14

Tying the Knot Across the Gap

When a marriage joins partners of two different religions—Judaism and Catholicism, let’s say—the wedding can be a major flash point as traditions collide. It’s often the first time the couple has to directly confront their differences, and it happens in the public eye, in a place and a ritual full of religious symbols, as well as family and cultural history.

When instead the marriage is between a nonreligious partner and a religious one, there are still issues, but the collision can be much less dramatic. Religious traditions have very specific ideas about what happens when two people marry, and it goes well beyond “something borrowed, something blue” and the Chicken Dance. There are sometimes nonnegotiable sacraments grounded in centuries of history and doctrine. During most of that history, it was safe to assume the betrothed shared a religion, and the marriage was designed to join the new couple not just to each other but to the religious community itself.

A wedding that joins a Catholic partner to a Jewish one is operating from two different rulebooks, each with different mandates for everything from words spoken to rituals observed to who officiates. Some of these aren’t just different but mutually exclusive, and working it all out can be pretty tricky.

But when one partner is nonreligious, one rulebook disappears. There are still deeply felt values and preferences on both sides, but the potential for conflict on the details—“do this first, then do that”—is much lower. The couple is left to work out their own comfort level with the elements of the remaining religious rulebook while incorporating other elements to reflect the secular partner’s values and identity.

There’s no end to the variety of ways couples find to split the secular/religious difference. One couple in the McGowan-Sikes survey was married by a Mormon bishop, but in a secular setting. One had a ceremony in the church of the bride’s parents—but in the multipurpose room, not the sanctuary. A common solution is to have two separate ceremonies: a religious service, usually in a church, and a secular ceremony, whether in a courthouse, a backyard, a home, a park, or on the beach. In some countries—most of Europe, for example, and Mexico—the civil ceremony is required and the religious ceremony is optional. In some U.S. states, the opposite is true: The religious service is the required one.

Some couples even go beyond two services to express their own multiple perspectives: Karl (an atheist) and Monica (Catholic at the time, now Jewish) had three ceremonies: a pagan handfasting (“that was just us,” Karl says), then a justice of the peace at a courthouse, then a full Catholic wedding Mass.

According to the survey, most secular/religious couples who have a ceremony opt for one that fits much of the form and features of the traditional religious wedding. In some cases (9.2%) this is because they were both religious on their wedding day. But even for the 9 in 10 who already held different views, the usual trappings of church and clergy are common:

→ 51% were married/committed in a conventional religious setting.

→ 30% were married/committed in a nontraditional setting, such as a beach or private home.

→ 10% were married/committed in a civil setting, such as a courthouse.

→ 9% had no ceremony or are not married.

As for the person officiating (if any),

→ 70% were married by members of the clergy (59% denominational, 11% nondenominational).

→ 16% were married by a civil official (judge, justice of the peace).

→ 4% were married by a nontraditional officiant (ranging from a friend to an Elvis impersonator).

→ 2% were married by a Humanist celebrant.

→ 1% were married by a combination of religious and nonreligious officiants.

Some of the most interesting responses were the 7% who checked “Other.” Some described creative, nontraditional ceremonies of the skydiving/underwater/roller-coaster type, but others were clearly an attempt to split the secular/religious difference.

Half of all respondents reported no tension at all around their wedding choices, while 28% reported low to moderate tension. Just 12% reported tension above moderate to severe.

As for overall tension, the survey supports the idea that the absence of a set rulebook on the secular side gives a marked advantage over the joining of two religions. Half of respondents reported no tension at all related to religion in their wedding, while 28% reported low to moderate tension; 10% can’t recall, leaving 12% who report tension above moderate to severe.

Of all the elements of a wedding ceremony, the highest tension involved the inclusion or exclusion of certain readings or prayers.

The officiant was next; about a third of respondents said that decision produced some sparks, and 10% said the conflict was more than moderate.

The big surprise in this category was location. You might expect a lot of friction to come from whether or not the wedding was in a church. But even though two-thirds of the surveyed couples were already a secular/religious mix at the altar, nearly 70% said there was no tension at all over selecting the setting. Just 8% said they experienced more than a moderate amount of tension over it.

Once again, the absence of a second rulebook opens more possibilities for compromise.

Approaching the Altar from Different Directions

As a result of one decision made by Danielle, a Southern Baptist, and her agnostic fiancé, Tom, not a single one of their friends attended their May 2001 wedding.

