This article analyses the most important sociological studies concerning the relathionships between religion and family which appeared in the Seventies in the USA, in France, and in Italy. The numerous essays considered are put together and discussed under the following headings: a) religion, family and marriage: new directions; b) premarital sex and engagement; c) fecundity, abortion; d) sex roles, family roles and power; e) extramarital sexual permissiveness, divorce; f) family life cycle and religion. Notwithstanding the absence of really new results and discovers in recent literature, it is stressed by the author that a new positive trend consists in the elaboration of some operational concepts.