Marriage, Worship, and Sexuality

• Post by: Patrick F. Fagan
• January 24, 2016

Research has demonstrated the relationship between marriage and economic well-being, and even of the economic benefits of marrying younger than most in the U.S. find appropriate. We also find a fundamental relationship between marriage, chastity, and the worship of God—of the Judeo-Christian way of handling our sexual power—and how this plays out in marriage and family life and from there shapes the ability of American society to perform its major tasks.[1] Or, in other words: Marriage impacts income (or poverty).Chastity impacts marriage.Worship impacts chastity. Let us first first look at the correlation between family structure and education from the AddHealth Survey. Teenagers from always-intact, married families thrive significantly better than others in Math and English (see Figure 1). And from the same survey the work of Dr. Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas at Austin shows the power of worship in the performance of inner-city poor children. (Figure 1) For these children, weekly worship delivers school performance that is the equivalent of moving into a middle-class neighborhood, with all that better schools have to offer. Nothing in public policy comes close in yielding returns like these in education. So it is no surprise then that those who receive mostly A’s are more frequently children from intact married families that worship God weekly (see Figure 2). (Figure 2) If you were a betting man on whom would you bet to have the highest income 10 years from now? Both common sense and myriad social science studies tell us that the better you do in school, the more you earn later when you join the workforce, and thus the more productive you are. Marriage also increases productivity. Controlling for all relevant factors, men’s productivity increases about 27% when they marry (see Figure 3)[2]. And the most productive segment of the workforce is “married men with three children or more.” (Figure 3)