Okay, it’s less dramatic than it sounds. “We only invited family to the wedding,” Danielle says, “and friends came to the reception. I wanted it to be small because I don’t enjoy the limelight. Some of our friends were really upset that they couldn’t come to the wedding.”

“So that was our big controversy!” Tom says with a laugh. “Not anything about religion.”

See Tom and Danielle, Chapter 5

That statement is surprisingly common. Though the wedding can be a flash point for mixed-belief couples, most of the respondents to the McGowan-Sikes survey said religion was not a significant source of tension in their wedding. Three-fourths said there was little or no tension over the choice of location, officiant, or music for the event, while fewer than 10% placed these tensions anywhere in the top half of a 10-point scale.

The inclusion of particular readings or prayers is a bit more tension inducing. Just over half reported some level of tension, though still just 12% put this in the top half of the tension scale.

Some of this lack of tension is explained by the fact that a third of respondents shared the same belief at their wedding. Even adjusting for this yields a surprisingly low level of religious tension for secular/religious weddings. This chapter examines the ways couples navigate the challenge, creating a meaningful, emotional ceremony that does what weddings are supposed to do: solemnize and celebrate the union of two individuals into a single shared life.

The choices they made are by no means the only way to design a wedding that joins secular and religious partners, but neither are they unusual. It’s worth taking a close look at the ceremonies to see the way that many secular/religious couples tie the knot.

The Three Flavors

The purpose of a wedding may seem obvious: Two people who weren’t married at the beginning end up married at the end. But other changes are happening as well, and some couples include specific rituals to underline those changes. Not just two people but two extended families, two circles of friends, two communities, even two cultures are often intersecting—and in the case of mixed-belief couples, two worldviews. Partners who share a single religious identity have the option of plugging into an established wedding ritual without thinking much about the elements unless they want to. But mixed-belief couples have not only the need but the opportunity to think about what they want their ceremony to mean. In the process, they often include some combination of religious and secular elements but go beyond the traditional, underlining these other intersections in a way that is meaningful to them.

For secular/religious couples, in addition to the elements of the ceremony—the music, the rings, vows, dresses, attendants, officiant, and all the rest—there’s the question of the “flavor” of the wedding, including the balance of the religious and the secular. There are three general approaches: a ceremony that is essentially religious, one that is essentially secular, or one that attempts to balance the two.

I call these the Sacred, the Secular, and the Blend.

#1: The Sacred

No one at my wedding in 1991 would have guessed there was an atheist in the room, much less that he was the guy in tux and tails. The setting was a beautiful, historic Lutheran church in San Francisco that we had chosen because it was beautiful and historic and in San Francisco, my wife’s hometown—not because it was Lutheran.

We upped the religious ante with not one but two ministers: a Methodist friend of the family and a Southern Baptist uncle of Becca’s whose contribution included a sermonette with a rafter-rattling reference to Matthew 21:21, the assurance that faith can move mountains. The readings were all Christian, ranging from the indispensable “Love is patient, love is kind” passage from First Corinthians (see “The Secular-Sacred, and the Sacred-Secular”) to an excerpt from The Prophet by the Christian mystic poet Khalil Gibran.

If we’d been married 10 years later, I might have asked that we include some secular poetry or meditations. I was no less secular in 1991, but it played a much smaller part of my personal identity at that point than it would later. At age 28, I was all about music. My degrees were in music, and I was about to begin a 15-year career as a conductor and professor of music. I’d have been more offended by bad music than by all the Psalms in the King James Bible, so it was more than enough that I had complete control over that aspect of my wedding.

The prelude music included solo piano works by Ravel, played by my brother Ron, and my own arrangement of Bach’s secular cantata “Sheep May Safely Graze” for strings and two recorders. Becca came down the aisle to Bach’s “Air on the G String,” played by the San Francisco Conservatory String Quartet. We lit the unity candle to a prelude I wrote myself, played once again by Ron, and we left to one of the great recessionals, the Widor Toccata, played by the organist of Grace (Episcopal) Cathedral in San Francisco.

For those of you keeping score, we had now achieved the Protestant quadfecta: a Lutheran church, an Episcopal organist, and Methodist and Baptist ministers. I was awash in Christianity—and I didn’t care a bit. Musically, I was in my own heaven, and that’s who I was.

