Sola Fide’s Fruit — What the Data Says About Faith Without Works

Matthew 7:16 — “by their fruits ye shall know them.” The question is not whether Evangelicals are good people. It is whether a doctrine that severs salvation from ongoing works produces measurable fruit. The federal data gives a precise — and clarifying — answer.

The Test, and the Right Way to Run It

The doctrine of Sola Fide — faith alone — claims that genuine saving faith inevitably produces a transformed life, even though works are declared spiritually irrelevant to the salvation already secured. That is a testable claim, and Jesus Himself named the test: a tree is known by its fruit. The honest way to run it is not with hostile sources or anecdotes, but with the best behavioral data available, read fairly.

That data exists. The sociologist David J. Ayers of Grove City College — himself an Evangelical — analyzed the federal National Survey of Family Growth (2013–2017) and the General Social Survey in a 2019 study for the Institute for Family Studies. The numbers below are his.

What the Federal Data Shows

Ayers, “Sex and the Single Evangelical” — NSFG & GSS

• Intercourse — roughly two-thirds of Evangelicals have engaged in sexual intercourse; about three-quarters have engaged in at least one of three forms of sexual activity.
• Never-married adults — by Ayers’ analysis of the GSS, 86% of never-married Evangelical women and 82% of men had had at least one opposite-sex partner since age 18.
• Attitudes — in the GSS (2014–2018), only 37% of “fundamentalist” adults said sex outside marriage is “always wrong,” while 41% said it is “not wrong at all.”

At the level of mere self-identification, in other words, Evangelical sexual behavior tracks close to the general population. The bare profession of “faith alone” is not, by itself, producing a measurably different life. On one of the most straightforward behavioral markers available, the transformation the doctrine promises is not visible at the population level.

But the Fruit Appears Where There Is Practice

Here the same data turns the analysis from an accusation into a diagnosis — and this is the decisive point. Ayers found that religious commitment changes the picture sharply. Among Evangelicals ages 18–22 who attend church weekly, about 51% had had intercourse — markedly lower than their less-observant peers, even if still a majority. The variable that moves the behavior is not professed belief; it is ongoing practice — attendance, devotion, the lived works of religion.

That is the whole finding, and it is not an attack on Evangelicals. The data does not say they are immoral; many live lives of real integrity. The data indicts the doctrine — the specific claim that faith alone, apart from works, transforms the life. Where the life is in fact transformed, it is works that are doing it: the fruit appears exactly where there is practice, and fails to appear where there is only profession. The behavioral payoff tracks the one thing Sola Fide insists is unnecessary.

An Illustration, Not a Proof: the 2015 Breach

A familiar episode illustrates the gap between profession and practice — though it must be handled with care, because it proves far less than it is often made to. When the infidelity website Ashley Madison was breached in 2015, prominent Christian teachers were among those exposed. The most visible was R.C. Sproul Jr., a well-known Reformed teacher, who acknowledged creating an account and was suspended by Ligonier Ministries (Christianity Today). The Evangelical researcher Ed Stetzer, citing conversations across several denominations, predicted that “at least 400 church leaders” would resign that week (Christianity Today).

But honesty requires the caveats, and they are large. This is an illustration, not a statistic: a handful of named leaders proves nothing about a population. The leaked data itself is unreliable — Stetzer noted in the same article that the site was largely a scam, its accounts overwhelmingly male and its female users all but nonexistent. And the once-popular claim that the “Bible Belt” led the nation in per-capita usage does not hold: by one breakdown of the leaked data, Washington, D.C. ranked highest. The episode is worth one paragraph and no more. The real weight of the argument rests on the federal survey data above, not on a scandal.

The Comparison: a Faith That Builds the Works In

If the variable that actually moves behavior is ongoing practice rather than bare profession, then a tradition that builds works, standards, and covenant accountability into the faith itself should show measurably different fruit. It does — and the cleanest evidence is in stated ethics, where the contrast is direct and primary-sourced.

