Have Views of Marital Fidelity Changed Over Time?

Does shifting religious affiliations lead to changing views of adultery?

This post has been unlocked through a generous grant from the Lilly Endowment for the Association of Religion Data Archives (ARDA). The graphs you see here use data that is publicly available for download and analysis through link(s) provided in the text below.

---

The command to stay faithful to one’s marital partner is found in many major religious traditions. The Quran states, “Do not go near adultery. It is truly a shameful deed and an evil way” (17:32). One of the Ten Commandments of the Hebrew Bible is clear on this issue, “You shall not commit adultery” (Exodus 20:14). Hinduism places a great deal of emphasis on the concept of ‘marital fidelity.’ The Third Precept in Buddhism commands followers to avoid “sexual misconduct,” which is almost always understood to mean that, among other things, followers should remain faithful to their marriage partner. Sikhism also condemns adultery, as does Taoism. The point should be clear: It’s hard to find a faith tradition that doesn’t strongly discourage an individual from engaging in sexual relations with someone who isn’t their marital partner.

Yet, a lot has changed around the issue of sex in the United States in the last fifty years. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Free Love movement gathered steam with its emphasis on reinventing sexual ethics with thought leaders arguing that the government had become much too involved in matters of sexuality, birth control, and marriage. Observers of the movement have argued that the Free Love movement may have planted the seeds of secularization that really began to accelerate in the early 1990s.

But did this huge cultural movement actually result in noticeable changes in the sexual ethics of Americans in the area of marital infidelity? Since 1973, the General Social Survey has been asking:

“What is your opinion about a married person having sexual relations with someone other than the marriage partner--is it always wrong, almost always wrong, wrong only sometimes, or not wrong at all?”

Let’s begin by just tracing the responses to that question over the entire course of the dataset.

There’s definitely no dramatic swings in public opinion regarding this question in the General Social Survey. But there has been some modest movement in the trend lines that is worth pondering. For instance, in 1973, about 70% of Americans believed that sex with someone other than the marriage partner was “always” wrong. The share slowly crept up over the decades and it reached its apex around 2010, when over 80% of folks chose this option. However, that position has become slightly less popular over time and in the last couple of surveys has pegged it around 70%. In other words, the same level it was fifty years earlier.

Given that between 70% and 80% of folks believed that marital infidelity was always wrong, the other three response options have never really been that popular. These lines are almost straight from the early 1970s through 2010. The most noticeable shift is the “sometimes wrong” line which started at 11% in 1973 and declined to about 5% in the early 2000s. But that has rebounded and is now back to where it started. The proportion of Americans who believe that infidelity is “not wrong” has never been that large - averaging around 2% of the survey in many years.

But it does look like there’s been quite a bit of movement in the data since 2010. To zero in on this, I put together a simple bar graph of the responses to this survey question in both 2010 and 2022.

I think the story here is pretty straightforward. The share of Americans who believe that it’s always wrong for a person to have sexual relations with someone other than their marriage partner has declined from 79% in 2010 to 69% in 2022. But, remember, that’s about the same percentage it was way back in 1972. Where did those 10 percentage points end up? Well, they evenly distributed between “almost always wrong” (12% to 17%) and “sometimes wrong” (6% to 11%). Again, the share of adults who have no issue at all with infidelity is incredibly marginal - just 3% in the 2022 data. There’s just no evidence in this data that a lot of Americans hold a Free Love approach to this topic.

To this point, I haven’t explicitly injected religion into the discussion. So let me show you the distribution of responses to the question in six different religious traditions using the RELTRAD scheme. This is the survey data from the last two years that the GSS was collected (2021 and 2022).

It should come as little surprise that evangelicals were the most likely to say that sexual relations with someone other than the marriage partner is always wrong, nearly nine in ten chose this option in the GSS. The group closest to evangelicals was Black Protestants - 80% of them said it was “always” wrong. The other two Christian traditions in this graph (Mainline Protestants and Catholics) look very similar in the distribution of their responses with about 70% believing that marital infidelity is always wrong.