Aside from a unity candle that wouldn’t light until the minister liberated the wick with a pocketknife, and his mispronunciation of my name (“I present to you, for the first time, Mr. and Mrs. Dale and Rebekah Maguvvin!”), the rest went off without a hitch—a typical late-20th-century American wedding, Mainline Protestant in every detail right down to the rings and vows and “What God hath joined.” Twenty-three years later, no man has put it asunder.

See Arlene and Nate, Chapter 8

Like me, Nate was happy to oblige his Baptist fiancée with a church wedding, despite being an atheist himself. “The wedding decisions were actually a matter of mutual respect for both of us. I knew it was important for her and her family to have a church wedding, and she and her family knew that jumping through religious hoops to get married in a formal religious service was not fair to me as an atheist. We found a local Baptist minister who was engaging and embraced us, and the deal was made. I was as shocked as anybody! We worked out a ceremony that was religious enough for Arlene and not too heavily religious for me,” he recalls.

But the church they chose hadn’t been their first choice. They originally asked Arlene’s uncle, a Baptist minister, to officiate, but his church declined because Nate was not religious. “Arlene and I also both refused to go to their required ‘counseling’ sessions prior to them agreeing to marry us,” he says. Like many couples, they say that being ticked off by the same thing brought them closer.

See Scott and Dhanya, Chapter 6

A religious wedding requires the most flexibility on the part of the nonreligious partner, of course. In the case of Scott, a nonreligious American marrying Dhanya, a Gujarati Hindu South African, there were multiple gaps to cross, including not just religion but culture, nationality, and dialect.

“Scott said he did not feel strongly about a particular ceremony and I could decide,” says Dhanya. That’s a sentence that could just as easily have come from a Christian or Jewish partner when the nonreligious partner doesn’t have a strong inclination. “I wanted to have a Hindu wedding ceremony, and so it was.”

Some drama in Dhanya’s family (unrelated to their marriage) resulted in Scott and Dhanya getting little help in the complex preparations for a Gujarati wedding. Things were complicated further when the usual four days of ceremonies were compressed to three. “I wanted the pre-wedding events to start on Friday,” Dhanya explains, “but this was not possible as that day on the Gujarati calendar was an inauspicious day to start or perform any big event in one’s life. So after consulting with the priest, we decided to have all three pre-wedding events on Saturday, the day before the wedding. It was hectic and stressful.”

Scott nods in agreement. “Usually, each side’s family performs some rituals, but since my side is not Hindu, we didn’t have our own ceremonies. It felt a little like I was not allowed at my own party.” It was this preparation period that proved the most difficult for Scott. “Preparing for the wedding was one of the most challenging things I’ve had to do in my life. There’s no single set of customs for Hindu marriages, and it was a huge challenge for me to learn and understand what the different aspects of our wedding were going to be. So there I was, trying to help Dhanya plan our wedding, but I wasn’t getting any help from written sources, and every time we talked to somebody, they gave us information that conflicted with what someone else said.”

One of the greatest frustrations for Scott had to do with the meaning and significance of things. “I have a questioning mind, and nobody could explain why things are done in certain ways, or why it mattered. I think their customs are things that have just been done for generations, and everybody has some intuition but not many can explain the reasons. The priest can give a bit of explanation, but it’s always a fuzzy and half-answered one. It was frustrating.”

In fairness, this probably has less to do with a given culture or religion than we might think—we’re just less aware of what we accept without question in our own cultural frames. If I’d asked Becca why she was supposed to wear something old, new, borrowed, and blue at our wedding, she probably would have said, “It’s tradition,” which is not entirely satisfying to a questioning mind. Likewise, I’d have come up blank if someone asked me why I was putting the ring on the fourth finger of her left hand. “Because that’s the ring finger, dummy” doesn’t really cut it.

“I did know some of the reasons for things,” Dhanya says, with mock defensiveness. “During the ceremony we light a fire in a havan kund, a steel vessel in which the fire is lit. The sacred fire, Agni, is believed to be the messenger between the Gods and humans. Agni is believed to also be the great protector from evil and is the eternal witness of the marriage. We make offerings to Agni during this part of the ceremony, and each time we make an offering to the fire we say the word sv h.¹ Guru [the priest] told us before we began that we must both shout the word sv h, and whoever shouts the loudest will rule in the household. Scott says he shouted it louder, but I think it was a tie!”

