Research at the University of Pennsylvania has found that urban women who attend church frequently substantially increase their chances of getting married. W. Bradford Wilcox, author of the study titled “Then Comes Marriage? Religion, Race, and Marriage in Urban America,” said, “This report shows that religious institutions, especially black churches, are bulwarks of marriage in urban communities where the institution of marriage is endangered.”
Wilcox, who is a fellow at the university’s Center for Research on Religion and Urban Civil Society, explained, “Churches promote the values and virtues that make for good marriages, and they also provide young people with marriage role models. Indeed, religious attendance is about as important as socioeconomic factors such as income in predicting marriage among urban parents.”
Among Wilcox’s findings: urban unwed mothers who attend church several times a month or more are 100 percent more likely to be married at the time of their child’s birth than mothers who do not attend church frequently; urban mothers who have a non-marital birth are 90 percent more likely to marry within a year of that birth if they attend church frequently, compared to urban mothers who do not attend church frequently; and the effects of religious attendance are particularly strong for African-American women.
But the study also found that church attendance does not ensure marriage.
Explained Wilcox, “One of the more surprising findings is that one-third of all unwed urban mothers are frequent churchgoers. This means that many unmarried mothers are more integrated into the social fabric of their communities than we once thought.”
(EP)
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