Real Marriage_ The Truth About Sex, Friendship, and Life Together - Mark Driscoll [134]
They began with a summary of past research on the frequency of sex by married couples in the United States and investigated how religion mediates this outcome. Because this arena of research is relatively outdated, they then presented findings from the 2008 nationally representative General Social Survey (GSS).1 Next, they explored masturbation frequency in the United States, particularly through the lens of religious affiliation. Because of the private nature of this topic, few studies have focused on masturbation frequency. Therefore they present findings from the 1992 National Health and Social Life Survey.2
What About Christian Couples?
Almost no studies have looked at the rates of marital sexual frequency by religious affiliation. And if they have been done, they are relatively outdated. They still provide, however, important glimpses in how religion affects sex frequency. Laumann et al. (1994) noted that religious individuals were less likely to think about sex, masturbate, have oral or anal sex, or have multiple partners.3 Evangelical Protestant adults reported the highest frequency of sex, the highest levels of satisfaction with sex, and the lowest frequency of oral and anal sex. Moreover, they were more likely to have had only one sex partner in the last year. The study suggested that religion can and does continue to influence people’s sexual lives well into adulthood and marriage.4 Christopher and Sprecher (2000) found that “social and background characteristics, such as race, social status, and religion, were generally unrelated to marital sexual frequency, with the exception of a few modest associations, such as a Catholic background being associated with a lower frequency.”5 The most recent work (2010) is from Michael McFarland, Jeremy Uecker, and Mark Regnerus; they analyzed religion and sex among older U.S. adults aged fifty-seven to eighty-five.6
McFarland et al. interpreted their findings for us:
The majority of married respondents had engaged in sexual activity at least once in the last year, and they also indicated elevated levels of sexual satisfaction. Percentage breakdowns of sexual frequency (not shown) indicated that roughly 30% of married respondents did not have sex in the last year, 25% had sex once per month or less, and 24% had sex more than once per month. Finally, over 20% of respondents aged 57–85 indicated that they engaged in sexual intercourse once per week or more.7
How does religion play a role in how often unmarried people have sex? McFarland noted,
First, among both men and women, those indicating low and moderate levels of attendance and integration were more likely to have had sex within the last year than those with high levels of religiosity. Second, the percentage of unmarried men that had sex in the last year was higher among men regardless of religiosity. A higher percentage of men that had high religious attendance or strongly agreed that they carry their religious beliefs into their everyday lives had sex in the last year than did women indicating the lowest levels of religious attendance and integration . . . religion shared an inverse relationship with sex in the last year, and this relationship was stronger among women.8
The authors concluded that religion “is largely unrelated with sexual frequency and satisfaction, although religious integration in daily life shares a weak, but positive, association with pleasure from sex.”9 For unmarried adults, religious integration has a negative association with having had sex in the last year among women, but not men. The take-home point is that religious affiliation seemed to better predict who would and would not have extramarital sex, rather than sexual frequency and satisfaction among married couples.
Recent Data on Marital Sex Frequency
On the basis of the Docent researchers’ survey of the literature on this topic, it appears that recent work is more difficult to find and even more difficult in terms