“That’s one thing I learned—that a Hindu wedding can be more fun than a typical Christian wedding,” Scott says. “It’s not so serious. We teased each other or other people involved. Our priest was cracking jokes with us. We smiled often and laughed occasionally. There’s no rehearsal, but there’s no worry because the priest instructs you and mistakes don’t really matter. I just followed the example of Dhanya or did what the priest said. I forgot about the audience for most of the ceremony, which was two and a half hours long. I enjoyed the wedding itself, but it took a lot of effort and mental anguish to get to that point. Of the challenges our relationship has faced, the wedding prep was a big one. But we made it through.”

The value and importance of religious ritual and tradition to a religious family and community transcends theology—in fact, it often has little to do with theology. Religious practices like those in a wedding tie the individual and the moment to other individuals and moments. It’s about identity and connection. And if that identity and connection are important to the religious partner, as they were to Dhanya and as they were to my wife, it’s important for the nonreligious partner to recognize and honor that element of the ritual, even if he or she completely disregards the beliefs in which they are framed.

#2: The Secular

Kevin was a nonpracticing Catholic when he first met Nora in Houston, where they both worked as pipeline engineers. Nora says she was a “full-on atheist” then, as she is now.

“I didn’t want to be with someone who was really religious,” she says, “so on one of our first dates, I asked him three questions: Do you believe everything in the Bible is true? He said no, I don’t. Do you believe everything the pope says is right—about birth control, for example? He said no. Then the big one: Do you think I’m going to hell because I’m an atheist? I didn’t want him to be trying to save me all the time. He said no, he said he thinks that God doesn’t judge over one little thing or condition. He believes God judges people on who they are overall.”

Four years later they were married, and the wedding was entirely secular, from the location (a boat in Galveston Bay) to the officiant (Nora’s uncle, an atheist who is culturally Jewish) to the music and symbolism.

“Not everyone in his family was happy that it wasn’t religious,” Nora recalls. “He had one grandmother who refused to come because it wasn’t in a church.” But in the end there was little fuss from the family over the absence of Catholic elements.

Kevin and Nora planned the ceremony carefully with her officiant uncle, including many touches that had special significance to their families or to themselves. Nora came down the aisle to Simon and Garfunkel’s “Bridge over Troubled Waters,” just as her mother had done years before. “She didn’t know it was coming,” Nora says, smiling. “It was fun to see her jump when it started playing.”

After brief remarks by Nora’s uncle, the ceremony turned to a symbolic ritual called a handfasting, one I mentioned previously in this chapter. Originally a Scottish synonym for the wedding itself, in recent years handfasting has been revived as a literal ritual in which the hands of the couple are bound together with ribbon or cloth. Nora and Kevin chose to use two ribbons, one symbolizing friends, the other family.

Her uncle wrapped their hands and said:

These are the hands of your best friend, young and strong and full of love for you, that are holding yours on your wedding day, as you promise to love each other today, tomorrow, and forever.

These are the hands that will work alongside yours, as together you build your future.

These are the hands that will passionately love you and cherish you through the years, and with the slightest touch, will comfort you like no other.

These are the hands that will hold you when fear or grief fills your mind.

These are the hands that will countless times wipe the tears from your eyes; tears of sorrow, and tears of joy.

These are the hands that will give you strength when you need it.

And lastly, these are the hands that even when wrinkled and aged, will still be reaching for yours, still giving you the same unspoken tenderness with just a touch.

This was followed by lovely secular vows:

I, Nora (Kevin), affirm my love to you, Kevin (Nora)

And I invite you to share my life in good times and in bad

When life seems easy, and when it seems hard

When our love is simple and when it is an effort

I will cherish and respect you, care for and protect you and comfort and encourage you

This I promise you today and for all the days of our life together

And the exchange of rings.

The ceremony was short—perhaps 20 minutes—but memorable and meaningful, rich with symbolism and significance.

See Andrew and Lewis, Chapter 12

Andrew and Lewis became engaged shortly after same-sex marriage was legalized in their home state in 2012. Like Kevin and Nora, they too plan to have a secular wedding. “The details of our service are not set in stone yet,” says Andrew, an atheist, “but we plan to have a short secular ceremony in the same restaurant that will host the reception. We will have an officiant with some gravitas introduce us, give a little speech, guide us in saying vows to each other, and tell us when to exchange rings and kiss. Interestingly enough, my grandfather, a former Congregationalist minister and current Quaker, has agreed to officiate the completely secular ceremony. He’s a good man. Like many Quakers, he doesn’t feel that we have to share his religion. He just wants us to be good people and be happy.”

