Interfaith Marriages

There are a few websites that I check out regularly...if not daily, then at least a few times a week. These include The Pew Religion news page and Duke's Faith and Leadership page, which in additional to featured articles, also highlights news stories each day. Often, there aren't many stories that catch my attention, other times there are. Usually is I post about the stories at all, it's to share them on Facebook and share a few reflections (already this morning I've posted a story from the Washington Post about people protesting a possible (i.e. in development) show about Jesus living in NYC today--and why I think there are probably better things to worry about for Christians.

Then I checked out the Faith and Leadership page and came across this article about how the rate of interfaith marriages is increasing, but that these marriages are also failing at a higher rate than the average population.

Here is the article.

I think one line really start to get at the issue for me as a pastor..."But couples don't want to hear that, and no one really wants to tell them."

When I do premarital counseling with couples (and I haven't really done any true interfaith weddings, more like one person is way more interested in church participation than another) I do not tell couples what they should do or not related to their religious lives. I suppose some pastors would criticize me for this, but I find the setting to be too charged--these people just want to get through these sessions so you'll marry them. I'm afraid they'd be prone to say whatever they think I want to hear. So my speech on religious life goes something like this: "Look, I'm not going to tell you what to do. But I will say this. Early in a relationship, religion can seem like a non-issue for many couples. Your schedules may not really allow you to go to church anyway, and at any rate, you may simply have expectations for the future. You need to talk about those now. Because religion WILL become an issue if not before then, then when you have children. Don't make your kids resolve this for you. Deal with it now. Discuss your views, especially how you see religious life being (or not being) a regular part of your lives, and if you want to find a church community and get more involved, it may be easier to do that now than when you have a young child and are adjusting to that."

We live in a pluralistic world, and many people are able to make such relationships work. But many people are not.

One of the big things people try to assert is that their religion does not exclude others. I have yet to find one for which that is true--precisely because each faith's beliefs are so unique so as to not be able to be interpreted in any way other than their "native" way. For a Buddhist to say they accept Christianity would be to reject the Christological claims of Christianity generally. Christianity does not accept that Jesus was simply a prophet, so Islam cannot be fully reconciled with Christian beliefs. Christianity does not believe in reincarnation, on and on. It doesn't mean we all have to fight, it just means you can't believe everything at once.

Check out this quote from the article:

But the effects on the marriages themselves can be tragic -- it is an open secret among academics that tsk-tsking grandmothers may be right. According to calculations based on the American Religious Identification Survey of 2001, people who had been in mixed-religion marriages were three times more likely to be divorced or separated than those who were in same-religion marriages.

This same article even points out that differences not only amongst denominations, but also the degree of the couple's religious involvement (i.e. one spouse worships regularly, the other does not) also seems to increase the rate of divorce.

Or check out this quote about how well-intentioned couples can still face difficulties:

Even among those who have tough conversations, says Joshua Coleman, a psychologist and co-chair of the Council on Contemporary Families, a nonpartisan research organization, religion can become a serious point of contention later on. One parent may agree to raise the children in the other's faith, he says, but then that faith "becomes repellent" to him or her. Coleman doesn't think that people get married with the intention of deceiving their spouse; "they just have no idea how powerfully unconscious religion can be."

So at any rate, I thought the article was interesting, though not predictive for people (after all, there are still a lot of interfaith marriages that don't end in divorce). What do you think?