The guilt that comes with religion stops us from having good sex lives, or so says psychologist Dr Darrel Ray.

After conducting an online survey that questioned 14 500 people who reportedly rejected religion, Ray, who is an independent researcher, discovered that almost 50 percent claimed there was an improvement in their sex lives.

His study was inspired by his own experience of rejecting his fundamentalist Christian background and finding an improvement in his own sex life; and by his interest to find out if there were others with similar experiences.

Ray’s respondents were either atheist or agnostic, many formerly religious, but those who grew up in secular homes were the ones who claimed to have the best sex of all.

His study fingered guilt as an influencing factor when it came to how good a person’s sex life is and that abandoning religion helped to release this guilt. In fact those respondents who claimed to have been exposed to the most conservative religious environments were the ones who reported the most improvement in their sex lives.

Those with a Mormon background – which has a very strict view of sex – scored the highest in the amount of guilt they felt, along with Baptists, Pentecostals, Seventh Day Adventists and Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Catholics were next in line to feel guilty, then Lutherans, while atheists and agnostics scored lowest on the guilt scale.

Yet while Ray’s study may shed some light on the impact of religion on our sex lives, it is important to take into account that there are many who have grown up in secular households who do not have particularly good sex lives for many other reasons. There are also those who thrive on guilt as a turn on.

Therefore, while guilt may dampen the pleasure of sex for many, a good sex life depends on a vast range of factors which may not have been taken into consideration in Ray’s study.