“Even though I’m religious, my universalism means there is little purpose in pushing my religion into other people’s faces,” says Lewis. “The core of my religious beliefs are that a good Christian ought to strive to embody Christ in everything he does, in actions rather than just words. So I try to effectively preach the gospel, so to speak, by simply being the sort of person that I believe Jesus would want me to be, not by trying to pressure people into it. If anyone asks about my beliefs, I’m more than happy to discuss them, but I consider the specifics secondary to the commandment that all people ought to love one another to the fullest extent possible, and to show them God through that love.”

#3: The Blend

Tom and Danielle’s wedding showed more evidence of give-and-take between the religious and the secular. They worked together to create a ceremony that would represent them both, and the result is worth a close look.

Danielle wanted a minister to perform the ceremony. Tom asked that he be nondenominational, and Danielle agreed. “We planned the whole ceremony with him,” she says. “We wanted it to be very short. I don’t like the limelight, for one thing. And we cut out a lot of the overly religious tones so it could be both of ours.”

“I honestly don’t remember how much religious content was left in,” says Tom.

See Tom and Danielle, Chapter 5

After a quick look at their wedding video—and it was quick, about 20 minutes in all—I could see for myself how much care and flexibility had gone into it. Take the music, for example—the same “Air on the G String” (secular) that had been my wife’s processional was the attendants’ processional this time, and “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring” (religious) was Danielle’s processional.

The (nondenominational) pastor gave a Gaelic greeting ( céad míle fáilte, “a hundred thousand welcomes”—see “Tapping a Third Tradition”), then began his introduction: “You are entering into a union that is both sacred and serious. It is sacred because marriage is established by God himself”—a clear reference to the religious side. But he moved on to underline the seriousness of the human commitment they were undertaking, and the faith in each other that it showed.

The pastor read the same passage from Gibran’s The Prophet that had been in my wedding:

You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore.

You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days.

Ay, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.

But let there be spaces in your togetherness,

And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

Love one another, but make not a bond of love:

Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.

Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.

Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf.

Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,

Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.²

A nice combination of religious and secular ideas there.

Next came one of the most specifically religious elements in Tom and Danielle’s service—a wedding prayer adapted from the United Church of Christ. Look closely and you’ll see a secular/religious couple compromising to honor and accommodate each other. Here’s the original version:

O Father, our hearts are filled with great happiness on this our wedding day. We come before You at the altar of love, pledging our lives and our hearts to one another. Grant that, with Your help, we may be true and loving, living together in such a way as to never bring shame and heartbreak into our marriage. Temper us with kindness and understanding and rid us of all pretense and jealousy. Help us to be sweethearts, helpmates, friends, and lovers, that together we may meet the cares and problems of life more bravely. And as time takes away our youthful charm, may we find contentment in the greater joys of rich companionship. May our home truly be a place of love and harmony where Your Spirit is ever present. Bless us on our wedding day, our Father, and walk with us through all our life together. Amen.

Now look closely at the way Tom and Danielle adapted it:

Father in heaven, our hearts are filled with great happiness on this our wedding day. We come before the altar of love, pledging our lives and our hearts to each other. We pray that we may be ever true and loving to one another and avoid all pretense or envy, that we together may meet the cares and problems of life more bravely. And may our home be a place of love and harmony. Walk beside us Father we pray, in all our life together. Amen.

The original prayer includes so many religious references that the nonreligious partner may feel overwhelmed by it. Tom and Danielle worked with their minister to create a version that was still entirely religious, but not overwhelming. It still begins and ends with clear references to God, but in between:

“We come before You at the altar of love” is now “We come before the altar of love.”

“Grant that, with Your help, we may be true and loving” becomes “We pray that we may be ever true and loving.”

“May our home truly be a place of love and harmony where Your Spirit is ever present” is now “May our home be a place of love and harmony.”

Obviously a wedding between two Christians can and should include any and all references to God. But when one partner is nonreligious, it is considerate to soften the religious content without removing it.

We had a Baha’i marriage, which is simultaneously very religious, meaning it has a specific set of things that have to happen, and also totally nontraditional. You can get married wherever, and there is no officiant. You marry yourselves.

