Religion Affects Whether US Women Marry Early, Without Cohabiting or Having a Nonmarital Birth First

ABSTRACT In recent US cohorts, premarital sex is ubiquitous, and cohabitation typically precedes marriage. Yet many religions discourage premarital sex, which implies disapproval of cohabitation or premarital birth. Using a discrete‐time event history, we assess how religious denomination, frequency of religious service attendance, and a rich set of controls affect which family‐forming transition women experienced first and how early. Marriage, cohabitation, and nonunion births are competing hazards to be the first family‐forming event. We use the 1997 to 2019–20 waves of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Only 14% of this cohort, born 1980–84, married as their first family‐forming transition. Women were more likely to marry as their first event if they attended religious services more frequently or belonged to a conservative denomination. These factors also discourage or delay premarital sex, but the vast majority of even religious and religiously conservative women have sex before marriage.