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So good, so good, so good.
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Welcome back everybody to Religion on the Mind, the podcast. It's about psychology and religion. Really. That's the most succinct way to say it. I am your host, Dr. Dan Koch. I'm a licensed therapist and occasional researcher in the psychology of religion. And I liked the last Study hall episode that I released. That's what we decided to call it after I had recorded it. So I didn't call it that at first, but I think that's a good name. I am in the process of studying for our big licensure exam to become a licensed psychologist. That's the sort of terminal final form of licensure in this very long career path that I decided to embark on in my early 30s, mid-30s and feels good. It's a shit ton of work. It's so much studying. It is hard to describe how much studying it is compared to other things I've done in my life. I won't try. I just will say I like the idea of bringing you guys along for part of the ride. So I'm going to do another one of these and maybe more of them. Last time we talked about some nature nurture type questions in developmental psychology. We're going to stay in developmental today with some other topics. And just a refresher. What I'm doing here is I'm sharing with you really kind of the basic consensus understanding of a handful of issues, the type of thing that I am being required to memorize fresh whether or not I I initially learned it in school, so I'm explaining that. But then I'm going the additional step, which is what makes it appropriate for this podcast, which is I'm looking for ways that that has been studied or correlated or put into conversation with religion, psychology of religion, or religious and spiritual practice, especially if I think it would just be of interest to my listeners based on what I know you guys tend to be interested in. And often that overlaps with what I'm interested in, which is wonderful. So, okay, let's move to our first topic of the day. Let's talk about sex, baby. Let's talk about you and me. That's of Course, let's talk about sex by Salt and Pepa, which, by the way, if we're talking about how I was introduced to sex in my actual autobiography, Salt n Pepa played a not insignificant role with especially the song Shoop, I wanna Shoop, which basically is, you know, I wanna fuck. Anyway, we're gonna talk about sex today. And that's just a silly way for me to get into it. I am like, you know, learning and relearning stuff in all these different areas. And specifically we're talking about, at least at first here, there's a developmental angle on talking. This main kind of research finding that is a part of my study materials is about how sex drive interest activity changes over the lifespan. So there's a big survey done in 2010 of 6,000 adults ages 25 to 85. And basically, most people are interested in sex. But men are more likely than women to report being sexually active. They are more likely to report having a good sex life. They're more likely to report being interested in sex. And the developmental angle that's interesting here is as men and women get older, the gap increases. So on average for women as they age, their interest will dip more than it will for men on average, as they age. Another finding that is, you know, maybe kind of commonsensical, but I don't know if we always think about it, is if you want to know what's the best predictor for whether you will care about sex or have more sex later in life. So if we wanna say, well, how do I know if this person will still be having sex at age 75? The best predictor is how much sex they have earlier in their life, that other factors might come in and change things. But there does seem to be a sort of a fundamental continuity in someone's interest and overall sexual activity that persists and that that factor is stronger. Any sort of secondary or third factor, another one that I think you can probably infer, especially if you get like, I don't know, Instagram reels for supplement companies or popular podcasts hosted by famous men. But for older men, health status is strongly related to sexual activity, right? So in older men, let's say I don't know what the actual cutoff is, but let's just say like 60 and up, something like that. The biggest correlation there, besides how much activity you had when you were younger, is, how are you doing physically? In other words, for men, if they can keep their overall health, then they are likely to keep their overall sex drive and sex life, whereas for women Older women, again, let's say it's 60 and up, something like that. The physical health is not the number one variable. The number one variable, well, there's actually two. So physical health is also important for women, but coming in alongside it at a similar level is marital status or availability of a regular sex partner. So that's interesting if you contrast them. So for men, if they are not married, but they are in good health and they're like in their 60s or something, not being married or not having a partner is not going to stop them at a statistically significant level or not at the same significant level as it will stop women. So men in their 60s who are physically capable of having sex, they're gonna find sex, they're gonna figure it out, even if they're not married. Whereas women, again, it's not everybody. Women are less likely to do that if they have a partner, then they'll have sex with that partner. And if they don't, even if they're healthy, they are less likely to look for sex. So how does this relate to religion? The kind of headline, big findings here are pretty straightforward. None of this will be surprising. Higher religious involvement, okay, the more religious you are, and usually this is measured as religiosity. So