W. Bradford Wilcox and Nicholas H. Wolfinger, Soul Mates: Religion, Sex, Love, and Marriage among African Americans and Latinos, Oxford University Press, 2016, 248 pp., $27.95.
Soul Mates, by academic sociologists W. Bradford Wilcox and Nicholas H. Wolfinger, has one central message: Religious blacks and Hispanics lead more upright, family-oriented lives than their irreligious peers. The authors use an impressive array of statistics, along with personal interview data, to conclude that religion is associated with less violence, criminality, infidelity, and idleness, and with more civility, hard work, honesty, and monogamy.
This is no doubt true, and holds for whites as well. However, irreligious whites are almost always better citizens by these measures than religious blacks and Hispanics, and the associations the authors find between religion and morality are sometimes small.
For example, according to a 2006 study (see Table 1 below), 20 percent of non-churchgoing African-American men aged 18 to 60 reported being in an adulterous relationship, while only 15 percent of more religious black men did.
For black women, 26 percent of non-churchgoers and 20 percent of churchgoers reported marital infidelity. Still, it is striking to learn that one in five black women who regularly sit in the pews admits to having an extramarital affair. For white churchgoers, the same study found only five percent of men and seven percent of women admitting they were unfaithful. The rates for secular whites–seven percent for men and 10 percent for women–are still lower than for non-white churchgoers. The authors say little about the racial differences, focusing instead on the conclusion that “for all three groups, regular church attendance makes infidelity less likely.”
Other data show even greater racial disparities. As is shown in Table 2 below, black men are 249 percent more likely to father a child out of wedlock than white men, and are still 142 percent more likely even after the authors “adjust for economic differences.”
The authors also report a negative correlation between church attendance and having an illegitimate child (see Table 3). Here we find that the group most likely to have out-of-wedlock births–black men–are second-to-last in terms of the how much churchgoing relates to them waiting until they are married. White women who attend church frequently reduce their odds of having an illegitimate child by 60 percent, but churchgoing black men decrease their odds by only 23 percent.
These persistent disparities could be seen as undercutting the author’ thesis about the importance of churchgoing, since whites attend church less often then blacks (see Table 4).
White men, who have the lowest rate of marital infidelity, also have the lowest rate of church attendance (21 percent), while black women, who report the highest rates of infidelity, have the highest attendance rate (42 percent). If one ignored race entirely, it would be logical to conclude that churchgoing is associated with less family-oriented lives!
Most of the data in this book show that whites are more likely than blacks or Hispanics to lead productive, family-oriented lives.
Such was the case in a study of “idleness” among young men, i.e. those who are neither working nor in school (see Table 5). A survey of young men aged 22-26 found that while church attendance corresponded to lower rates of idleness across the board, the percentage of non-churchgoing whites who are “idle” is still lower than the percent of churchgoing “idle” blacks. Interestingly, the rates for Hispanics are very close to those for whites.
