Soul Mates is a book about people like David Hernandez, a New Yorker of Puerto Rican descent.  Twenty years ago David was dealing drugs in Spanish Harlem.  After a personal tragedy, he found solace at a Pentecostal Church and turned his life around.  Today he’s a happily married father and, in one of life’s great ironies, a cop with the NYPD.  He credits his turn-around to his faith and participation in his church’s ministries.

Much attention has been paid in recent years to the state of the family, especially among African Americans and Latinos.  Countless academics and pundits have pointed to a family crisis, characterized by out-of-wedlock childbearing, fall marriage rates, and divorce.  Almost all of these commentators ignore the powerful role that organized religion plays in sustaining family life in minority communities across America.

Soul Mates is the first book to chronicle the vital role that churches are playing in contemporary America among Black and Latino families.  Rather than focusing on what’s wrong with American families, we shine a spotlight on the many happy couples that are benefiting  from their regular participation in a spiritual community.  Our book shows that couples who attend religious services regularly—denomination doesn’t matter—are much more likely to enjoy strong relationships.

Chapter by chapter, we study nonmarital childbearing, marriage, relationship quality, and divorce.  The past few decades have seen a powerful retreat from marriage, and it’s been strongest among Blacks and Latinos.  Both are much more likely than white Americans to have children prior to marriage.  African Americans also have lower marriage rates and higher divorce rates.  But we find that organized religion is a bulwark against the social and economic currents that buffet American families.  Church attendance reduces the likelihood of having children before marriage.  People who attend regularly have happier relationships, whether or not they’re married.  Religious participation also makes marriage more likely in the first place.  And men of color who attend church services regularly are less likely to run afoul of the law and more likely to succeed in the workforce.

Religion is not a panacea.  Curiously, regular church attendance reduces white divorce rates but has no impact on Black and Latino marital stability.  And of course religion cannot make up for the profound economic challenges that have undermined intimate relationships in contemporary America. Nor does religion completely offset the seismic shift in norms surrounding marriage and relationships.  Indeed, Soul Mates shows that structural factors, like income and education, and cultural forces, including attitudes toward marriage and single parenting, both contribute to the retreat from marriage.

One of the strengths of our book is the wealth of evidence we bring to the table.  Soul Mates is based on the analysis of six national data sets, scores of interviews and focus groups with clergy and parishioners, and a year of ethnographic fieldwork.  The national data allow us to identify patterns and trends, while the interviews and focus groups tell the stories of individual Latinos and African Americans.

Soul Mates introduces us to many people like David Hernandez.  We learn how religion works (and, occasionally, doesn’t work) in their lives to support stable and happy relationships.  The book concludes with a discussion of what else religion—and society more generally—could be doing to help men and women forge strong unions in an era of family change.