"Our collective efforts to deter premarital sex are not that successful: 41 percent of churchgoing, conservative Protestant men's relationships become sexual within one month, barely lower than the national average of 48 percent. We expend so much energy to generate so little difference."

Excerpted from "Match-Making Ministry?" in the Fall 2010 issue of Leadership Journal. To read the full quote IN context be sure to subscribe to Leadership today by clicking on the LJ cover in the left column.

Mark Regnerus is associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and the author of Forbidden Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford, 2007).