it's like, how often do you go to church? How often do you report praying or other sort of religious involved activities? So it's generally a behavioral measure in the choices you make with your time and your life. How many of them are religious? So, and it could also just be like, you know, do you identify as religious? Do you identify as being a member of a particular denomination or church? These kinds of things go into religious involvement. So the more religious involvement you have, this is correlated with lower rates of sex before marriage. It correlates with fewer lifetime sexual partners, it correlates with lower rates of casual sex, and it correlates with earlier date of marriage. That's all pretty straightforward, right? I mean, anybody who has listened to enough of this podcast could have. Could have guessed probably all four of those, right? So that's not the interesting part. What's more interesting and nuanced is what are the mechanisms by which this happens? So a researcher named Mark Regneris, I might be mispronouncing his name, in 2007, put out this big study that he called Forbidden Fruit about religious adolescence and sex. I mean, come on. Great title, right? Selling Itself. And he drew on this big longitudinal study of adolescent health and also did some qualitative interviews. That means he asked questions to get more of a sense of story from respondents. And then the longitudinal study is quantitative. And he was trying to get beyond. Just like religion reduces sex, he wanted to get a little deeper and, you know, see what he could figure out. So here's the main stuff that he found. Religious adolescents do start having sex later on average. So religiosity suppresses the age at which you start having sex on average in a religious community. But when these religious teenagers, whenever they do start having sex, they are significantly less likely to use contraception either consistently or correctly. They are less likely to have talked about contraception with their sexual partner beforehand. And so in a way, you would think that having less sex and having sex later would make, you know, pregnancy less likely. STI is less likely. It can actually, in the larger sample, there can be a kind of an elevated risk of pregnancy and STI because the percentage of sexual encounters, while numerically fewer overall carry with them a higher risk of those things because of contraception. And communication around contraception, again, that's also probably like, pretty familiar to a lot of listeners. If you went to a Christian school, maybe like a Christian high school, and there was, I don't know, some young, I guess not young women, some teenage girls in your school that went away for a year and came back, that kind of a thing, that's maybe a bit more old school and maybe a bit more Catholic tinged in American history. But I've heard a lot of stories like that, and I wasn't paying a lot of attention to it, But I think there was a girl or two like that in my Christian high school, you know, within living memory that that happened to. And you know, that kind of lack of sex education is obviously a part of that. There's also an interesting gender issue here because male focused contraception, which is generally like a condom, especially if you're young, you're not going to have had a vasectomy. You know, a condom is a split second decision. You can go, oh, I need to pick up a condom, and it takes you five minutes to stop at 7, 11, or something like that, if that's what you realize you need to do. Whereas female contraception, the most effective forms are hormonal, it's the pill or it's an iud. And that kind of contraception takes planning. You have to go to the doctor ahead of time and say, you know what? I think I'm ready to potentially become sexually active. And I think most of us understand that within a religious community that conversation is going to be harder to have. Who's going to take you? Is one of your parents going to take you to the doctor? Are you going to tell them why you're going? Is that a conversation you're comfortable having? You can imagine so many scenarios where a young person is just not going to do that. They're not going to go down that road at all. It just seems it's too out of the ordinary, it's too costly. They just don't have really a category for it. Now here's something interesting that I had not read before and that I maybe could have guessed it, but it had never come up exactly like this. So this age gap, right, as you get older, men are more likely to have sex than women, and that partnership variable is less important for men. They'll find other ways kind of a thing. There is an interesting psychological angle here within religion that women's sexual purity, their being a virgin at the time of marriage and not sleeping around, that tends to be more heavily moralized, more heavily monitored, and more tied to identity in high religiosity contexts than it is for men. And this is hard to totally prove. It's always kind of like anecdotal. But like, I just think about. You think of all the pastors and minister ministry leaders who are men who have sexual sin episodes or sexual failure, you know, moral failures around intimacy and relationships, all this kind of PR language that churches use. It's just, it's not that hard for them to like be reinstated. You know, it's like it's seen as a kind of thing that, well, we can just sort of nip that in the bud. We have some policies for that and we rush towards forgiveness. Obviously, I'm painting with a very broad brush here, and there are wonderful examples of churches and denominations and organizations that hold their men to higher standards than that. But that is kind of, you know, and I remember this from growing up in purity culture in the 90s and early 2000s, that there was a kind