Religion and premarital sex

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/brainiac/2013/02/religion_and_pr.html

Posted by Kevin Hartnett February 15, 2013 11:53 AM

Water rolls down hill. Sex happens. But a recent study in the American Sociological Review reveals that even in this globalized, secular age, the religion you belong to still has major effects on how likely you are to have taken a turn in bed before marriage.

The paper, “Religion and Sexual Behaviors,” was written by Amy Adamczyk and Brittany Hayes of the City University of New York. They were particularly interested in determining whether Muslims were less likely to have engaged in premarital sex than adherents of other major religions.

To answer that question the sociologists examined survey data of 418,000 people in developing countries. They found that, true to Islam’s conservative reputation, Muslims were the least likely of all major religious groups to have had sex before marriage:


Sex is a notoriously difficult subject to study. There are all sorts of reasons people dissemble about what they do, and you can imagine those incentives are even stronger when you’re a woman in a conservative Muslim household being asked whether you had sex before marrying your husband. Aware of these challenges, the researchers ran several statistical tests to assess respondents’ truthfulness. They found that Muslims and Hindus were actually the least likely of all religious groups to fib about premarital sex. This could suggest that Muslims and Hindus have fewer transgressions to lie about; or it could mean that Muslims and Hindus are better dissemblers given the heightened consequences around premarital sex in those cultures.

more at link