—Lena, an Episcopalian, about her wedding to Sean, an agnostic Baha’i

The vows were the traditional ones from the 17th-century Book of Common Prayer: “Tom, will you have this woman to be your wife, to live together in the holy covenant of marriage? Will you love her, comfort her, honor and keep her, in sickness and in health, and forsaking all others, be faithful to her as long as you both shall live? If so answer, ‘I will.’”

Then it was time for the lighting of the unity candle, a modern ritual in which the couple use two small tapers to light a single larger candle, signifying the joining of two lives and families. The tapers themselves are usually lit by members of the two families—in this case, the mothers of the couple, a nice connection of the two families.

After a soloist sang “Let It Be Me” by the Everly Brothers (secular), the minister read what must surely be the single most popular element of modern weddings, and for good reason—the unparalleled ode to love in First Corinthians:

If I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, but do not have love, I have become a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy, and know all mysteries and all knowledge; and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. And if I give all my possessions to feed the poor, and if I surrender my body to be burned, but do not have love, it profits me nothing. Love is patient, love is kind and is not jealous; love does not brag and is not arrogant, does not act unbecomingly; it does not seek its own, is not provoked, does not take into account a wrong suffered, does not rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; it bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails.³

In addition to being beautiful and wedding appropriate, this passage is a perfect example of the “secular-sacred”—a religious message that works just as well for the secular heart. (See “The Secular-Sacred, and the Sacred-Secular.”)

They concluded with the exchange of rings, followed by a passage from Conversations with God by Neale Donald Walsch:

A circle is a symbol of the Sun, and the Earth, and the Universe. It is a symbol of holiness, and of perfection and peace. It is also the symbol of the eternality of spiritual truth, love and life—that which has no beginning and no end. And in this moment, [Tom and Danielle] choose for it to also be a symbol of unity, but not of possession; of joining, but not of restricting; of encirclement, but not of entrapment. For love cannot be possessed, nor can it be restricted. For your souls are eternally free.⁴

And the presentation of the couple.

No one present at Tom and Danielle’s wedding could have reasonably claimed that God was excluded from the ceremony. At the same time, meaningful secular rituals and pieces of music were included, and none of the religious content required Tom to pledge fealty, belief, or belonging that he didn’t wish to pledge.

I’m an atheist, raised Jewish. My wife was raised Catholic. We dealt well with our differences. We mixed traditions at our wedding, lighting unity candles and smashing a glass. We even had a bagpiper playing ‘Hava Nagila,’ which got a good laugh from everyone.

—Joseph

Anna (a Catholic who later became an atheist) and Gary (an atheist who later became a Baptist) had a justice of the peace officiate at their wedding. “I carried my grandmother’s Bible down the aisle with my bouquet,” says Anna. “It’s a family tradition, so I wanted to do that for her. We walked down the aisle to the traditional ‘Wedding March,’ and the recessional was Schroeder’s theme song from the Peanuts cartoons.” Other aspects of the ceremony honored the diverse members of her wedding party. “I wanted them all to participate because they were some of the people closest to me, the ones who I respected, who influenced me, and who I looked up to and turned to for advice. It was important that they be able to participate in a way that reflected who they are, as well as who we were as a couple at the time. My maid of honor recited a Lakota wedding prayer; one of my other bridesmaids, who is Baha’i, gave a Baha’i reading; and my brother read a Christian prayer before we sat down to dinner. We also incorporated a few Italian traditions. It was quite an eclectic ceremony.”

See Anna and Gary, Chapter 10

Their setting was also unique, a banquet hall in a Wild West town. “I have a degree in history and my main focus of study was the frontier expansion of the U.S. and the conflicts with Plains tribes. So we thought it would be fun to have the ceremony with a bit of a cowboys and Indians theme.” Just as my own wedding choices reflected my identity as a musician, Anna’s reflected hers as a historian.

Not everyone in Anna’s Catholic family was pleased with the choices. “My dad’s side of the family was concerned because it wasn’t in the Catholic Church. And my more conservative and fundamentalist family members were concerned because we had readings from so many different religious backgrounds.” There was some tension, but no boycotts or major difficulties.

The Secular-Sacred, and the Sacred-Secular

Why is First Corinthians 13 such a reliable staple of modern weddings? It’s a gorgeous, poetic passage about love, of course. But it also isn’t limited to a single point of view. It’s from the Bible, and therefore religious, but the text itself doesn’t put love in an exclusively religious frame. Religious and nonreligious hearts alike are receptive to the idea that life without love is hollow (“a clanging cymbal”), that it is patient, kind, and slow to anger, never envious or boastful, and always forgiving—especially as the couples stand at the altar. It originates in a sacred source but is just as meaningful to secular ears. It doesn’t refute God but also doesn’t mention him. It mentions faith, but only to underline the fact (twice) that it is less important than love. It’s a perfect example of the “secular-sacred,” something that can fulfill both a secular and a sacred purpose without alienating either one.

