Do people marry or religions marry?

Sometimes it really is a marriage of religions, though, at least from some points of view: in my own faith- community, it can be hard to see a boundary. We've had a lot of people come to Pagan ways through partners, and sometimes I see there's an element of coming to love our ways along with the person. I think it was similar with an atheist friend who married into Judaism.

The real problems I see in interfaith marriage often have to do with *privilege.* I've seen Christian-Pagan couples motor along fine and then hit the rocks once kids are involved and the Christian or their family says, 'For the sake of the kids/my relatives cut out this nonsense and submit/hide/convert/keep it from the kids.' ...there are often a lot of pressures to do these things for the 'wrong reasons' because the Christian relatives and affluent institutions tend to freak out/withdraw support if the child won't be raised in their ways, (And only their ways) and Pagan communities tend to be tolerant, ...and because of worries about stigma and all the usual that are actually threat of marginalization used to justify marginalization.

The problem with these things is they often aren't terribly honest, and that usually means trouble later in any relationship.

Anecdotally, I haven't seen as many of the same kinds of issues when someone from a majority religion 'marries into' a smaller one and associated community: not that it's without its own complications, but nothing that can't be worked out: minority religions may have concerns about traditions being 'watered down,' but also are far less accustomed to having their way as a matter of course.

For community/family purposes, the Unitarian Universalists often have a lot of good things going on in that way: being very pluralistic, and often actively-celebrating that, they're a place where families can celebrate together without necessarily having to make a social division of it.

Since the odds are up to fifty percent that any marriage in America might end in divorce, depending on the area, perhaps that statistic is a bit misleading. The more conservative-Christian the area, in fact, the higher the divorce rate, so perhaps that's not saying much in particular. One wonders if interfaith marriages are actually above the curve in those areas, or what.

I do think that the much-emphasized *polarization* between (certain kinds of) 'believers' and (certain kinds of) 'nonbelievers' can be somewhat misleading, as well. The media and much of the Internet gravitate toward emphasizing conflict and not looking at much else.

A lot of the people churches claim as members don't necessarily 'believe hard' and the majority of atheists are not the strident and 'anti-religion' ones that are so loud on the Internet. The fastest-growing demographic group in America are the 'Nones' who may encompass varying degrees of unaffiliated spirituality, some from alternative or personal paths, and varying degrees of nonbelief or agnosticism.

To my observation, interfaith marriages depend much on the particular religions involved: how much they are theologically-compatible and how picky/exclusivist they are: (I've seen different branches of Lutherans and other Protestants who may seem almost identical from the outside cause tremendous strife between couples and their communities over differences that seem trivial, for instance.

Perhaps it's not always about how different theologies are, but rather how much they respect difference.)