The Influence of Religion on Attitudes toward Nonmarital Sexuality: A Preliminary Assessment of Reference Group Theory

Prior research on the relationship between religion and/or religiosity and nonmarital sexuality (i.e., premarital, extramarital, and homosexual relations) has found an inverse relationship with enough consistency to qualify as an empirical generalization. However, while parsimonious, such a generalization is overly simplistic. Moreover, the research findings on which this generalization is based were biased by specification errors due to the employment of a theoretically inappropriate functional form. In this paper, we propose models, derived from reference group theory, which stress an interactive influence of both religion and religiosity on sexual attitudes, rather than the simple bivariate linear effects common in earlier studies. These models were assessed with data from the NORC General Social Surveys. Our findings, obtained from logistic regression analyses, support our theoretical models: The effects of religiosity on nonmarital sexuality vary predictably by religious affiliation.