of a sense of like. In fact, I don't think it's going too far to say that there were seasons of my life, especially around peak puberty, let's call it like 15 to 20 to 20, something like that. Where almost the entirety of my spiritual life that I discussed with other people, with Bible study leaders or youth group leaders, with my fellow Christian friends, with my accountability partners, almost should have given a trigger warning for that term. Almost the entirety of that faith conversation was about sex. It was about masturbation, it was about pornography use. Uh, it was about like, that's if we weren't, you know, like, I was not in any danger of having actual sex at that point for all kinds of reasons. But if you were, then they would be about. That would be. That would jump to the top of the queue. That would be the most pressing thing we could address in our group this week is if this person was, you know, having sex or thinking about having sex with his girlfriend or, you know, something like that. That was so much of what we talked about, but it was talked about in a get up and dust yourself off kind of a way. Get back on the horse. And by the way, I've worked with gay Christian clients multiple times who have some of what's called the side B approach to being a gay Christian, where you accept your identity as queer, but you try not to act on it. A lot of that uses the very similar kind of like, all right, brush yourself off, get back on the horse kind of a thing. And it just didn't like, you would not say. I mean, we did have a term like, oh, he's a man whore. I think more recently people call someone a fuckboy, which is a much funnier term. Better branding. Oh, he's a man whore or whatever. That carried a little bit of derision, but also, let's be honest, a little bit of respect, admiration. That was like this thing we couldn't imagine. It's like being a professional athlete or something. Whereas with women, with girls, teenagers and young women, it was like, well, yeah, you're a whore. It was more of a permanent character stain, more of an identity piece for men and women. That's my anecdotal experience that has also come up with experts on the show, especially the earlier Purity Culture episodes that I recorded with Tina Shermer Sellers and Linda K. Klein about her book Pure. So I think, I don't know the super empirical research on that, but that's my strong sense. And so basically that approach of, well, for men, it's a slip up. And there's also a recognition like, boys will be boys, men will be men. There was this like, in some sense, I think there's some realism to that, that there are biological and hormonal differences and that men are sort of statistically more likely to, like, I don't know, I guess you can't say they're more likely to sleep around, at least not heterosexually, because it takes two to tango in each of those cases. But I don't know, maybe you could point to. This is probably actually the way to think about it. If you point to the Sexual activity levels in gay men versus lesbian women. You're gonna find a discrepancy there. Let me actually look up, see what that discrepancy actually is so that I'm not just making shit up. Okay, good news. I was not off. This is actually one of the more robust and consistently replicated findings in sexuality research. So there is. You know, there might be things about being gay as a man versus being lesbian as a woman that would confound this, that are distinct from being heterosexual as a man or woman. Right. That might. You know, I don't know. Like, I can't. It's not my field, and I don't know how to look under the hood, so to speak. But basically, the findings is like something like two to three times the frequency for the average gay man versus the average lesbian woman. Or actually, those are. That's couples. So for couples, gay couples are having two to three times the sex as lesbian couples. And if you put all three in a list with heterosexual couples, the general order is gay male couples, most sex, heterosexual in the middle, lesbian couples, lowest sex. So that gestures at, you know, some differences, some gender differences there that is related to, you know, what I think was a little bit of realism that, like, boys will be boys, men will be men. You know, Christian adolescents are gonna masturbate. They are gonna do things that can express themselves sexually in a way that women might be less likely to do. But, of course, if you listen to women who write and speak on the harms and details of purity culture, they will also report there's sort of an under focus on the sexuality of women, which I think is tied in with exactly what we're saying here as well. There's sort of like a. It doesn't even get a spotlight put on it because that's how much we want to sort of ignore women's sexuality. Again, speaking in broad brushstrokes here. Okay, now here is something I totally only found in researching this to do this episode. So, you know, we've talked about Religious Residue with Darrell Van Tongren, who will be back on the show soon to do some existentialism and Christianity stuff with me. Very excited about that. Darrell's been on a number of times, and he's talked about his concept at least once, maybe two or three times on the pod of religious residue that even when people leave Christianity, for instance, there are parts that stick with them. And over time, you kind of see some of that residue fade away. But also, certain things can stick around indefinitely, even when you don't have the same beliefs anymore, or the same attendance patterns, or the same self identification as a member of the religious group even when that changes. And so putting that together with research from Jennings and colleagues is that actually there can be a psychological residue of that early religious sexual formation