Interfaith Relationships

Today's post deals with interfaith relationships/marriages. Clearly there are widely varied opinions on this. There are traditionalists who would disown a child for marrying someone of a different religion. There are modern theists who are open to the idea of possibly marrying someone of a different religion, but know that it will inevitably create some extra conflict. Then there are the agnostics/atheists who could give a hoot about what religion their partner is.

I’ve searched a lot for statistics about this. But for the most part, experts seem to think atheists and agnostics have a lower divorce rate and born-again Christians have the highest divorce rate. Does this surprise anyone? I’ve seen many interfaith marriages work out well. And I’ve seen many marriages within the same church crash and burn. I’ve seen people go through a relationship for y ears only to realize that they’ve been wasting their time because they could never marry each other due to their religious convictions. I think a big reason the non-religious people may have more successful marriages is that they are more open-minded and their judgment is never clouded by the notion of God and what He wants and trying to idealize things.

I suppose I fall into the category of a very liberal born-again Protestant. I say liberal in the sense that I totally respect all religions and am open to learning about them and possibly changing my faith someday. But my set of morals and values are as strong as anyone’s, and they are mostly independent of religion. Back to the topic at hand. All religions teach basically the same things. They may have different Gods, different prayers, different holidays but all religion is essentially the same. And which religion we are is largely based on where we grow up or where our parents grew up. The goal of all religion is the give us an explanation for the unexplainable, to guide us to be better people, and make the world a better place. Even the extreme Islam groups have this as their primary goal - they just have a very radical idea of how to achieve that.

So, interfaith relationships are totally fine. Religion is not what keeps us apart. It’s the morals and values that we often associated with religion that are the crucial issues. There are many Christians who, when you evaluate the way the live and their personal values, are very non-Christian, while some atheist may have a lifestyle and values that are equivalent to a good Christian. And to me, a good Christian will be better off with the atheist than a Christian with different values.