Key Takeaways

• Fr. Matt DeGance and Communio founder J.P. De Gance appeared on Fox News Radio’s Lighthouse Faith podcast to discuss new Communio research showing a definitive correlation between pre-marital chastity and a healthy marriage.

• More young adults are attending church and getting married at higher rates than ever before — a trend that runs counter to the dominant cultural narrative about faith and relationships in decline.

• The episode centers on a truth as old as Scripture: “It is not good for the man to be alone.” (Genesis 2:18) God designed human beings for covenant relationship, and the Church is uniquely positioned to help people get there.

• Communio’s research shows that the choices couples make before marriage, including sexual behavior, significantly shape the health and stability of their marriages afterward.

• For churches, this data is both a challenge and an opportunity: the conversation about chastity doesn’t have to be framed as restriction. It can be framed as preparation for the kind of marriage people actually want.

The Story: A Fox News Radio Conversation That Every Pastor Should Hear

On June 7, 2026, Fox News Radio’s Lighthouse Faith podcast — one of the most widely listened-to faith-focused audio programs in the country — featured a tag-team interview with two voices who bring both the theological and the empirical dimensions of this conversation together.

Fr. Matt DeGance, a Catholic priest, and J.P. De Gance, founder and president of Communio, joined host Lauren Green to address a question the culture has been asking for years, often without arriving at a satisfying answer: Is chastity before marriage actually the solution to healthy relationships?

Their answer, grounded in Communio’s research and pastoral experience, is clear: yes. And the data behind that answer is more robust than most people realize.

The full episode is available now on Fox News Radio and wherever you listen to podcasts.

► Listen to the full Lighthouse Faith episode → radio.foxnews.com

The Core Finding: What Happens Before the Wedding Shapes What Happens After It

The conversation on Lighthouse Faith is built on a foundation of research that Communio has developed over years of studying marriage, faith, and family across tens of thousands of churchgoers nationwide.

The finding is direct: there is a definitive correlation between pre-marital chastity and a healthy marriage. Couples who practice chastity before marriage enter that marriage with a different relational foundation — one built on communication, commitment, and a shared vision of the relationship rather than on physical intimacy that often substitutes for the deeper work of knowing and being known.

This is not simply a theological position. It is an empirical one. Research consistently shows that couples who cohabit before marriage, who have multiple sexual partners prior to marriage, or who begin their sexual relationship before establishing a committed covenant are statistically more likely to experience lower marital satisfaction, higher conflict, and greater risk of divorce. The choices made before the wedding shape the patterns, expectations, and relational habits that define the marriage itself.

J.P. De Gance has noted in prior interviews that 70 to 80% of divorces are not high-conflict. They are the slow accumulation of disconnection, unmet expectations, and relational habits that were never formed well in the first place. Chastity, in this context, is not primarily about avoiding sin. It is about building the kind of relational depth that makes a marriage capable of weathering everything that comes after.

The Counterintuitive Angle: Chastity Isn’t About Restriction. It’s About Preparation.

Here is the reframe that changes the entire pastoral conversation.

For decades, the Church’s teaching on chastity has been communicated primarily in the language of prohibition. Don’t do this. Wait. Guard yourself. The message was theologically correct. But the framing consistently missed something the culture needed to hear: chastity is not a barrier to intimacy. It is the pathway to the deepest kind of it.

What Fr. Matt and J.P. bring to the Lighthouse Faith conversation is a vision of chastity that is ordered toward something, not merely against something. It is preparation for covenant. It is the formation of the habits of self-gift, self-discipline, and genuine other-centeredness that marriage requires in order to flourish. When a person learns to love someone without making the relationship primarily about their own gratification, they are developing the precise capacities that make them capable of the kind of love a spouse actually needs.

This reframe matters enormously for how pastors and parish leaders communicate this teaching to young adults. The question is not “can you wait?” The question is “what kind of person do you want to be when you walk down that aisle, and what kind of marriage do you want to build?” Chastity is the answer to both.

And according to Communio’s data, couples who have embraced that answer are building the marriages that prove it.

What This Means for Your Church

At Communio, the Lighthouse Faith episode points to a conversation that most churches are either avoiding or having poorly.

The research is clear: pre-marital sexual behavior is one of the most significant predictors of marital health and stability. But most premarital preparation programs spend little time on it, and most churches have no structured pathway for helping young adults navigate their sexual and relational lives with the formation they need to make good decisions.

This is a gap the local church is uniquely positioned to close. Not through lectures or shame, but through the kind of honest, hopeful, data-grounded conversation that J.P. and Fr. Matt model in this episode. A conversation that takes young adults seriously enough to tell them the truth, and that offers them a vision of relationship and marriage that is genuinely worth pursuing.

Think about the young adults in your congregation. The ones navigating dating culture, cohabitation, and the enormous pressure to follow paths that the data shows lead away from the marriages they say they want. These young people are not hostile to the Church’s vision. Many of them are hungry for it. They simply need a community that will hold it out to them clearly, compassionately, and with the research to back it up.

That is the conversation Communio helps churches have. And the Lighthouse Faith episode is one of the most accessible entry points into it that we have seen on a national platform.

Take the Next Step

Communio partners with churches to build relationship ministry that equips young adults, engaged couples, and married couples with the formation they need at every stage.

► Listen to the full Fox News Radio Lighthouse Faith episode → radio.foxnews.com

► Download the Passing the Torch report → communio.org/passing-the-torch-report

Credit: This post draws on the Lighthouse Faith podcast episode featuring Fr. Matt DeGance and J.P. De Gance, published June 7, 2026 on Fox News Radio, and Communio’s nationwide research on faith, marriage, and relationships. Listen to the full episode here.