What about the non-religious - do they hold to a different sexual ethic? I think it’s fair to say that they do based on this data. Less than a majority (47%) say that a married person having sex with someone other than their spouse is always wrong. That’s at least twenty points lower than Christian groups. About 6% of the nones say that there’s nothing wrong with marital infidelity - that’s double the national average and another 20% report that it’s only “sometimes wrong” which is also about double the rate found in the general population.

But has there been a major shift in sexual ethics among these six groups over the last dozen years? This is the share of each tradition that said infidelity was always wrong in 2010 compared to 2022.

For evangelicals, if there’s been any movement in their views it is not substantively large. About 90% of evangelicals condemned marital infidelity in 2010 and 2022. But there has been some really noticeable movement among other religious groups, though. For instance, the “always wrong” share of the mainline has dropped from 77% in 2010 to just 69% in 2022. For Black Protestants, the drop is five percentage points and for Catholics it’s even larger at nine percentage points (from 82% to 73%).

But the biggest shift is among those who report no religious affiliation. In 2010, nearly seven in ten nones believed that sexual activity with someone other than your marriage partner was always wrong. In the 2022 data, that had dropped to just 54%. That’s pretty compelling evidence that the non-religious have moved pretty significantly away from traditional sexual ethics in the last decade or so. There’s been erosion among some Christian groups, too - but it’s much more pronounced among the non-religious.

But there’s another factor looming in this discussion that I haven’t entertained yet - age. It’s fair to say that there’s been some big generational shifts in American society related to these topics. Views of same-sex marriage differ significantly among younger American compared to older ones. We know that the marriage rate has declined dramatically among Millennials compared to Boomers, and that fertility rates have dropped significantly among young adults in the last several decades. So, that got me wondering if there have been changes in views of marital infidelity at the birth cohort level.

This graph tells an incredibly compelling story about how sexual ethics has changed among birth cohorts over the last five decades. The top row are folks born in the 1940s and 1950s. It’s fair to say that if those generations embraced a Free Love ethic when they were in early adulthood, they have jettisoned that belief as they have aged. For instance, among people born in the early 1950s, only two-thirds believed that marital infidelity was always wrong in the 1970s. Today, it’s about 80%. Older folks have embraced a more conservative sexual ethic as they have aged.

The middle row is people born in the 1960s and 1970s. There’s not been a lot of changes in their opinion over time. However, those trend lines begin to slightly turn down among people born between 1975 and 1979. That downward trend becomes incredibly apparent when looking at the youngest birth cohorts in the data. Among Millennials their view of marital infidelity has changed dramatically over time. For instance, among people born in the late 1980s, nearly 90% believed that sex with a non-marriage partner was always wrong in 2008. In the most recent data that was thirty points lower. Older folks have become more traditional as they have aged. Younger people have moved in the opposite direction.

But let’s combine age and religion for one final bit of analysis.

I must admit that I was a bit surprised at how little age seemed to matter once religious tradition was added to the analysis. For instance, among evangelicals there’s no huge age divide – huge numbers of young and old believe marital infidelity is always wrong and that hasn’t changed much since 2010. For the mainline there’s been a clear drop off, but that’s true among those both under and over the age of 40. Again, not a huge generational divide. That’s true of Catholics too. In 2022, about 73% of Catholics under 40 think it’s “always wrong” to have sex with a non-marriage partner. It’s 73% of Catholics who are over the age of 40, too.

There are only two groups where there’s a large age difference in responses. Among those of other faith groups (which consists of a lot of disparate groups like Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and Wiccans), older folks are much more likely to hold to a traditional sexual ethic. In fact, the gap has widened in 2022. Now 68% of those over the age of 40 think sex outside marriage is always wrong compared to 45% of those under the age of 40. Among the nones, there’s a gap (51% of those under the age of 40 compared to 59% of the nones who are at least 40 years old), but it’s a bit smaller.

Looking broadly, I don’t know if it’s fair to say that Americans, as a whole, have a different view of the sanctity of marriage today than they did back in the 1970s. But the huge shifts in birth cohorts suggest that this will change in the years to come. Younger people have clearly shifted to a more permissive view over the last decade or so. There’s always the possibility that their views will become more conservative as they age, which was the case with the Baby Boomers, but that’s impossible to predict based on this data.

Code for this post can be found here.