ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Saturday, August 31, 1996 TAG: 9609040001
SECTION: RELIGION PAGE: B-9 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID BRIGGS ASSOCIATED PRESS
Strong religious teachings against premarital intercourse - and the will to wait - do not lead to an abnormal sex life after marriage, according to one study of members of the Mormon Church.
Consistent with church policy, three-quarters of Mormon respondents in a national study of families said that premarital sex is unacceptable, compared with about half of respondents from mainline Christian denominations holding that view.
However, once they were married, there were no significant differences in the frequency of sex or conflicts about sex among members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints compared with members of other religious groups.
``Single LDS people do differ sexually from those of other religious groups, but strong premarital proscriptions do not appear to substantially affect sexual adjustment and behavior in LDS marriages,'' according to researchers Thomas B. Holman and John R. Harding of Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah.
Holman and Harding report their findings in the September issue of the journal, the Review of Religious Research. The study is based on an analysis of the National Survey of Families and Households, a 1988 federal government-funded project that included interviews from a national probability sample of 13,017 people.
Based on interpretations of the Bible and the Book of Mormon, the church teaches that any sexual intimacy outside of marriage is a serious sin, but that within marriage, sexuality ``contains the most exquisite and exalted physical, emotional and spiritual feelings associated with the word love.''
Previous studies of Mormons have indicated they are substantially less likely to engage in premarital sex, and the results of the national family survey support those findings.
In the family survey, 74 percent of Mormon respondents disagreed with the statement that premarital sex is acceptable. Only 55 percent of conservative Protestants and 47 percent of Catholics disagreed with the statement.
And only 8 percent of Mormons said they had lived with a member of the opposite sex before marriage, compared with 20 percent of conservative Protestants and 45 percent of people with no religious affiliation who reported living together without being married.
The question that interested researchers is whether forgoing sexual experience before marriage would lead to problems after marriage. Holman and Harding said a number of writers have suggested that strict premarital sexual abstinence standards could lead to sexual maladjustment, ranging from infrequent sex after marriage to unusually high levels of sex, to ``make up for lost time.''
However, Mormons were found to have fairly typical married sex lives.
Married Mormons reported having sex an average of 7.43 times a month, compared to 7.72 times a month for conservative Protestants and 6.64 times for Catholics.
On average, there was no statistical difference in the frequency of disagreements about sex among Mormons compared with married persons from other religious groups.
In related findings in their study, Holman and Harding said that people claiming no religious affiliations had the most sex and also the most conflicts about sex. Jewish and liberal Protestant respondents reported the lowest frequency of married sex and the highest percentage of married persons having no sex at all in the past year.
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