The passage mentioned from The Prophet (“Let there be spaces in your togetherness / And let the winds of the heavens dance between you”) is another example, written by a Christian philosopher, but including only light allusions to religion, and containing a message about retaining your own identity even as you join in marriage, an idea that resonates just as easily with the nonreligious.

The Vedas, the Qur’an, the texts of the Buddhavacana, and biblical passages from such books as Proverbs and Ecclesiastes include many other examples of sacred texts that work well in a secular context.

There’s also a growing body of moving and humane literature from writers who are not just secular but atheists and humanists themselves. A moving passage from Unweaving the Rainbow by atheist biologist Richard Dawkins that begins, “We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones” has become a staple in nonreligious ceremonies of all kinds. Humanist philosopher A. C. Grayling’s The Good Book: A Humanist Bible imagines what the Bible might have looked like if, instead of drawing on Mediterranean religious texts, it had drawn on the rich variety of secular philosophy from around the ancient world. The result is not a dry anthology, but the same kind of narrative stream commonly found in religious texts, and a wonderful source of inspirational readings.

Grayling’s Meditations for the Humanist and André Comte-Sponville’s The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality are two more sources of poetic and meaningful passages that are grounded in nontheistic values without denigrating religion—perfect examples of what might be called the “sacredsecular.”

Tapping a Third Tradition

One inspired response to the challenge of a mixed-belief wedding is the inclusion of symbols, rituals, or readings from a tradition to which neither partner belongs. It’s an effective way of underlining the basic human values to which they both subscribe without grounding them exclusively in one perspective or the other.

Common examples include:

→ The Buddha’s sermon at Rajagaha, verses 19–20¹¹ (“Do not deceive, do not despise each other anywhere. Do not be angry nor bear secret resentments; for as a mother will risk her life and watches over her child, so boundless be your love to all, so tender, kind and mild,” etc.)

→ The “Apache Wedding Prayer”¹² (“Now you will feel no rain, for each of you will be shelter for the other. Now you will feel no cold, for each of you will be warmth to the other. Now there will be no loneliness, for each of you will be companion to the other,” etc.)

→ The I Ching¹³ (“When two people are at one in their inmost hearts, they shatter even the strength of iron or bronze. And when two people understand each other in their inmost hearts, their words are sweet and strong, like the fragrance of orchids,” etc.)

→ The Ritual Song of Krishna and Radha¹⁴ (“Let the earth of my body be mixed with the earth my beloved walks on. Let the fire of my body be the light in the mirror that reflects his face. Let the water of my body combine with the water of the lotus pool he bathes in. Let the breath of my body be air soothing his exhausted limbs. Let me be calm sky over my beloved,” etc.)

Though this kind of cross-cultural borrowing is not for everyone (and some are downright hostile to it),¹⁵ many others find it a unique and poetic way to underline their connection to a larger human identity beyond either of their own traditions.

The Bottom Line

At its best, a marriage joins unique individuals without erasing their individuality. A wedding ideally celebrates both the individuals and the union.

When partners share a religion, the new union will usually take on that same religious identity. But when they differ in their perspective, the marriage itself becomes as unique as the partners. No two will be quite alike, which is why the secular/religious wedding runs such an incredible gamut.

If one partner identifies more strongly with his or her worldview than the other, the ceremony will often lean in the direction of the stronger identity. My wife’s Christian identity was more important to her than my atheist identity was to me in 1991, so our wedding was straightforwardly religious, and I was represented not by my worldview but by something that mattered more to me: music. Scott’s nonreligious identity was moderate and Dhanya’s Hindu identity was strong, so they had a Hindu wedding. Nora’s atheism was more central to her than Kevin’s Catholicism was to him, so their wedding was secular. And when both identify very strongly with their different worldviews, two (or more) separate ceremonies are often the solution.

Communicate openly, think outside the traditional box, and work together to create a ceremony that honors both the union and the very different individuals in it. The act of creative compromise is terrific practice and an outstanding metaphor for the lifelong secular/religious partnership you are creating together.