Religiousness and Infidelity: Attendance, but not Faith and Prayer, Predict Marital Fidelity:
High religiousness has been consistently linked with a decreased likelihood of past infidelity but has been solely defined by religious service attendance, a limited assessment of a complex facet of life. The current study developed nine religiousness subscales using items from the 1998 General Social Survey to more fully explore the association between religiousness and infidelity. Interestingly, logistic regressions using currently married participants (N = 1,439) demonstrated that attendance, but not faith, nearness to God, prayer, and other religious attributes, was related to infidelity. Exploratory analyses also found that individuals with high religious importance but low attendance were more likely to have had an affair and weak evidence that marital happiness moderated the association between religiousness and infidelity.
I wouldn’t put that much weight on one study…but this speaks to the functional significance of religious phenomena. Secularists often make the critique that great evil has been acted upon in the name of religion, but the flip side of this is that the same psychological and social parameters which result in group conformity which generates hostility toward perceived outgroups also can serve as critical buffers for those within the circle of the ingroup. The fact that institutional religion is declining as a source of social cohesion and identification, but supernatural beliefs far less so, suggests that anomie and anti-social behavior may increase….
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