and that the attitudes and the meaning making architecture around sexuality. So what is sex? What's it for? What's it mean when I have sex? What are the okay kinds of sex? What are the not okay kinds of sex? What is the role of sex in a good and well lived life? That even when people leave religion, that stuff is less likely to change than other things. And so you can kind of keep this cognitive and emotional understanding set of patterns and habits that can persist even after religious identification ends. And so you can, for instance, still be ashamed of sexual acts that you no longer actually think are shameful or wrong. And so I think what we could do here in this conversation is we could say that's another layer that might be a multiplier on what we've already talked about and that will also then widen the gap between men and women. This would affect men and women both in a kind of a suppressing type of a way as well as a shame increasing kind of a way. But if what we're saying about adolescence is true, that there is a disparity in the seriousness with which that is treated among young men and young women. And I think there's evidence in leadership, men in leadership as well, and women in leadership. Like if the church worship pastor who's a woman, it has an affair. I'd love to see numbers on this. But my sense is it's just much less likely that she will be reinstated in the same amount of time as a man would be in the exact same position. Right. So that this is another layer sort of pointing in the same direction of widening that gender gap with age, even because of that residue factor that it persists through time. I think that's really, really interesting. But now, after all this, you know, negative Nancy talk, there's also, there are multiple studies that have a really interesting finding that might be kind of counterintuitive here, which is that among married couples, religiously active couples report higher sexual satisfaction than non religious married couples. And so if you had been thinking, and a lot of people do think this, that, oh, there's something about religion that leads to just like a worse sex life overall. Obviously in certain cases that is true, but it's not true, at least around the quality and satisfaction of married sex. And there are some ideas that Researchers have proposed to like as possible mechanisms for what makes the difference. So the first is that when people are religious, they tend to see investment in their marriage as a religious commitment. I mean, just think about wedding vows. You know, so Jeffrey and I used traditional wedding vows. So, like, here before God and all these others, like, I take you in sickness and health and for richer, for poorer. Right. Like all the metaphors about Christ and the church, the way that, you know, they will often emphasize the wedding miracle at Cana, you know, Jesus first miracle was at a wedding. Like, this is something that God loves. This is something that God blesses. And so committing to that relationship, investing in it is a fundamental part of a religious person, of a practicing Christian's marriage in maybe most cases. And sex is not the only way to invest in a relationship. But speaking of someone who's been married for 16 years, it's toward the top of the list. When sex is going well, a lot of other things are going well. When sex is going poorly, a lot of other things tend to go poorly. And it's not rocket science to put those two and two together. So that's the first one. Another one is that a religious couple, a couple who are both, you know, religiously involved, they probably think about sex in similar ways because sex does tend to have, like religions tend to have, rather solid, like, well formed, well thought out, you know, a total system way of thinking about sex. And if two people are similarly religious, they will probably share that, which means they're less likely to have, like, some deep conflict about what this is supposed to mean and what it's supposed to do in our relationship kind of a thing. And the third mechanism that's been offered is that there is community accountability structures that support marriage. And this seems definitely true to me because again, there is a sense, like in almost any church, conservative, liberal, pick your church, someone comes to you, they come to a pastor, they come to a fellow congregant, someone in their small group, someone that they like talking to in the coffee hour, or ideally someone that they have a deeper friendship with. And they say, hey, I'm struggling in my marriage. Well, you know, unless there is, like, abuse happening or some kind of big red flag, generally speaking, a Christian is going to support another Christian in keeping their marriage going. And that support could take any number of forms that any individual might need. Maybe it's like, hey, let's get some group date nights going or some double dates. Or it might be like, here's a book that that draws on scripture that you could Both read, you know, that both members of the couple would have a similar buy in, right to thinking, oh, this is likely to help us. So that. And then also just, you know, spiritual leadership, encouraging it. You know, a lot of churches will have marriage conferences or workshops or adult Sunday school classes or series things like this that will have for the statistically average couple, a benefit. It's going to help keep their marriage more intact and more healthy. And that in turn would lead to better sex. Because I think it's also pretty well understood by people who've been married long enough that when you feel relationally close to your spouse, that changes the character of sex. It makes the sex more meaningful. And I would say something like it increases the meaningfulness and it increases sort of the time that the afterglow