Stated Ethics — Pew (2012) & Gallup

• 79% vs. 61% — Latter-day Saints are “significantly more likely than evangelicals to say that sex outside of marriage is wrong (79% vs. 61%)” (Pew) — far above the roughly one-third of the general public who say the same (Pew exec. summary).
• 29% — only 29% of Mormons call premarital sex morally acceptable; Gallup found them “alone” among major U.S. religious groups in deeming it not acceptable — the single most conservative position of any (Gallup).

Behavior follows the same direction, though it demands precision and a date stamp. BYU sociologist Tim Heaton, across three national surveys, found that while about 80% of unmarried young people nationally report premarital intercourse, the rate among Latter-day Saint youth ran roughly 50–60% — well below the national figure, though, in his words, “much higher than many people would like” (primary source: Tim B. Heaton, “Demographics of the Contemporary Mormon Family,” Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought 25, no. 3 (1992): 19–34, esp. p. 23; summarized in Deseret News; cf. Chadwick, Top & McClendon, “Sexual Purity,” BYU Religious Studies Center). Cohabitation before marriage runs dramatically lower still — on the order of 8% among Latter-day Saints, against roughly 20% of conservative Protestants and 45% of the religiously unaffiliated (Thomas B. Holman & John R. Harding, “The Teaching of Nonmarital Sexual Abstinence and Members’ Sexual Attitudes and Behaviors: The Case of Latter-Day Saints,” Review of Religious Research 38, no. 1 (1996): 51–60).

Three honest caveats keep this from becoming the very kind of overstatement this page exists to correct. First, the same nominal-versus-active distinction applies: the 50–60% counts all self-identified Latter-day Saints, and Heaton found weekly attendance to be the single biggest predictor of abstinence — the committed are markedly lower, exactly as among Evangelicals. Second, this is not near-universal abstinence; a covenant standard is not magic, and a real gap between teaching and behavior exists on every side. Third, the LDS behavioral data is dated — Heaton’s surveys are from the 1990s and the Pew attitudes from 2012; there is no recent Latter-day Saint behavioral breakdown as current as the 2013–17 federal cycles cited above, so these figures describe that era, not necessarily today. (One further, careful note, owed to the seriousness of the subject: a Dialogue analysis argued the ~60% figure overstates voluntary premarital sex because it does not separate out victims of sexual abuse — so the share who knowingly set the standard aside is lower than the raw number.)

One stereotype the data quietly kills: premarital restraint does not produce marital dysfunction. Married Latter-day Saints report marital intimacy at about 7.4 times a month — statistically indistinguishable from conservative Protestants (~7.7) and Catholics (~6.6) (Holman & Harding, 1996). The standard governs the unmarried; it does not damage the married. The point is not that Latter-day Saints are better people — it is that the thesis holds in both directions: where a faith asks for ongoing works, the fruit is measurably different, in stated ethics most of all. That is exactly what James would predict.

James Saw This Coming

What the modern data shows in numbers, an ancient Apostle stated in a sentence. The motivational structure of Sola Fide — salvation secured by a past moment of faith, with subsequent works declared spiritually irrelevant to it — is precisely the structure James warned would produce a faith that does nothing.

James 2:17

“Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone.”

It is no small thing that Martin Luther, the father of Sola Fide, called the Epistle of James an “epistle of straw” in his 1522 preface to the New Testament and questioned its place in the canon — for James posed, in the first century, the exact problem the surveys measure in the twenty-first. The data is James 2 in sociological form: faith severed from works does not, by itself, change the life; the works are where the fruit grows.

Verdict

Read fairly, the evidence is not that Evangelicals are immoral — it is that the doctrine of faith alone, taken at its word, predicts exactly what the data shows: where belief is merely professed, there is no measurable behavioral difference; where it is practiced, the difference appears. The fruit tracks the works. That is not a verdict against a people; it is a verdict for a principle — the one James named and the one Matthew 7:16 assumes.

Works are not the basis of salvation; they are its evidence and its fruit. A gospel that builds ongoing obedience into the covenant — faith made complete in works — is not adding to grace; it is keeping the very condition the data shows to be decisive. The test was not invented by Latter-day Saints. It was specified by Jesus Christ, and answered by James. A tree is known by its fruit.