as a god.

Millions of people have aimed too low, worshiped a false god, and so lost even the liberation and pleasure they sought. Millions more are suffering from a system they didn’t create but must now negotiate.

Churchgoers are far from perfect, and some of the worst blazes in my lifetime have been set by pastors and apologists. But the fact is, something about God’s way of doing things works, resulting in dramatically better lives and relationships on average.

As Christians share these findings and make the case for a different kind of sexual revolution, we should remember where we’re aiming: not at better sex or marriages, not at reforming a culture, not even at getting people back in church. We’re aiming at pointing people to the only Love who satisfies. The other types of love have an uncanny way of following.