of a good sexual experience loving relationship lasts longer when you're more locked in together. On what that meant. I've said that in these episodes I also want to kind of gesture at more upcoming, not so well established, more fringy or interesting angles. And there are a few things in the research. So in the last 10 years or so, the purity culture literature has really matured. I've talked about this before, but it's one of the things that I wish I had been aware of when I was developing the spiritual abuse scale because I think that there is like a particular kind of purity culture, sexuality tinged form of spiritual abuse that is not reducible to sort of gender discrimination which did show up on the scale and is a part of the screener. So if I ever redo it, I'll probably look into the purity culture and similar literature to see if I can kind of get some of that into a 2.0 or whatever version of the scale. So there's, you know, a lot of work here. There is sort of religious sexual harm has emerged as a category of study in a kind of a fresh way. There's, you know, there's a lot of work on shame, a lot of work on embodiment, and a lot of work on specifically queer sexuality and religious contexts and how purity culture shows up differently. There maybe combined with some of the other shortfalls and problems that are inherent with religion. There's also research around something that I'm very familiar with as a clinician, which is that if you are religious and you're queer, there are just different forms of pressure that sort of overlap and multiply on each other. And it just, it just compounds and heightens the psychological cost of having that sexual minority status, which of course you can experience. In the secular sort of general culture. But it just has generally, unless you are at like a rainbow flag church, like where I take the boys, unless you're somewhere like that. It's this additional element. And so many of my clients, you know, this is a part of their story, a huge part of their story. So that idea of the religious residue and the continuity of the way that our thinking and our emotions, our affective selves which relate directly to our bodies, including our sexual systems and organs, that residue of shame of here's what's okay sex, here's what's not okay sex that can persist even when a person has gone, no, I think I'm like, I'm gay, I'm not going to not be gay, but might find like, why do I still have these feelings and thoughts and this shame and whatever. Why do I have this tumult? Well, that finding earlier about the way that we form that cognitive and affective meaning making schema around sex, that can be even more central and prevalent for someone whose orientation is queer because of that natural antipathy with their religious group. And then finally there's kind of a gap in the literature around what's going on with older religious couples and that gender gap in sexual activity and sexual interest. It's an area that psychology of religion researchers typically don't study. So maybe that is something that I could get into at some point. I am definitely really interested in learning more about sexuality and how it intersects with religion and psychology because I have just found anecdotally that so many of my clients who were raised in Christian context, and I would say this has also been my experience, the effects of purity, culture and that standard sexual ethic, they really do persist. And so even someone who's coming to work with me primarily on stuff that is not about their sex life, religious change, and all the various downstream effects of that vocationally, relationally, self concept, identity, meaning, struggling with addictive patterns, whatever. Often when we get into it, oh, there's a lot of room for growth in that marriage, sex life, for instance. And I know, speaking personally, that when I think about how long it took me to start thinking seriously about those questions, I'm surprised at how long it took. And I think that again, that's anecdotal, that's just me. But I think it's speaking to that concept of residue that those formations around sex, possibly because sex is so central to human psychology. And my argument for that is an evolutionary argument, that in the actual history of human evolution or evolution toward Homo sapiens Reproduction. Reproduction is the thing you get the genes if you reproduce. So everything, so much of natural selection is geared toward reproduction. And I just think we find kind of a. Yeah, sex is really central to us. It just kind of touches on these. No pun intended, it utilizes. And there's an interplay in, like, the sort of the deepest parts of ourselves. Who am I? What do I want? And the feelings of sexual arousal, release, sexual joining, coupling, it's just so strong. That stuff is just really strong for most people. And so, yeah, this has been really interesting. Just kind of thinking aloud here. I think that this finding about religious residue specifically applying to our cognitive and emotional schemas around sex, that that persists even when our beliefs change about our faith or whatever, even if our religious involvement ceases or declines or shifts. That. That stuff is stubborn. It's really stubborn. And my guess, I think that's a good place to end, because my guess is a lot of you guys can relate to that. I certainly relate to that. So. Okay. Thus concludes our second study hall episode. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I enjoyed making it. So I think I'll do some more of these. It's also helpful for me, as I said last time, to encode some of this information better. Helps me study more effectively and learn more effectively around the particular areas of psychology that I do want to be kind of maximizing my growth in. So thanks, guys. See you next week. It.